Seeding the Divide: John Tanton, the Sierra Club, and the Struggle Over U.S. Environmentalism3/1/2025
Elcioglu, Emine Fidan. 2025. “Seeding the Divide: John Tanton, the Sierra Club, and the Struggle Over U.S. Environmentalism.” Race and Class. https://doi.org/10.1177/03063968251371957 I revisit the Sierra Club’s internal fights over immigration. Some watchdog groups frame the controversy as a far-right infiltration, while critical race scholars see exclusion as inherent to environmentalism. Drawing on archival records, I argue instead that restrictionism grew out of the Sierra Club’s own ambivalence. By sustaining a technocratic middle ground that rejected both overt xenophobia and systemic critique, the Club created a vacuum in the 1970s and 1980s. John Tanton, attuned to these hesitations, used them as openings to build an restrictionist infrastructure from within. That infrastructure proved powerful enough to shape the Trump administration's immigration policy today. This history shows that environmentalism has always been a terrain of struggle, marked as much by missed opportunities as by exclusionary turns.  Paul Ehrlich’s Tonight Show appearances turned his The Population Bomb into a sensation, spreading a doomsday vision of overpopulation that later fueled anti-immigrant environmentalism.
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