The inanity of the social justice Sierra Club
In 1996 the Sierra Club sold out to the tune of $100 million. They could never mention the immigration - population - environment connection again. Even though mass immigration is driving America's population to double within the lifetimes of children born today, and even though increasing population has an increasing impact on our sustaining ecosystems, the Sierra Club would never again discuss the interrelationship.
As a result - or perhaps as a causative factor - the Sierra Club has turned into a bunch of social justice warriors in hiking boots. Take a look at the latest drivel unabashedly published in the June 8, 2020 Sierra magazine:
Racism Is Killing the Planet - The ideology of white supremacy leads the way toward disposable people and a disposable natural world, by Hop Hopkins.
It's not parody. They really believe this stuff. Here's an excerpt:
But I want to share another lens from which we can view this moment. I really believe in my heart of hearts—after a lifetime of thinking and talking about these issues—that we will never survive the climate crisis without ending white supremacy.
Here’s why: You can’t have climate change without sacrifice zones, and you can’t have sacrifice zones without disposable people, and you can't have disposable people without racism....
We’re in this global environmental mess because we have declared parts of our planet to be disposable. The watersheds where we frack the earth to extract gas are considered disposable...
In order to treat places and resources as disposable, the people who live there have to get treated like rubbish too. Sacrifice zones imply sacrificed people....
Wait, there's more!
Devaluing Black and Indigenous people’s lives to build wealth for white communities isn’t new. White settlers began that project in the 15th century, when they arrived in North America. Most Native peoples of North America lived in regenerative relationships with the land; they were careful to take no more than the land could sustain. The settlers had another ethic: They sought to dominate and control...
How could the white settlers bring themselves to do it?
They did it by telling a certain story about Native peoples, a story that said Native peoples were less “civilized” than white settlers and therefore deserved to be terrorized and pushed from their lands....
Perhaps the hopelessly naive author should read Scalp Dance: Indian Warfare on the High Plains, which definitively lays to rest the "noble savage" myth.
After unequivocally establishing White Men Bad, the author then spews more claptrap:
The compound interest on the profits from that enslavement became the basis of intergenerational wealth for white communities—the intergenerational wealth that perpetuates race-based economic inequality to this day.
Ok, we get it. Racist white men destroy the environment:
How does this all connect to today’s environmental crises? It’s all part of the same story of dehumanization. The pollution-spewing global mega-corporations that created Cancer Alley are just the latest evolution of the extractive white-settler mindset that cleared the forests and plowed the prairies.
Whites aren't part of the problem, they are the problem. And yet stupid whites don't even realize they are racist:
When it comes to racism, many white people are like fish swimming in water: White supremacy is so pervasive that it’s hard to even know that it’s there.
The author continues:
If we valued everyone’s lives equally, if we placed the public health and well-being of the many above the profits of a few, there wouldn’t be a climate crisis. There would be nowhere to put a coal plant, because no one would accept the risks of living near such a monster if they had the power to choose.
So we should tear down coal power plants which, incidentally, were built by racist whites. Everyone could live in peace and harmony in their racially mixed wood-heated homes, except for occasional expeditions into retreating forests to clear-cut fuel supplies, while hunting wild Quinoa with bows and arrows.
John Muir, conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club, must be spinning in his grave. But oh, wait - he was one of those white racists.
What's behind the article
It's hard to comment rationally on the article because it is so irrationally based on convoluted premises.
Nevertheless, ere are a few key observations:
- For years, the Sierra Club has kowtowed to the social justice agenda. As noted above, they really believe this stuff. At this point, they are a self-selected group of social justice warriors whose first priority is societal transformation. Environmental issues are but a fulcrum by which to leverage their overriding issue.
- As Whites are becoming a minority in the nation they created, so-called "environmental" groups have shockingly discovered that people imported from other cultures don't give a whit about the environment. Ironically, that leaves Whites as the predominant cultural group with an interest in protecting of our natural ecosystems.
- Even so, so-called "environmental" organizations are marketing to social justice warriors and ethnic groups because they have alienated their true environmentalist base. There is nowhere else to turn for support. Articles like the above are part of the ethnic marketing strategy.
- When social justice warriors regurgitate the White Man Bad mantra, what they are really expressing is hatred of Western Civilization. Whites are a proxy for Western Civilization - which, incidentally, Whites built.