My local chapter here in Minnesota seems really great actually! I've had a number of their leaders come talk in my classes over the years and they seem to be doing great work across a number of important local/regional issues.

I always teach this as an example of why simplistic economic thinking can lead us to morally questionable judgements in the realm of environment & development.

Probably 2 of the biggest highlights of my entire life, right there in that short semester.

There was also a day when I randomly looked to the horizon over the bay at sunset through my binoculars and saw a gigantic flock of shearwaters flying by at the edge of sight, and sat there for an hour until it got dark, and the flock was still passing. I later read that there are millions of them.

I spent a semester at the Hopkins Marine Station as a student, and one day while we were in class we saw a humpback whale breach about 100 meters offshore. Everyone ran out of their classes and labs, and we all stood there for half an hour as the whale breached continuously. One of life's highlights

But the bigger question seems to be: can we raise money to fund public and common pool goods through voluntary action? And the answer, both theoretically and empirically appears, at least so far, to be no.

There's been a lot of publicity about how carbon offsets and credits are not achieving intended goals, but much less publicity about this bigger failure to actual generate revenue. When people talk about fixing the markets, they are usually talking about new ways to measure impact.

For context, this is about the same as the annual budget of the US Forest Service, and less than twice the annual expenditure of Indian governments on forests. The Nature Conservancy has a budget of about 1 billion dollars, so over the last 15 years, TNC has raised more money than the VCM.

I also thought it was weird that they said that the Sierra Club was mostly a climate organization. I guess I'm now getting old, but I think of the Sierra Club primarily as a national parks & wilderness areas organization, reflecting its roots as a Bay Area hiking club.

Thanks! Its hard to run a big national organization that relies heavily on volunteers and local chapters... they're inevitably going to have varying goals. The alternative though isn't much better - other big e-NGOs primarily seem to do what rich donors want, which I don't know if its better.

I'd be curious to know more about all of this, maybe from a less biased source than this reporter who seems to have decided that the story was about wokeism harming an environmental group before they actually did the reporting.

Anyway, my point with these stories is that the idea that there is conflict within the organization is hardly new or news, and its not clear from the reporting why or whether these particular conflicts are harming the organization or whether other factors have been more important

I also heard from our local Minnesota chapter leadership when I moved here that while the local chapter was focused on social justice issues and promoting high density urban growth, this brought them into conflict with chapters in California - SF in particular, that had the opposite views.

This was a political non-starter, and meant that the club couldn't meaningfully participate in the wheeling and dealing that the smaller and more nimble organizations could do, meaning that the Sierra Club was basically a non-participant in the conflicts I worked on.

Later there was a membership referendum which made the official position of the Club that there should be NO logging at all on national forest lands.

this was part of an implicit agreement between the timber industry and the big environmental groups - the enviros got national parks, the timber industry got the forests - so the SC wasn't engaged in national forest policy.

First, during the late 80s and early 90s timber wars, the Sierra Club had stood on the sidelines while smaller activist orgs took the lead.