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By Sanjay Ranchod

The Sierra Club's future

I JOINED THE Sierra Club 10 years ago because I wanted to do more to protect the environment than just write a check for annual membership dues. The organization offered me opportunities to get involved with environmental campaigns on issues I deeply care about, like protecting wilderness and curbing global warming.

These are the Sierra Club's strength – its welcoming grassroots democracy and its history of organizing and inspiring volunteers to effect political change – and the reasons it has become a major force in American politics today. But the organization's openness and effectiveness also have made it a target of fringe interests seeking political clout and mainstream credibility.

Today the Sierra Club's board of directors, which is directly elected by its 700,000-plus grassroots members, is the subject of an attempted takeover by anti-immigration advocates who are being supported by outside, nonenvironmental groups. The anti-immigration candidates seek control of the organization's $83 million budget and want to take advantage of its political reputation.

The takeover attempt has drawn national media attention and turned into a battle for the future of the organization. The big issue at stake in the board election, for which I am a candidate, is how the Sierra Club will deal with the very real environmental issue of unsustainable population growth.

In 1998, Sierra Club members voted down an anti-immigration ballot initiative and decided to tackle global population growth by dealing with its root causes. Restricting immigration to the United States, members decided, is not the best way to protect the environment. Just as pollution doesn't respect national borders, immigration restrictions don't solve environmental problems; they merely shift those problems elsewhere.

Global population growth is best addressed by providing all people a decent standard of living and by giving all women the means to control their fertility – in short, by mitigating the conditions that drive people from their homes to begin with. To help address this problem, the Sierra Club has increased financial support for its global population program to advocate for increased U.S. funding for successful domestic and international family-planning efforts.

Migration is a global phenomenon that happens when opportunity, freedom, environmental degradation, and desperation are distributed across the globe so unevenly that people are forced to stay and barely survive, or move and possibly thrive. We must address these root inequalities if we are to effectively reduce migration pressures.

Unfortunately, the immigration controversy has been a distraction from the Sierra Club's efforts to educate the public about the Bush administration's destructive environmental record and threatens to polarize our membership just when environmentalists must unite to stop the most anti-environmental president in history. Moreover, divisive positions would alienate many of our allies and hamper our ability to build broad coalitions in support of conservation goals.

Anti-immigration positions will also make it more difficult to diversify and expand our membership. That's a particular concern to me. Despite the Sierra Club's work on environmental justice issues and outreach to labor and minority communities, anti-immigration positions would only reinforce negative stereotypes about the environmental movement.

If you are a Sierra Club member, please vote in our ongoing board election to keep the nation's most influential environmental organization true to its historic conservation mission. If you are not yet a member, please join. We have a lot of work to do.

Sanjay Ranchod is a San Francisco consumer attorney and past chair of the Sierra Club's national global warming campaign. Candidates put on the ballot by the Sierra Club's Nominating Committee, all of whom support the current neutral position on immigration, are: Nick Aumen, Ed Dobson, Michael Dorsey, Chad Hanson, Dave Karpf, Jan O'Connell, Sanjay Ranchod, and Lisa Renstrom. Candiates endorsed by Support U.S. Population Stabilization (www.susps.org), who are urging the Sierra Club to push for limits on immigration, are: Dick Lamm, Frank Morris, David Pimentel, Kim McCoy, and Robert (Roy) van de Hoek.