How Social Justice Destroyed Environmentalists

By Andrew Follett

Wednesday, November 12, 2025

 

America’s oldest and most influential environmental group is collapsing because it has been shifting its focus to other left-wing causes instead of environmentalism for decades.

 

The Sierra Club has lost 60 percent of its 4 million members and held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, because, as the New York Times wrote, it offended members and volunteers who had “loved the club’s single-minded defense of the environment, by asking them to fully embrace its pivot to the left. Some even felt they were investigated by the club for failing to go along. ”

 

“We can’t defend the environment by shutting ourselves up in a big, green box labeled ‘environmental issues,’” the group’s then-executive director, Michael Brune, wrote to members in 2017, explaining the organization’s rebranding to fight Trump.

 

During President Trump’s first term, the Sierra Club was financially rewarded for this pivot away from environmentalism, but the organization’s fundraising subsequently collapsed as it became just another left-wing group.

 

The Sierra Club raised just $173 million in fiscal year 2023. That’s significant, but it’s almost nine times less than the $1.48 billion raised by the Nature Conservancy, a similar organization that remained focused on conservation, not politics. The Sierra Club now faces a $40 million projected budget deficit, despite taking millions from shell companies tied to Vladimir Putin’s Russia.

 

Of the 23 Sierra Club leaders included in the group’s 2023 tax filing, roughly 14 of them have left the organization.

 

The organization’s spending has surged, however, with its labor costs doubling between 2016 and 2024, according to budget documents reviewed by the New York Times after the club agreed to expand its union and raise salaries by 30 percent.

 

According to the New York Times, “We have two F.T.E.s [Full Time Equivalents] devoted to Trump’s war on the Arctic refuge, and we have 108 going to D.E.I. [Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion.]” And what those DEI employees generated was, frankly, left-wing speech-policing wholly unrelated to environmental stewardship.

 

In the woke frenzy of 2020, the Sierra Club even went so far as to cancel its own founder for having “made derogatory comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that drew on deeply harmful racist stereotypes.”

 

“The Sierra Club is a 128-year-old organization with a complex history, some of which has caused significant and immeasurable harm,” Brune wrote while serving as executive director in July 2020. “As defenders of Black life pull down Confederate monuments across the country, we must also take this moment to reexamine our past and our substantial role in perpetuating white supremacy.”

 

The club even pledged to defund the police and make financial reparations for slavery.

 

“As the climate crisis continues to disproportionately harm Black communities, it is up to us to build an intersectional climate justice movement that ensures a habitable planet for all people,” Brune said in a press statement. “And we cannot create that movement without demanding reparations for Black people — a community that is burdened with deep trauma stemming from a legacy of colonialism, genocide, land theft, enslavement, racial terror, racial capitalism, structural discrimination, and exclusion.”

 

Brune pledged to spend millions “to make long-overdue investments in our staff of color and our environmental and racial justice work” and “create a dialogue with, and resources for, our members about the intersection between racism and environmental justice issues and invest in our HR and training capacities to ensure that staff, volunteers, and members are held accountable for any harm they inflict upon members of our Sierra Club community who identify as Black, Indigenous, or people of color.”

 

What helpful things were these expensive woke activists producing?

 

One example is Sierra’s 2018 “equity language guide,” which really must be read in full to be believed. It spends 26 pages discussing “people-first language,” supposedly advanced by such steps as replacing the term “felon” with “formerly incarcerated person” or banning calling an opponent “deaf,” “blind,” or “lame” for fear it may offend disabled people.

 

Hilariously, the guide even advises the organization’s employees and volunteers not to call others “American.”

 

“Avoid using the term ‘Americans’ generically for a group (because it limits the group to those who have citizenship status as Americans),” states the guide. “There may be moments when it is appropriate to utilize this word, but one must first ask whether it is absolutely necessary.”

 

The reason for this Orwellian language policing? The group’s “complex history with immigration issues” as it now views itself as an “ally to immigrant communities and supports immigration reform policies that create a path to citizenship for all residents of the U.S.”

 

As the guide acknowledges, however, this wasn’t always the case, because “as recently as the 1990s, people organized within the Sierra Club to push the organization to take explicitly anti-immigrant positions” on environmental grounds. Until 1996, the environmental group’s official policy was that both birth rates and immigration levels needed to sharply decline to decrease the American population as rapidly as possible, causing the group to splinter.

 

It’s certainly true that many left-wing groups abandoned their core missions to “resist” President Trump during their first term, but the Sierra Club has been doing this for some time.

 

As I have previously reported, the Sierra Club has been purging itself of dissenters from left-wing orthodoxy on immigration, with the organization’s Austin chapter pulling out of an Earth Day festival merely because other environmental groups that want to restrict immigration would be in attendance.

 

“We consider them hate groups,” Reggie James, the director of the Sierra Club’s Texas chapter, told the Austin American-Statesman in 2016. “It’s Earth Day; it’s not This-Side-of-the-Border Day.”

 

The Sierra Club splintered several times over the question of immigration before finally announcing in 2013 that it supports a pathway to citizenship for illegal aliens. Those who disagreed were effectively booted from the organization.

 

It also probably didn’t help that Joe Sanberg, one of the Sierra Club’s four board members, pleaded guilty to stealing almost $250 million in a complex carbon offset scheme. He now faces years in prison.

 

As I previously reported, Sanberg was a huge deal on the progressive left. He received glowing profiles from outlets such as The Atlantic, which praised his support for “Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, increasing corporate regulation, and investing in food stamps and Medicaid,” and his fraud-laden company was financially backed by famous actors Robert Downey Jr. and Leonardo DiCaprio.

 

It also didn’t help that Ben Jealous, the Sierra Club’s former executive director, was the subject of sexual harassment complaints before he was fired from his job in August. The Sierra Club declined to publicly disclose the details about why it fired Jealous, but the board voted unanimously to terminate his employment.

 

Jealous, the former head of the NAACP and the Sierra Club’s first African-American leader, claims he was fired due to racial discrimination and a conspiracy against him.

 

“No one can be surprised that the Sierra Club has resorted to personal attacks. That’s how racial retaliation works,” Jealous claimed in a statement. “When you’re being discriminated against, they don’t accuse you of being Black.”

 

Al Sharpton warned of “serious racial implications” in Jealous’s firing.

 

The Sierra Club’s pivot away from environmentalism and toward DEI has not only destroyed its fundraising capacity, but it evidently hasn’t even helped the organization to avoid race-related public relations controversies.