Sierra Club threatens to censure board members who spoke to press in defense of John Muir
The censure effort stalled amid push back from members and volunteers.
On Monday night, the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors threatened to officially censure two of its members for their public statements in defense of John Muir, the conservation icon who founded the organization in 1892. One of the board members targeted in the censure effort, Aaron Mair, previously served as the first African American president in the Sierra Club’s history. The other, Chad Hanson, is a well known forest ecologist and activist.
This latest flare up within the nation’s largest environmental group comes as it weathers a series of intense internal controversies over race and identity, workplace culture, organizational structure, and the legacy of Muir, who some Club leaders have effectively disavowed in recent years.
In the summer of 2020, as protests and riots in the wake of George Floyd’s murder rocked the nation, the Sierra Club’s executive director Michael Brune wrote an article for the Club’s website titled “Pulling Down Our Monuments.” In it, he accused his organization of “perpetuating white supremacy” and in some cases through history causing “immeasurable harm”. He also denounced Muir for “making deragotary comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes” and for his friendship with men like Henry Fairfield Osborn, who would eventually become a leading eugenecist. You can read the whole article here. The piece includes a variety of reactions from Club staff and members. The story was widely picked up by the mainstream press and I think it’s fair to say it sent shockwaves through the conservation movement. It also had plenty of critics.
Among those critics: Sierra Club board members Mair and Hanson, as well as Mary Ann Nelson, a longtime Sierra Club volunteer and the Club’s first Black board member. Together, Mair, Hanson and Nelson penned a detailed response to Brune’s allegations against Muir. They sought to challenge not only Brune’s article but also a March 2021 essay in the Sierra Club’s magazine by the author Rebecca Solnit that aligned with Brune’s perspective. Hanson, Mair and Nelson tried to place their piece with Sierra magazine in the spring of 2021, but they weren’t able to do so. A majority of the board blocked them from publishing their rebuttal before it made it through the magazine’s editorial process.
According to minutes from a March 10, 2021 Sierra Club board meeting, which were first obtained by Politico, Hanson, Mair and Nelson “wanted to make a rebuttal, but the language in the rebuttal was not in line with the consensus language and included language such as ‘honor, respect, and celebrate John Muir.’”
In a resolution officially blocking the publication of the trio’s article, the Board stated that it “reviewed the article submitted to Sierra Magazine by Directors Hanson and Mair and former Director Nelson and finds it to be inconsistent with the messaging guidance adopted by resolution on February 27 and thus should not be published in Sierra Magazine or posted on its website.”
The Board did, however, grant Hanson and Mair permission to share their opinion in other venues. “The Board of Directors acknowledges and affirms that all Directors have the right to state personal views through independent channels and media, and that, when they choose to communicate their independent views, they should use independent channels and clearly state that their views are not those of the Board of Directors nor the Sierra Club,” stated the board in its resolution on March 10, 2021. You can read the board meeting minutes here.
Ultimately, Hanson, Mair and Nelson took their article elsewhere, publishing a lengthy exploration of John Muir’s record in Earth Island Journal on August 11, 2021. Here is an excerpt:
It’s important to think critically about our movement’s historical figures, John Muir included. However, some recent articles by environmentalists and environmental writers — though perhaps guided by good intentions, and well-written and researched in other respects — contain some inaccurate and unfounded information that could create damaging divisions among the conservation movement and environmental justice advocates. We aim to set the record straight.
A 2020 Sierra Club online column, for example, insinuated that Muir aligned with the abhorrent views of white supremacist Joseph LeConte and eugenicist David Starr Jordan, both of whom were on the early Sierra Club board of directors with Muir. The post generated headlines. One national news story after another reported the inaccurate claim that John Muir was a racist, despite the fact that Muir’s association with LeConte and Jordan pertained to their shared interests in geology and wildlife and Muir did not espouse either their white supremacist views nor support their writings on eugenics or LeConte’s history of enslaving people. Implying or equating Muir with eugenics proponents like LeConte or Jordan and their works is both factually and historically wrong. In an unfortunate failure of omission, the online article also failed to credit foundational previous work on history and race by people of color in the Sierra Club.
Another recent article, in Politico, claimed that “John Muir, who founded the Sierra Club, sought to preserve land by urging policies that pushed Native Americans and Blacks off it,” tracking a 2011 book and a 2018 Outside magazine article which made the same factual misrepresentation.
These writings provided no historical source for this claim, nor does one exist because the statement is simply inaccurate. Muir did not promote removal of Native peoples from ancestral lands, nor did he promote exclusion of Black Americans from protected lands. Similarly, a report by the Center for American Progress falsely claimed that Muir “promoted ideas of restricting immigration by nonwhites,” citing a 2019 article by The Guardian which attributed those anti-immigrant views to a person named Madison Grant, not to John Muir. A 2016 article in Atlas Obscura inaccurately stated that Muir called Native Americans “uncouth…savages” when, in fact, he was referring to White settlers.
Most recently, Sierra magazine published an essay that blames Muir for the “erasure” of Native Americans, claiming that Muir failed to “recognize and convey” the fact that Native peoples had lived on the land, and influenced the landscape, long before the arrival of settlers. This too, however, is at odds with Muir’s writings. In My First Summer in the Sierra, Muir mused, “How many centuries Indians have roamed these woods nobody knows; probably a great many, extending far beyond the time Columbus touched our shores.” And Muir specifically noted how Native peoples interacted with the landscape while living in harmony with wild nature, writing about their influence “on the forest by their fires they made to improve their hunting grounds.”
In our opinion, these articles and others have presented a narrow and sometimes inaccurate image of Muir — one that omits the eventual evolution in his views.
In their article, Mair, Hanson and Nelson explicitly stated that they were representing “their own views and are not speaking on behalf of the Sierra Club.” Michael Brune announced his resignation from Sierra Club days after the trio published their piece, in an apparent coincidence.
After issuing their defense of Muir in Earth Island Journal, Mair, Hanson and Nelson spoke with Politico, which put out its own story on August 16, 2021 about the controversy over Muir within the Sierra Club. In his interview with Politico, Aaron Mair stated that Brune’s depiction of the writings and life of John Muir was “ahistorical” and “revisionist”. Hanson, for his part, told Politico that he believed it was important to acknowledge the Sierra Club’s history with racism, but that “false allegations” are damaging to the organization and the conservation movement more broadly.
More than anything else, the interviews Mair and Hanson gave to Politico seem to have led to the board’s threat to punish them. On Monday evening this week, Mair and Hanson each faced a resolution of censure from their fellow board members over their press statements in defense of Muir. The proceedings occured during an open meeting of the board and were attended by a large number of Club leaders, members and volunteers.
The censure resolution against Mair charged him with a variety of alleged misdeeds, including the following:
“Director Mair spoke to a Politico reporter regarding internal Sierra Club matters for an article published on August 16, 2021. He did so during a very sensitive time for the organization, when a leadership transition was underway; the Board, including Director Mair, was engaged in confidential internal conversations to manage that transition; and the Board was specifically asked to exercise discretion and direct any media inquiries through the Communications Department. Director Mair did not inform any of the organization’s communications staff or authorized spokespersons, either before or after speaking with the reporter. Due to the public interest in the resignation of the Executive Director, it was a particularly risky and inappropriate time to speak with national press about internal Sierra Club matters without authorization and without notifying designated spokespeople or communications staff of the contact. The article resulted in significant harm to the organization, including creating a false impression of the reasons for the resignation of the Executive Director. The harm created by the interview and the resulting article was substantial and ongoing.”
[….]
“Director Mair co-wrote an article published in Earth Island Journal that has left many leaders within the Sierra Club feeling undermined. For many years, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) staff and volunteer leaders in particular have organized for long-overdue transformation in the organization, and their powerful and tireless work has resulted in changes including the Sierra Club’s Board of Directors taking a public position on the legacy of John Muir. Director Mair’s article used words like “sloppy” and “opportunistic” to refer to some critical re-evaluation of John Muir, and did not recognize, respect, or credit the work of the organization’s internal activists.”
The charges against Hanson were almost identical. You can read the full censure resolution against Mair here. You can read the censure resolution against Hanson here.
Hanson and Mair penned a lengthy response to the charges against them that was circulated among the Club’s membership and leaders in the day leading up to the open board meeting on Monday. In their response, Hanson and Mair state that they had followed the Board’s own guidance for articulating their personal views outside of Sierra Club media channels. They criticized the “personal attacks and threats” they’d faced from other members of the board of directors. And they reaffirmed their defense of Muir, noting that the Club’s “attack” on its own founder had undermined the organization financially:
“Is has been our position from the outset that an inaccurate and misleading attack on the Sierra Club’s founder would not only create damaging divisions between conservation and environmental justice and equity—at a time when we need to strengthen intersections rather than widen divisions—but could also have a severe adverse financial impact on the Sierra Club. Recently we have seen irrefutable evidence of that severe adverse financial impact. We have upheld our fiduciary duty to the Sierra Club, against significant adversity and attacks, in this regard, and we believe recent evidence of financial impacts has vindicated us. The Board majority should take responsibility for its actions, and the financial consequences of its actions, and change course here. This current path—doubling-down on the inaccurate and misleading attacks on Muir and proposing to further attack and censor us—will only exacerbate the damage the Board majority has already done, and represents a breach of Directors’ fiduciary duty under the circumstances.”
You can read the full response by Hanson and Mair to the censure resolutions against them here.
The threat to censure Mair and Hanson spurred pushback from prominent Club members and leaders, who attended the virtual board meeting on Monday night but were not allowed to speak. In the end, the board withdrew the proposed vote on the resolutions targeting the pair. It remains to be seen whether the board will revive the effort to censure them at a later date.
The Sierra Club did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
The whole incident is indicative of the turmoil over identity, history and power within the Club that some believe has undermined its core mission and chilled open discourse among staff and members at a critical moment in the fight against the climate and extinction crises.
As one former Club insider told me, increasingly “there is a lack of space for any type of dissenting opinion” at the organization. The person asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation.
This is a developing story. Check back for more.