|   Race card being used to support more Wilderness designations | PK RIPPER
Jan 10, 2004 4:23 PM | | Latino leaders back wilderness bill
PROTECTION: More than 400,000 acres in the Inland area would ban mechanized equipment.
01:35 AM PST on Friday, January 9, 2004
By JENNIFER BOWLES / The Press-Enterprise
When Louie Lujan was 8, his father took him on his first ride to the California desert.
Somewhere along a darkened road, near the San Bernardino-Riverside county line, his father pulled over and told his son to get out.
"I was scared. I thought some animal would attack me," he recalled. "I heard nothing but silence and then my dad told me to look up, and I saw the Milky Way."
"It was the closest I ever felt to a god," he said. "It's moments like those that really change your life."
Lujan, who went on to study planetary geology in college and is now vice mayor of La Puente, joined a group of Southern California Latino leaders Thursday in supporting a wilderness bill sponsored by Rep. Hilda Solis, D-El Monte. If passed, the bill would set aside 1.7 million acres of public land as wilderness and protect more than 300 miles of rivers across the region.
In the Inland area, the rivers include stretches of Deep Creek in the San Bernardino Mountains and the south fork of the San Jacinto River near Hemet. The land includes more than 400,000 acres of the two-county Inland area, primarily in the desert and mountain ranges.
Considered the most stringent of land protections, wilderness designations ban any mechanized equipment, including off-road vehicles and bicycles. Hiking and horseback riding are allowed.
The event, held at a park in Duarte with the snow-capped Mount Baldy as a backdrop, was aimed at courting Hispanic support for the bill. Members of the National Hispanic Environmental Council, co-founded in 1995 by Manuel Hernandez, a Riverside engineer, said they would launch an educational campaign to get the word out.
Ed Navarro, a former state parks superintendent who now manages Olvera Street, the historical monument in downtown Los Angeles, said Latinos support the environment more than is recognized.
A statewide poll conducted in 2002 by Bendixen and Association, a Florida-based polling firm, showed that 81 percent of Latinos support wilderness protections, compared to 72 percent of Californians overall.
"We support the bill because of the recreational opportunities, the quality of life issues with clean air and clean water," said Navarro, a board member of the Hispanic council.
"But the biggest thing is we have a strong sense of family and of protecting something for the future generations," he said."
Solis, the bill's author, said as a child her family couldn't afford to travel to places like Yosemite National Park, so they went to the Angeles National Forest for weekend outings.
She said it is important for everyone to leave behind the smoggy, concrete urban areas to get closer to nature.
"If we don't fight for this now," she said, "we will lose it."
The bill, introduced in late October, is being circulated for discussion in subcommittees of the House Resources Committee.
Nicol Andrews, spokeswoman for the resources committee, chaired by Rep. Richard Pombo, R-Tracy, said Pombo would take a close look at the bill before setting it on the main committee's calendar.
"Wilderness protection is the most extreme of protections," she said by telephone from Washington, D.C. "It essentially locks it up and throws away the key."
She said Pombo would want to make sure the local residents support such designations and that there aren't other ways of protecting the land.
_____________________________________________________________________
This quote by Navarro makes no sense to me, "We support the bill because of the recreational opportunities, the quality of life issues with clean air and clean water," said Navarro, a board member of the Hispanic council.
Navarro and his Hispanic council support eliminating recreational activities such as mountain biking would make more sense to me. |
| huh? | Dwight Moody
Jan 13, 2004 1:20 PM | | I'm guessing you mean:
This quote by Navarro makes no sense to me: 'We support the bill because of the recreational opportunities, the quality of life issues with clean air and clean water,' said Navarro, a board member of the Hispanic council."
"Navarro and his Hispanic council support eliminating recreational activities such as mountain biking." would make more sense to me.
If that's what you meant, I have to say that the issue's a lot more complicated than that. Mountainbikers aren't a big lobby, and I'm sure the enviro people are promising something to this Latino group. Frankly, the Latinos have bigger problems than outdoor recreation to worry about. And they can still go hiking. |
| Election Becomes a Fight Over Sierra Club's Future | Dances With Hornets
Jan 18, 2004 1:01 PM | | Someone forwarded me this article. In light of hispanic support in the article posted by PK I thought this relavent.
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-sierra18jan18,1,7295202.story?coll=la-home-headlines
Election Becomes a Fight Over Sierra Club's Future
Animal-rights activists and anti-immigration advocates are teaming in
a bid to control the board, to the dismay of traditionalists. By Miguel Bustillo and Kenneth R. Weiss Times Staff Writers
January 18, 2004
An unusual alliance of anti-immigration advocates and animal-rights
activists is attempting to take over the leadership of the Sierra
Club, America's oldest national environmental group, in what is
emerging as a bitter fight over the future of the 112-year-old
organization founded by Scottish immigrant John Muir.
Leaders of a faction that failed to persuade the club to take a stand
against immigration in 1998 are seeking to win majority control of
the group's 15-member governing board in a spring election - this
time, as part of a broader coalition that includes vegetarians, who
want the club to denounce hunting, fishing and raising animals for
human consumption.
In response, 11 former Sierra Club presidents have written a letter
expressing "extreme concern for the continuing viability of the
club," protesting what they see as a concerted effort by outside
organizations to hijack the mainstream conservationist group and its
$95-million annual budget.
Some of the insurgent candidates vying for the five available seats
on the governing board only recently joined the Sierra Club. If they
win, they will control eight of the 15 seats. Members will vote in
the board elections in March, with the results tallied in April.
People who join the club by the end of January should be able to vote.
The election has attracted the interest of anti-immigration groups,
which are encouraging their members to join the club to help elect
the insurgent candidates.
"What has outraged Sierra Club leaders is that external organizations
would attempt to interfere and manipulate our election to advance
their own agendas," said Robert Cox, a past Sierra Club president.
Moreover, club officials argue that members of the two insurgent
groups share fundamentally anti-human views, in their opposition to
immigration and in their belief that people should take a backseat to
other species.
The Sierra Club's "dominant perspective has been to protect nature
for people," said Executive Director Carl Pope. "But by pulling up
the gangplank on immigration, they are tapping into a strand of
misanthropy that says human beings are a problem."
Pope noted that 18% of Sierra Club members like to fish or hunt, and
he worried they could be driven out by the new agenda from
animal-rights advocates. "It's important to have hunters and
fishermen in the Sierra Club," Pope said. "We are a big-tent
organization. We want the Sierra Club to be a comfortable place for
Americans who want clean air, clean water, and to protect America's
open spaces."
The list of insurgent candidates features some high-profile names,
including former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, Cornell University
entomology professor David Pimentel, and Frank Morris, former
director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation. All three have
been outspoken advocates of controlling population growth or
restricting immigration. Lamm is coauthor of "The Immigration Time
Bomb: The Fragmenting of America."
Club officials say the campaign got underway quietly with the recent
election of three activists, including UCLA astronomy professor
Benjamin Zuckerman, a longtime champion of curbs on immigration; and
Paul Watson, head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, a marine
environmental group perhaps best-known for ramming whaling ships.
During their campaigns, the candidates downplayed the views they are
now advancing.
Club members who support the insurgent candidates accused the
organization's old guard of trying to demonize them as radicals to
head off the increasingly popular efforts to win a new majority.
"I really think we ought to be judged on our merits and what we've
done in the past, and not divide the Sierra Club," Pimentel said.
Political squabbles are hardly new to the 750,000-member Sierra Club,
whose members squared off just last year over whether to take a stand
against the war in Iraq. But the dispute over this spring's elections
is becoming especially rancorous.
Some longtime Sierrans worry that a takeover by the insurgents would
brand the organization as bigoted and xenophobic.
"I don't think that Lamm, Pimentel and Morris are racists," Pope
said. "But they are clearly being supported by racists."
Zuckerman and Watson call those claims ludicrous. They argue that the
club has a responsibility to take strong positions on the issues
affecting the health of the planet.
"Everything else the Sierra Club is doing is doomed to fail if the
United States continues on its rapid population growth," said
Zuckerman, 50, who was the leading vote-getter in the Sierra Club
board election two years ago.
"There are people who are being born today who will see a California
that has more people than the entire United States when I was born,"
he said.
Asked what the Sierra Club could do to curb population growth,
Zuckerman said the group must "talk about the numbers - how much
immigration we should have and how many babies - so the mix of
fertility and immigration is debated and we can come to a level where
the population will stabilize."
Watson, who was a co-founder of Greenpeace but who broke ranks with
that organization because he advocated more aggressive tactics, said
he did not expect the Sierra Club to adopt the confrontational
methods of Sea Shepherd.
But the club, he said, should promote eating habits that protect
Earth's other inhabitants.
"Human beings are literally stealing resources from all the other
species on this planet," said Watson, a Canadian immigrant.
In an e-mail response to the letter by the 11 former presidents,
Watson wrote, "Is the advocating of low-impact vegetarian diets a
cause for concern? I guess it is if you have a vested interest in
grazing or the beef or poultry industry. I fail to see how
vegetarianism in the age of Mad Cow Disease, E. coli, PCBs in fish,
etc., can be considered anything but practical and realistic."
Sierra Club President Larry Fahn and the other prior presidents have
pointed out that the club's members already voted to remain neutral
on immigration in 1998 after a lengthy public debate, and said that
revisiting the divisive dispute would detract from what board members
have agreed is the most immediate action needed to protect the
environment: unseating President Bush.
The presence of the anti-immigration candidates has led civil rights
leader Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks
what it considers hate groups, to join the Sierra Club and run for
its board. Dees said he decided to throw his hat into the ring to
generate publicity after his staff found that anti-immigration groups
were urging members to join the Sierra Club and help swing the vote.
"I'm not running to win a seat on the board," Dees said. "I'm running
to sound the alarm of an attempt to take over this organization by
the radical element of anti-immigration people. They are interested
in keeping this country white."
Earlier this month, VDare.com, an anti-immigration website founded by
former Forbes senior editor Peter Brimelow, author of the book "Alien
Nation," ran an article discussing the Sierra Club elections. The
article referred to Dees as a "left-wing smear artist" and urged
immigration-control activists to join the Sierra Club and vote for
like-minded candidates in its upcoming elections.
The article in turn was picked up by an anti-Semitic website and
topped with a homophobic, anti-Semitic headline. The author of the
article, Brenda Walker, said she was dismayed at that, but Sierra
Club officials cited the recycled article as evidence of extremist
support for the anti-immigration candidates.
Roderick Nash, a retired UC Santa Barbara historian who has tracked
the environmental movement, noted that since its early days, the
Sierra Club has struggled with tensions over humanity's imprint on
the environment.
Gentlemen hikers and climbers - who wanted to preserve America's
beautiful places so the privileged could visit them - wrote diatribes
in the early 20th century about Anglo Americans being overrun by
unsavory immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, he said.
Nor is it the first time the Sierra Club has been the target of a
supposed takeover. In the late 1970s, when the club was embroiled in
a battle with Walt Disney Co. over a proposed ski resort in Mineral
King near Sequoia, the ski industry ran a slate of candidates to push
for support of more ski resorts, Pope said. Those candidates lost.
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only. [Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml] |
| Save The Sierra Club From The Treason LobbyAct Now! | Dances With Hornets
Jan 20, 2004 5:59 PM | | Someone emailed me the following posting - FYI
http://vdare.com/walker/long_march.htm
January 08, 2004
Save The Sierra Club From The Treason LobbyAct Now!
By Brenda Walker
[Recently by Brenda Walker: A Democrat Is Disgusted By Her Party's Presidential Candidates]
A war is being waged for the soul of the Sierra Club, the nation's premier environmental group. True conservationists, who want to preserve America's resources and natural heritage, have been working within the organization's democratic framework to return the 110-year-old group to policy positions that promote population sanity, foreign and domestic.
That means immigration reduction which the Club's liberal leaders explicitly eschewed in 1996.
The members have elected three outstanding immigration realists to the Board of Directors (15 total, with five chosen annually for three-year terms). They are: UCLA Prof. Ben Zuckerman (elected 2002); Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug LaFollette; Sea Shepherd founder Paul Watson (both elected in 2003). All are serious environmentalists of many years standing and worthy heirs to the tradition of Sierra Club founder John Muir.
The good news: other highly qualified candidates with population expertise are running in the Board elections to be held by mail this spring. Those contending for the 2004 seats include: former Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, one-time head of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation Frank Morris: Cornell University Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology David Pimentel.
The bad news: the Treason Lobby is working to pull the Sierra Club even further from genuine environmentalism. Incredibly, one of the candidates now gathering signature petitions in order to appear on the spring ballot is none other than left-wing smear artist Morris Dees, founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC). Dees is far more known for his fundraising abilities and his mudslinging than any interest in preserving the earth. Why is he pursuing an unpaid position requiring a serious time commitment?
Harper's magazine (November 2000) blew the whistle on Dees' use of the issue of civil rights to amass a huge fortune for the SPLC, more than $100 million. Author Ken Silverstein concluded that Dees has cared more about "a relentless fund-raising campaign" than racial justice. The SPLC has few blacks working for it, and that Dees' fundraising appeals inflate the importance of the Ku Klux Klan. (Silverstein reports that the KKK has fewer than 2,000 members nationwide and that most "hate crimes" are perpetrated by angry individuals, not racist conspiracies.)
More recently (12/16/03), the Northern Virginia Journal came to this conclusion about the SPLC:
"If you don't particularly want your charitable donations to go towards somebody's mortgage or country club dues, give your hard-earned dollars to a real charity, not a bunch of slick, parasitic hucksters who live high on the hog by raising money on behalf of needy people who never see a dime of it."
The Journal noted that the Arlington-based Better Business Bureau's Wise Giving Alliance had condemned the SPLC for spending 89 percent of its income on administration and fundraising. Administrative costs can indeed run high with six-figure paychecks like Dees' annual $280,699.
This electoral season's first "greening of hate" article has already been published. Writer Betsy Hartmann, whose writing shows more affinity with Marx than Muir, made the usual groundless accusations of racism based on the "links between the green wing of the anti-immigration movement and nativism and white supremacy" that come from the SPLC's smear campaign. Needless to say, there is no evidence of any such beliefs on the part of Sierra immigration realists, so Hartmann uses the emotive smear "links," a favorite SPLC tactic. (For example, we could say that Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope and conservative Pat Buchanan both opposed NAFTA, so they're "linked"get it?)
Polls consistently show that the great majority of Americanseven Democratswant immigration to be legal, controlled and reduced. It is absurd on its face to claim that Americans are "racist" because they want their immigration laws enforced. The issue of law and borders is profoundly mainstreamas is protecting the environment.
The prize is enormous. The Sierra Club is arguably the most influential voice of the environmental movement, one well heard by Washington and the media. It has one of the largest memberships of green groupsaround 740,000and name recognition to die for. Its colorful history has included the lyrical writer and activist John Muir, as well as latter-day icon, the late David Brower who was not afraid to state the obvious connections between excessive immigration, explosive population growth and environmental damage. Brower famously remarked, "Overpopulation is perhaps the biggest problem facing us, and immigration is part of that problem. It has to be addressed."
But the environmentalist movement in general, and the Sierra Club in particular, has been Missing In Action in the immigration debate. Until about a decade ago, the Club had a sensible view about the limits to growth on a small planet. Its official position in 1970 was that the organization should support policies that "bring about the stabilization of the population first of the United States and then of the world." Back at the time of the first Earth Day, environmentalists understood that there was such a thing as explosive overpopulation. Paul Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb, appeared on the Johnny Carson Show and raised national awareness about the danger of overpopulationnot excluding immigration. [Click here for the little-known sequel to Ehrlich's famous dispute with immigration enthusiast economist Julian Simon]. It was only later that political correctness began to afflict the reasoning capabilities of environmentalists.
The nadir was reached in 1996, when the Club reversed its domestic population position by stating it
"will take no position on immigration levels or on policies governing immigration into the United States. The Club remains committed to environmental rights and protections for all within our borders, without discrimination based on immigration status."
Long-time members organized to return the Club to its earlier immigration realist position. They mounted a 1998 ballot initiative asking the membership to approve a reversion to the previous policy that sought to limit America's population growth. The Club's permanent officials fought back with their enormous institutional power, and the measure lost 60-40 in a low poll. Now, however, the effort to elect responsible conservationists to the Board has paid off.
Environmentalism has not always been considered a liberal or left issue. It's no accident that the words conservative and conservation have the same root. The Republican Roosevelt was a great champion of the outdoors and of conserving America's unique wild places.
If you care about protecting the planet, including the American chunk of it, then join the Sierra Club NOW and have your vote influence this debate.
Membership information is available here: Sierra Club Memberships and Donation. An introductory membership is just $25.00.
You must join by the end of January to participate in the next election. But earlier enrollment is betterbureaucratic accidents happen.
Great strides have been taken toward returning the Sierra Club to responsible environmentalism. It could play a decisive role in the immigration debate. But active grassroots support is essential to keep it on the right track.
All that is necessary for the triumph of Dees is for immigration reformers to sit on their credit cards.
Author Brenda Walker [email her] has been a member of the Sierra Club since 1984 and has long wondered why more conservatives don't support conservation. She produces the websites http://www.limitstogrowth.org/ and http://www.immigrationshumancost.org/
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, any copyrighted work in this message is distributed under fair use without profit or payment for non-profit research and educational purposes only. [Ref. http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml] |
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