By Leslie Feinberg
Why on earth is the venerable and heavily endowed Sierra Club threatening to disband its Utah chapter?
Are they renegades who spilled an ocean of crude oil, despoiling endangered wildlife preserves? Did they net dolphins in the race for a lucrative sea harvest? Did they filibuster on behalf of gasoline-guzzling SUVs? Argue against wind and solar power? Pooh-pooh the perilous thinning of the ozone layer? Take a chain saw to old-growth redwoods? No, that's Dubya's "Earth Last" milieu.
Here's why the heretical board members of the Sierra Club's 175-member Glen Canyon chapter in southern Utah drew the ire of the 15-member executive board of the country's oldest environmental group: They spoke out against one of the gravest threats to this planet and its populations--Pentagon war.
"War is not healthy for children and other living things," the dissident group's secretary Dan Kent explained succinctly in a recently issued statement. "It is the ultimate act of environmental destruction. ... For the board to compel our silence plays right into Bush's mad world, where a nation of police, prisons, bombs, bunkers is better than lowering oneself to diplomacy to save lives."
The Utah chapter notes that back in 1981, the Sierra Club did pass an anti-war resolution, bolstered by the consensus that war brings with it dire environmental consequences.
Yet in October, when 13 former Sierra Club board members closed ranks with the Utah activists to ask for a formal statement against U.S. saber-rattling at Iraq, leaders of the 700,000-member organization instead adopted a resolution that "supports disarming Iraq of weapons of mass destruction."
Anyone honestly searching for weapons that could explode the planet into smither eens would not have to leave the confines of the continental United States.
Heaped on top of the capitulation to Washington's dogs of war was another resolution that immediately followed--this one "clarifying" the 1981 statement as having been a "broad general policy framework" that "does not authorize members, leaders or club entities to take positions on military conflicts."
The anti-war apostates characterize this tacked-on language as a gag order.
Glen Canyon board member Patrick Diehl lambasted the national board's action as "extremely divisive," concluding, "I sincerely believe that the majority agrees with our position. I think we are expressing the general disagreement with the board's action."
Reprinted from the Dec. 19, 2002, issue of Workers World newspaper
