A really ugly shade of green
Dick Lamm, public-policy gadfly and former Democratic governor of Colorado, is being denounced these days as a right-wing extremist, a neo-Nazi, and a racist. "In all my years of public life, nobody has ever talked that way about me," he said. His offense is that he is one of three men running for the Sierra Club board of directors on a platform of limiting immigration to protect the environment. In response, the leadership of the club and its allies have been playing the race card with berserk ferocity. Among the charges are "environmental racism" and "the greening of hate," which presumably means that the three represent dark forces gussied up in environmental green. These arguments assume that any urge to cap or slow immigration is a form of anti-Latino or anti-Asian bigotry. "It's hate," Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope said of the splinter group endorsing the insurgent candidates. He also described the group, Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization, as profoundly infected by "a virus."
The candidates tarred by these charges are:
Lamm, widely seen as an ally of the civil rights movement during his term as governor, and who helped organize a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chapter when he was a law student at Berkeley. He is the chairman of the board of advisers of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
Frank Morris, retired U.S. foreign service officer and former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
David Pimentel, a Cornell professor of entomology studying the impact of population growth on the Earth's carrying capacity.
The background of the dispute is that the Sierra Club does not want to make the obvious move for an environmental organization in a time of mass migration--calling for limits on immigration to relieve pressures on the ecosystem. Thirty years ago, the club committed itself to "stabilization of the population, first of the United States and then of the world." In those days, stabilization in the United States meant urging native-born Americans to have fewer children. By 1996, when stabilization meant doing something about mass migration, legal and illegal, the Sierra Club backed away from stabilization and adopted a policy of neutrality on immigration.
The current fight has split conservationists. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supports the Sierra leadership. On the other side is former Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson, a founder of Earth Day, who thinks that America can't argue for world population control without setting an example by stabilizing its own population. Far-right groups, including nativists and white racists, are urging their members to join the Sierra Club for the current mail voting, which ends April 21. On the left, MoveOn.org is supporting current Sierra leadership. So is the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is supposed to limit itself to confronting hate groups. It was Morris Dees, the controversial leader of the law center, who contributed the line "the greening of hate."
Pope has shamelessly tried to connect Lamm, Morris, and Pimentel to the most racist anti-immigration people. He told the New York Times: "If somebody who isn't a Nazi is put on the ballot by the American Nazi party," it can be hard to distinguish the views of the candidates from those of the backers. Good grief. Next we'll be hearing that FDR was a commie because Stalin fought on his side during World War II.
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