www.newsandletters.org
|
|
NEWS & LETTERS, April 2004Racists in Sierra ClubThe right wing is once again angling to turn the Sierra Club into a front group for anti-immigration reactionaries. In 1998 a referendum for the environmental group to adopt an anti-immigration policy garnered 40% of votes, but only because hordes of right-wingers joined just to vote for it. The rabble have returned, this time to elect candidates in the March-April elections for the board of directors who are in bed with racist groups. White supremacist and nativist groups urged sympathizers to join and elect the anti-immigration slate. Of even greater concern, however, is their endorsement by Paul Watson, head of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, who was recently elected to the Sierra Club board and wants to turn it into an animal rights group. Watson has a mystique of radicalism because of Sea Shepherd’s practice of ramming whaling ships. UNPRINCIPLED ALLIANCE Such "direct action" is the prime measure of worthiness to a certain type of middle-class would-be "radical," from reactionaries like Earth First! founder Dave Foreman to Black Bloc anarchists. The ease with which Watson fell into an unprincipled alliance with the racist right should be proof enough of that attitude’s emptiness. The more the true nature of these candidates comes to light, the more likely their takeover attempt is to fail. Resistance within the Sierra Club has come from two directions. One group, Groundswell, is fighting to maintain the club as a "big tent," open to welcomers and haters of immigrants, and to hunters as well as animal rightists, as long as they favor conservation. Quite different are the environmental justice activists and others who formed Sierrans for Human Rights to counter anti-immigration forces in "the environmental movement as a whole," calling on the Sierra Club to jettison its current neutrality on immigration. Instead they call for "a deeper analysis into the causes of immigration, many of which are rooted in the inequities inherent in economic globalization...damaging communities and ecosystems alike." And they call for "an unequivocal position in support of justice for immigrants." ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE The success the Right has already had in placing some reactionaries on the board--alongside their chum Paul Watson--highlights the incompleteness of the environmental movement’s response to the movement against environmental racism. In the past 15 years mainstream groups like the Sierra Club have tried to attract people of color as staff and members. But the environmental justice movement also challenged the narrowness of ideas--a challenge not to separate environmentalism from the needed social transformation. The official neutrality on immigration is one sign of the failure to respond. The door was left open to the Right precisely because of the pragmatic refusal to close the gap between environmental activism and the deep, revolutionary transformation needed to steer this society away from its current path damaging both communities and ecosystems. Instead, the mainstream remains tied into the corrupt political system, which has moved drastically to the Right and is dragging the environmental movement along with it. --Franklin Dmitryev |
|
Home l News & Letters Newspaper l Back issues l News and Letters Committees l Dialogues l Raya Dunayevskaya l Contact us l Search Published by News and Letters Committees |
