Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
1980s, the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the Natural Resources Defense
Council, and the National Wildlife Federation all lobbied Congress vigor-
ously to extend and expand the United States' ever-shrinking contributions
to the U.N. Environment Programme, and many of these organizations cre-
ated committees or sections to deal exclusively with international issues.
37
In general, however, American environmental groups continued to focus
primarily on the local issues that interested their largely middle-class mem-
berships, and they carefully selected the international issues they thought
their members would support. Professional environmentalists sought tan-
gible environmental problems with definitive solutions that appealed to the
interests and values of their grassroots constituencies, and in the 1970s the
issue of climate change did not yet fit the bill.
The Sierra Club's International Program was a central node of the
American environmental effort abroad. “No organization did more to
prepare the way for the Stockholm Conference and the creation of the
United Nations Environment Programme than the Sierra Club,” wrote
UNEP chief Maurice Strong to Sierra Club International Program director
Patricia Scharlin upon leaving his post in 1975, “and none have been more
effective or consistent in their support for our international activities dur-
ing the crucial formative period.”
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During the 1970s, Scharlin and her col-
leagues collaborated with the Natural Resource Defense Council, Friends
of the Earth, Zero Population Growth, the National Wildlife Federation,
and others to influence international environmental policy both within
official U.S. government delegations and as an independent supranational
bloc at a series of U.N. conferences on food, water, desertification, human
settlements, and population.
The Sierra Club's commitment to population control helped drive its
International Program. The club had helped to publish and promote Paul
Ehrlich's
Population Bomb
in 1968, as well as follow-up articles by Ehrlich
and his wife, Anne, in the early 1970s. When the group's International
Program began to reevaluate its mission in 1976, members made it clear that
population was their top international priority.
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Tying overpopulation to
overconsumption, many members saw population control— both in the
developing and more developed countries— as the sine qua non of environ-
mental protection. It was an issue of global proportions that underpinned
environmental issues at all scales. “Most of our environmental problems
are the
direct
result of over-population,” one Sierra Club chapter officer
