Sierra Club
Article
Sierra Club is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 3 times across 3 issues between August 08, 2022 and June 23, 2023. The archive places it in contexts such as ""Greenpeace and the Sierra Club would be ‘fossil fuel safety’""; “including from the Sierra Club”; “Others, like the Sierra Club, long predated Nader but began copying his tactics”. It most often appears alongside FDA, Robert McNamara, United States.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 3
- Issue count: 3
- First seen: August 08, 2022
- Last seen: June 23, 2023
Appears In
Related Pages
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- FDA (2 shared issues)
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- Robert McNamara (2 shared issues)
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- United States (2 shared issues)
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- Washington Post (2 shared issues)
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- 1965 (1 shared issues)
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- 1968 Summer Olympics (1 shared issues)
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- 2000 election (1 shared issues)
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- 2023 book review contest (1 shared issues)
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- 60 Minutes (1 shared issues)
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- 80,000 Hours (1 shared issues)
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- 80,000 Hours’ Guide To Working In AI Policy And Strategy (1 shared issues)
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- Adam Mastroianni (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
Imagine if oil companies and environmental activists were both considered part of the broader “fossil fuel community”. Exxon and Shell would be “fossil fuel capabilities”; Greenpeace and the Sierra Club would be “fossil fuel safety” - two equally beloved parts of the rich diverse tapestry of fossil fuel-related work. They would all go to the same parties - fossil fuel community parties - and maybe Greta Thunberg would get bored of protesting climate change and become a coal baron.
Luckily for Ehrlich, no one cares. He remains a professor emeritus at Stanford, and president of Stanford’s Center for Conservation Biology. He has won practically every environmental award imaginable, including from the Sierra Club, the World Wildlife Fund, and the United Nations (all > 10 years after the Indian sterilization campaign he endorsed). He won the MacArthur “Genius” Prize ($800,000) in 1990, the Crafoord Prize ($700,000, presented by the King of Sweden) that same year, and was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 2012. He was recently interviewed on 60 Minutes about the importance of sustainability; the mass sterilization campaign never came up. He is about as honored and beloved as it’s possible for a public intellectual to get.
But his real influence lay in the many other groups his example inspired. Some, like the Environmental Defense Fund, were explicitly modeled on Nader’s organizations. Others, like the Sierra Club, long predated Nader but began copying his tactics. The number of active nonprofits tripled during the 1970s.
Initially, the vast majority of these groups were left-leaning, but pretty soon conservative activists got in the game too. And why wouldn’t they? Although he’s often caricatured as a radical liberal, there was something very small-c conservative about the way Nader and his ilk operated. They were heavily distrustful of government and spent most of their time either publishing reports criticizing the government or just suing the government directly. (In the first two years of the Nader-inspired Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, a whopping 70 of their 77 lawsuits were filed against the government!) And the laws they pushed for were designed with that distrust in mind.