Does the Sierra Club Believe in Borders? It Depends

The Sierra Club board of directors recent vote to back amnesty for illegal immigrants and support vastly increased levels of legal immigration is, when all is said and done, a vote for open borders, or no borders at all.  At least our nation’s borders, that is.

Can you imagine the Sierra Club board voting to open the borders of Yosemite National Park to any and all comers, or better yet, eliminating Yosemite’s boundaries altogether?

Henceforth, the Board of Directors of the Sierra Club urges that – because all man-made borders and boundaries are unnatural, arbitrary, and un-ecological, mere lines on a map, and not etched on the ground or in nature – Yosemite National Park should welcome not just campers and hikers, but loggers, miners, ranchers, developers, dam builders, off-road-vehicle enthusiasts, hunters, trappers, cabin owners, and land speculators.

It is unfair to exclude these hardworking folks and outdoor recreationists, who after all, provide valuable social and economic products and services to society. They have just as much right to use and enjoy our precious public lands as do all human beings.

Can’t imagine the Sierra Club board ever voting to open Yosemite’s closed boundaries?  Could it be that the boundaries of national parks – and national forests, national wildlife refuges, and designated national wilderness areas – are more sacrosanct to club leaders than their own country’s borders? That would indeed appear to be the case, for this organization that prides itself on protecting the planet.

Once, the Sierra Club focused on protecting America’s wild lands and environment, while the global commons – the biosphere, atmosphere, and oceans – was an important but secondary interest. The Club acknowledged that its ability – and Americans’ ability – to effect change on the global scale was limited.

Nowadays at the Sierra Club , any preference for saving U.S. environmental treasures first and foremost is implicitly considered parochial, outmoded, and futile, if not outright exclusionary and xenophobic. This contrasts sharply with the earlier, more patriotic orientation of the Club, when its emphasis was preserving American resources and landscapes for posterity.

The abandoned approach of old was perhaps best exemplified in the 1960s-era book and poster unabashedly entitled “THIS IS THE AMERICAN EARTH.”The poster I remember vividly featured the dramatic and famous Ansel Adams black and white photograph of the Sierra Nevada Range (John Muir’s “Range of Light”) from Lone Pine, California in the Owens Valley. The shining Sierra peaks pierce the heavens behind the brooding Alabama Hills, deep in shadow. The fluted crest of Mt. Whitney, highest point in the Lower 48, soars nearly 14,500 feet skyward.

Setting aside wild places like these rank among the Sierra Club’s greatest achievements. Given the Club leadership’s current priorities and sensibilities, however, they would probably sneer at such small-mindedness.  Protecting the planet, after all, means expanding one’s horizons to embrace the Earth’s salvation, and not just the playgrounds of elitist backpackers.

In their quixotic quest to protect the planet, however, Club leadership has thrown the overpopulated, overstressed American landscape under the bus. In spurning U.S. borders while endorsing amnesty and expanded legal immigration – and the virtually unlimited U.S. population growth these portend – the effete Sierra Club leadership has in essence said it doesn’t care about protecting the Central Valley, Sierra foothills, Puget Sound, Chesapeake Bay, the Front Range of the Rockies, the Everglades, and American forests that are falling to make way for population-driven sprawl. More American wildlife species will become endangered and extinct as American environmentalists overlook them in their misguided penchant to save the world.

And the borders the Sierra Club apparently does support – of national parks and the like – will be more and more meaningless as overpopulation besieges them.