Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
The problem with making climate a Sierra Club issue, as Patricia Schar-
lin saw it, was that members did not see climate change as a “'back yard'
kind of issue, or one that [commanded] a short term horizon.”
44
Despite a
strong rhetorical and administrative commitment to international chal-
lenges, the Sierra Club remained an essentially local grassroots institu-
tion. Scharlin noted that climate change “inspires emotional interest, has
a global, international dimension, and very serious, long-term complica-
tions.” But she also noted that the issue lacked the immediacy of prob-
lems like population growth or industrial air pollution that could easily
be framed in terms of their local and regional impacts.
45
An increasing
population, for example, not only strained the world's natural resources
in the abstract; it also put actual pressure on those resources contained in
America's wilderness areas and open spaces, threatening the wilderness
experience itself. The problem of population growth was global, but its
most important environmental impacts were local. As Scharlin pointed
out, neither scientists nor environmentalists had yet managed to identify
the specific threats that climate change might pose to local and regional
environmental amenities.
46
As a result, Sierra Club members did not iden-
tify with the issue, and climate change failed to show up either in the Inter-
national Program's goals or in larger club priorities.
47
the forcing function of knoWledge
The scale and complexity that made climate change so difficult for envi-
ronmentalists to engage with were the very qualities that appealed to
many climate scientists. The uncertainties of climate change made scien-
tists keen to study the issue and identify its potential impacts on natural
resources. Within the American scientific community, efforts to incor-
porate climate science into resource management took two forms. First,
most climate scientists, regardless of their politics, supported the proposed
National Climate Program, a national-level bureaucracy for coordinating
climatic research and incorporating climate data into domestic agricul-
tural planning and natural resource management. The National Climate
Program would not only support the needs of American farmers, ranch-
ers, and emergency management professionals; it would also establish a
secure role for climate scientists in formulating natural resource policies,
both within federal agencies and in Congress. Second, scientists at the
