Plan B Forum

The Sierra Club speaks out against its 'racist' founder, environmental icon John Muir

America's oldest conservation organization is reckoning with its history of racism and the troubling views of its founder, environmental icon John Muir.

"The Sierra Club is a 128-year-old organization with a complex history, some of which has caused significant and immeasurable harm," read a statement posted on the organization's website Wednesday morning.

The post went on to examine the club's own role in "perpetuating white supremacy" and spoke out against its revered founder and "Father of National Parks" on his racism and ties with figures involved in eugenics.

The Sierra Club — historically considered a progressive and liberal organization — made the statement at a time when institutions across the country are being forced to reckon with their problematic pasts.

In the statement Sierra Club Executive Director Michael Brune said that Muir "made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes, though his views evolved later in his life. As the most iconic figure in Sierra Club history, Muir’s words and actions carry an especially heavy weight. They continue to hurt and alienate Indigenous people and people of color who come into contact with the Sierra Club."

There may be no one more important in the history of environmental conservation than Muir, who founded the club in 1892 in San Francisco and became its first president. But Muir's views on people of color often echoed the white supremacy shared by many figures in the early conservation movement.

The naturalist, who helped convince Congress to establish Yosemite Valley as a national park, once referred to African Americans as “Sambos,” an epithet that many Black people consider to be as offensive as the n-word. He also once wrote that the Native Americans he encountered while walking the country were "dirty."

Muir realized many of his greatest accomplishments while living in the Bay Area at a 14-room Italianate Victorian mansion in Martinez. The house and surrounding tract of native oak woodlands now form the John Muir Historic Site, a U.S National Historic Landmark.

Tom Leatherman, the General Superintendent at National Park Service, told SFGATE that the Martinez site wants to tell the story of John Muir, including the parts of it that are problematic today, and they would "welcome the opportunity to sit down with the Sierra Club and discuss his legacy."

Beyond speaking out against its founder, the Sierra Club's statement goes on to shine a light on other early club associates' problematic history, describing member and founding president of Stanford University, David Starr Jordan, as "a 'kingpin' of the eugenics movement" who "pushed for forced-sterilization laws and programs that deprived tens of thousands of women of their right to bear children — mostly Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and poor women, and those living with disabilities and mental illness."

"For all the harms the Sierra Club has caused, and continues to cause, to Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color, I am deeply sorry," Brune added.

ex-khobar Andy wrote: ↑

Thu Jul 23, 2020 1:43 pm

Eugenics per se was a pretty mainstream view 80 or 100 years ago. Some of the great biologists of the time (e.g., Julian Huxley, JBS Haldane) were supporters to some extent. There's a 'don't throw the baby out with the bathwater' aspect to this argument.