Steven Rosenfeld’s tompaine.com essay is a depiction of the bitter schism in the 750,000-member Sierra Club, where an insurgent group wants to focus the organization’s efforts on curbing immigration to the U.S. as a means of reducing the nation’s disproportionate use of the globe’s ‘carrying capacity’. The current board of directors election is provoking unprecedented outside attention and advocacy by non-environmental groups with political agendas including, on one hand, the Southern Poverty Law Center, whose Morris Dees is running for the board, he says, to prevent the “greening of hate;” and on the other, groups which the SPLC identifies as right-wing hate groups. A major figure among the insurgents is the former co-founder of Greenpeace, Paul Watson, whose animal rights activism is another source of opposition to the takeover bid from pro-hunting constituencies. Watson denies there is a conspiracy to take over the Club but critics offer documentation that he has bragged about engineering exactly such a coup.

It strikes me that the case is not being made so much for anti-immigration policy as the time-honored environmentalist position of limiting population growth. The stated platforms of the three Sierra Club Directors allied with the controversial candidates speak in terms of population policy instead of immigration policy — probably because there is no question that a racially divisive stand on immigration would attract the American would-be ethnic cleansers and their ilk and is not the only, or even the best, way to reduce the obscene impact of American profligacy on the rest of the world. The insurgents who do speak more directly of immigration curbs, according to past presidents of the Sierra Club, are outsiders who have no prior history of environmental activism but prominent positions with anti-immigration groups and have taken money from right-wing benefactors. Is slippage from concerns with environment and population to activism around immigration reforms — and race — inevitable?

When asked in an e-mail if it was possible to frame population issues so charges of racism did not arise, Gov. Lamm replied, “Every nation in the world that takes immigrants (Canada, Australia, New Zealand) has similar policies and doesn’t get charged with racism. Of course there is no guarantee, because some people can and will say anything. So the charge will be made, but it can be made non-credible. Our family marched in Selma (Alabama) and I believe good-hearted people must raise this issue.

So why do environmental groups have such a hard time with population issues? The former governor replied, “Political correctness reigns.”