From: A Berkeley Reader [Email her]
So the Sierra Club quickly—in matter of days—rescinded a decision to cancel its scheduled trips to Israel when outraged Jewish groups protested the anti-Zionist boycott [Sierra Club reverses course after canceling trips to Israel, by Gabe Stutman, Jewish News of Northern California, March 15, 2022].
Too bad that the Sierra Club didn't have the same prompt response on behalf of their own country, when in the mid-1990s they chose to drop the immigration issue in exchange for a billionaire's donations to their group. As some` readers may recall,
[In 2004] the Los Angeles Times reported that David Gelbaum, an American businessman focused on green technology who has donated at least $200 million to the Sierra Club, had warned [Executive Director] Carl Pope that his donations were contingent upon how the club handled the issue of immigration. "I did tell Carl Pope in 1994 or 1995 that if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me," the Times reported he said.
[A Brief Chronology of the Sierra Club's Retreat from the Immigration-Population Connection (Updated), August 14, 2018]
See earlier letters from the same reader.
James Fulford writes: The old Sierra Club opposed population growth (and thus mass immigration) because it was bad for the environment. How Many Americans? by Leon F. Bouvier and Lindsey Grant was published by Sierra Club Books in 1994 making that point, and reviewed by Peter Brimelow in the pages of the pre-purge National Review.
Brimelow wrote
The publication by the Sierra Club of this explicit account of the inexorable relationship between immigration, population growth, and environmental stress certainly suggests that the other hiking boot is about to drop, and that this most powerful of liberal lobbies is about to act on the immigration issue. At last.
He was wrong, largely as a result of Gelbaum's secret threat to Carl Pope, but while that happened in 1994 or 1995, the public, including actual members of the Sierra Club, didn't find out about it until ten years later [The Man Behind the Land, by Kenneth R. Weiss, LA Times, October 17, 2004].
