THE SIERRA CLUB'S STRATEGIC RESPONSE TO THE BUSH ADMINISTRATION

INTRODUCTION

The Sierra Club faces the largest challenge in its 110 year history. At its February meeting the Board of Directors unanimously resolved that the Club must muster and focus its energy and resources to counter the Bush Administration's assault on basic American environmental values.

This confidential strategic plan is intended to lay out for our grass-roots leadership the imperative we face, the approach we have selected, and the contribution we hope each of you will volunteer to make. From Groups and Chapters to the Board of Directors each part of the Club has a role to play.

THE CHALLENGE

The earth beneath our feet has shifted. We're struggling to be heard in a world preoccupied with war, terrorism and safety. We're dealing with an administration that shows no respect for our nation's environmental values, and holds nothing sacred. This Administration believes that "business knows best"; and that the American people don't even need to know what their own government is doing. They have cynically followed the advice of Frank Luntz, their pollster, and cloaked their destructive environmental policies in a rhetoric of environmental compassion.

Protecting the environment is still a core American value. Americans deeply believe in the need to protect our health and heritage; the environmental policies of this Administration, since it first came into office, have been, and continue to be, its most controversial stance.

Indeed, Frank Luntz warned the Administration that the environment was "the single biggest vulnerability for the Republicans and especially for George Bush"; but Luntz's advice, which the Administration has followed, was not for the Administration to rejoin the American environmental mainstream by changing its policies, but instead for it to change its

language:

"You cannot allow yourself to be labeled 'anti-environment' simply because you are opposed to the current regulatory configuration. ...when we talk about 'rolling back regulations' involving the environment, we are sending a signal Americans don't support. If we suggest that the choice is between environmental protection and deregulation, the environment will win consistently."

VISION

America can, and should, do better. We've promised, as a nation, to protect our air and water, our forests and wildlife. But this Administration has defaulted on these promises.

In 1970 we committed that we would clean up the air in every American community. We gave existing dirty power plants and refineries more time, because we were promised they would soon be replaced. That didn't happen. now the Administration suggests that we ought to let profits, not our health, determine whether these power plants will be cleaned up at all, ever.

The Western Governors, Republican and Democratic, suggested two years ago that we united around the job of protecting rural communities from the risk of fire by adequately funding fire reduction programs. But the new Bush budget actually puts less money into fire prevention around communities, and is blackmailing rural communities -- if they want fire protection, they must sacrifice our old growth forests to pay the bill.

The 1972 Clean Water Act promised that all of our lakes, rivers, and streams would be fishable and swimmable. About two thirds were not; since then we have cleaned up one third, and have another third left to go. (When I grew up in suburban Washington, D.C., if you fell into the Potomac River, you needed a tetanus shot. Today if you fall in at the same spot, you might startle a beaver.)

But many waters remain polluted. We know that even those that appear pristine may be so contaminated with mercury that the fish they support are not safe to eat. We know how to stop dumping mercury in the environment. But the Administration for nine months suppressed the EPA study showing how bad the problem was, and meanwhile sabotaged an international program to reduce mercury pollution. Administration representatives insisted that instead of cleaning up the mercury, we should warn the public against eating the fish, because this was quicker and cheaper.

As we face war in the Middle East, soaring gasoline prices, and the every mounting evidence of ecosystem damage from global warming, Americans overwhelmingly agree that they want their cars, trucks and SUV's to be well designed. American auto consumers want the best and latest technology to improve their fuel efficiency. The "Freedom package", a readily available set of efficient engineering improvements identified by the Sierra Club could be offered on every vehicle sold. A Ford Explorer with the Freedom Package would get 35 mpg, not 19. Instead, the Bush Administration proposed a pathetic 1.5 mpg improvement in fuel efficiency, less than could be achieved by the single improvement of installing better tires. It suggests that to deal with the problem of imported oil we should sacrifice the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to the oil industry.

This rejection of well tested solutions is not myopic; it is strategic. The Administration believes that if the American people are told they have no good choices, while the Administration continues its anaesthetizing rhetoric, the public will not realize that this grim environmental future is being chosen by the Administration.The intensity and rapidity of their initiatives is not random, it is calculated; they hope to force us into a defensive posture on so many issues and on behalf of so many places at once that we are overwhelmed and divided.

The Administration is following a strategy of lowering our hopes and dashing our dreams. In place of solutions it proposes defeatism -- we are told the debate should be over which of our gains thus far we must sacrifice to save the remainder.

In response, quite simply, we must rally the American people around three

principles:

o environmental solutions are available and tested;

o we should not expose families and communities to unnecessary environmental risks;

o in short, America can, and should, do better.

But for these principles to resonate, we need to reexamine our communications habits. We should start by explaining the solutions, not trying to alarm people with the threat. We need to talk not in policy language, but in concrete terms -- pollution control equipment is much easier for most of us to understand rather than New Source Performance Standards.

COMMUNITY

The Administration will seek to dominate the media with its message of lowered aspirations and diminished accountability. War and the economy may further depress and dispirit our nation. To rebuild hope we must rebuild community. People can draw hope and vision from their neighbors far more easily than from the evening news or the front page.

The Administration has already learned this lesson. Perhaps the most surprising information learned after the mid-term elections was that it was not the media that shaped the election results, but grassroots, one-to-one, neighbor-to neighbor outreach and organizing, done best this year as part of the Republican Party's get-out-the-vote effort. Beneath the radar, in Georgia, Ralph Reed used 2,000 activists trained over the last year and 500 paid staffers to identify voters, down to specific household and to contact them repeatedly with phone calls, mail and visits from party activists. In Colorado, an aggressive absentee ballot program that involved five personal contacts between the campaign and voters, gave Wayne Allard the win before election day.

No organization in the environmental community has more experience in grassroots organizing than the Sierra Club. Person to person, one to one communication was our founding tradition. We are a Club. Individuals who share inspiration by nature, a sense of responsibility for preserving nature, and an optimism that together we can make a difference. But today this tradition has been usurped by our opponents.

We must reclaim this inheritance and make it the organizational centerpiece of our future.

We all know that one of our largest difficulties as an organization is to find motivated, dedicated volunteers. Person to person communication and relationship building is the crucial ingredient in helping to resolve this dilemma.

In addition to recruiting volunteers to do tabling or building crowds for rallies, we must keep the conversation going with the people who sign our postcards and pick up our literature. Community demands that we chat about the local park as well as about PCB's, and that we acknowledge that for most people, acting locally must precede thinking globally.

But we must then use these personal relationships to engage our friends and neighbors in the business of environmental protection. We're going to need to learn new tactics, and build new capacities, to sustain this much higher level of grass-roots involvement. We need to learn who we need to talk to, and in what order. Targeting matters. Door to door campaigning must become second nature. We'll need much more sophisticated, and more accessible, data bases and infrastructure to keep track of our greatly expanded volunteer base.

Because Americans who share our values need to pursue their goals not only privately, at home, but through participating in public life. Building environmental community means urging people to become informed through the media, but also to compare notes with their neighbors; to recycle,but also to show up and demand better governmental support for recycling; to buy green products, but also to support green politics.

We'll know we've succeeded when environmentally concerned Americans can find the Sierra Club right there in their own neighborhood, when we become not "those environmentalists" but "my friends and neighbors."

ACCOUNTABILITY

Over and over again politicians and corporations say, "We know the public agrees with the need for an environmentally sustainable future. We know Americans don't want poisoned air, polluted water, toxic communities or devastated landscapes. But we don't think most Americans care very much about those things, and our campaign contributors and friends don't want to be held accountable for their environmental stewardship. We're going with our cronies, not the public. The future can wait."

Ever since its pioneering newspaper ad, "Would you flood the Sistine Chapel so the tourists can see the ceiling?" the Sierra Club has demonstrated its commitment to hold our elected officials accountable for their behavior. That ad stopped the dams in the Grand Canyon. And time and time again we have demonstrated that the American people do care, and will act, and will hold politicians accountable -- if we carefully, and systematically, explain to them what their leaders are doing. The Sistine Chapel ad worked because it explained what few Americans knew -- that Congress was getting ready to dam the Grand Canyon. Our yard-sign Earth Day campaign, our klatches and wetlands walks and Rotary speeches will also work -- because Americans do not yet understand that this Administration would actually put their community at risk from mercury, or reduce spending on preventing fires, or shift the burden of cleaning up toxic wastes from those who dumped it to the taxpayers in whose communities it was dumped.

We need to demonstrate, over and over again, that it is not only members of Congress and votes on legislation that will be the focus or public concern and public praise our outrage. We need to make currently invisible regulatory processes visible; currently low intensity controversies hot currently back-room deals public.

We must show that Yeats's prediction was wrong: that in America in 2003/2004, it will not be the case that "The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity." We must show that our quiet conviction, and that of millions of other caring Americans who are thinking about our future can shake the very foundations of a political establishment recklessly bent on sacrificing tomorrow on the altar of yesterday.

EACH PART OF THE CLUB HAS A ROLE TO PLAY

This mobilization to stop the Bush Administration changes nothing, and everything. The Sierra Club is still in the business of direct action organizing, conducting public education and voter education campaigns, monitoring water quality, appealing timber sales, lobbying Congress and the state legislatures, filing lawsuits, holding elected officials accountable, educating the media.

But what is changing is our coordinated approach, the premium placed on integration and achieving economies of scale, and how we measure success.

We need to focus, but not in the way a laser beam focuses -- we are not going to DO one thing, or WORK on one issue, or emphasize ONE tactic or one state.

The focus we need is that of an array of mirrors in a solar power plant. Each mirror captures the energy from its own location, but each is focussed on a central target. Energy captured from a landscape is concentrated on a single, intense and powerful focal point.

We want each of our programs and activities to tell the same basic tale, and model the same approach, everywhere:

o We can do better, America has the solutions. We can protect every

community at risk from environmental threats; no neighborhood needs to be left behind in this day and age. Before we talk about the ecological damage resulting from a proposed salvage sale, let's tell people the story of a successful community fire protection program. If we're going to bring a lawsuit to clean up a power plant, let's mention one in the state next door that's already been modernized. If we are mobilizing people against air and water pollution from a huge corporate hog facility, let's also tell the story of a small, responsible, family farmer next door.

o We need to solve these problems at the community level. Every concerned American needs to join us in building a stronger grass-roots environmental community in their neighborhood. Let's make sure that if someone comes to a membership meeting we find out what they'd like to do, or even learn more about -- so we'll have the opportunity get to know them better. If we are gathering signatures on a local petition, let's make sure we have a method to capture the names, addresses, phone numbers and email addresses, and get them into our activist data base, instead of gathering the signatures and turning them over to the Planning Commission and never getting back to those who signed with the results of their effort.

o We won't accept excuses. We need to hold ourselves, our corporations and our politicians to the same high standard. We need to take care of America the Beautiful. And we need to hold our leaders accountable for their stewardship. If our local Congresswomen says something outrageous, and we know she won't listen an environmental point of view, we should still write a letter to the editor and copy the Congresswomen pointing out how out of touch with our community her viewpoint is. If our community celebrates the anniversary of the protection of an important local wetland, we can be at the celebration with materials explaining how the Bush Administration wants to eliminate federal protection of 60% of wetland habitat. If our Republican Governor takes on the Bush Administration and speaks up for clean air, let's make sure we thank him, loudly and publicly, even if he's not perfect.

The Sierra Club is the one national conservation organization with all of the necessary campaign tools available to bring to this effort. We have state and national lobbyists, a staff presence in almost every state, a well developed capacity to hold politicians accountable , a legal program, local/state/national publications, a web site, and email alert capacity, volunteers in every Congressional district and every major media market, a canvass, an outings program, a books program, etc. There is no other organization with this much capacity. Our challenge is to harness and direct that capacity in a challenging and exciting new direction and to train our volunteers and staff to operate in this new way, and to accelerate the already impressive pace of personal growth and institutional vision that has kept the Sierra Club vigorous and effective for 110 years.

BOTTOM LINE

We will give the very highest priority to work that raises our sights, builds environmental community and holds our leaders accountable. We want every part of the Club to focus its energy on this effort. And we believe that the Sierra Club is uniquely equipped, and hence uniquely responsible, for stopping the environmental counter-revolution being led by the Bush Administration.