At the Sierra Club, also addressing race, gender and environment (published in 2022)

As protests following the killing of George Floyd rocked the nation in the summer of 2020, the executive director of the Sierra Club wrote an explosive blog post about John Muir, the legendary conservationist who founded the environmental organization.

Muir, the executive director wrote, had made “disparaging comments about Black people and Indigenous peoples that were based on deeply damaging racist stereotypes.”

That blog post, and the internal debate that followed led to the departure of the executive director last year. And while the Sierra Club now has an acting executive director, many of its public leadership duties have fallen to the chairman of the board of directors, Ramón Cruz.

Mr. Cruz, who is from Puerto Rico, has worked in the environmental movement for decades. He was arrested while protesting the Navy’s use of Vieques Island as a training ground, and held positions with the Environmental Defense Fund and the Partnership for New York City.

And while the Sierra Club works to move beyond Muir’s uproar, Mr. Cruz doesn’t view the organization’s work strictly as advancing conservation or fighting climate change, but as part of a broader movement for social and ecological justice.

This telephone interview has been shortened and edited for clarity.

Where are you today?

I am in Brooklyn, New York, the land of the Canarsee people. When we say where we are today, we have the land recognitions of indigenous peoples. New York was the greater Lenape area and Brooklyn was Canarsee country.

Why do you think it’s important to recognize that?

Especially after the summer of reckoning, after George Floyd and so much focus on the effects of systemic racism in our society, understanding the legacy of racism, supremacy and colonialism is very important to understanding where we are as a society today. I am from Puerto Rico, a colonized country. All this is very important. So when I introduce myself I usually say I’m in the Greater Lenape Territory in the Canarsee People’s Unceded Land, but I’m from Borinquen which is the Taíno name of the island of Puerto Rico.

We were not the original inhabitants of most of the places we enter. There have been other groups and other nations that have been there for thousands of years, and when it comes to environmental issues, many of these groups were much better stewards of our natural world than we are today.

Tell me about your experience as a boy in Puerto Rico and your relationship with the country.

My uncle had a house behind the Yunque National Forest, and that’s where we would celebrate all major occasions, everything from Epiphany to Mother’s Day to Holy Week, so that was a place I definitely connected with that aspect. I was also a boy scout, so my family went camping.

And my mother was a big influence. She was a nun, and while I’m not necessarily focused on the religious rituals, she had a service call. She was also a scientist and she had an ecology club at the school I went to. She was a teacher there and we did recycling when there wasn’t much recycling going on.

What does the organization think about the balance between nature conservation and climate change?

I would say both are the same. Over the past 10 years or so, the Sierra Club has put a lot of effort into transforming itself into an organization that puts justice and fairness at the heart of what we do. That’s important to recognize because the environmental movement and the environmental justice movement didn’t necessarily work together for many years.

When we go to a place, we want to make sure that we are invited and that the emphasis is on bottom-up organizing. That there is a spirit of reciprocity and solidarity, and that we are inclusive and that we also share resources. It is that commitment to transformation in the Sierra Club that enables us to be better allies and better partners, so that instead of just leading the movement, we are broadening the movement.

We are an organization that strives to be much better allies than we have been in the past. It also recognizes where we may have done damage in the past, where we are in the progressive movement and the interconnectedness with other parts of the movement – that environmental rights are human rights, justice rights, gender rights and reproductive rights. .

You said that conservation and climate change are essentially the same thing, but we’re increasingly seeing these two things actually conflicting sometimes, for example with offshore wind farms or large transmission lines passing through relatively pristine land. Now how should we weigh the relative merits of each of these causes?

The climate crisis is the greatest threat in human history. There is also no doubt that everything humans do has an impact on the natural environment. That is why I think the most important thing is to put science at the forefront of strategies and actions. Renewable energy projects can therefore have consequences and negative effects. However, these are much less than fossil fuels.

To your question of where we draw the line, it varies on a case-by-case basis. In Puerto Rico a few governments ago there were a lot of big renewable projects and permits being given away, and the environmental community was against it not because we were against renewable energy, but because we were against projects that benefit only a few, that follow corruption programs that we seen in the past, and who also use productive land that could have been used for agriculture or conservation if there were alternatives. There will always be some tension.

If the Sierra Club focuses so much on issues like immigration or racial justice, is there a risk of losing sight of its core environmental and conservation mission?

For me it doesn’t take our eyes off the ball; it’s really about broadening our vision. At least that view was very narrow in the past – thinking it’s only about nature and not seeing the interactions and how important is the betterment of everyone in society. Apart from that, I really believe that we cannot really win the battle in the climate crisis if we do not address these social and racial aspects.

If we think we can frack gas in Appalachia under the assumption that it’s good for the economy, the people in those places become disposable. There is an ideology behind it that is based on racism and supremacy. You have to break that down to make sure we don’t have any places of sacrifice, that there aren’t any disposable people.

The legacy of environmental pollution is also the legacy of that system. So what we’re saying is we don’t just care about the places, but we care about the people in those places, and we believe that in order to protect the environment, we also need to protect people and to make sure people have the resources to thrive in an economy that builds a planet that is balanced and healthy for all.

Saying that confronting the climate crisis is essentially also confronting things like the legacy of racial justice in this country risks alienating some Americans who might be willing to have a conversation about the climate crisis , but don’t want to have a conversation about race?

Over the past 20 years, all efforts to pass climate legislation have been led by broad national groups that would say, “Let’s go with market mechanisms or focus on the big picture.” And many of the environmental justice and community groups weren’t thrilled about it because they knew they would still be affected. As much as I’d like to have a national carbon trading program, when it comes to local issues, you can have a trading system but still have pollution in areas that then become the zones of sacrifice. So I have to make sure we’re better allies.

We were in the middle of discussions about Muir and his legacy. In California, you may have many things named after him. But even if you change people’s minds about Muir, you still have a movement that has a set of goals that are very precise and very important.

How optimistic or pessimistic are you about the ability of the international community to keep warming below 1.5 degrees and avoid the worst effects of climate change?

I am pessimistic and optimistic at the same time. Pessimistic that we don’t have enough time to keep fighting amongst ourselves. However, there were many things that were very successful in Glasgow. [The 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference was held in Glasgow.]

Is it enough for what we need? Absolutely not. We are not on track to meet the grand goals of the Paris agreement. But are we closer after Glasgow? Yes absolutely. So it’s a mixed bag. International cooperation is essential to the survival of, you know, people and the world as we know it today.