See also: Candidate Positions
See also: Candidate Positions
by Harold Wood
See Also: Update On LeConte Memorial Lodge & Fundraising
"What is at stake in the Sierra Club Board decision: the Sierra Club itself. Is the Sierra Club to divorce itself from its history? Is it to become a generic environmental activist organization? If it detaches from its famous historic roots, it loses its meaning, soul and unique place in the minds and hearts of Americans, and ultimately its value and power as an organization."
- Barbara Mossberg
In addition to the Board candidates responses to questions posed by the nominating committee, which may be found here; currently there are to me 3 key issues relevant to this year's Board of Directors Election, and that is the candidates' positions about:
I recently posed 3 sets of questions to candidates for the Sierra Club Board of Directors in 2016.
The questions addressed three main concerns:
The answers from those Board Candidates who have chosen to respond are available here.
As a Life Member of the Sierra Club, who joined the Club in 1968, here are my positions on these issues:
Although the Board is slated to make a decision March 17, 2016 on the first issue, I do not see that as the end of the issue. The Club election continues until the end of April, and after that, those of us who have been engaged for 28 - plus years in advocating the "heart and soul" of the Sierra Club's mission do not feel it would be responsible to just fade away into the woodwork.
It is true that the situation and decision regarding LeConte Lodge as it was framed back in November of 2015 when the Board first considered it, was more complex then than it is now. However, since that time the complexity of the problem has become much more simplified, and it is no longer necessary to "address the complexity." The name change for the LeConte Memorial is now a fait accompli. Nor is there really a "myriad of options" any longer. The response from the National Park Service to the board's questions were already known to those of us experienced in the program, so there was no real point to the Board seeking further clarification from NPS's Tom Medema. But as the situation stands now, today, the decision really is a simple and clear one. It is simply as whether we want the Sierra Club to maintain the core of its identity and its mission to "explore, enjoy, and preserve'" Yosemite and the planet, or to allow a government agency to literally bury us as nothing more than a historical footnote. That is really the choice the Board is facing.
Especially if the building is renamed something like the Yosemite Conservation Memorial as the NPS suggests it may be, what we now stand to lose is to me literally the heart and soul of the Sierra Club. Campaigns come and go; but the the spiritual birthplace of the Sierra Club is in Yosemite. Even before the LeConte Lodge was built, the Sierra Club had the first original visitor center in Yosemite Valley. Long before the National Park Service was created 100 years ago, the Sierra Club was already laying the foundation for the modern conservation movement, and it was doing so within Yosemite and within its first "Public Reading Room" and later the LeConte Memorial Lodge. As such, today the Lodge is a hugely unappreciated public relations gold mine for the Sierra Club.
Campaigns come and go. This year it is the Our Wild America's campaign for national monuments; a few years ago it was the "Resilient Habitats" campaign for which the Lodge actively engaged visitors. Before that, our LeConte Lodge proudly installed a Climate Change Exhibit, even before the National Park Service created its own exhibit on the topic. Before that there were campaigns for the Wilderness Act and Redwood National Park and North Cascades National Park; before that there were campaigns to keep dams out of the Grand Canyon and Dinosaur National Monument. Before that there was the effort to establish the National Park Service itself and the Club effort to keep a dam out of Hetch Hetchy Valley, which is how we got the NPS is the first place.
But before all of those campaigns there was the LeConte Memorial Lodge in Yosemite, the birthplace and shining beacon of the Sierra Club's conservation ethic. LeConte Lodge was the first showcase, and thus the birthplace of the first "Exhibit Format" book, "This is the American Earth," which set forth that conservation ethic for the twentieth century and beyond. The Sierra Club's mission has always been core to the building, offered to the millions of Yosemite visitors - a core potential constituency of support for our ideals. And today, unless turned over to the NPS, the building can still promote our message, and even current campaigns. Despite the erroneous information the OWA leaders gave, we freely distribute membership brochures, copies of Sierra Magazine, and any other literature the Club staff gives to the curator to distribute about our current campaigns - and this can especially include ALL the elements of our current Strategic Plan. Given its location in Yosemite, the building is in an ideal situation to promote our diversity goals, which in a sense transcends all our current environmental issues.
For all these reasons, to give up LeConte Lodge is not just like abandoning one program vs. another program which is vying for the Club's limited budget dollars. To give up LeConte Lodge is giving up a key part of our identity. The Sierra Club has held the LeConte Lodge in a sacred trust for over 112 years, and to abandon that is nothing short of self-suicide.
This is why I included both the specific question about the Lodge - by whatever name it is known in the future and by whatever means we plainly reject Joseph LeConte's racism - and also the second question about preserving and celebrating the Club's history. Preserving our history does not mean an uncritical acceptance of things we did wrong. Past leaders of the Club did plenty of things wrong; but those are best dealt with not by ignoring them, but by identifying them and explaining why we are doing things differently now. In that sense, we can reject Joseph LeConte's racism clearly and forthrightly just as we reject the Sierra Club's historical Outings that allowed hundreds of people at a time to trample mountain meadows and delicate alpine landscapes.
The whole point of LeConte Memorial Lodge (by whatever name), and keeping and preserving the memory of our historical heritage, is to fulfill not just this year's current campaign or the next, but the inherent principles of the Sierra Club - its conservation message which has reached out for over 100 years regardless of whatever current campaign is popular at the time. To lose that is to lose our core identity.
On the issue of the role of the grassroots in the Sierra Club, the Club has come to rely on a centralized goverenance that puts more dependence on funding from a few large donors rather than volunteer input. The Lodge decision is an embodiment of that controversy. The Sierrra Club is made up of Chapters, Groups, and numerous grassroots teams. By its narture, the Club is more grassroots oriented than any other environmental organization. Because of this, the Board has a responsibility to make sure that all those entities have a voice when it makes decisions that directly affects those entities, a situation that is quite distinct from an "ordinary" non-profit organization..
Ultimately the power may be in the Board of Directors, but the board cannot make wise decisions unless it actively seeks that input, and shares the decision-making with its grassroots entities.
March 11, 2016
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