Sierra Club goes Woke, and goes Broke

A leftist biology professor posts:

This happens over and over again. It happened with the Southern Poverty Law Center. It happened with the ACLU. It happened with the Audubon Society. And now it’s happening with the Sierra Club. What is happening? An organization with a narrowly defined but admirable mission cannot resist the ideological Zeitgeist, and embraces social justice precepts that are not universally accepted. The organization becomes riven with controversy, and it erodes, becoming damaged. (This also happened with Scientific American, remember?)

The NYT from a week ago tells us how this is happening to the Sierra Club, which has lost money and membership after deciding to branch off into Social Justice Warriorism. Read about it by clicking the headline below, or find the article archived here for free.

That article starts:

The Sierra Club calls itself the “largest and most influential grass roots environmental organization in the country.” But it is in the middle of an implosion — left weakened, distracted and divided just as environmental protections are under assault by the Trump administration.

The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.

Its political giving has also dropped. Federal campaign-finance records show $3.6 million in donations from the Sierra Club during the push to defeat Donald J. Trump in 2020, but none as Mr. Trump stormed back to the presidency in 2024.

The article shows support collapsing in about 2020, but the real problem started decades earlier when it went pro-immigration. There are a lot of arguments for and against immigration, but for an environmentalist, migration from the Third World to the USA is overwhelmingly bad. The Sierra Club should have been overwhelmingly against it.

The story has surprisingly little to do with Donald Trump. If anything, Trump should have united them with opposition to coal-burning and other policies.