Sierra Club

The Sierra Club is one of the oldest and largest environmental advocacy organizations in the United States. It was founded in 1892 by a small group of outdoor enthusiasts in San Francisco concerned about protecting California's Sierra Nevada mountain range and particularly the famous Yosemite Valley. The club's first president was pioneering nature writer and activist John Muir.

In 1905, Muir and the Sierra Club were successful in getting Yosemite Valley transferred to the federal government and incorporated into a national park. However, soon after, the city of San Francisco announced plans to build a dam within the park, flooding the Hetch Hetchy Valley adjacent to Yosemite. Despite Muir's campaign against the dam, the project was approved in 1914, and Muir died a year later.

Following Muir's death, the Sierra Club entered a long period where it focused primarily on organizing hiking trips rather than on environmental advocacy. The Sierra Club returned to a strong activist role in national park protection when David Brower became the club's first executive director in 1952. Under Brower's leadership, the Sierra Club began an aggressive campaign to stop the construction of the Echo Park dam within the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah. Brower mobilized public opposition to the dam using innovative techniques, including production of a large format book filled with photographs of the scenic places that were threatened to be submerged by the dam. (This type of “exhibit-format” photo book about a threatened place became a defining characteristic of Sierra Club campaigns.) The club's campaign successfully stopped the dam. This was the first time that an environmental group had blocked a major federal project. As a concession though, the Sierra Club's board of directors agreed not to oppose another dam project in Glen Canyon. It was not in a national park and had few visitors. However, when Brower visited Glen Canyon in the wake of the compromise, he found it to be a place of unique natural beauty. The subsequent flooding of this canyon by the dam led Brower to question the role of compromise in environmental advocacy and resulted in him embracing a more confrontational approach to activism.

In the 1950s and 1960s, the Sierra Club gained national visibility for its high profile battles to protect national parks and forests from dams and other development projects. One of the most well-known campaigns involved a proposed series of dams that threatened to flood part of the Grand Canyon. In this campaign, Brower worked with publicist Jerry Mander to develop innovative newspaper ads that educated the public about the issue and provided clip-out letters expressing opposition to the dams for the readers to send to politicians. This new technique was highly effective and is now widely used by advocacy groups. While the Sierra Club succeeded in stopping the Grand Canyon dams, in 1966 the Internal Revenue Service responded to the ads by taking away the club's ability to receive tax-deductible donations.

The Sierra Club grew rapidly despite the loss of tax-exempt status. However, some of the club's board of directors were troubled by Brower's uncompromising style of environmental advocacy. They also expressed concern over Brower's expenditures on book projects and advocacy ads. From Brower's perspective, his conflicts with the directors stemmed from their lack of boldness and eagerness to compromise. These issues came to a head when the board agreed not to oppose a proposed nuclear power plant [Page 1285]in California if the power company relocated it from a popular recreation site to a less well-known natural area called Diablo Canyon. In the wake of this conflict, Brower resigned from the Sierra Club in 1969. He subsequently founded two noted environmental groups: Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute.

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