Farewell, Sierra Club

... I never stopped loving nature and worrying about conservation, but as I got older, I backed away from “Big Green,” what I call the network of large and well-funded environmental organizations, environmental media, academia, and the generally Democratic politicians they ally with. The appeals to emotion and fear that worked so well on me at age eight started to fall flat...

Big Green is quick to label anyone who fails to buy this classic high pressure sales technique a “climate denier.” But these tactics are tied to demands to reorder the economy and further concentrate power in federal or even global hands. AOC’s then chief of staff, Saikat Chakrabarti, openly said as much when discussing the Green New Deal with Washington governor Jay Insee’s climate director. “Do you guys think of it as a climate thing?” he said. “Because we really think of it as a how-do-you-change-the-entire-economy thing.”...

That population increase in California, and more specifically where it came from, brings me to another problem with Big Green, which is that it prioritizes helping its political allies over actual protection of the national environment....

Probably there is no better issue to illustrate the top-down demand for conformity by Big Green than immigration, the subject of my own expertise....

One of the biggest concerns of the environmental movement of the 1960s and 1970s was population growth, both nationally and globally. After the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, immigration became a primary driver of national population growth. For some time, environmentalists accepted that caring about population growth in the United States required caring about immigration policy. In 1989, the Sierra Club’s board adopted the policy position that “migration to the United States should be no greater than that which will permit achievement of population stabilization in the United States.”

However, by the mid-1990s, political and donor pressure convinced the Sierra Club to declare first neutrality on the immigration issue and finally, in 2013, support for amnesty [for illegal aliens]....

... it was in 2004, well after the fact, that it was reported that American businessman David Gellman [correction: David Gelbaum], $100 million contributor to the Sierra Club, told its director in the mid-1990s that“if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me....