Hostile Takeover or Rescue?

Sierra Club’s board candidates fight to shape the group’s future

The bruising battle over the election of new board members to the Sierra Club has exposed deep fault lines

in the nation’s largest environmental advocacy group. Regardless of the outcome, some observers predict the fight may change the way future board elections are held not only at the Sierra Club but possibly at other nonprofit organizations.

Sierra Club members this month are voting to replace five of the 15 members of the board of directors, who serve staggered three-year terms. The annual election has attracted unusual attention because a diverse array of outside groups has urged supporters to join the Sierra Club specifically to influence the composition of the board. Anyone who paid $25 to join by January 31 is eligible to vote in the election, which ends on April 21.

Smear Tactics and Lawsuits

While the Sierra Club has faced divisive issues in the past, many observers say this year’s campaign has turned particularly nasty. Supporters and opponents of the candidates for the board are flinging at one another charges of racism and xenophobia, of “environmental McCarthyism,” of meddling by outsiders with no history of involvement with the club, and of corruption and smear tactics. Lawsuits have been filed, then withdrawn, and thousands of dollars have been spent on campaigning.

Board challengers include some high-profile names, such as Dick Lamm, the former Colorado governor, and Morris Dees, co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center. And numerous advocacy groups have weighed in with their views, including MoveOn.org and groups concerned with immigration and population, with animal rights, and with hunting and fishing. Sierra Club members have also formed coalitions to support or to challenge the club’s current leadership.

Some board challengers say they hope to provide a needed jolt to an organization they believe has lost its edge. But others say a hostile takeover bid is in the works to wrest away control of the group’s $81-million budget and its venerated name in pursuit of divisive policies.

The Sierra Club fracas highlights a key struggle for national membership groups that have seen their ranks swell over the years: how to come up with a governance structure that gives all members an active say and yet isn’t too unwieldy or too susceptible to having a small faction gain power by virtue of low voter turnout.

Some observers say the kind of freewheeling democracy that characterizes the Sierra Club’s board-selection process is increasingly unusual. Not only are all of its 744,000 members in 64 chapters eligible to cast votes, but anyone who can gather signatures from at least 360 club members can become a board candidate, regardless of how briefly he or she has been involved with the group. Many other large environmental groups have centralized their programs at their headquarters and have loosened the direct connections with their members and supporters.

“The democratic nature of the Sierra Club is both a strength and a weakness,” says Jim Abernathy, executive director of the Environmental Support Center, in Washington, which works with grass-roots groups. “If you’re an advocacy organization, your strength is in being able to mobilize people. People with a stake in an organization are more willing to be mobilized, to attend a rally, to write a letter, or to speak out at a hearing.”

But while having the ability to vote for board members may make people more invested in an organization, Mr. Abernathy says, a low threshold for voting membership opens the door for people to join a nonprofit group solely to run for a seat on the board or to influence a vote. “I’m not sure that’s entirely appropriate,” he says.

Other advocacy groups are watching the Sierra Club fight with interest. Many already have some voting methods in place that limit the opportunity for outside groups to try to swing their board elections. The seven board members of Greenpeace, for example, are elected by the organization’s 66 voting members, who must have been involved in its activities for at least six years as a staff member or volunteer. The group’s 200,000 other supporters have no vote in the matter.

‘Dangerously Creative’

At the National Audubon Society, nine board members are elected by the members, one from each of nine geographic regions, and the remaining 30 or so are nominated by the society’s board or staff members and ratified by members attending the annual meeting.

But Audubon’s process is not universally popular. A group of Audubon members that seeks a greater voice in the organization’s affairs and increased support for its local chapters has organized itself under the banner “Take Back Audubon.” At board elections in December, the group failed to get any of its candidates elected, but its members hope the new board will consider some of its governance proposals when it meets next month. Governance issues may have little urgency among most of Audubon’s 450,000 members, however, since only about 5 percent of them voted in December, says John Bianchi, a spokesman for the group.

Friends of the Earth does give all 30,000 of its members the power to choose its 18 board members in direct elections, though voters normally endorse candidates selected by the board’s nominating committee, says Chris Pabon, director of foundation relations. Outside groups have not tried to elect their own candidates, he says, but such a step would be possible.

“When we developed our bylaws, we never imagined someone trying to do something like this,” Mr. Pabon says. “It’s dangerously creative.”

Shifting the organization’s policy priorities would be difficult, he says, because those are decided at biennial meetings of Friends of the Earth International, in which each of the 68 affiliates from different countries casts a single vote. But his organization is watching the Sierra Club’s situation, he adds, and could possibly modify its governance structure as a result.

At NARAL Pro-Choice America, a national group that lobbies to keep abortions legal, a nominating committee of seven board members submits names of candidates for approval by the full board. The group’s 200,000 members then are eligible to choose from among the candidates.

Growth in New Members

At the Sierra Club, some leaders proposed amending the bylaws several years ago to require candidates for the national board to have been club members for at least five years and have held other positions in the organization, says the club’s national president, Larry Fahn, executive director of the As You Sow Foundation, in San Francisco.

“All of those efforts fell on deaf ears,” he says, “because a majority of the board was not willing to do that. The conventional thinking was that members might not be willing to endorse that idea.”

In light of the current election, he says, “all such suggestions will be on the table.”

Some 30,000 people joined the Sierra Club from late November 2003 to January 31, the deadline for those who wanted to vote in the board election, Mr. Fahn reports. That compares with about 22,000 new members in the same period a year earlier, he says, leading him to believe that around 8,000 of the memberships could likely be attributed to outside campaigns to sign up new members.

Mr. Fahn says the divisive board battle has taken its toll on the organization. “It has been so excruciating,” he says. “We’ve been so distracted from our main mission and goals this year.”

One of the club’s principal goals, he says, is to draw attention to “how the Bush-Cheney administration has been systematically dismantling 40 years of environmental progress.” But that effort has “kind of bogged down,” he says, in view of the great interest in the club’s election. “I’ve talked to countless reporters,” he says, “but all they want to know about is our internal skirmishes.”

Debate Over Key Issues

Views about the issues at stake in the board election vary widely. Mr. Fahn and other club insiders decry what they characterize as an attempt by outsiders to hijack the organization’s agenda by promoting an anti-immigration platform. Although the Sierra Club has long been on record as endorsing a stable U.S. population to reduce strain on the environment, its members decided in 1998 by a 3 to 2 margin that the organization should be neutral on the question of immigration, to avoid getting distracted by that divisive issue.

Several board members have subsequently been elected who favor restrictions on immigration, however, and several candidates in the current election also hold such views. Chief among them is Mr. Lamm, who serves on the advisory board of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

“Our country’s population is exploding, 44 million added since 1990 alone, driven by rising fertility and record immigration,” says Mr. Lamm in his statement to voters. “The club’s population programs — global and domestic — must be strengthened.”

The immigration issue vaulted to prominence early this year when the Southern Poverty Law Center released a report saying that some of the white-supremacy groups that it tracks had been urging their members to enroll in the Sierra Club to vote in its election. The center’s co-founder, Mr. Dees, decided to run as a candidate for the club’s board, not in the hope of winning but to urge members to “vote against the ‘greening of hate.’”

“The whole point was to amplify our warning,” says Mark Potok, president of Intelligence Report, which operates out of the Southern Poverty Law Center. “By getting a candidate’s statement on the ballot, it guaranteed that our message would get into the homes of all Sierra Club members.”

The Sierra Club’s executive director, Carl Pope, has made few public comments on the controversy. But in a private meeting of the board in February, he reportedly compared the anti-immigration forces to a virus, and said, “It was a very sad moment for me when I had to recognize that hate wasn’t just something out there in American society that the Sierra Club had to fight, but that hate had gotten dangerously close to the club itself.”

Effectiveness at Issue

Yet other candidates say the real issue is about whether the club’s current leadership is doing enough to protect the environment.

This election is “about re-establishing the club as a major force in environmental protection,” says Karyn Strickler, a Maryland freelance writer and environmental activist running for a seat on the board. “You can draw a bright line between the old guard, who want to maintain their seat at the political table, and the reformers, who want more grass-roots involvement in the process and less political compromise.”

Ms. Strickler, former campaign director of the National Endangered Species Coalition, says she believes that the Sierra Club should remain neutral on the immigration issue, though she favors open debate on the matter.

How to Recover

The high tensions associated with this year’s board election have left many within the Sierra Club wondering if management or structural changes might prevent a repeat of such a public and divisive fight.

“My guess is that there’ll be lots of conversations about what we could do differently,” says Dave Karpf, a board candidate selected by the club’s nominating committee. He directed the Sierra Student Coalition in 1999 and is now involved in the club’s training and public-education efforts while he gets his Ph.D. in political science at the University of Pennsylvania.

“Democracy works well when you have a high degree of information and high voter turnout,” he says, adding that recent Sierra Club board elections have lacked both of those elements. Not only has turnout been meager, he says, but some candidates have tried to gloss over their positions on issues like immigration, leaving voters in the dark about their views.

Mr. Karpf says he spent $1,700 on his election campaign, mostly for the cost of mailing postcards to 6,500 club members in the Philadelphia area.

But he says tinkering with the electoral structure is not the answer. Rather, the Sierra Club must find a way to help engage its members so they feel they are part of the same social club, he says.

In the club’s early days, Mr. Karpf says, a large percentage of members would go on outings in the High Sierras, or in later decades meet at biennial wilderness conferences.

“There was a level of social connectedness where people knew each other and interacted with each other,” he says.

“Now we have 700,000 members, of whom just 30,000 are actively involved” in the club’s programs, Mr. Karpf adds. “So we need to re-create opportunities for social connectedness. We don’t need some massive overhaul of our democratic structure; we need to become an environmental community like we were 30 years ago.”

Another board candidate, Lisa Renstrom, of Charlotte, N.C., says the current election battle might prompt members to become more-active participants in the group’s work.

“If there’s a silver lining, it may be that many financial supporters of the club realize they have an opportunity to vote for the leadership,” Ms. Renstrom says. “I don’t think many of them even knew they could vote.”

Indeed, ballots returned so far suggest that the club may well log record participation among club members.

“We’re having the highest turnout we’ve had in many, many years,” says Mr. Fahn. By last week, he says, with two weeks to go in which members could cast ballots, the club had received more than 140,000 votes, representing more than 18 percent of its members. Mr. Fahn says he hopes voter turnout will surpass 20 percent this year, a participation level it last enjoyed in the early 1980s, when it had far fewer members. Last year, 8.7 percent of members voted in the board election.

Diversity in the Boardroom

No matter what the outcome of the Sierra Club election, the new board is bound to include people with divergent views about club policy on important issues. But conflicting viewpoints on a board can be healthy under the proper circumstances, some experts say.

“Diversity does not make decision making easier, but it makes for better decisions,” says Carol Weisman, president of BoardBuilders, a St. Louis consulting firm that tries to help organizations develop more-effective boards. “The more diverse your board, the more team-building you have to do” to keep people focused on their broad goals.

“When you get this kind of a mess, you really need to do some repair work,” Ms. Weisman says. “The board needs to find common ground, and what the skills and talents of the new members are. Otherwise, you get caught in this endless bitter bickering cycle which doesn’t do anything for the staff or the mission. You just start circling the drain.”