To explore, enjoy, and protect the planet. To practice and promote the responsible use of the Earth’s ecosystems and resources; to educate and enlist humanity to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment; and to use all lawful means to carry out those objectives. – Sierra Club mission statement With the Sierra Club's advocacy for “open borders” procured by multimillionaire David Gelbaum circa 2004, the above mission statement has become a meaningless paragraph of puffery, as the rapidly expanding population of the United States, driven by record numbers of immigrants, causes unprecedented environmental destruction and loss of wild lands.
Here's a fawning profile about Gelbaum from the Los Angeles Times (The West 100 - THE POWER ISSUE - Our list of the most powerful people in Southern California, August 13, 2006):
Under the guidance of politically savvy environmentalist David Myers, Gelbaum's gifts have protected enough mountain and desert land to create another Yosemite National Park ... Crucial tracts of the Mojave National Preserve have been protected, thanks to the Wildlands Conservancy, which Gelbaum cofounded. These days, the conservancy finds itself in the thick of the debate over the development of Tejon Ranch in the Tehachapi Mountains. The Gelbaum- backed group, along with the Sierra Club and others, wants to reduce the amount of the ranch that will be paved and preserve 245,000 acres as wilderness – a tussle that will help define the limits of growth in Southern California.
The Sierra Club's open borders advocacy has become more strident with their support of a Washington, DC demonstration scheduled for today. I would not be surprised to learn that David Gelbaum is bankrolling this event.
To better understand how the Sierra Club has become in large part a proxy organization supporting open borders it is helpful to review a few paragraphs of another Los Angeles Times news story, this one from 2004:
COLUMN ONE - The Man Behind the Land By Kenneth R. Weiss, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
October 27, 2004
....In 2001, Gelbaum branched out with two back-to-back anonymous gifts to the Sierra Club Foundation [$101.5 million in donations] that dwarfed all previous individual contributions to the club.
....he said [Carl] Pope [former Executive Director of the Sierra Club; appointed in 1992; served until January 20, 2010; succeeded by Michael Brune] long had known where he stood on the contentious [Proposition 187] issue. ‘I did tell Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.’ ... [Gelbaum] donated more than $180,000 to the campaign to oppose Proposition 187. After the measure passed, he said, he donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to civil rights lawyers who ultimately got the measure struck down in court.
Gelbaum, who reads the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión and is married to a Mexican American, said his views on immigration were shaped long ago by his grandfather, Abraham, a watchmaker who had come to America to escape persecution of Jews in Ukraine before World War I. “I asked [him], ‘Abe, what do you think about all of these Mexicans coming here?’” Gelbaum said. “Abe didn't speak English that well. He said, ‘I came here. How can I tell them not to come?’
“I cannot support an organization that is anti-immigration. It would dishonor the memory of my grandparents.”
An excellent October 2009 Jerry Kammer article [.pdf], “Strategic Negligence: How the Sierra Club’s Distortions on Border and Immigration Policy Are Undermining Its Environmental Legacy,” with 35 references, summarizes how the Sierra Club has been subsequently used as a tool for open borders advocacy.
As a former Sierra Club member, I found this sellout to be repugnant. I hope that the connection between overpopulation and environmental destruction will be restored by the Sierra Club and that they will repudiate the policies procured from 2004 to present by multimillionaire David Gelbaum and his allies.
Poster Comment:
[Author] Gene [Nelson] earned a Ph.D. in Natural Science in 1984. He has written extensively about the harm of large-scale immigration to the U.S. He testified twice in the U.S. House of Representatives and twice to the National Academy of Sciences regarding the the controversial H-1B visa program.
The writer's views are his own.
[Illegal immigration = illegal alien. More Sierra Club info in next posts]