A green leader’s bigotry

It’s difficult not to enjoy the Sierra Club’s discomfort with denouncing their founder John Muir as a bigoted racist who hated both Black and Indigenous people.

Much of my long career with the oil industry was devoted to battling Sierra Clubbers and other environmental zealots who wanted to block energy companies from operating in Alaska. That included 11 years as a senior executive at ARCO Alaska and 20 years as a public relations counselor to the major oil companies operating here.

I must admit I had no idea that Muir was such a jerk and I assume that many of the club’s 3.8 million members are sincerely committed to protecting the world’s wild places. But their leadership’s tactics over the years have not been what I considered admirable and they seriously distorted the public’s opinion about what the oil industry was trying to do in Alaska.

In case you missed it, on Wednesday the Sierra Club’s president, Michael Brune, reported that Muir was a racist who hated Black and Indigenous people. His white supremacist views were shared by many of the club’s original members.

The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 and Muir is widely considered its founder, though Brune’s statement this week referred to him as “co-founder.” Nobody was listed as any other founder so it’s hard not to assume that Brune was just trying to fudge a little by avoiding the suggestion that all of the club’s original members might have been sympathetic to his less admirable views.

Muir died in 1914 many years before I battled with his club’s leaders and others in the environmental movement. I joined ARCO in 1969 when the company hired me away from my reporting job at The Anchorage Times to head up their public relations effort here.

ARCO had just made the discovery of the major oil field at Prudhoe Bay. A lot of government-sponsored oil exploration had taken place at the National Petroleum Reserve to the west of Prudhoe from 1944 to 1981. Quite a bit of oil was found but nothing to justify the cost of development.

The huge Prudhoe Bay discovery in 1968 involved onshore acreage owned by the State of Alaska. It started the Arctic development drive and statewide oil boom that lasted for many years. The Sierra Club and other like-minded organizations tried hard to block the opening of Alaska’s Central Arctic but the discovery was too big and the opportunity too great to ignore.

The people of Alaska supported the drive for development and their efforts succeeded. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline was built and began carrying oil south to Valdez in 1977. That oil has been the foundation of our state’s economy ever since.

Petroleum companies like ConocoPhillips and Hilcorp are still actively working to develop new and promising oil fields in Alaska’s Arctic. This state still has a promising future in the oil industry if the zealots in opposition don’t manage to derail their momentum.

Organizations like the Sierra Club are still fighting against Alaska’s economic interests and, with help from other activists like those working to jack up oil taxes, they could be a major problem. The tax zealots don’t seem to realize — or more likely don’t care — that raising oil taxes significantly could jeopardize Alaska’s economy.

Many of the major companies operating here have sold their interests, primarily because the profit margins on drilling in northern Alaska are not high enough nowadays to hold their interest. That is a major concern for those who live and work here.

With the economy already weakened by the turmoil of the coronavirus pandemic, creating a further disincentive by jacking up taxes could push many projects beyond reach.

John Muir would be smiling wherever he is.

Tom Brennan is an Anchorage columnist and author of five books. He was a reporter/columnist for The Anchorage Times and an editor and columnist at The Voice of The Times.