Bruce Hamilton

Bruce Hamilton

Deputy Executive Director, The Sierra Club

How did you become involved in the sierra club?

so, im 63 years old, ive been working at the club for 38 years, started in 1977 as a sierra club volunteer, and my dad taught environmental science at cornell university so i kind of grew up in that atmosphere and i spent every summer up in the adirondacks at camp. so its kind of in my blood and i went to school for wildlife biology. But i got kinda angry because everyone who was in wildlife biology just wanted to go and work for the game and fish department and figure out how to enforce hunting and fishing regulations and i was seeing what was happening to the natural environment. it was right around the first earth day, 1970, so i started taking an activist stance with the whole thing. I started, i had a job where i was writing environmental news for an advocacy journal called High Country News, and i did that while volunteering for the Sierra Club, and when a job came up with the sierra club as an organizer fighting against coal mining and power plants in wyoming and montana so i took the job!

 

Which parts of the Sierra Club (campaigns, initiatives, etc) have you been most involved in?

Everything. Started out as an organizer in those days i worked primarily on energy, clean air, wilderness, clean water, wildlife issues, and then i became the national field director. and so then during that period i was coordinating campaigns and field staff all around the country. so depending on what the campaign was, i might be working on alaska wilderness, or toxic waste, or for acid rain. ANy number of campaigns. and then after that, i was the National Conservation director, so at that point i wasnt just managing field systems, but all of the lobbyists, all of the lawyers, all of the state program, all the federal program, all the international program, so ive been around the block.

 

What for you has been an example of a successful campaign you’ve been a part of?

Some of the multi-year things, when we worked on the Alaska Lands Act, and ultimately protected 102 mil acres of Alaska, double the size of the park system, double the size of the refuge system, that was huge. took 10 years to do. The California Desert Protection Act was another thing that took 10 years, and that ultimately protected about 8 mil acres of CA Desert. A bunch of the pollution things to, but they were much more quick in and out things, because what would happen is, the originial Clean Air and Clean Water Act passed in the wake of Earth Day, but they had expiration dates attached to them, they had to come back to congress for reauthorization and so the law was either going to expire and reauthorize, and it was a chance for our opponents to try to weaken it or for us to try and strengthen it, so then we had a little tussle that would last for about a year, a year and a half, and then that would be over, and then we would forget about that campaign and go on to the next one. some were shorter term. and then some of the bigger change things are not in terms of public policy, but more in terms of changing hearts and minds and the way we were campaigning. so the Seirra Club used to be an organization that primarly focused on organizing our own members to then go on to contact the key decision maker, and that was what we did. that was our contribution. and initially that was sufficient because no one else was mobilizing their membership, so we could get in 100 to 150 letters, and we could fax them and that seemed like a lot at the time. and politicians would respond to that level of input. but we’ve gotten more complicated over time because more players emerged on the scene, and pretty soon even if we would get in several thousand, that was insufficient and it couldn’t just come from the enviro movement anymore, because that was somewhat predictable so any decision makers would dismiss that as well of course thats what the environmental community thinks but Ive got to think about broader society, or ive got to think about all my constituents. So, there was a big change that took place in the Sierra Club where we basically stopped just organizing ourselves and decided to go out on Main Street and try to find a broad coalition of allies that worked just  all the other environmental groups so it wasnt enough to just say lets go get NRDC and Audabon and the Wildlife Federation and Defenders of Wildlife and call it a day. Sure, you had to do that, but suddenly you could get the Chamber of Commerce, or AACP or steel workers, it became a much more powerful message, and more powerful movement, that could then actually sway things when the other side had so much money. They used to start buying what we started to call astroturf because it wasn’t really grassroots. and never the less they would make lots of noise and in the congressional office where suddenly they would appear to have all kinds of petitions and phone calls and mail and even though it usually wasn’t really grassroots based, it didnt really reflect the sentiments of the community, a politician could hide behind it or get confused by it. So we basically had to redouble our efforts. and then just the way you are communicating, we used to fly a couple constituents back to Washington DC and they would personally lobby, or the congressmen would go home for some vacation or holiday and we would try to meet with them in their district office, and youd get them 10 or 12 letters and that would be sufficient. And with electronic mail, it became easier to generate large volumes but also then the other side was able to generate large volumes, you’d do it with fax, and now nobody uses fax machines. So now a lot of it is clicktivism, where people are moving into the digital world and going online and doing online petitioning and sending your sentiment. so were constantly trying to struggle between different technologies, but also balancing the online and on land organizing. And what is most effective for the given forum that youre trying to influence, the given decision maker that youre trying to influence. And one of the things about the Sierra Club is we have probably one of the most extensive tool kits that a public intertest organization in the country or in the world has. If one thing doesnt work we can go and try another thing. SO if you operate at the local state federal and international level and you get stimied somewhere, you can turn around and make progress in a different area. The legislative process is blocked, you can go work administratively, or try and do with Obama now, if that doesnt work you can go to the courts, or maybe you can mobilize the people. So theres lots of different ways that approach accomplishing your goal. and if you get too stuck in your ways, and it gets too formulaic, you arent being effective anymore, and thats critical. and we found a way to be effective now, and its no cookie cutter way now, you have to constantly reinvent your campaign and reinvent yourself; stay nimble.

 

I imagine going out onto main street was a hard transition, and getting just your average joe to want to be involved or community organize, so how did you/The Sierra Club go about getting those people involved?

We hired professional organizers, and put them in a number of different communities to test different models. We had a program called “building an environmental community.” It was intentional. WE said its not going to work if we go into a community and tell them “hey, we want you to all care about saving the caribu in the arctic” cause thats not what they care about. the original model said go into the community, go into the coffee shop, enter into a dialogue and find out what the community is most passionate about, that also fits in with basic Sierra Club values and policies. So if what they want is to clean up their local river, then initially thats what we have to organize for, cause we care about that too. And if they want to focus on a toxic waste dump, or theyre actually worried about a factory shutting down thats causing a lot of pollution because theyre worried about losing jobs, then we have to work with them to come up with some sort of solution that both cleans up the pollution and allows the jobs to continue. But lets try to not have the Sierra Club have the leadership role saying we know how to save your community, but rather how do we partner with you in order to accomplish mutual goals and as a result build trust in the process and support this broader coalition and your building huge mailing lists so that when the time comes for the sierra club to support a campaign that we’re really passionate about, that we have enough trust and enough partnerships, and they understand that this other thing is good too and theyre willing to join us. And we have to step back in order to make progress forward. sort of like our enviro justice groups, when we are entering a community of color and we dont just want to come enter in and say hey were smart white guys, listen to us. We have to offer them organizing assistance, if they want help we can help and give ideas or help fundraising or if they want help turning out a crowd, we can help work with them but put them out front so they are the ones that are empowered. And thats a very different thing. Most sierra club members werent getting it. So it was an easy sell to our organizers cause we just said choose who youre supposed to be organizing. If they old guard local sierra club wanted to work on their favorite wilderness area etc, we didnt want to discourage them from doing that, but that wasnt what our organizer was going to do. And they didnt necessarily all want to go down to the rally and go out and clean up the river. It got to be kind of fun, cause suddenly you got to know your neighbros, and youre working together and youre actually accompishing something and then they are interested in coming and finding out more about what youre doing so for those sierra club members and leaders that participate, it was a tranformative exprience for them. Because it used to be just a small little exclusive club, but then it started to feel like a movement.

 

What would you say have been your greatest hurdles, and how did you get over them?

For example, if balancing on line and on land organizing, how has the Sierra Club gone about managing that?

I think everyone is struggling with it (350.org). They aren’t sure how to react to a steadily changing world. People are becoming less email responsive now. So how do you organize around instagram? Is twitter going to last? Theres a constant struggle about how do you best get people engaged, and once youve got them engaged, how do you move them up a ladder of engagement? because it cant just be something remote and electronic. Ultimately, there has to be a human connection and a real building of community. and thats why moveon keeps trying to have meet ups associated with their work, because it doesnt just work to send out the next petition and think youre really moving the change needle. Creedo hadnt figured that out. They have a huge network but its strictly online. Were just constantly having to go back and forth and keep it interesting and exciting. There isnt a 21st, a 2015, digital social engagement platform for the environment. You can go to the Sierra Club website sure, you can do Sierra Rise sure, but thats what add up is all about. Add up is something were inventing from scratch, and testing and making sure its really responsive to the users. So then itts not just stuff being pushed out of the Sierra Club headquarters in downtown San Francisco but its actually user generated and people can set up their own campaigns. It gives you feedback, its not just a one time click action and the next you get is an add for a next campaign. Now it will give you the next things yuo can do to have an even bigger impact. To find out how many people in your community have responded, we can send you the name of the addup community in your zipcode. you can invite them to a BBQ! There are lots of ways to make it easy for people to be engaged. But right now, were just trying to get our 650,000 members who are willing to get a newsletter and magazine, and help out when elections come around, then theres roughly 2 million “champions” that are out there that have taken a number of actions and clearly are like minded souls, but for some reason or another they have yet to join us and the question is, why arent they joinging us? are they worried about getting hit up? Are they just not interested in a deeper engagement? maybe what the sierra club is offering isnt really what theyre looking for. And they would be willing to take those actions. 2014 Sierra Club isnt appealing to them. They dont give a shit about the Magazine, or about local outings. So that is it that they DO give a shit about? Maybe the set of benefits, the set of opportunities is not really what is appealing to that particular sect, so it may be that instead of the standard set of things, say once yuo join the Sierra Club regardless of who you are, your demographic, your history and your age, you dont get the standard package. Its not like you all get the magazine and the chapter news letter and the invitation to go on a local outing– boooring. instead, depending on who you are, maybe theres special set of benefits and opportunities, for people who are spanish speaking, people who are gay or lesbian, people who are under 25, people who live in urban areas, whatever it is. This is the kind of thing i think were really going to have to struggle with and figure out to build a broader group of constituents. Instead of a group of old white people like me who grew up liking to backpack, its going to require some different niches of the Sierra Club.

 

What, right now, are you striving to do in your career as an environmental activist or advocate?

Too broad of a question, but i will tell you that what keeps me up at night, and what keeps me wanting to go to the office, and not think about retirement, is that theres too much unfinished work, and the main part of that is: how are we going to turn around this climate thing. I feel really pained and guilty that i didnt fix this is time to not pass all these problems on to my children. While what excites me is wildlife stuff, its all at risk because of climate change. wilderness and wildlife will keep going, but its all about to change, because if we get the climate thing wrong, everything will perish. Its a hollow victory. How can you turn this thing around if its so big and impossible to deal with. Weve got a congress and people in power who want to deny that climate change exists, and china and india that are on a course to make the problem worse. We just keep losing time. If were going to help the climate survive, we should have started 10 years ago not 20 years from now. so thats the big thing there, i feel very passionate about that.

And to diversify the Sierra Club and the environmental movement. To remain a potent effective force, we have to succeed in having the whole broad spectrum of the population engaged in it. We all care about it, we all benefit from it, so we all have to figure out how to work together to solve our problems.

 

Has there been a time in your career when you felt particularly pessimistic, and how did you keep going?

Oh Ive felt sad on many election nights. Ever since Obama was first elected, and i put the hope poster up in the hallway, there’s been a number of steady disappointments. We lost a working democratic majority in congress and suddenly its all screeched to a halt. Its not very exiting times. But we’ve been through this before, I can tell you about other decades when we were just completely stalemated in DC. and then you just turn around and find other places to make progress. And then Obamas been getting his mojo back, you saw him sign the climate change deal with China. Maybe things can work. We’ve been working with him administratively to protect a bunch of land, congress doesnt want to designate a lot of wilderness so it doesnt do much good to beat your head against that brick wall. He can use his power under the antiquity act to create a bunch of national monuments so we’re doin that. I dont stay depressed for long, because we just have to regroup and say “we’re resilient, we can make this work, we’ve got many other avenues to go, and if its somehting we think is best for society and best for the American people, and they would support this. They didnt vote for dirty air and dirty water and no action on climate change, but it looks like it, because the majority of candidates that won. 30% of the population voted, most of them white guys and republicans, and that doesnt speak for America, but that does speak to the fact that we cant let that particular set back ruin the country .

 

Looking at the local leve, what do you think are the best ways to bring about change? Policy, organizing, which way is best tailored to local change?

Well I just spent my election night realizing that long distance phone calls weren’t the answer. So i went to my local city council meetings, which was important to me because thats where things I cared about were being discussed, like Chevron. The Richmond Progressive Coalition managed to do it all, to beat back Chevron. So its easier in some local places, like Berkeley, but its much more interesting in other places, for example we got a place in Texas as well as other places around the country to put a moratorium on fracking. There’s been a lot of PR and news that put environmentalists in a negative light, but we’ve actually managed to pass a lot of local things recently.

 

Have you spent much time working at the federal level?

Most of what I do in the Sierra Club is at the federal level, and its traditionally been our strongest form. Its not always in the Congress, right now its all about Keystone XL and the vote (which then didnt pass, yay!). We’re trying to make sure the Senate doesn’t go along with the House, but even if they do, setting it up so that Obama will veto the bill. So that’s all at the federal level. But at the same time, Sierra Club operates at all the levels. When I was conservation directory, I used to tell people, I dont know whats going on at every level of the Sierra Club, and if I did, not enough would be going on. THere are thousands of campaigns happening. One of the things I just completed was an updated food and agriculture policy. So we don’t work on food and agriculture, we dont have campaigners and we dont have money but never-the-less a lot of people are passionate about it. And are interested in promoting farmers markets and keeping pesticides out of our foods and making sure we arent killing the climate with agricultural pollution. So to develop this stuff, it empowers people to go out and get involved in their local issues. It might be composting, community markets, right to farm bills, preserving agricultural land, reducing meat consumption. We just want to get all that information out and around so that people can be empowered to fight back.

 

Is there anything else, in terms of the “how to” of bringing about social change, that you have opinions on?

We’ve been mainly talking about externals; how do you go create an environmental community and then create a political force that can then go change public policy. Thats traditionally what the Sierra Club is very good at. I think what is much harder is trying to figure out how to change and transform the Sierra Club. Because then you start getting into personal behavior patterns, have you’ve got somebody motivated enough who will go take an action on any given day, or are they going to retreat back into their private lives. And so the club has been talking about, for 30 years, diversity equity inclusion. But we still are primarly white and primarily older. And so how can you actually bring about that change? Even though we go off and hire young people of color, organizers and other people throughout our staff, when you interview them, its not a very friendly place. The inclusion part is really missing. and its pretty isolating to go work for a big white privileged organization. And even if we managed to transform the staff, which I think is doable, and we’re working on it. Everyone now at the Sierra Club staff has to have a diversity work plan. And every department has a diversity plan. And every year, we’re building deeper commitments and understandings that change behaviors. So it becomes a more diverse place, so that diversity can thrive. But then you look at the whole volunteer structure, and thats a whole other challenge. You can’t insist that every individual, every club leader, has to go through a dismantling racism class. You don’t wan’t to turn volunteers away, but then they go “what do you mean dismantling racism, I’m not a racist.”

And engaging younger people. It’s one thing to have a Sierra student coalition thats largely self governing, and its a whole other thing when you actually try to integrate so that when they leave the womb of college and get out in the real world, they don’t just drop out cause they dont have a student network. If they try to make the leap and go to a local group but the local group is not very fun and not very inclusive, and not very young, that doesn’t make them want to continue working with or for the Sierra Club. So those are the big challenges that I see. the other stuff is relatively easy by comparison. Trying to change a culture is a lot different than trying to change a vote.

 

In your 38 years, have you seen a culture shift? Or the beginning of one? How far has it come?

Its gone a very long way but it has an even further ways to go. Its not the same as it was in many ways, its much bigger and much more diverse. its much broader in its agenda, its much more open to new ideas, the whole transition to having an online digital strategy community is mind blowing compared to the 60s and 70s.

 

Would you say in terms of changing the Sierra Club culture, how have those changes come about? Policies?

Diversity equity inclusion, theres a very detailed plan that attempts to address every single aspect. So yes, part of it is hiring. Part is retention, part is inclusion, part is having relevant programs that encourage people to listen to new and diverse employees and ideas. If you look at the traditional wilderness program that we used to run when i first joined the Sierra Club, “Wild America” now, we basically pressed a reset button and invited a bunch of young people and people of color and helped plan the campaign with us. It became a very different campaign, that wasn’t just focused on trying to protect the remote wilderness back country areas, it has a lot more to do with getting people outdoors and experiencing it together and protecting nearby nature, and more listening to different cultures and what they want to protect.

 

So inviting those new people to join was effective? They came?

We’ve got a better campaign position for success, but its still predominantly white people. So even though its now got all these other components that we believe should be attractive, we’ve got a smattering of people of color, its going to be a while before its mainstream. It takes patience to try to keep the coalition alive and grow.