Laid-Off Sierra Club Staffers: ‘We Can’t Give Up on United Fronts’

Founded in 1892, the organization led the creation of the National Park Service, expanding on a legacy of dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples by insisting that protecting land meant removing it from Indigenous stewardship. “The Population Bomb,” which the Sierra Club published in 1968, was weaponized against poor people and people of color. It placed blame for the global ecological crisis on those least responsible: poor women of color and immigrants. This contributed to the anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-single mother attacks that continue to this day.   These shifts represent a reassertion of carbon fundamentalism—placing prime attention on carbon as opposed to a systems analysis focused on ending extractivism, disposability, and racism. They pave the way for false solutions (strategies based in corporate ownership and technological fixes) like net zero and carbon offsets.  Electrifying everything is a framework to electrify exploitation.  The Sierra Club’s new framework is a death sentence for the majority around the world, from Ghana to the Gulf South and from the Arctic to Soweto.