Environmental Group To Remove Founder's Statue Due To Racist Remarks, Controversial Friendships

The Sierra Club said Wednesday that it would address its own history rooted in racism and remove the statue of its controversial founder, John Muir.

“The Sierra Club is a 128-year-old organization with a complex history, some of which has caused significant and immeasurable harm,” Sierra Club executive director Michael Brune said on the group’s website. “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.”

Muir founded the Sierra Club in 1892 as part of his efforts to help protect California’s Sierra Nevada Mountains. This would expand to include defending Yosemite Valley and the Sequoia National Forest from encroaching interests, growing to over 3.8 million members and supports by 2020 as one of the strongest conservation groups in the U.S.

However, Muir was also a controversial figure because of repeated racist statements aimed at Blacks and Native Americans. While the Sierra Club says Muir changed his views over time, other early leaders were equally guilty of promoting white supremacist ideals and eugenics, a pseudo-science promoted by racist and white supremacist groups. The core tenant of eugenics was the idea of improving humanity’s genetic quality by promoting those considered superior and the exclusion of those considered inferior.

David Starr Jordan, who served on the group’s board of directors under Muir, was described as a “kingpin” of eugenics.

“A 'kingpin' of the eugenics movement, he pushed for forced-sterilization laws and programs that deprived tens of thousands of women of their right to bear children -- mostly Black, Latinx, Indigenous, and poor women, and those living with disabilities and mental illness,” Brune said. “He cofounded the Human Betterment Foundation, whose research and model laws were used to create Nazi Germany’s eugenics legislation.”

The Washington Post also cited Muir’s friendship with Henry Fairfield Osborn, a founding member of the American Eugenics Society, as another example of the company Muir kept at the time.

“For all the harms the Sierra Club has caused, and continues to cause, to Black people, Indigenous people, and other people of color, I am deeply sorry,” Brune said. “I know that apologies are empty unless accompanied by a commitment to change. I am making that commitment, publicly, right now. And I invite you to hold me and other Sierra Club leaders, staff, and volunteers accountable whenever we don’t live up to our commitment to becoming an actively anti-racist organization.”

Brune has also committed around $5 million of the group’s budget over the next year to “investments in our staff of color” along with expanding its “environmental and racial justice work.”