WHY IS IT NEVER THEIR OWN DUTY TO DIE?:

The Invasion of the Elegant Trogons: Is Sierra Club’s anti-immigration insurgency for the birds? (Susan Zakin, 4/01/04, LA Weekly)

More than 30 years ago, three men worked together at Zero Population Growth, a Washington, D.C., environmental group founded by scientist Paul Ehrlich. In 1969, Ehrlich’s best-selling Malthusian rant, The Population Bomb, had alerted the world to the dangers of overpopulation. The Stanford biology professor was enjoying his 15 minutes of celebrity, cracking wise on the Johnny Carson show. Zero Population Growth captured the spirit of the times with bumper stickers like “Control Your Local Stork.” Ehrlich left the running of the organization to others.

Dick Lamm, an up-and-coming attorney with political ambitions, was one of Zero Population Growth’s first presidents. Lamm had his eureka moment while traveling in India, where the spectacle of human suffering on the streets of Calcutta had shocked both him and his pregnant wife, Dottie.

John Tanton, a Michigan ophthalmologist who had been active in the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society, followed Lamm as the group’s president in the mid-1970s. Handing out birth control pills wasn’t enough for Tanton; he believed immigration should be curtailed, too. Tanton was described by a colleague as a “soft nativist,” someone who wasn’t exactly a racist but thought that white Anglo-Saxon Protestants had founded a pretty darn good country, so why mess with success?

A bright young man named Carl Pope joined the staff of ZPG in 1970, fresh from a Peace Corps stint in India. Like Dick Lamm, Pope believed the experience of being in India had changed him profoundly. But Pope, who was about a decade younger than the other two, had immersed himself in the life of India, learning to speak Hindustani fluently while spending two years working in a rural health clinic. His job? Handing out condoms.

Today these men are opponents in a pitched battle for control over the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club’s $95 million budget, 750,000 members and high-powered lobbying apparatus make it arguably the nation’s premier environmental organization. But in a quirk of fate, the club is incorporated in California, which means its board is subject to the same low-bar election laws that enabled former child-actor Gary Coleman to get on the ballot in last year’s gubernatorial election. Over the past three years, an oddball coalition of anti-immigration zealots and animal-rights activists has gained three seats on the Sierra Club’s board of directors as petition candidates. Now five more insurgents, including Dick Lamm, are running a well-funded campaign, threatening to take control of the club’s 15-member board of directors. Many Sierra Club leaders, including more than a dozen former presidents, are worried that should the insurgents prevail when election returns are counted this month, the club’s credibility and political effectiveness will be seriously threatened. [...]

John Tanton is regarded as the éminence grise of the country’s anti-immigration movement, a phenomenon of the political fringe that appears to be gaining some ground with the explosion of illegal immigrants from Mexico. Today, Tanton, the good old farm boy who once rang doorbells as a Sierra Club volunteer in his home state of Michigan, runs a nonprofit organization called U.S. Inc., which has received at least $2.7 million from family foundations associated with right-wing activist Richard Mellon Scaife. Tanton’s behind-the-scenes influence inspired the Southern Poverty Law Center to call him “The Puppeteer” in an investigative article published in its magazine. He has either funded or helped organize a spate of immigration “reform” groups that run the gamut from ostensibly nonpartisan think tanks in Washington, D.C., to outright wackos predicting the collapse of the United States under an onslaught of dusky, fecund hordes.

Dick Lamm is far more well-known than Tanton. From 1975 to 1987, the affable Lamm served three terms as the Democratic governor of Colorado. By the 1980s, though, the ex-governor was veering outside the political mainstream by calling for draconian measures to control population. In 1984, Lamm made national headlines when he talked about the elderly’s “duty to die.”

Yet in an interview, Lamm sounds like the same laid-back, outdoorsy guy who helped give the New West a good name back in the 1970s. “The population issue in the U.S. is immigration,” Lamm says. [...]

In the late 1970s, Tanton established his own organizations: Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, the Center for Immigration Studies, U.S. English, and the journal The Social Contract. In 1988, Tanton, who remains a life member of the Sierra Club, co-wrote a memo to anti-immigration activists in which he flirted with overt racism, asking questions like: “As Whites see their power and control over their lives declining, will they simply go quietly into the night? Or will there be an explosion? Why don’t non-Hispanic Whites have a group identity, as do Blacks, Jews, Hispanics?” In a strategic twist, Tanton cast himself as a defender of African-Americans, whom he claimed were adversely affected by immigrants willing to work for low wages. But it was something else in the memo that caught the attention of Mark Potok at the Southern Poverty Law Center, who unearthed the memo last fall. “The Sierra Club may not want to touch the immigration issue, but the immigration issue is going to touch the Sierra Club!” Tanton wrote.

Tanton’s words seemed, at the very least, prophetic. In 1997, a handful of Sierra Club members managed to get a measure on the ballot endorsing a reduction in immigration. In a 60-40 vote, the membership decided to remain neutral on immigration, favoring instead a “comprehensive approach” promoting international economic security, women’s rights and reproductive health.

But the assault by the immigration reformers, as they call themselves, had only just begun. In 2002, USC astrophysics professor Ben Zuckerman won a seat on the Sierra Club board of directors. The following year, Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug LaFollette joined him there. Both were hardcore proponents of limiting immigration.

The third insurgent candidate was Paul Watson, the self-styled “master and commander” of the whale-ship-ramming marine protection group Sea Shepherd. Watson was on board with the anti-immigration zealots, but not exactly of them. Watson, who was kicked out of Greenpeace decades ago for his lack of Gandhian restraint, says he doesn’t dislike Hispanics or Chinese — he just dislikes people.

At least Mr. Watson is universal in his anti-human stance rather than picking and choosing.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 1, 2004 11:05 PM