Population control and immigration
Some critics of the Sierra Club have charged that the club’s views on population growth, and the efforts of some club members to restrain immigration, are a continuation of aspects of the Eugenics movement.[41][42]
In 1969, the Sierra Club published Paul R. Ehrlich’s book, The Population Bomb, in which he said that population growth was responsible for environmental decline and advocated coercive measures to reduce it. Some observers have argued that the book had a “racial dimension” in the tradition of the Eugenics movement, and that it “reiterated many of Osborn’s jeremiads.”[43][44][45]
In 1978, John Tanton, former Chairman of the National Sierra Club Population Committee and former President of Zero Population Growth, founded the Federation for American Immigration Reform.[45]
During the 1980s, some Sierra Club members, including Paul Ehrlich’s wife Anne,[43] wanted to take the Club into the contentious field of immigration to the United States. The Club’s position was that overpopulation was a significant factor in the degradation of the environment. Accordingly, the Club supported stabilizing and reducing U.S. and world population. Some members argued that, as a practical matter, U.S. population could not be stabilized, let alone reduced, at the then-current levels of immigration. They urged the Club to support immigration reduction. The Club had previously addressed the issue of “mass immigration,”[46] and in 1988, the organization’s Population Committee and Conservation Coordinating Committee stated that immigration to the U.S. should be limited, so as to achieve population stabilization.[47]
Other Sierrans thought that the immigration issue was too far from the Club’s core environmentalist mission, and were also concerned that involvement would impair the organization’s political ability to pursue its other objectives. In 1996, the Board of Directors accepted this latter view, and voted that the Sierra Club would be neutral on issues of immigration.[citation needed]
The advocates of immigration reduction sought to reverse this decision through the referendum provision of the Bylaws of the Sierra Club. They organized themselves as “SUSPS”, a name originally derived from “Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization” (although that name is no longer used since the Sierra Club objected to infringing the Club’s trademark in the term “Sierrans”). SUSPS and its allies gathered the necessary signatures to place the issue on the ballot in the Club’s election in the spring of 1998. The Board’s decision that the Club would take no position on immigration was upheld by the membership by a three-to-two margin.[citation needed]
The controversy resurfaced when a group of three immigration reduction proponents ran in the 2004 Board of Directors elections, hoping to move the Club’s position away from a neutral stance on immigration, and restore the stance previously held.[48] Groups outside of the Club became involved, such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and MoveOn.[49] Of the three candidates, two (Frank Morris and David Pimentel), were on the board of the anti-immigration group Diversity Alliance for a Sustainable America[50][51] and two (Richard Lamm and Frank Morris) were on the board of directors or the board of advisors of the Federation for American Immigration Reform;[50] both had also held leadership positions within the NAACP.[52] Their candidacies were denounced by a fourth candidate, Morris Dees of the SPLC, as a “hostile takeover” attempt by “radical anti-immigrant activists.”[49][53] The immigration reduction proponents won only 3% of all votes cast in the election,[54] and the controversy subsided.
