The Sierra Clubs Organizational Repertoires. Over the course of the 20th century, the Sierra Club had gone from a fledgling nature enthusiast social club with less than 600 members in 1902,[3] to a respected and influential environmental organiza

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The Sierra Club’s Organizational Repertoires

When the Sierra Club was incorporated in 1892, its stated mission was to “explore, enjoy and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast.” By 1970 the Club had changed enough that Executive Director Michael McCloskey described the organization as concentrating “specifically on political action to change public policy.” Over the course of the 20th century, the Sierra Club had gone from a fledgling nature enthusiast social club with less than 600 members in 1902, to a respected and influential environmental organization with a membership tallying over 700,000 by 2004. How did this happen? The answer is not a simple one. A switch in organizational philosophy led by a new generation of members in the middle part of the 20th century resulted in the Club’s entrance into the political arena. That switch was bitterly contested by the old guard within the Club. However, by 1972 and the Supreme Court case Sierra Club v. Morton, the organization had completed its transition. Simply shifting organizational philosophy does not create change, however. The Sierra Club incorporated several strategies to enact its policy goals. These methods, or “organizational repertoire”, as labeled by Clemens, included letter writing campaigns, newsletter publications, and ultimately litigation. By applying Clemens’ theory, we can see how the Sierra Club transformed its organizational repertoire and became an effective opponent to the federal government and advocate for the environment.

        In Elisabeth Clemens’ 1993 article on what she terms “organizational repertoires”, Clemens attempts to explain how social movement groups create institutional change. According to Clemens, the dominant theoretical models discount social movements as futile. Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy” states that all organizations will eventually be ruled by a small of group of leaders, obliterating the democratic intentions of that group, and distancing the organization from its “initial commitment to the transformation of the political system.” Thus the organization does not create real change, because its leaders are so far removed from the goals which they set out to enact. The leaders then gain a disincentive to create radical or progressive change, because doing so might lead to their ousting. This disincentive is shared by the organization’s paid administrative staff, which has an “interest in the continuation of the organization… [because] of their own economic situation.” Clemens also explains that, according to Michels, the nature of social movement organizations themselves leads to a lack of real change. This is because the social movement must necessarily interact with the political system in hopes of enacting policy goals. Michels argues that the social movement therefore has to “moderate their radical goals” in order to cement a broad enough coalition within the political system. This can also result in the co-opting of the social movement’s goals by another organization, namely governmental institutions, which take and skew the original purpose of the policy objective. However, it is Clemens’ argument that these pitfalls can be avoided by using different organizational models. “It is necessary,” she writes, “to abandon the assumptions… of [the] institutional homogeneity… of social movements”, because that is not always the case. Instead, effective social movements have used a wide variety of methods and strategies to enact their social change. These strategies are not new altogether, but generally novel to the social movement they are being used for. These new “organizational repertoires” adopted by the social movements are often influenced or colored by cultural trends of the time. This results in an increased likelihood of success for the strategy, simply because the organizational method is familiar and does not seem radical to the political institutions, even though it in fact might be a completely new application. Clemens draws two conclusions from this: first, specific movement organizational models are more likely to work depending on the political regime in place; and second, the social movement organization can ameliorate this problem by utilizing social or cultural models which are not political, and incorporate them into their political strategies. We will see over the course of this paper that the Sierra Club’s evolution affirms much of Clemens’ theory.

Environmentalism was first seen in the United States in the late 19th century. This came in the form of the conservationist movement. Conservationists were concerned mostly with the protection of land, especially forests. The conservationist movement focused on petitioning the federal government to protect large tracks of land, creating national parks. The Forest Reserve Act was passed in 1891 by the Benjamin Harrison administration, putting several forests under national jurisdiction. The issue was placed into prominence by President Theodore Roosevelt, who came to power in 1901. Roosevelt, a staunch conservationist, toured much of the United States’ frontiers and reserved significant amounts of land for nature preserves and parks. In fact, it was President Roosevelt’s camping trip in the Sierra Nevada in 1903 with naturalist and Sierra Club founder John Muir which led to increased federal protection of Yosemite National Park. Roosevelt would expand the national forests “from forty-three million to more than 150 million acres” by the end of his presidency. 

John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club, was born in Scotland in 1838. At the age of 11, he and his family moved to Wisconsin, and by the time he was 20, Muir was already in love with nature. He went on long walking trips throughout the United States and Canada, including a walk one-thousand miles long through the South. Muir eventually ended up in California, from where he set out to hike the Sierra Nevada in the 1860s. He lived in the mountains for five years, keeping copious notes and writing journal entries, some of which he later published. Before long, Muir had become “the nation’s archpriest of wild nature.” Muir was a spiritual and solitary man, not inclined to confrontation, but as he saw the rapid destruction of Yosemite in the Sierra Nevada, he was moved to action. Partnering with magazine editor Robert Underwood Johnson, Muir lobbied the federal government to protect Yosemite, and in 1892, Johnson and a professor at nearby Berkley convinced Muir that a permanent organization was imperative to help protect the Sierra Nevada. That organization, founded the same year, was the Sierra Club.

The Sierra Club set out with one goal in mind: the protection of the national parks. Eager settlers and logging companies spread out into the Sierra Nevada, encroaching, in Muir’s opinion, on the area’s majesty and wholeness. By the turn of the century, however, the Club had stymied the threat enough that it was losing members because of perceived inactivity. Therefore, the Club began to take on a more social role: the enjoyment of nature. In 1901 the Club organized its first group outing, which “infused new life and spirit into the club”, according to the Secretary’s Report in the 1902 edition of the Sierra Club Bulletin. The same report predicted that future trips would increase membership even more. It was soon after this that Roosevelt’s camping expedition with Muir would help solidify the Club’s environmental agenda on the national level. The Club’s weight would soon be tested in its first real political battle a couple of years later in 1907.

Hetch Hetchy, a valley in Yosemite, was the object of that political battle. The mayor of San Francisco petitioned the federal government to release the valley to California in order for a dam and reservoir to be built. At the time, Teddy Roosevelt was still President, and his chief environmental advisor was Gifford Pinchot, the leader of the United States Forest Service. While the Sierra Club had gained a powerful ally in Roosevelt years earlier, Pinchot’s influence over the President was resulting in divergent environmental philosophies between the administration and the Club. This clash in philosophies could be labeled as the preservationist versus the utilitarian conservationist. Essentially, Muir, the preservationist, believed that the natural beauty of the mountains should be preserved by any means necessary; Pinchot, the utilitarian, believed that the “land and its riches should be used by the people”, albeit “wisely and efficiently.” In the case of Hetch Hetchy, Pinchot argued that the reservoir was for a legitimate government function and public good. Pinchot’s philosophy that “natural resources existed for the benefit of humanity” ran completely opposite to the Muir mantra of preserving the aesthetic and spiritual condition of the Earth, and so the first struggle between the government and the Sierra Club began.

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Muir and a younger member of the club, the lawyer Will Colby, led the fight for Hetch Hetchy. Before long, however, there was dissension within the Club. Many of the organization’s members, including the Club’s vice-president, were in favor of the dam and reservoir, because they believed it served a public good which the Club had no right to oppose. The increasingly vocal minority in the Club which supported the dam and opposed the Club’s leaders discouraged Muir greatly, who was, at 69, now an old man. Muir offered to resign his position as president as well as his membership in ...

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