Conservation Influencers

Sierra Club

USA

The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 by John Muir, a racist supporter of eugenics and forced-sterilization laws, to help people enjoy and protect the wilderness in the USA. Among Sierra Club’s other early leaders were Joseph LeConte and David Starr Jordan, both of whom believed in white supremacy.

In 1969, building on its founders’ extremist political outlook, the Sierra Club published Paul R. Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, which argued that the world faced a choice between controlling reproduction or ending up with a high death rate. However, in June 2020 the Sierra Club published a critique of its history, which apologised for its founders’ misanthropy and support for bigoted causes (Pulling Down Our Monuments). But, notably, this supposed reconciliation with and distancing from past misdeeds made no mention of the Sierra Club’s support for Ehrlich’s Malthusian thesis that maintains that there are six billion too many people inhabiting planet earth.

Today, Sierra Cub claims to have 3.8 million members (it costs USD1000 per person for life or USD1250 for a joint life) and supporters (cost free), organized into local chapters across the USA.

One of Sierra Club’s primary goals is to prohibit all hunting and ‘harassment’ of marine mammals. However, it makes an exception for ‘occasional specimens captured for scientific research and zoos; hunting by American Indians, Eskimos, Aleuts, etc., for the sole use of their families, and carefully managed seal fisheries (sometimes called “harvests”), so long as these activities do not endanger marine mammal populations’.

Sierra Club also supports a nation-wide consumer boycott of yellow tuna products that are, in its words, ‘killed and injured during the purse-seine method of fishing’. Its call for a boycott of yellow tuna does not apply to albacore, bonita or tuna caught by other methods.

In national parks, Sierra Club opposes ‘all sport hunting, even when it is legal,’ though in other areas it supports lawful hunting in order to help manage natural areas. But it opposes ‘trapping, including body-gripping, restraining and killing traps and snares’.

Leader

Michael Brune, Executive Director, author of Coming Clean: Breaking America’s Addiction to Oil and Coal (2010).

Governance

Elected executive committee of five people, led by Ramón Cruz, President until 2023, and a Board consisting of a further 10 elected members.

Finance

According to its 2019 annual report, the Sierra Club has assets of USD222,847, 989 and its revenue in 2019 was USD137, 934, 145, most of which was spent on programmes, grants and services.

About the directory

Conservation Influencers is a searchable directory of the animal activist, environmental and ecological lobby. It examines the history, mission, methodology and reputation of NGOs to assess their impact on the global conservation cause.

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Franz Weber Foundation

From 1990 until 2015, Franz Weber Foundation (FFW) managed the Fazao-Malfakassa National Park in Togo, which was, according to an in-depth investigation by Duke University, ‘established by forcing the local communities off their land and without taking into consideration their point of view’. That same study cited convincing evidence from reports published in 1990, confirming that competition for land use was already ‘creating conflict between the local communities and park managers’. In 2015 Togo refused to renew FFW’s contract because, the report says, ‘local communities were still excluded from the management of the natural resources of their land’ and FFW had ‘failed to fulfil its contract’. Franz Weber Foundation plays a major role within CITES because it funds and manages from Switzerland the African Elephant Coalition (AEC), which represents 32 African range states, some of which have barely any elephants and others none at all. Contrary to the wishes of the range states in Southern Africa, which manage most of the world’s wild elephant populations, the AEC at CITES’ CoPs repeatedly tables proposals to put all of the world’s elephants in appendix I. And the AEC uses its voting power to keep in place prohibitions on ivory sales and all other trade in elephant-related derivatives, including skins and hair, which Southern African nations wish to legalise.

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