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CounterPunch
December
12, 2002
Torquemadas
in Birkenstocks
The War Club
by JEFFREY ST. CLAIR
My dear old friend David Brower must be fuming
in his grave. The Sierra Club, the organization he almost single-handedly
built into a global green powerhouse, has become so cowardly
since his death two years ago that now it refuses even take a
stand against war, which Brower believed to be the ultimate environmental
nightmare.
Even worse, its bosses-like petty enforcers
from the McCarthy Era--are now threatening to exile from the
Club any leaders who step forward to voice their opposition to
the looming bombing and subsequent invasion and occupation of
Iraq.
It is a telltale sign of the enervated
condition of the big greens that there's precious little dissent
in the Sierra Club on the prospect of another war in the Persian
Gulf. Indeed, it took four activists from Utah, of all places,
to light the fire. Let them be known as the Glen Canyon Group
Four: John Weisheit, Tori Woodard, Patrick Diehl and Dan Kent.
Last week, they announced that they opposed
the war. They identified themselves as leaders of the Sierra
Club's Glen Canyon Group, based in Moab, Utah, former stomping
grounds of Edward Abbey.
"The present administration has
declared its intention to achieve total military dominance of
the world," says Patrick Diehl, vice-chair of the Glen Canyon
Group. "We believe that such ambitions will produce a state
of perpetual war, undoing whatever protection of the environment
that conservation groups may have so far achieved."
This noble stand was soon followed by
a similarly principled anti-war resolution enacted by the Club's
San Francisco Bay Chapter.
Then: slam! The long arm of Sierra Club
HQ came down on them-clumsily as usual.
There's apparently scant room for free
speech inside the Sierra Club these days, even when the topic
is of paramount concern to the health of the planet. Especially
then.
The Club's peevish executive director,
Carl Pope, and his gang of glowering enforcers, blustered that
the Glen Canyon Four had impertinently violated Club rules. They
threatened to level sanctions against the activists, ranging
from expelling them from their positions to dissolving the rebellious
group entirely. Angry phone calls and nasty emails flew back
and forth. The Glen Canyon Four were threatened with a BOLT action-BOLT
being the stark acronym for a Breach of Leadership Trust.
"For the board to compel our silence
plays right into Bush's mad world, where a nation of police,
prisons, bombs, bunkers is better than lowering oneself to diplomacy
to save lives,'' says Dan Kent.
The Sierra Club's Breach of Leadership
Trust rule functions as a kind of proto-type for Ashcroft's Patriot
Act, designed to stigmatize, intimidate and muzzle internal dissenters.
As result, the Club is rife with snoops, snitches, and would-be
Torquemadas in Birkenstocks.
In this case, the intimidation isn't
likely to work. John Weisheit is perhaps the most accomplished
river guide on the Colorado. He's stared down Cataract Canyon
and Lava Falls in their most violent incarnations without flinching.
Tori Woodard and Patrick Diehl live in the outback of Escalante,
Utah, where they routinely receive death threats for their environmental
activism. A couple of years ago, a band of local yahoos vandalized
their home, threw bottles of beer through two front windows,
kicked in the front door, trashed the garden, and cut the phone
line to the house. They're still there-the only enviros in that
distant belly of the beast. Pompous chest-thumping by the likes
of Carl Pope won't scare off these people.
Peculiarly, the Club has chosen to invoke
its internal policing power mainly against members who have pushed
for the Club to adopt more robust environmental policies: ending
livestock grazing, mining and logging on public lands; backing
Ralph Nader and the Green Party; or opposing the sell-out of
Yosemite National Park to a corrupt firm linked to Bruce Babbitt.
The most disgusting internal crackdown came last year in a spiteful
attack on Moisha Blechman, a Sierra Club activist in New York
City, who was smeared with accusations of the most scurrilous
kind, mainly because she was too green for the cautious twerps
who run the Club.
Meanwhile, the Sierra Club turns a blind
eye to renegade chapters in New Mexico and other places that
attack and ridicule its current policies, such as the No Commercial
Logging plank, as being too radical. Even worse, the Club leadership
stands mute as a gang of Malthusian brigands infiltrate its ranks
seeking to hi-jack the organization as a vehicle to carry forward
a racist anti-immigration agenda that would make Pat Buchanan
cringe.
All of this would seem mighty strange,
if you remain naïve enough to believe that the Sierra Club
is an organization principally (or even parenthetically) devoted
to the preservation of the planet.
It's not, of course. Like any other corporation,
the Sierra Club's managers are obsessively preoccupied with beefing
up the Club's bottom line and solidifying its access to power,
the bloodstream of most nonprofits. (Read: a snuggling relationship
to the DNC, supine though it may be).
So here's a warning: When you join the
Sierra Club and affix your signature to that membership card
you are also signing a loyalty oath.
Loyalty to what? Certainly not the environment.
These days it's loyalty to the image of the Club that matters.
And increasingly the desired image of the Club is manufactured
by its bosses, not its members.
How important is "image" to
the Sierra Club? Well, it spends more than $2 million a year
and employs 25 people to work full time in its Communication
and Information Services unit-the outfit's largest single amalgamation
of funds.
Last week the Los Angeles Times published
a story about the Iraq affair. And the bosses of the Club froze,
like stuffed weasels in the spotlight. This was not the kind
of media attention they'd spent all that money to garner. On
the one hand, they didn't want to be seen as tolerating internal
opposition to a popular war. On the other hand, many, if not
most, Sierra Club members probably harbor serious doubts about
the war and the way the Bushites intend to prosecute it. So a
kind of organizational paralysis ensued. It's just as well.
In a letter to the Los Angeles Times,
Club President Jennifer Ferenstein exuded some shopworn homilies
about US dependence on foreign oil and pronounced that the Club's
resolution warned against "Iraqi aggression." This
language sounds cagey, but it's actually moronic and craven.
Even Bush has yet to charge Iraq with plans to invade its neighbors
this time around. Moreover, while the Club supports the Bush
Administration's purported goal of disarming Iraq, it remains
silent on disarming the Pentagon.
Ferenstein attempted to clarify the Club's
confused policy a few days later in a primly worded letter to
the Christian Science Monitor, but she came off sounding even
sillier. "In order to reduce oil's influence in geopolitical
relations, the U.S. and other nations have to move away from
an oil-dependent economy toward a future based on clean energy,
greater efficiency and more renewable power," writes Ferenstein.
"The Sierra Club has called for a peaceful resolution of
the conflict in Iraq, proceeding according to the UN resolutions,
and we emphatically believe that long-term stability depends
on the U.S. reducing our oil dependence."
Apparently, Ferenstein doesn't understand
that the UN Resolution gives the US and Britain the green light
to whack Iraq with the slightest provocation, real or fabricated.
And apparently war is okay with the Club as long as it's the
result of a consensus process (even if the UN consensus was brokered
by bullying and bribery)-although how the environment suffers
any less under this feel-good scenario remains a mystery.
It's not as if the environmental ruin
caused by the first Gulf War is unknown. In January of 2000 Green
Cross International, a Christian environmental group, released
its detailed investigation of the environmental consequences
of the Gulf War. Their findings were grim: more than 60 million
gallons of crude spilled into the desert, forming 246 oil lakes;
1,500 miles of the Gulf Coast was saturated with oil; Kuwait's
only freshwater aquifer, source of more than 40 percent of the
country's drinking water, was heavily contaminated with benzenes
and other toxins; 33,000 land mines remain scattered across the
desert; incidences of birth defects, childhood illnesses and
cancers climbed dramatically after the war.
Cruise missiles targeted Iraqi oil refineries,
pipelines, chemical plants, and water treatment systems. Ten
years later, many of these facilities remained destroyed, unremediated
and hazardous.
Months of bombing of Iraq by US and British
planes and cruise missiles also left behind an even more deadly
and insidious legacy: tons of shell casings, bullets and bomb
fragments laced with depleted uranium. In all, the US hit Iraqi
targets with more than 970 radioactive bombs and missiles.
More than 10 years later, the health
consequences from this radioactive bombing campaign are beginning
to come into focus. And they are dire, indeed. Iraqi physicians
call it "the white death"-leukemia. Since 1990, the
incident rate of leukemia in Iraq has grown by more than 600
percent. The situation is compounded by Iraq's forced isolations
and the sadistic sanctions regime, recently described by UN secretary
general Kofi Annan as "a humanitarian crisis", that
makes detection and treatment of the cancers all the more difficult.
The return engagement promises to be
just as grim, if not worse.
Compared to a titan like Brower, timid
little people run the Sierra Club these days. In her two years
as president, Ferenstein has gone from being the bubbly Katie
Couric of the environmental movement to its Margaret Thatcher.
In the process, she may have set back the cause of eco-feminism
by 20 years.
But Ferenstein is largely just a figurehead,
the hand puppet of executive director Carl Pope. Pope has never
had much of a reputation as an environmental activist. He's a
wheeler-dealer, who keeps the Club's policies in lockstep with
its big funders and political patrons. Where Dave Brower scaled
mountains, nearly all of Pope's climbing has been up organizational
ladders.
This limp state of affairs has been coming
for some time. After 9/11, the Club leadership was so cowed by
the events that they publicly announced that they were putting
their environmental campaigns on hold and pledged not to criticize
Bush, who at that very moment was seeking to exploit the tragedy
in order to expand oil drilling in some the most fragile and
imperiled lands on the continent.
The same with the war on Iraq. The mandarins
who run the Club made a decision early on to let their position
float in grim harmony with the DNC's spineless warmongering.
To date only two board members have stood
up against the war: Marcia Hanscom from Los Angeles and Michael
Dorsey, the Club's only black board member and a man with a true
passion for social and environmental justice. That's two out
of 15. There's more vigorous dissent inside Bush's National Security
Council.
All this would have disgusted Brower,
who was a veteran of the famous 10th Mountain Division in World
War II but a peacenik at heart. I first met Brower in 1980. He'd
already been booted out of the Sierra Club for being too militant
and had gone on to found Friends of the Earth, where he was about
to meet same fate. He asked me to do some writing for him on
what he thought was the great environmental issue of our time:
war. At the time, Brower was helping jumpstart the nuclear freeze
movement and I was honored to join him.
"If we greens don't broaden our
thinking to tackle war," he told me, "we may save some
wilderness, but lose the world." He was a master at aphorisms
like that. Especially after a couple of martinis-heavily charged
with Tanqueray.
He was right, of course. A century of
wars have ravaged the environment as brutally as the timber giants
and the chemical companies. And the nuclear industry, headquartered
in DC and Moscow, threatened the whole shebang with what Jonathan
Schell in the Fate of the Earth, a book Brower ceaselessly plugged,
called "the second death": the extinction of all life
on earth.
Brower also knew what most contemporary
enviros don't: that the day-to-day operations of the military
complex itself--weapons production and testing--amount to the
most toxic industry on the planet, as a trip to the poisoned
wastelands of Hanford, Fallon, Nevada or Rocky Flats will readily
reveal.
For some reason, battling the Pentagon
has never had the allure of fighting the Forest Service (an agency
that I detest), which by comparison behaves like the Cub Scouts
of the federal government.
Back in 1990, Brower and his beautiful
and courageous wife Anne came to Portland, just as the bombing
of Iraq had gotten into high gear. There were demonstrations
on the streets nearly every night over the course of that war.
Together we joined a crowd of several hundred activists gathered
in the December rain. We stood shoulder-to-shoulder on the old
Hawthorne Bridge for an hour, shutting down rush hour traffic
out of downtown. We sang We Shall Overcome as the police stared
us down, the Browers' unmistakable voices sailing above it all.
Those days are gone. Both Dave and Anne
are dead. But a new peace movement is rising and Brower
helped give it life and meaning.
The spirit of the new peace (and environmental)
movement won't be found within the confines of any club. It's
out on the streets and in the woods, where it's always been.
Hurry. It's not too late to join. No membership card required.
Yesterday's
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American
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Who Hates
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The Baffling Patriotism of Daniel Pipes
Kevin Gray
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Soul Brothers?
Will Youmans
Israel's Demographic Obsession
Ron Jacobs
Berrigan: Blessed are the Peacemakers
Walt Brasch
Jackass: the People
William Cook
World Wide Intifada?
John Stauber / Sheldon
Rampton
Flashback: How PR Sold the Gulf War
Terry Jones
Bombs Away!
Ralph Nader
The Robo-Candidate
Anis Shivani
Information Prozac
Harvey, Engel, Alam
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