[The recent upheaval at the Sierra Club pulls back years of work
to turn the influential group toward climate justice. Green capital
could be the winner. Frontline communities stand to lose big.]
[[link removed]]

LAID-OFF SIERRA CLUB STAFFERS: ‘WE CAN’T GIVE UP ON UNITED
FRONTS’  
[[link removed]]


 

Brooke Anderson, Hop Hopkins, Michelle Mascarenhas
August 8, 2023
Convergence
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
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[[link removed]]
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_ The recent upheaval at the Sierra Club pulls back years of work to
turn the influential group toward climate justice. Green capital could
be the winner. Frontline communities stand to lose big. _

Michelle Mascarenhas facilitating the 3 Circles Strategy tool at the
Prepare, Pollinate, Practice training for trainers in March 2020,
(photo by Brooke Anderson)

 

_For the last decade, climate justice organizers have seen the Sierra
Club as a critical lever for moving a climate agenda that centers
equity and just transition. It has the largest grassroots base outside
of labor, the most substantial infrastructure of any national green
group in the US, and roots in a movement that at times was not afraid
to go toe-to-toe with large corporations or development-oriented
pro-business government entities._

_But beginning in May, the organization accelerated a restructuring
[[link removed]] process
that included layoffs of the entire equity and environmental justice
teams and of senior staffers, several Black women and other women of
color among them. At the same time, numerous new executive-level staff
with high salaries were brought on to usher in a new organizational
direction. This move, led by new BIPOC executive leadership, pulls
back years of steady progress towards aligning the organization with
the more progressive climate agenda. It is a harbinger of a shift away
from equity and towards green capital just as the 2024 election
nears—and reflects an anti-woke backlash occurring in liberal
organizations across many sectors of the movement._

_To better understand these shifts, movement journalist Brooke
Anderson interviewed two longtime climate justice organizers and
veteran social movement strategists, Michelle Mascarenhas and Hop
Hopkins. Prior to being laid off from the Sierra Club this spring,
Mascarenhas was its national director of campaigns
[[link removed]],
and Hopkins resigned as its director of organizational transformation
[[link removed]]._

_Hopkins and Mascarenhas had been working to align the Sierra Club
with the frontline-led climate justice movement, as part of an
intentional effort to shift the organization from its racist roots and
practice. Founded in 1892, the organization led the creation of the
National Park Service, expanding on a legacy of dispossession and
genocide of Indigenous peoples by insisting that protecting land meant
removing it from Indigenous stewardship. “The Population Bomb,”
which the Sierra Club published in 1968, was weaponized against poor
people and people of color. It placed blame for the global ecological
crisis on those least responsible: poor women of color and immigrants.
This contributed to the anti-Black, anti-immigrant, anti-single mother
attacks that continue to this day. _

_The sophisticated analysis Mascarenhas and Hopkins offer of “what
time it is on the clock of the world” (to borrow from the late,
great Grace Lee Boggs) doesn’t just speak to happenings inside the
Sierra Club. Rather, it holds deep-rooted and durable wisdom for left
organizers attempting to make critical interventions in larger,
liberal or centrist spaces in the non-profit industrial complex—and
clarifies the sides and the stakes in today’s debates over climate
policy. _

BROOKE ANDERSON: WHY DID YOU BOTH CHOOSE TO WORK IN THE SIERRA CLUB,
AND WHAT DID YOU HOPE TO ACCOMPLISH THERE? WHY IS IT IMPORTANT TO THE
LEFT WHAT BECOMES OF THE SIERRA CLUB?

HOP HOPKINS: I’ve been heavily influenced by the chapter structure
and national reach of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, the
Brown Berets, and the American Indian Movement. The Black Panthers had
13 chartered chapters. Imagine if they had been able to scale to 30-40
cities? Or had a chapter in every state? For me, this was an
organizational form that the Sierra Club represented. Ten years ago my
community of social movement leftists mostly worked inside small to
medium 501(c)3’s and didn’t have experience operating at a
national scale. On the road to liberation, we knew we had to learn how
to practice little “d” democracy and govern at scale. That’s
when I started to look at the Sierra Club as a site of struggle in
order to gain experience governing at scale. At this time
authoritarianism, white nationalism and the Southern strategy were not
as ascendant as they are now. However, those of us intervening in and
observing right-wing movements understood the global connections
between climate denial, rising anti-democratic movements and the goal
of the right wing to seize state and federal power prior to
2050—when the United States will be a majority-minority nation.

In order to fight a climate catastrophe that is global in nature, we
need to understand how to scale our work inside and outside of the
non-profit industrial complex into self-governing, member-based, power
building pro-democratic forms of organization.

I’d been organizing for more than fifteen years in 2015 and had
experienced the negative impacts from large mainstream environmental
and conservation groups (big greens) within the environmental justice
movement. The Sierra Club had a foundational role to play in the
continued dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their lands and
putting forward right-wing environmental ideology like that in “The
Population Bomb,” which to this day continues to be massively
detrimental to Black, Brown, and migrant communities across the globe.
We sought to align the Sierra Club, from being one of the most harmful
organizations—where liberal middle-class white folks were,
consciously or unconsciously, being organized into white
supremacy—with the progressive wings of the pro-democracy, labor,
and climate and environmental justice movements, and root the Club in
the Jemez principles
[[link removed]],
Black Lives Matter, land rematriation, reparations, just transition
[[link removed]], and redistribution
of philanthropic funds. We were successful in achieving this alignment
in many ways as were we successful in  developing a political home
for white environmentalists to resist ecofascism
[[link removed]] and
exposing them to anti-racist models of organizing in support of
frameworks for the liberation of themselves, people of color and
working-class white folks. 

MICHELLE MASCARENHAS: We [the grassroots, frontline community
organizing sector] formed the Climate Justice Alliance
[[link removed]] in 2012 to create a new center
of gravity in the climate movement that called for system change, not
climate change. We needed a climate movement that would center the
extractive economy as the driver of climate (with “extractive
economy” being shorthand for racialized settler-colonial globalized
industrial capitalism), and advocate for a frontline-led just
transition to regenerative economies. At the time, big greens and
governments were not even giving lip service to these tenets in how
they took on climate. That began to shift dramatically over the past
decade. So the moment felt ripe to help align the largest grassroots
membership-based environmental organization in the country, with 64
chapters including every state, Hawai’i, and Puerto Rico, with a
just transition framework. As the climate crisis becomes more
apparent, we need more on-ramps for white people, middle-class people,
and others who might not yet be organized around their frontlines to
engage in a movement for systemic transformation.

Bringing white people into the multi-racial front

BA: WHAT IS THE POTENTIAL POWER OF BRINGING ORGANIZATIONS LIKE THE
SIERRA CLUB INTO A UNITED FRONT [A BROAD COALITION TO ADVANCE SHARED
OBJECTIVES], AND HOW CAN LEFT ORGANIZERS TRYING TO MAKE THOSE
INTERVENTIONS IN LIBERAL OR NEOLIBERAL SPACES STAY GROUNDED AND
ALIGNED?

HH: The Sierra Club has significant influence on how the environment
is conceptualized. Moving an organization like the Sierra Club on an
intersectional journey—to how climate is intrinsically connected to
the history of extractivism [the exploitation of land and labor for
profit]—is an important endeavor. The hypothesis goes like this: If
we are able to organize white middle-class environmentalists to
develop an anti-racist root-cause analysis of the climate catastrophe,
we will create the conditions for the Sierra Club to join a larger
multi-racial united front for liberation. If we do this, then we will
learn aspects of how to govern democratically at scale and organize
white folks against white supremacy and ecofascism at one of the
biggest non-profit sites of its production and reproduction. By moving
the Sierra Club, it is having an exponential impact on other big
greens, philanthropy, and politicians. Just as climate justice is
intrinsically linked to racial justice, land back is inseparable from
reparations. We’re not going to get one without the other. To get
the balance of forces to secure land back and reparations, and to
improve material conditions for the working class, working poor, trans
people, etc., it is important to have formations like the Sierra Club
in a larger united front.

By not organizing that key space, white middle-class well-educated
liberals continue to drift, or full on put foot to the pedal toward
right-wing ideologies. Predominantly white institutions left to their
own devices won’t take on white supremacy on their own. They’ll
continue to tweak around the edges of extractivism, disposability, and
sacrifice. 

In 1966 SNCC tried to wrestle with this question of what to do with
well-meaning white liberals. However, leftists have largely retreated
from organizing predominantly white spaces. Respect to organizations
like SURJ and The Catalyst Project for having taken this task on.
However, we need more forms of organizations with the specific purpose
of attracting, supporting and developing hundreds of thousands of
white folks into the struggles for climate, racial, gender and
economic justice. We decided to take up the task and intervene in
predominantly white liberal environmental spaces to help develop
shared interest in defeating white supremacy, cultivate anti-racist
leadership and help build a root-cause systems analysis of the climate
crisis and social inequity.

In the last several elections, it’s been clear that we’re losing
older white middle-class well-educated folks to conservative
ideologies. The right wing understands this and values the power of
the Sierra Club’s membership base, and national infrastructure, and
the political power it wields. So much so that they’ve tried to take
it over twice—once in 1998 and again in 2004. During our years of
organizing, we lifted up the genealogy of ecofascism and
authoritarianism and how central they are to the birth and development
of the environmental movement. Through webinars, teach-ins and
articles we illustrated how they’re not just trees in the same
forest, but they’re actually branches of the same tree.

The ‘war on woke’ subverts progress towards justice

BA: HELP US SITUATE THAT NEED FOR A UNITED FRONT—AND WHERE THE
SIERRA CLUB STANDS IN THAT PROJECT—IN —THE QUESTION OF “WHAT
TIME IS IT ON THE CLOCK OF THE WORLD?”

HH: We’re now seeing the Southern strategy coming into fruition.
The Southern strategy is a Civil Rights-era Republican strategy to
transition power away from the Democratic Party by appealing to the
racism of white voters. They created media institutions, think tanks,
university programs and the Christian right to agitate and exploit
cultural and racial divisions and moved that strategy over several
decades to get us to where we are now. 

Meanwhile,  the US Census reports
[[link removed]] that
by 2044, the US will become a majority-minority country. Those on the
Right have had that on their mind for a long time, and have been
organizing to control the levers of power so that it doesn’t impact
their ability to lead. Politically, that has meant gerrymandering and
voting disenfranchisement and voter suppression of more and more
people of color to shift electoral outcomes.

Social scientists Judy Churdy and Hakeem Jefferson, who study
whiteness and white ideas about racism, report
[[link removed]] that
while there was an uptick in white concern about racism in the summer
of 2020 amidst the uprisings surrounding the murders of George Floyd,
Breanna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery, it was an overrepresentation of
people who sincerely care about racial justice, and fleeting. What we
see now is an indicator of this fact. White ideas about racism are at
a lower point now than they were in 2020. We’re seeing the
counterinsurgent backlash on the Right in the form of
anti-“wokeness” and a liberal institutional retreat from justice,
equity, inclusion and belonging.

The backlash is being experienced as a cultural phenomenon.
Organizations that haven’t moved to genuine understanding and
anti-racist practice are experiencing the pushback from conservative
forces inside and outside their organizations. As I mentioned earlier,
the Sierra Club’s board was almost taken over twice by conservative
movements and I think we’re experiencing the third instance now. If
Sierra Club’s commitment to racial justice is as genuine as claimed,
why eradicate the equity department and create a narrative that the
work that they were doing was harmful?

This is happening not just at the Sierra Club, but in a number of
liberal institutions from corporate to non-profit formations. The
impact has been devastating on people of color across the workforce.
The gains made over the past decade and especially in the past two to
three years will turn out to be more devastating if they too follow
the trend observed by Churdy and Jefferson. 

BA:  TELL US ABOUT SOME OF THE PROGRESS IN THE LAST SEVERAL YEARS TO
ALIGN THE CLUB WITH FRONTLINE, GRASSROOTS ENVIRONMENTAL AND CLIMATE
JUSTICE WORK BEING LED BY BIPOC COMMUNITIES.

MM: After widespread accusations of a staff and volunteer culture
that tolerated abuse
[[link removed]],
the Sierra Club Board approved a set of values
[[link removed]]: anti-racism, balance,
collaboration, justice, and transformation. These values provided a
framework from which to do political education, and also a ground on
which white volunteers, staff of color, and a range of folks coming
from different backgrounds could come together, approach conflict and
harm, and build across race, class, gender, sexuality, age, and life
experience. 

Frontline groups were increasingly engaging with and putting pressure
on Sierra Club to align with a climate justice agenda. In turn, Sierra
Club’s on-the-ground staff and chapter volunteers who were engaging
with frontline groups often pushed the organization to shift
priorities, policy, or strategy. Meanwhile, others in key roles were
able to help anchor, support and train numerous staff and member
leaders in the tenets of a climate justice and just transition agenda,
culture, and practice in a relatively short period of time, laying the
groundwork for deeper transformation.

HH: When I got to the Sierra Club nine years ago, you couldn’t say
the word racism without being accused of being a racist. Between then
and now we operationalized the implementation of the Jemez Principles
and the Principles of Environmental Justice
[[link removed]]; signed onto the BLM
platform; passed an organizational resolution supporting reparations
for Black people; adopted land acknowledgements; went through change
processes resulting in structural shifts to increase transparency in
decision-making and budgeting and correct historic pay inequity among
national and chapter staff; and  conducted training and education
around the exclusionary and racist origins of the Sierra Club.  These
and many other moves made it possible for the organization to be
explicit that its struggle for the planet is indistinguishable from
the struggle for the humanity of all people. The Club has since
recognized that the compounding crises we are collectively
experiencing are a product of the legacy of colonialism, genocide,
slavery and systemic exploitation grounded in anti-Indigenous and
anti-Black policies and structures.

This hasn’t been without difficulties and the work to get here began
before Michelle and I became Sierra Club staff. A great many staff and
volunteers that were involved in the efforts above are no longer at
the Sierra Club; some were fired or pushed out, some left due to
inhospitable working conditions or lack of alignment with the changes
and others are resigning and being laid off now. Recognition is owed
to many women of color, especially Black women, who carried much of
this work and paid a uniquely heavy cost over the years.

Electrifying everything = electrifying exploitation

BA: WHAT WILL THE IMPACT OF THESE SHIFTS AT THE SIERRA CLUB BE ON THE
BROADER CLIMATE JUSTICE MOVEMENT, AND ON GRASSROOTS FRONTLINE
COMMUNITIES THAT THE SIERRA CLUB HAS BEEN BUILDING WITH?

HH: These shifts represent a reassertion of carbon
fundamentalism—placing prime attention on carbon as opposed to a
systems analysis focused on ending extractivism, disposability, and
racism. They pave the way for false solutions (strategies based in
corporate ownership and technological fixes) like net zero and carbon
offsets that dominate the climate change narrative. This
anti-“wokeness” is an anti-systems framework. It doesn’t want to
go to the root causes of the issue. It’s a neoliberal,
compartmentalized reading of the problem that seeks to leave systems
of power and governance unchanged and in the hands of those that
created the problems in the first place. Trust has been broken
internally and externally and some Sierra Club relationships may never
be recoverable while others will continue to hold a tactical
relationship to the organization. Over the years we were part of a
successful movement to align the organization with the progressive
wings of the environmental and climate justice sector and to help
Sierra Club develop a more holistic, intersectional and interdependent
worldview. Holding those positions in this current moment of backlash
is a work in progress.

MM: We’re in a moment of transition. That transition is inevitable
but justice is not. Who leads is going to determine how it goes and
where we end up. “Grey” capital—fossil fuel companies as a
prominent example—is still working to maintain a large slice of the
dwindling and disaster-prone pie. But “green” capital is rapidly
gaining. With the passage of the Inflation Reduction Act, “green”
companies are ready to build, build, build a whole new infrastructure
reliant on mining for rare earth minerals, building individually owned
vehicles as opposed to mass transit, and utility-scale solar that
compromises biodiversity and leads further toward eco-apartheid. For
the Sierra Club to shift from a core campaign of fighting fossil fuels
toward an “electrify everything” agenda represents a huge shift
toward false solutions and a missed opportunity for utilizing the
political power that the Sierra Club wields towards a truly just
transition.

For example, if solar in a red state is only being advocated for by
Amazon and Walmart, the Sierra Club is likely to put its advocacy
resources in support of those companies going solar. Electrifying
everything is a framework to electrify exploitation. This is using the
guise of the climate crisis to further extract from Black, Indigenous,
people of color and poor white people and send them under the bus. If
someone can’t afford a car today, how is a tax credit going to get
them an electric car tomorrow? If our communities are priced out of
home ownership, how is a tax credit on rooftop solar going to help?
Inequity will be exacerbated and resources wasted. The restructuring
at the Sierra Club represents a deadly shift on how movement forces
are shaping the economy in this critical time of transition.

The existing institutions are crumbling or collapsing or imploding, or
transforming into vehicles for other purposes. At the same time, in
this moment of transition, we need to be training our folks to be
agents of their own collective self-determination. There is so much
new muscle; we need to learn to do that well and every venue is an
opportunity. We must move toward collective governance of our
watersheds, foodsheds, tradesheds, housing, eco-resilience locally
rooted in our neighborhoods and as part of indigenous sovereignty and
racial justice. The Sierra Club chapter structure could be such a
powerful vehicle for the work to craft permanently organized
communities
[[link removed]]–but
only after the transformative work to create principled
anti-oppression spaces. Unfortunately, that work has been held up with
the recent restructuring.

BA: THERE’S A DETAILED PIECE IN THE _GUARDIAN_
[[link removed]] ABOUT
THE LABOR ISSUES IN THE RESTRUCTURING. AS DIRECTOR-LEVEL STAFF,
NEITHER OF YOU WERE IN THE UNION’S BARGAINING UNIT, BUT YOU’VE
BEEN SUPPORTIVE OF THE UNION. WHAT IS THE ROLE OF UNIONS IN HOLDING
ORGANIZATIONS LIKE THE SIERRA CLUB TO THEIR ESPOUSED VALUES AND
PROVIDING A PLACE FROM WHICH TO ORGANIZE FOR A MORE TRANSFORMATIONAL
AGENDA?

MM: Unions provide a critical organizing force within our
institutions. They provide a place for protection and support around
grievances—material conditions, wages, benefits, etc.—but have the
potential to push for a transformative vision as well. At the Sierra
Club, the union [Progressive Workers Union
[[link removed]]] has been led largely by women
of color who are taking on the transformational agenda that Hop is
talking about from both their positions in the Sierra Club, but also
in their work building the union as a democratic institution itself. I
met with the union stewards of my unit regularly to have a dialogue on
how I could be moving our campaigns towards an anti-racist,
collaborative, equitable, just, transformative agenda and how we could
be doing that together. The union brings the perspective of the folks
doing the work on the ground in an organized and strategic way.

Disaster capitalism inside your organization

BA: MANY OF US HAVE BEEN LET GO FROM LIBERAL ORGANIZATIONS WHILE
TRYING TO ADVANCE MORE TRANSFORMATIVE, LIBERATORY, OR RADICAL AGENDAS.
IT CAN BE CONFUSING, ISOLATING, AND DEVASTATING FOR ORGANIZERS. WHAT
ADVICE CAN YOU OFFER?

HH: If we don’t make meaning of the moment from a progressive,
intersectional place, we can be subject to the gaslighting that
neoliberalism promotes in times like this. When restructuring is
happening organizations will say that they used an “equity lens”
to help guide the decisions to balance the budget and make structural
changes. This does nothing to explain the anxiety, isolation, and real
confusion people feel while they are living in fear of losing their
job as colleagues are laid off all around them. This is especially
true when hard fought structural gains in the form of equity
departments are dismantled and equity positions eliminated. Many of
those laid off are people of color recently hired as a response to
demands of institutions to increase their cultural competency and take
action to address organizational and societal injustices. This is
happening across the workforce with a disproportionate impact on women
of color. How did using an equity lens arrive at these ends? You just
might think you don’t get it or if you’re laid off, it must be
your fault. 

Well, it isn’t your fault. This is disaster capitalism right inside
your own organization. Gaslighting is on nitrous in these moments. If
your organization is undergoing a restructuring and ending its equity,
justice and inclusion departments and programs, asking where will the
work live on and how will progress be sustained, monitored and funded
are good questions to cut through the gaslighting.

BA: WHAT HAPPENS NEXT?

HH: Again, what is happening inside the Sierra Club is happening in
other parts of the NPIC [Non-Profit Industrial Complex] and I don’t
align with some of my comrades and friends who are saying “F*ck
em.” We won’t abandon the years in the making of local, regional
and national organizing infrastructure that was so costly to build and
more importantly we won’t abandon the communities and people that
we’ve built trusting relationships with. From the inside and
outside, we’ll continue to agitate them to take more progressive
positions based in solidarity and not charity. We’ll continue to
move the organization to run interference with philanthropy and other
big greens in order to align with, partner with and take leadership
from the grassroots environmental and climate justice sectors. We’ll
continue to make hypotheses, question the assumptions they’re based
on, test and evaluate them and then develop new hypotheses based on
the new conditions. In other words, we’re gonna “keep on keepin’
on” being organizers.

MM: As social movement leftists, we cannot cede the space of the big
institutions like the Sierra Club to the right or to liberal forces.
As “strong men” archetypes rise to carry out authoritarian agendas
in nation states around the world, we are also seeing that happen in
our institutions as part of the backlash to the feminist, anti-racist
gains we’ve been making. As they try to isolate us, it’s
imperative that we stay anchored to a political home that includes
folks inside and outside those institutions. So it’s key for us to
build that space to recraft our strategy.

Secondly, the climate justice movement needs to gear up to take on
this new front of facism. We’ve seen ecofascism coming from the
Right but we need to now take on the liberals directing precious
resources—time, labor, capital, attention—towards a
testosterone-fueled “get mine,” or growth at any cost, agenda.
What we need to understand as the new renewable energy tyranny. 
[[link removed]]The
Sierra Club’s new “electrify everything” framework is a death
sentence for the majority around the world, from Ghana to the Gulf
South and from the Arctic to Soweto. The Left has made great strides
in the past several years to make what is materially necessary to
address the ecological crisis—land back, indigenous sovereignty,
reparations, community-controlled economy—more and more politically
possible. We can’t cede the space now.

_Brooke Anderson is a freelance photographer and photojournalist
based on unceded Ohlone land in Oakland, CA. Her most recent work can
be found in YES! Magazine, Teen Vogue, and In These Times. She
covers social movements for climate justice and worker power. She is a
proud member of the Pacific Media Workers Guild, CWA 39521, AFL-CIO.
She can be found on Instagram at @MovementPhotographer and on Twitter
at @MovementPhotog._

_Hop Hopkins is the former Director of Organizational Transformation
[[link removed]] at
the Sierra Club, where he helped the organization evolve its
commitment to anti-racism. Hop is a longtime social movement
strategist and scholar, and has been a leader in movements from
HIV/AIDS to anti-globalization, food sovereignty, anti-displacement
and clean energy transition, after beginning his career as a
grassroots environmental justice community organizer. Most recently he
was a Climate Justice Fellow
[[link removed]] and
adjunct professor at Antioch University. He is based on Tongva land in
Los Angeles, CA._

_Michelle Mascarenhas is the former National Director of Campaigns
[[link removed]] at
the Sierra Club. Before coming to the Sierra Club, Michelle was a
co-director of Movement Generation Justice & Ecology Project
[[link removed]] where she supported the formation
of the Climate Justice Alliance
[[link removed]], the Reclaim Our Power Utility
Justice Project [[link removed]], and projects at the
intersection of land, Indigenous sovereignty, reparations and Black
liberation. Prior to her time at MG, Michelle worked as a union
organizer and organized farm-to-school projects. Michelle is based on
Chochenyo Ohlone land in Berkeley, CA. _

_Convergence is a magazine for radical insights. We produce articles,
videos, and podcasts to sharpen our collective practice, lift up
stories about organizing, and engage in strategic debate — all with
the goal of winning multi-racial democracy and a radically democratic
economy._

* Sierra Club
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* Climate Change
[[link removed]]
* environmental racism
[[link removed]]
* green capitalism
[[link removed]]

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