During March, elections are taking D
place to the governing board of the Sierra Club, a US environmental organisation with over 750,000 members. The central issue in these elections is combating the growth in US population through halting immigration. An alliance of animal rights activists, politicians and academics may end the Club's "neutral" position on immigration.
This alliance includes board member and co-founder of Greenpeace (now head of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society) Paul Watson, environmentalist academics and politicians like Richard Lamm, former Democrat governor of Colorado and Frank Morris, former director of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation.
These last two oppose "latinisation" of the USA, on grounds that it disadvantages black people. They are members of anti-immigration organisations Federation for American Immigration Reform and the Center for Immigration Studies, which are funded in part by a right-wing billionaire. Far right groups are said to have infiltrated the Sierra Club to influence the vote.
The Club is susceptible to this reactionary takeover, because it has had - according to Alexander Cockburn - a "century-long obsession with population control and racial eugenics", along with the majority of US environmentalists.
In 1998, a motion to include population/immigration control into the Club's policies, initiated by Dave Foreman and Anne Ehrlich was narrowly defeated in a referendum. The Club essentially initiated the population control debate in 1968 by publishing Paul Ehrlich's book "The Population Time Bomb".
Foreman is a former leader of Earth First!, some of whose websites still carry his call for "warrior society" to rise up "as antibodies" and "rid us of the human pox" that's ravaging the planet. While still a leader of Earth First!, he welcomed the Ethiopian famines of the 1980's. Although Foreman is meant to have "moderated" his views recently, he still claims that "any comprehensive policy on population stabilization must take into account immigration levels".
This is the nub of the issue. If you concede that population is a driving force of environmental destruction, rather than capitalism's inherent drive to accumulate, then the "logical" conclusion is deeply reactionary, particularly in those countries where use of resources is greatest and population growth is mainly the result of current or recent immigration.
A, the ecological crisis deepens, the danger is that more environmentalists will adopt ra ist positions.
Could there be similar developments in Britain? Labour's racist asylum policies are setting the scene, while the UK-based Optimum Population Trust calls for "a level of net migration that does not cause population growth". This body is stuffed with academics and government and EU officials, including Jonathon Porritt, head of the government's Sustainable Development Commission and Crispin Tickell, former UN ambassador.
Meanwhile, The Ecologist has published letters calling for the environmental movement to join the campaign against immigration, including one from a member of Friends of the Earth "closely connected to the BNP". SIERRA CLUBY BOOKSTORE
Alexander Cockburn describes the Sierra Club as a "middle-class do-gooder move ment with public credentials paddling in the most polluted waters of American politica life". It concedes the arguments on popula tion and immigration. Whether environmental movements ir Britain develop in the same way depends ir part on whether anti-capitalists are able to grasp the initiative in the ecological struggle
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16 soclaist res istance March 2004