Growing the Green Giant: Ecological Threats, Political Threats, and U.S. Membership in Sierra Club, 1892-Present

A growing body of research examines questions related to the emergence of environmental organizations and the growth of the environmental organizational field in the United States, but we need to know more about why particular environmental organizations grow or decline in terms of membership size over time. In this article, we draw on both qualitative and quantitative data to assess factors contributing to the growth of the Sierra Club, one of the United States’ oldest and largest environmental organizations. First, through an analytic narrative that synthesizes insights from secondary accounts of the history of the Sierra Club, we identify a variety of ecological and political threats that have led to growth in the Sierra Club from its founding in 1892 to the present day. Then, through time-series analyses of quantitative data, we show that two particular types of environmental and political threats—growth in carbon dioxide emissions and the presence of Republican Presidents—have led to growth in the Sierra Club from 1960 (when it began mass recruitment of members) to 2016. We contextualize these findings within the broader social scientific literature on neoliberalism and its consequences for environmental degradation and environmental mobilization. Overall, our findings provide support for threat-based models of mobilization and hold significant implications for research on environmental organizations.

This is the American Earth: An exhibition and book by Ansel Adams, Nancy Newhall, and the Sierra Club

During a remarkable period of growth for the Sierra Club during the Cold War, the club sponsored This Is the American Earth in 1954, a collaborative project between Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall that resulted in a 1955 exhibition of photographs and a 1960 photobook on the theme of nature conservation. The two productions of photography provide a crucial opportunity to examine how the medium was employed as a campaign tool and an instrument of propaganda over a period of six years. Yet, the project has been almost exclusively defined by its 1960 book. This thesis aims to recuperate the message and import of the 1955 exhibition to determine the function of the entire project, significantly revealing that in addition to being a social and political device, This Is the American Earth marked a critical point in Adams’s and Newhall’s ongoing battle for photography’s recognition as a fine art.

This is the American Earth: An exhibition and book by Ansel Adams, Nancy Newhall, and the Sierra Club

During a remarkable period of growth for the Sierra Club during the Cold War, the club sponsored This Is the American Earth in 1954, a collaborative project between Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall that resulted in a 1955 exhibition of photographs and a 1960 photobook on the theme of nature conservation. The two productions of photography provide a crucial opportunity to examine how the medium was employed as a campaign tool and an instrument of propaganda over a period of six years. Yet, the project has been almost exclusively defined by its 1960 book. This thesis aims to recuperate the message and import of the 1955 exhibition to determine the function of the entire project, significantly revealing that in addition to being a social and political device, This Is the American Earth marked a critical point in Adams’s and Newhall’s ongoing battle for photography’s recognition as a fine art.

The Roads Home

Chapter 2 follows the early travels of John Muir to get a glimpse of the highly mobile landscape of the decades that followed the Civil War, particularly in the South and West. Before he rose to fame as the founder of the Sierra Club, Muir walked the country’s roads alongside mobile laborers, newly freed African Americans, and Native peoples. For them, as for the itinerant naturalist, sleeping outside could constitute a marginal and perilous, if all-too-familiar existence. Muir alternately knocked on strangers’ doors, slept outside in fear of disease and alligators, and herded sheep in Sierra meadows. His interpretations and criticisms of Black and Indigenous people figured into Muir’s seminal perspectives on wilderness, which in turn influenced changing views of public nature, including recreational and nonrecreational campers alike in the late nineteenth century.

Growing the Green Giant: Ecological Threats, Political Threats, and U.S. Membership in Sierra Club, 1892–Present

A growing body of research examines questions related to the emergence of environmental organizations and the growth of the environmental organizational field in the United States, but we need to know more about why particular environmental organizations grow or decline in terms of membership size over time. In this article, we draw on both qualitative and quantitative data to assess factors contributing to the growth of the Sierra Club, one of the United States’ oldest and largest environmental organizations. First, through an analytic narrative that synthesizes insights from secondary accounts of the history of the Sierra Club, we identify a variety of ecological and political threats that have led to growth in the Sierra Club from its founding in 1892 to the present day. Then, through time-series analyses of quantitative data, we show that two particular types of environmental and political threats—growth in carbon dioxide emissions and the presence of Republican Presidents—have led to growth in the Sierra Club from 1960 (when it began mass recruitment of members) to 2016. We contextualize these findings within the broader social scientific literature on neoliberalism and its consequences for environmental degradation and environmental mobilization. Overall, our findings provide support for threat-based models of mobilization and hold significant implications for research on environmental organizations.

The Nature Business

This chapter begins with the introduction of Robert Kafin and his law partner, Ed Needleman who had been talking to Ted Hullar from the Sierra Club, David Newhouse from the Adirondack Mountain Club (ADK), and Courtney Jones, a philanthropist from the Lake Champlain town of Westport at Harold Hochschild's Great Camp in October 1971. The chapter describes Kafin's career shift and how he learned what was going on in the Adirondacks. Kafin saw that the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and other new federal laws were broadly written and not widely understood, especially by law firms north of Albany. The chapter reviews how the Adirondack Pack Agency Act added a big new state law to that pile. These laws could be used to shape or stop development. The chapter then shifts to describe how the Adirondack Project established Kafin & Needleman as the people to talk to if you wanted to block development in the Adirondacks. It also reviews the implications of Horizon and Ton-Da-Lay development for the Adirondack Park Agency (APA). Ultimately, the chapter examines the power and influence of some lawyers in relation to the APA.

Washington View: Toward more climate-friendly schools

The Biden administration is taking steps to address climate change, but, so far, little attention has been paid to the role of schools. Even within the education sector, as Maria Ferguson explains, conversations about education and climate change tend to focus how to teach students about it, rather than about how schools themselves might contribute to it. Groups such as UndauntedK12 and the Sierra Club are encouraging schools, and the policy makers who fund them, to look for opportunities to make school buildings and buses more climate friendly.