The Sierra Club Tries to Move Past John Muir, George Floyd and #MeToo

For 3 years, the nation’s most distinguished environmental group has been ruminating about its previous and future. Like many different American establishments, the Sierra Membership was convulsed by the 2020 homicide of George Floyd, beset by painful questions on its mission and historical past, together with whether or not its founder, John Muir, was biased in opposition to folks of coloration.

Now, the group is making an attempt to emerge from different facet of that appraisal. It has named Ben Jealous, a civil rights activist, writer, investor and nonprofit chief as its new govt director.

Mr. Jealous, 50, chief govt of the Nationwide Affiliation for the Development of Coloured Folks from 2008 to 2013, is the primary individual of coloration to steer the Sierra Membership.

With greater than $149 million in annual contributions, lots of of workers, greater than 1,000,000 members and supporters, and 64 chapters across the nation, the Sierra Membership is the enormous sequoia of the conservation motion — inconceivable to disregard, and on the middle of an expansive ecosystem of activists, nonprofit organizations and grass roots campaigns.

However the homicide of Mr. Floyd and subsequent protests across the nation shook the muse of the establishment. Its govt director wrote that the Sierra Membership had performed a “substantial function in perpetuating white supremacy.” The weblog put up was an effort to acknowledge the group’s failings, but it surely drew a public rebuke from some board members and sparked a fierce inside struggle.

That very same summer season, a Sierra Membership worker claimed to have been raped by a former senior worker who was nonetheless volunteering for the group, prompting investigations into different accusations of abuse because the #MeToo motion continued.

And, in 2021, an inside report documented a poisonous tradition the place dangerous conduct was tolerated and accountability was missing. Weeks later, the manager director resigned and a board member took over public management duties, leaving the Sierra Membership rudderless through the first yr of the Biden presidency, as local weather change turned a central political difficulty.

“There’s been a second of reckoning that was necessary for the Sierra Membership,” Mr. Jealous mentioned. “Reckonings are onerous, and I’ve by no means seen anyone actually do it proper. There’s a variety of pent-up emotion, and all of it comes out.”

Mr. Jealous mentioned he hoped to harness that vitality, getting the Sierra Membership extra engaged with environmental points affecting minority communities, and discovering methods to deliver extra Black folks, Hispanics and Asians into the environmental motion.

His appointment comes after an almost yearlong search. He joined the Sierra Membership after two years as president of Folks for the American Approach, a progressive advocacy group.

“He outshined and out-sparkled all the different folks we interviewed,” mentioned Rita Harris, a Sierra Membership board member who was concerned within the search. “He positively seems to be the individual we want proper now.”

Mr. Jealous, a Rhodes scholar who ran unsuccessfully for governor of Maryland in 2018, mentioned his {qualifications} for the job go effectively past being a civil-rights chief and that he has at all times been an environmentalist.

Rising up in Northern California, Mr. Jealous mentioned that his “earliest reminiscences embody sleeping within redwood bushes.” His mother and father took him mountain climbing in Yosemite Nationwide Park twice a yr, and the Sierra Membership journal was at all times mendacity round the home.

At 9 years previous, Mr. Jealous mentioned he turned the youngest-ever docent at his native pure historical past museum. And as a young person, he served as a tour information on the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

He continued to work on environmental points as a younger skilled. On the Public Curiosity Analysis Group, a corporation based by Ralph Nader, he helped launch Neighborhood Inexperienced Corps, a program that gave current faculty graduates publicity to grass roots activism. And on the N.A.A.C.P., he launched a local weather justice program, an effort centered on environmental points affecting Black communities.

“I’m the primary Sierra Membership govt director shortly to develop up in a redwood forest in Northern California, to sleep beneath them,” he mentioned.

However as Mr. Jealous prepares to embark on a listening tour throughout his first months on the job, he’s prone to hear from staffers nonetheless working by means of a tough few years for the group.

The summer season of 2020, with Covid raging and protests erupting within the streets of American cities, a nationwide dialog about systemic racism was in full swing. A parade of excessive profile companies, universities and nonprofit organizations had been caught up in public squabbles as employees, customers and critics piled on.

But even throughout that interval of unrest, what unfolded on the Sierra Membership stood out.

Michael Brune, the group’s longtime govt director, wrote a weblog put up titled “Pulling Down Our Monuments.” In it, he disavowed Mr. Muir, who based the membership in 1892 and is credited with preserving Yosemite as a nationwide park and beginning the American environmental motion. However in a few of his writings, Mr. Muir characterised Black People and Native People as soiled and lazy. He additionally was pleasant with some early membership members who had been white supremacists and who promoted eugenics.

The Sierra Membership, Mr. Brune wrote, had precipitated “important and immeasurable hurt,” including that “as defenders of Black life pull down Accomplice monuments throughout the nation, we should additionally take this second to re-examine our previous and our substantial function in perpetuating white supremacy.”

The put up sparked a backlash from inside and out of doors the group, with some board members publicly criticizing Mr. Brune and different distinguished environmentalists and disputing his characterization of Mr. Muir. Mr. Brune left the group in August 2021.

Mr. Jealous mentioned he hoped to maneuver past the controversy, however noticed Mr. Muir as a conservationist first.

“After I have a look at John Muir, I see a person within the late nineteenth century, who talked lots like males within the late nineteenth century,” he mentioned. “The way in which that I grew up was actually valuing him as any individual who helped protect essentially the most lovely locations that had been the panorama of my childhood.”

Mr. Jealous may even need to take care of a corporation that, in keeping with an inside report ready by Ramona Methods, a consulting group, tolerated bullying conduct by senior workers and lacked a robust tradition of accountability.

“We’ve got to take care of all the fairness points contained in the Sierra Membership,” Mr. Jealous mentioned. “These embody, completely, problems with gender, in addition to racial fairness and likewise pay fairness. We’ve got people who find themselves ‘chapter employees’ who’re making lower than people who find themselves ‘nationwide employees’ for a similar group, doing the identical job.”

However whereas Mr. Jealous and the group hope to place the current tumult behind them, the instances have modified. Not is the Sierra Membership merely centered on conserving pristine nature. As an alternative, it’s embracing voting rights and different progressive causes that aren’t overtly concerning the struggle to guard the setting and fight local weather change.

“Whereas earlier than, 100 years in the past we had been all for preserving the Sierra Nevadas, now we all know that, so as to protect that, we additionally have to have livelihoods that may guarantee that may be preserved for future generations, good wages, all of that,” mentioned Ramón Cruz, the Sierra Membership board’s president, who had successfully been serving as its chief since Mr. Brune’s resignation. “It’s inconceivable to divorce this stuff from one another.”

Mr. Jealous, who expanded the vary of points the N.A.A.C.P. tackled whereas he was chief govt — and in doing so expanded its membership and fund-raising, as effectively — is raring to try to accomplish the identical feat on the Sierra Membership.

“The Sierra Membership, greater than another environmentalist group, has grow to be quickly extra inclusive,” he mentioned. “We don’t we don’t get to avoid wasting the planet and never tackle the ravages of poverty.”

What this implies in follow stays to be seen. Mr. Jealous mentioned he hoped to get the group extra concerned in native campaigns on every thing from industrial air pollution to {the electrical} grid. He added that the Sierra Membership had a task to play ensuring that the $370 billion in local weather change funding included within the Inflation Discount Act was not wasted.

“The one manner that that’s one thing apart from political pork is that if actions are inbuilt each single state on this nation to ensure that these {dollars} are spent impactfully,” he mentioned.

And nonetheless, efforts to develop wind and photo voltaic vitality are going through rising native resistance across the nation, at instances pitting Indigenous teams in opposition to the builders of renewable vitality initiatives.

“These are actual conversations that we’re going to be ready to have,” Mr. Jealous mentioned. “And the one group that may actually lead that successfully can be a corporation that each is on fireplace to guard the planet and is on fireplace for social justice. In the end, one of the best options are going to require us to determine learn how to maintain each of these in our minds on the identical time.”