Defending the environment against the Sierra Club

The Sierra Club and other self-styled "environmental" lobbies are out to collect 1,000,000 signatures petitioning Congress to remove Interior Secretary James Watt from office.

This is not a matter of petty politics, nor even of the undoubted fact that the powerful voice of the mass media will put a small group of power-hungry elitists in the fight of a nature-loving mass movement.

The deeper trouble is that most people have let themselves be persuaded to believe in a "balance between the energy needs of industry and the desire to preserve the environment."

This is a fundamental misconception, shared by duped nature lovers with witless industry executives. First, it is energy and technology that enables man to live in civilization, yet in harmony with nature; and it is, to the contrary, the lack of industry and multiple land use that has inflicted grievous damage on the environment in backward countries. The evidence, as so often, flatly contradicts the fashionable cliches (see Dunn below).

Second, the air and water have not become cleaner thanks to the Sierra Club, but in spite of it. No matter how well meaning their followers may be, the leaders of the "environmental" movement have always subordinated their alleged environmental concerns to their more ardent desire of freezing society with their kind of people in command.

Their words extol the beauties of nature, but their actions say Nature for the masters, not for the masses: horse riding, not recreational vehicles in National Parks. (The horses do more damage, but they are not ridden by the riff-raff.)

Their methods include backroom deals (see Ackerman); deliberate misinformation (see Tucker 77); legalistic sabotage by obstruction and pretense of adversary proceedings [AtE May 78, Dec.80]; "cherry stemming" (excluding roads from maps to conjure up "wilderness" areas); all papered over with sanctimonious talk about the environment. And much of it at public expense, for via "intervenors" and other methods they have their delicate hands deep in your pocket.

The attack against Watt by these "liberals" focuses on his religious beliefs, as if multiple use of public lands for all the people were a question of theology. Even the respectability seeking Audubon has now joined this medieval line of attack.

The great moral crusade is led by Sierra Club Director M. McCloskey, who as early as 1974 conceded that nuclear power was less hazardous to public health than coal, but opposed it in favor of coal anyway; and by such friends of the earth as David Brower, himself a former Sierra Club Director until his service was terminated after he was charged with unlawfully attempting to divert Sierra Club funds into his own pockets.(*)

Watt's policy of multiple land use, promoting energy, water, minerals, timber, agriculture, and recreation is the only one that ever benefited the environment.

The real issues of this confrontation will be hidden behind a shrill media barrage about environmental protection. But everyone can help the truth by first learning it (see reading list below), and then making it known.

The environment has few enemies as harmful as the environmentalists; it has none as hypocritical.

* Minutes of Sierra Club Board of Directors Meetings, San Francisco, June 8 and October 19, 1968.