War Liberal

I know a little about this. The Sierra Club was targeted for take over a few years back by John Tanton's "Federation for American Immigration Reform" or FAIR. Part of Tanton's argument is that human population is a large problem of the conservation program... so viola, suddenly conservation and anti-immigrantion policies find themselves some common ground. If Tanton manages to pull it off it would give FAIR access to large and well-funded lobbying group that could indirectly push the anti-immigration agenda. Good luck to Dees... I hope is name recognition alone is enough to get him elected to the board.

Morris Dees is being disingenuous if he wants to claim that it is "right-wing" groups trying to take over the Sierra Club.

John Tanton's background is in the conservation movement and specifically the Zero Population Growth movement, which makes any claims from Dees and his ilk that Tanton is a right-winger absurd. It also makes the smears against the Federation for American Immigration Reform by the likes of Dees and Chip Berlet accusing them of being a white racist group absurd.

What this is, is an internal debate among the environmental movement over what degree the current high numbers of legal immigration into the U.S. play in promoting suburban sprawl, overdevelopment, overpopulation within the U.S., and enabling global overpopulation to continue by allowing the U.S. to act as a safety valve for the third world's overpopulation problems. There is no outside "right-wing" conspiracy to take over the Sierra Club and certainly no white supremacist involvement, regardless of what Dees says.

There are plenty of respected environmental activists who take the position that immigration into the U.S. needs to be curbed on environmental and overpopulation grounds: Richard Lamm (former Democratic Colorado governor), the late writer Edward Abbey, Dave Foreman, Paul Erlich who is the author of "The Population Bomb", Paul Watson (one of the Greenpeace founders who heads the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society), etc. Not a one of them could be characterized as "right-wing".

Morris Dees, however, I'm not sure about. Hasn't he been a big campaigner in favor of repressive "anti-crime" and "anti-terrorism" bills which were precursors of the Patriot Act? Doesn't he work closely with the FBI? To me, that makes Morris Dees the right-winger.