I Opened and Read It, It Said They Were Suckers

I got an offer from the Sierra Club last week to join their membership rolls. As it is something I've thought about doing for the past year or so and since I had the mailer in hand, I thought it might as well be time.

The Sierra Club has an undeniably laudable mission of opposing even the most innocuous intrusion on our earth's ecosystems and resources and educating people to protect and restore the quality of the natural and human environment - except for when it's inconvenient or politically unwise.

The Club's founder, John Muir, is someone I esteem highly. Another person I hold in high regard, William O. Douglas, led the Club as president in decades previous. Point is, this is an organization whose mission I dearly believe in, are generally led by people I respect, and would feel good financially supporting.

Until I started reading their literature, that is.

The Sierra Club presents itself as a non-partisan organization. For tax purposes, they are -officially. In reality, they are anything but.

I may be one of the most liberal Republicans I know but I'm still a Republican. You don't get my money by bad-mouthing my party's leader a year before an election year.

To be sure, the Republican Party, over the past 25 years, has a pitiful history of protecting the environment and its natural resources.

For instance, the Senate Majority Leader attached a non-germane rider to the 2002 Supplemental Appropriations Act for Further Recovery for and Response to Terrorist Attacks on the United States. He correctly understood that no responsible elected official would cast a nay vote in the War on Terror - not that year, anyway. This rider violated the treaties of 1851 and 1868 between the United States and the Lokata Nation which forbid resource extraction from the Black Hills and successfully suspended law to allow logging to be conducted in the most sacred area to the Lakota.

Oops - it was a Democrat who did that; and the Sierra Club remained silent.

For the past several years, about the time the Sierra Club conveniently re-found its voice in protecting forests from needless and destructive clearing, the Bush Administration has employed the same ruse of fire protection as former Senator Daschle and has proposed opening a portion of the Sierra Nevada to logging. Because, as the Club has told me, "the oil industry and other profiteers hope to benefit from their connections with the Bush Administration".

I do believe the sequoia trees, some as old as 3,400 years old, do deserve protecting. After all, they have existed for over half of the Earth's total existence.

Opensecrets.org reports that in the 2004 election cycle, the Sierra Club donated $364,763 to Democrat candidates and $24,187, of 6.6% or their total contributions, to Republican Candidates. In the 2006 cycle, it was $208,808 to $7,579, or 3.6%.

So, I'm going to take a chance.

I don't believe my party will continue its hold on the White House after the next election. I'm going to wait until 2009 when a new administration takes over and will send them my dollars the first time I receive a mailer lambasting just one anti-environment policy from the new administration they feel is extreme.

Any side bets?