Sierra Club Quotes

It was Thomas Edison who brought us electricity, not the Sierra Club. It was the Wright brothers who got us off the ground, not the Federal Aviation Administration. It was Henry Ford who ended the isolation of millions of Americans by making the automobile affordable, not Ralph Nader. Those who have helped the poor the most have not been those who have gone around loudly expressing 'compassion' for the poor, but those who found ways to make industry more productive and distribution more efficient, so that the poor of today can afford things that the affluent of yesterday could only dream about.

I was once asked if I had any ideas for a really scary reality TV show. I have one reality show that would really make your hair stand on end: "C-Students from Yale." George W. Bush has gathered around him upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka Christians, and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences. To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete's foot . . . PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose! . . . So many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick. They have taken charge of communications and the schools, so we might as well be Poland under occupation. They might have felt that taking our country into an endless war was simply something decisive to do. What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. They are going to do something every fuckin' day and they are not afraid. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reasons that they don't give a fuck what happens next. Simply can't. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody's telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass! There is a tragic flaw in our precious Constitution, and I don't know what can be done to fix it. This is it: Only nut cases want to be president.

This was love, this was sacrifice, the opposite of sin, and maybe it was fucked up to feel like God was here with us in the back room of a strip club, but I did, like He was bearing witness to this moment where Poppy opened herself to the worst of me and erased it with her love, just like God did for us sinners every moment of every day.

Some things you remember. Some things you can't forget.

I shouldn’t put you over my lap and spank your ass for being a brazen little slut and coming here without a bra,” I growled in her ear. “I shouldn’t twist ropes around your wrists and ankles until your cunt is exposed and then screw you until you can’t walk anymore. I shouldn’t flip you over and fuck your ass until your eyes water. I shouldn’t drive you down to the strip club and fuck you in the back room, so that you’ll forget all about Sterling and the only name you’ll remember to say is mine.” I lightly bit her nipple again. “Or God’s.

I don't want anything from you." The terse words were loud in the silence of her house. “I only want you.” Turning to face Cole, Sierra caught the tortured expression moments before he masked it. “And I want you too. Heaven help me, I love both of you and this is killing me.

I think I kind of like it. Look at me. Sitting in this ridiculous truck, just thrilled at the prospect of you turning on my heated seat, and my belly all topsy-turvy because you called me babe. Get me home. I feel a sudden need to burn some incense and renew my Sierra Club membership.

All you need to get to heaven is a good pair of boots.

A small cabin stands in the Glacier Peak Wilderness, about a hundred yards off a trail that crosses the Cascade Range. In midsummer, the cabin looked strange in the forest. It was only twelve feet square, but it rose fully two stories and then had a high and steeply peaked roof. From the ridge of the roof, moreover, a ten-foot pole stuck straight up. Tied to the top of the pole was a shovel. To hikers shedding their backpacks at the door of the cabin on a cold summer evening -- as the five of us did -- it was somewhat unnerving to look up and think of people walking around in snow perhaps thirty-five feet above, hunting for that shovel, then digging their way down to the threshold. [1971]

Imagínense un bloque de marmol muy grande, enorme. Les dan un martillo y lo golpean. ¿Van a romperlo? No. Imposible. El mármol es muy duro y un martillo normal y corriente, a lo mucho, lo descascarillará un poco. Pero si este mismo bloque de mármol tiene un grieta, le cae una gota de agua y se hiela, es capaz de partirlo en dos. ¡Una simple gota de agua! ¿Y por qué? Porque es más fuerte. Nosotros los seres humanos, sobre todo en la infancia y adolescencia, estamos llenos de grietas. ¿Qué son las grietas? Los complejos. Cuantas más grietas, peor. Y a la mala gente, en cuánto ve esas grietas, te mete el dedo por ellas, como gotas de agua helada, para hacerte daño. La única forma de desarmaros es no dándoles armas ni municiones. Y el mejor remedio para eso es aceptarse uno como es y reírse de sí mismo. ¡Con buen humor! ¡Reírse, no tomarse en serio, es lo más sano!

BUYING OFF THE ENVIRONMENTALISTS Where are the environmentalists? For fifty years, they’ve been carrying on about overpopulation; promoting family planning, birth control, abortion; and saying old people have a “duty to die and get out of the way”—in Colorado’s Democratic Governor Richard Lamm’s words. In 1971, Oregon governor and environmentalist Tom McCall told a CBS interviewer, “Come visit us again. . . . But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.” How about another 30 million people coming here to live? The Sierra Club began sounding the alarm over the country’s expanding population in 1965—the very year Teddy Kennedy’s immigration act passed65—and in 1978, adopted a resolution expressly asking Congress to “conduct a thorough examination of U.S. immigration laws.” For a while, the Club talked about almost nothing else. “It is obvious,” the Club said two years later, “that the numbers of immigrants the United States accepts affects our population size and growth rate,” even more than “the number of children per family.”66 Over the next three decades, America took in tens of millions of legal immigrants and illegal aliens alike. But, suddenly, about ten years ago, the Sierra Club realized to its embarrassment that importing multiple millions of polluting, fire-setting, littering immigrants is actually fantastic for the environment! The advantages of overpopulation dawned on the Sierra Club right after it received a $100 million donation from hedge fund billionaire David Gelbaum with the express stipulation that—as he told the Los Angeles Times—“if they ever came out anti-immigration, they would never get a dollar from me.”67 It would be as if someone offered the Catholic Church $100 million to be pro-abortion. But the Sierra Club said: Sure! Did you bring the check? Obviously, there’s no longer any reason to listen to them on anything. They want us to get all excited about some widening of a road that’s going to disturb a sandfly, but the Sierra Club is totally copasetic with our national parks being turned into garbage dumps. Not only did the Sierra Club never again say another word against immigration, but, in 2004, it went the extra mile, denouncing three actual environmentalists running for the Club’s board, by claiming they were racists who opposed mass immigration. The three “white supremacists” were Dick Lamm, the three-time Democratic governor of Colorado; Frank Morris, former head of the Black Congressional Caucus Foundation; and Cornell professor David Pimentel, who created the first ecology course at the university in 1957 and had no particular interest in immigration.68 But they couldn’t be bought off, so they were called racists.

Nature is the great equalizer. Nature knows no difference between black and white. The biggest challenge the environmental movement faces today is transcending class, gender, and the racial divide so we can come together on climate, both domestically and internationally." -Sierra Club Board President Aaron Mair

The usual suspects, The Sierra Club, Greenpeace, a United Nations “sustainability” group, and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy – this last one the group of billionaire global warming True Believer and political activist Tom Steyer — are enthusiastic about this kind of “deregulation.” Breitbart has reported that Steyer money is helping to promote these initiatives, and is even trying to seduce various conservative groups to go along with policies that would almost certainly advance a left-wing agenda but do nothing to improve the environment. As is always the case when environmentalists start talking about “deregulation” and energy independence, it’s time to put up the nonsense filters.

It wasn’t the Sierra Club that tried to pressure the National Academy of Sciences over the 1983 Carbon Dioxide Assessment; it was officials from the Department of Energy under Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t Environmental Defense that worked with Bill Nierenberg to alter the Executive Summary of the 1983 Acid Rain Peer Review Panel; it was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And it was the Wall Street Journal spreading the attack

It wasn’t the Sierra Club that tried to pressure the National Academy of Sciences over the 1983 Carbon Dioxide Assessment; it was officials from the Department of Energy under Ronald Reagan. It wasn’t Environmental Defense that worked with Bill Nierenberg to alter the Executive Summary of the 1983 Acid Rain Peer Review Panel; it was the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. And it was the Wall Street Journal spreading the attack on Santer and the IPCC, not Mother Jones.

350.org, the Sierra Club, NRDC, and EDF were all accepting money from fossil fuel billionaires Steyer and Bloomberg.99

Some environmentalists already are proponents of urban compactness. Sierra Club’s magazine reports that in Vancouver, “Mayor Sam Sullivan’s EcoDensity program includes zoning changes to allow ‘secondary suites,’ or in-law apartments; triplexes; and narrow streets with houses that abut property lines.” Peter Calthorpe’s “walkability” has become a real estate selling point, with walkable neighborhoods able to charge premium prices.

That was when I began to learn how to do all the things I had been taught not to do. I learned over the years to accept more and more of myself,. The doctor and theologian Gerald May said self-acceptance is freedom. I learned to waste a lot more time, which is the opposite of the fourth thing you're told after you're born: Don't waste time. (It comes right after Go clean your room.) The fifth rule is Don't waste paper, but in order to become who I was meant to be, I learned I had to waste more paper, to practice messes, false starts and blunders: these are necessary stops on the route of creativity and emotional growth. To make up for all my papery mistakes, I sent money to the Sierra Club. I had to accept that contrary to my parents' terror of looking bad, almost everybody worth his or her salt was a mess and had been an overly sensitive child. Almost everyone had at one time or another been exposed to the world as being flawed, and human. And that it was good, for the development of character and empathy, for the growth of the spirit. Periods in the wilderness or desert were not lost time. You might find life, wildflowers, fossils, sources of water.

He also discusses Christopher D. Stone, a law professor from the University of Southern California who used a theory of legal standing in 1972 when arguing Sierra Club v. Morton and went on to write the book Should Trees Have Standing? Since then, similar legal undertakings have happened in Ecuador, Argentina, Peru, Pakistan, India, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. In 2019, the Yurok Tribe (the same tribe that provided guidance for the California law on controlled burns) granted legal personhood to the Klamath River under tribal law, hoping it would aid legal actions on behalf of the river.

the Sierra Club took out full-page advertisements attacking the dams in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Los Angeles Times. One of the Bureau’s arguments for building the dams, an argument which it would later regret, was that tourists would better appreciate the beauties of the Grand Canyon from motorboats. “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel,” asked one advertisement, “so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?

Town, as they called it, pleased me the less, the longer I saw it. But until our language stretches itself and takes in a new word of closer fit, town will have to do for the name of such a place as was Medicine Bow. I have seen and slept in many like it since. Scattered wide, they littered the frontier from the Columbia to the Rio Grande, from the Missouri to the Sierras. They lay stark, dotted over a planet of treeless dust, like soiled packs of cards. Each was similar to the next, as one old five-spot of clubs resembles another. Houses, empty bottles, and garbage, they were forever of the same shapeless pattern. More forlorn they were than stale bones. They seemed to have been strewn there by the wind and to be waiting till the wind should come again and blow them away. Yet serene above their foulness swam a pure and quiet light, such as the East never sees; they might be bathing in the air of creation's first morning. Beneath sun and stars their days and nights were immaculate and wonderful.

and maybe it was fucked up to feel like God was here with us in the back room of a strip club,

The inevitable fact is that satellite technology and space exploration are far more accessible to large institutions, military and corporate, and are hundreds of times more likely to benefit their goals than yours or mine or the Sierra Club's. These space communications technologies were invented to provide a competitive edge to the institutions that invented them, and to assist their intended exploitation of nature. People who wish to live within the confines of the planet's organic limits, and who are not committed to a constantly expanding economy, or to seeking control of resources or land, do not need satellites to map resources. The people who live near what we call "resources" already know they are there, and are happy to leave them in place.

Ishmael Beah’s memoir of his life as a boy soldier in Sierra Leone, A Long Way Gone.

the Whitefish Golf Club, digging into a New York strip and a mound of garlic mashed potatoes. Trying to figure out how to keep Sierra from breaking up with him. “At least I have a gun,” Sam said. His Remington rifle, which he kept in his trunk next to his police bag. Just in case. Because bear or not, living in the shadow of Glacier National Park, Sam knew to expect trouble. “Did you find her?” The voice ricocheted up the path and Sam turned. Grimaced. The frantic and desperate Quinn Starr, aka Romeo. About seventeen, with dark brown hair chopped

Charting liberal hypocrisy is now old hat. From academia to the Sierra Club, elite progressives expect to live lives that are quite different from what they envision for the less sophisticated. No one believes that Elizabeth Warren would wish affirmative action to work for everyone in the way that she herself subverted it. Nor would we expect Warren not to be in the 1 percent that she so scolds — any more than we would assume that Al Gore would not leave a carbon footprint as large as those of thousands of the less environmentally sensitive put together.

My name is Layla Bailey, and this is my biome.” I cut to the footage of my house, turning up the audio so that I can be heard explaining my habitat. I added today’s men in plastic suits to the very end, and I narrate over it. “These people and CPS are the apex predators of my ecosystem, and I am an endangered species. The last of my kind. But the Sierra Club doesn’t make posters out of kids like me.” I add three screenshots near the end. The first is the only picture of my mom I could find, in profile and wreathed in smoke. “This is my mother, Darlene Thompson. She was born in captivity and released into the wild without any skills to care for herself. She is missing. If you see her, do not attempt to approach her, but please contact animal control.” The second is of Andy. “This is Andrew Fisher Bailey, my little brother. He was taken into captivity two days ago by people he had never seen before. I don’t know his whereabouts, but I hope he’s safe. If you see him, remember he is friendly but skittish. He is better off in captivity than in the wild.” The last one is my most recent report card, accessed on the school website by inputting the username and password I created for my mom last year. “This is me, Layla Louise Bailey. I was born in the wild and cannot be domesticated. However, I’m not yet fully capable of caring for myself, either. I have no money and not enough skills. What I have is a 4.0 and really low standards. I’ll do chores. I’ll be quiet. If you’ve got a garage or a laundry room I could sleep in, I am mostly housebroken. I just want to finish school, adopt my little brother, and go to college.

The Obama Administration has been trying to indoctrinate the public with its climate ideology in many ways and through a variety of agencies. This includes material on agency websites, advocacy of climate “education,”470 exhibits in National Parks,471 and grants by the National Science Foundation. One example is the $700,000 NSF grant to The Civilians, a New York theatre company, to finance the production of a show entitled “The Great Immensity,”472 “a play and media project about our environmental challenges.”473 A second example is a $5.7 million grant to Columbia University to record “voicemails from the future” that paint a picture of an Earth destroyed due to climate change.474 A third example is a $4.9 million grant to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to create scenarios based on America’s climate actions on climate change including a utopian future where everyone rides bicycles and courts forcibly take property from the wealthy.475 The general approach pursued by the Administration for arts and education-related climate propaganda appears to be very similar to the similar propaganda campaigns by Soviet and Eastern European governments to promote their political ends.

the UN IPCC AR3 actually made the following admission:206   In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.   So the IPCC agrees that climate is a “coupled, non-linear chaotic system” and “therefore that long term prediction of future climate states is not possible.” I regard this official statement by the IPCC as devastating but entirely appropriate. The climate system is chaotic and multivariate. So although climate is deterministic it is not determinable.

People underestimate the power of models. Observational evidence is not very useful, adding,…our approach is not entirely empirical. —John Mitchell, principal research scientist at the UK Met Office, 2011171

Global temperatures have been irregularly declining for at least 3,000 years based on Greenland ice core data similarly to what has occurred near the end of previous interglacial periods. The increases during the Twentieth Century have been well within normal bounds over the last 800,000 years for which we have ice core data from Antarctica.

I find it curious that even though US carbon emissions fell 12% between 2005 and 2012 and were at their lowest level since 1994,228 the CIC continues to advocate still more reductions despite no real evidence that the 12% has had any observable effects.

Why in the decade following 1990, were the number of ground temperature stations selected to calculate global temperature reduced from the available 14,000 to a mere 4,000? •    

Why do they need to get science journal editors removed from their jobs because they dared to publish a dissenting paper? •    

Why have global temperatures not risen in the best part of two decades while CO2 levels have kept on rising? •    

Come inside and we’ll talk,” she says, opening my car door. “I’m freezing my butt off here. Oh, why don’t the Chicago summers last longer?” Inside, I take off my shoes so I won’t wake up her parents. “Don’t worry, they left for the health club an hour ago.” “Then why was Doug escaping out your window?” Sierra winks. “You know, to keep the relationship exciting. Guys love adventure.

noted naturalist and Sierra Club cofounder John Muir,

The Environmental Handbook appeared in January 1970, and the Sierra Club’s Ecotactics came out in April. Both books were largely the work of the young. Both were huge hits. Sales of the handbook reached 1.5 million, while Ecotactics sold 500,000 copies.

Channels I Watch Often Darwin on the Trail (One of my two favorites) Flat Broke Outside Homemade Wanderlust (The other of my two favorites) Technomadia.com Books Read and Reread The Backpacker’s Field Manual, Rick Curtis Step By Step: An Introduction to Walking the Appalachian Trail, Appalachian Trail Conservancy The Best About Backpacking, A Sierra Club Totebook, Edited by Densise Van Lear The Modern Backpackers Handbook, Glenn Randall Lipsmackin’ Backpackin’, Christine and Tim Conners A Women’s Guide to the Wilderness: Your Complete Outdoor Handbook, Ruby McConnell Wild, Cheryl Strayed Girl in the Woods, Aspen Matis A Walk in the Woods, Bill Bryson Grandma Gatewood’s Walk, Ben Montgomery Journey on the Crest, Cindy Ross A Blistered Kind of Love: One Couple’s Trial by Trail, Angela and Duffy Ballard Appalachian Trials, Zach Davis Almost Somewhere, Suzanne Davis How to create more from what you already have

Carol built her cabin in the wilderness for many of the same reasons as Thoreau, who went to the woods “to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I come to die, discover that I had not lived.” Like Thoreau, Carol was a student of nature and a geographical extension of the wilderness that surrounded her. Both explored a life stripped down to its essentials. They wanted “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.” Thoreau believed wilderness provided a necessary counterbalance to the materialism and urbanization of industrialized America. It was a place of self-renewal and contact with the raw material of life. “In wildness is the preservation of the world,” he famously wrote. Thoreau was among the first to advocate for protecting America’s vanishing wildlands, proposing that the nation formally preserve “a certain sample of wild nature . . . a network of national preserves in which the bear and the panther may still exist and not be civilized off the face of the earth.” Wilderness preserves could provide a perpetual frontier to keep overindustrialized Americans in contact with the primitive honesty of the woods. In 1872—the same year that Tom and Andy founded Carnegie Steel—America designated its first national park: over two million acres in northwest Wyoming were set aside as Yellowstone National Park. A second national park soon followed, thanks to the inspiration of Sierra Club founder John Muir. He so loved the Sierra that he proposed a fifteen-hundred-square-mile park around Yosemite Valley and spent decades fighting for it. When Yosemite National Park was finally signed into law in 1890, Muir

This is the opposite of the Judeo-Christian ideology that – whether or not one is religious – remains the historic basis of our civilization. In the Book of Genesis, God says to mankind: “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Subduing the Earth and filling the Earth with people is about as far from the ideology of the Sierra Club as one can get. The Sierra Club and fellow green ideologues may think that nature worship is something new. But, plenty of illiterate peoples living in jungles are a step ahead of the Sierra Club. When a paradise on Earth fails to emerge from the adoption of utopian ideas, totalitarianism often follows. Rather than changing their ideas, because they prove ineffective, ideologues double down and try to force their ideas on the population. That, of course, is the history of communism. The green ideologues in the U.S. are not communists. Rather than championing the workers, they champion the Earth. They also champion themselves.

Sierra Azul Open Space Preserve, eighteen thousand acres of rugged wilderness.

Empecé a superar la tartamudez el día que dejó de importarme.

La gente te hace daño cuando sabe que puede hacerte daño. Si le quitas la oportunidad, la desarmas.

On June 4, 1892, twenty-seven men met in San Francisco to form the Sierra Club. Muir was chosen as president, a title he would hold until his death.