‘Toxic Intersectionality’: Sierra Club in ‘Downward Spiral’ After Pivot to Social Justice Warrioring
“It issued an ‘equity language guide,’ which warned employees to be cautious about using the words ‘vibrant’ and ‘hardworking,’ because they reinforced racist tropes.”
The New York Times published a fascinating read Friday detailing how the Sierra Club went from being a singularly focused, highly influential environmental group with big money backers like former NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg to one wracked with “internal chaos,” sexual harassment scandals, and an obsession with social justice warrioring, the latter of which appears to have been the catalyst for the “implosion” some current and former members say it is experiencing.
NEW: The Sierra Club embraced social justice. Then it tore itself apart. https://t.co/GgyqJfhyrR
— David Fahrenthold (@Fahrenthold) November 7, 2025
Early on, the piece detailed how membership had plummeted in recent years:
The group has lost 60 percent of the four million members and supporters it counted in 2019. It has held three rounds of employee layoffs since 2022, trying to climb out of a $40 million projected budget deficit.
The Sierra Club is in financial free fall:
– lost 60% of its members since 2019
– 3 rounds of layoffs since 2022
– $40 million projected budget deficit pic.twitter.com/rOvfogiWsM— Alec Stapp (@AlecStapp) November 7, 2025
The write-up also shared how, as President Donald Trump took office and began taking a bulldozer to what the Times called “environmental protections,” the Sierra Club was too distracted by infighting and sexual harassment scandals to fight back:
While Mr. Trump boosted coal power, canceled wind farms and rolled back pollution limits, the club was consumed by internal chaos, culminating when the board fired its executive director, Ben Jealous, a former president of the N.A.A.C.P.
“Sierra Club is in a downward spiral,” a group of managers wrote in a letter reviewed by The New York Times to the club’s leadership in June.
That spiral helps Mr. Trump. But it was not his doing. The Sierra Club did this to itself.
And how did they do that? The Times went on to explain:
During Mr. Trump’s first term, when the Sierra Club was flush with donations, its leaders sought to expand far beyond environmentalism, embracing other progressive causes. Those included racial justice, labor rights, gay rights, immigrant rights and more. They stand by that shift today.
This expansion into social justice warrioring caused the group to lose that singular focus. As a result, “the club had exhausted its finances and splintered its coalition” by 2022.
The idea behind the hard-left pivot was to bring in a younger generation of environmentalists while also trying to drag members along with the woketivism. That turned some folks off because, at the time, the Sierra Club had a sizable number of members who were not hardcore leftists but who nevertheless agreed with their stances on issues like coal and green energy.
Then, there was the “equity language guide”:
It issued an “equity language guide,” which warned employees to be cautious about using the words “vibrant” and “hardworking,” because they reinforced racist tropes. “Lame duck session” was out, because “lame” was offensive. Even “Americans” should be avoided, the guide said, because it excluded non-U. S. citizens.
After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, the group called for defunding the police and providing reparations for slavery.
Sierra Club’s equity language guide: “It’s never acceptable to use the word ‘lame,’ which is considered to be a slur.” https://t.co/n3u67m3iiN pic.twitter.com/ZzCmiIXiM8
— Christopher Ingraham🦗 (@_cingraham) November 7, 2025
A survey taken in late 2020 revealed that “more than half of members also said they were worried that the club’s shift toward social justice ‘will detract from its core mission of protecting the environment’ and alienate conservatives.”
After Trump left office in 2021, donations started drying up because the “common enemy” was gone and a Democrat was in the White House.
Not a single person reading this will be surprised to know that anti-Israelism was woven into the fabric of the SJW-focused club:
In 2022, a group of union members asked the Sierra Club to “follow [its] values of antiracism and justice” and cancel sightseeing trips it operated in Israel, in protest of the country’s treatment of Palestinians.
“Palestine is an environmental issue from our standpoint,” Erica Dodt, the president of the Progressive Workers’ Union, which includes Sierra Club employees, said in an interview. “People are a huge part of our environment.”
The club postponed the trips. But Sierra Club officials said the club heard a backlash from donors including Mr. Bloomberg, the major funder of “Beyond Coal” who also gave to humanitarian causes in Israel. His staff declined to comment. The Sierra Club said he is still a donor.
They ended up doing the trips after all, but the division over the issue remained.
One Sierra Club volunteer told the newspaper that she remembered a conversation with a staff member who she said was more interested in DEI than saving wolves:
Ms. Malone thought that someone else in the chapter had filed a complaint. She recalled an incident when a club staff member had scolded her for saying that the club should lobby Colorado’s legislature for more protections for wolves.
“One of the staff said, ‘That’s fine, Delia. But what do wolves have to do with equity, justice and inclusion?’” Ms. Malone said.
The story of the Sierra Club’s freefall was the definition of “go woke, go broke,” and people had thoughts:
Wow. In this case it looks like "get woke, go broke" was actually true. They've lost 60% of their members. What a fiasco. https://t.co/poyUiWPWAk
— Aaron M. Renn 🇺🇸 (@aaron_renn) November 7, 2025
This story has so many incredible parts.
But my favorite might be when the Sierra Club created a new rule that you could no longer use the word “Americans” because it was exclusionary. https://t.co/uORD7fwECK pic.twitter.com/IS4IfX5qtO
— Matt Whitlock (@mattdizwhitlock) November 7, 2025
This piece is a must read of how progressive politics got goofy, but my two favourite parts: https://t.co/zvo2rrPfeZ pic.twitter.com/W59jmCiODC
— Michael Gendron (@michaelgendron) November 7, 2025
The Sierra Club — which increased your energy costs by helping destroy our coal industry and energy infrastructure — is now destroying itself by going full communist. https://t.co/4CmfX5VqPL pic.twitter.com/kDtOXG5ygp
— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) November 7, 2025
I'd like to point out that one of the Sierra Club's four board members just pled guilty to stealing almost $250 million… https://t.co/E2LVya6IXE pic.twitter.com/oIp5COiwl1
— Andrew Follett (@AndrewCFollett) November 7, 2025
There were others on X, and in the comments section to the Times article, who explained why they had gotten so fed up with the Sierra Club that they’d cancelled their memberships or, in this professor’s case, stopped referencing them in his classes:
I tolerated the Sierra Club up until 2020 like you tolerate your kooky lib aunt. When they tried to struggle session John Muir for being a racist (against the wishes of their first black board member) I removed any mention of them from my classes. They’d lost the plot. pic.twitter.com/8gVTZEWsHK
— RodeoProfessor (@RodeoProfessor) November 7, 2025
The top reader comments on this article are fascinating. Virtually every one is from a former Sierra Club member frustrated with how the org lost its focus and embraced every trendy progressive cause. "Toxic intersectionality" one reader calls it. https://t.co/nJXvnJNqig
— Jim Meigs (@jamesbmeigs) November 7, 2025
“Toxic intersectionality” sounds like a pretty close-to-perfect way of describing it.
– Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via X. –
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Comments
Good riddance!
Sexual harassment scandals are from hiring activist women cashing in.
^^^ this ^^^
Two times in my work career, I was accused of sexual harassment. I let it go all the way to HR and then pointed out to them that I was homosexual. Funny thing how the complaints got dropped. I didn’t advertise my homosexuality in the office, but when my job was on the line, I did mention it to HR.
I got accused by a black woman for physical contact. She had made a career out of throwing “racist” around to bully people and everyone backed down. She demanded a struggle session with my and her boss to grand stand but I demanded a meeting with HR and her union rep. She changed her story 3 times from “brushing across the back” to “pushing her” then it was “elbowing her out of the way”. I told them at that point that if she was accusing me of physical assault the meeting was over and I was getting a lawyer. The company was not impressed with her shifting stories. A week later she was fired flushing 20yrs and a $80k job down the toilet. I saw her driving a cab last week and waved at her. Didn’t get a wave back.
Exactly….
Indeed. Sexual harassment was never a thing until women started entering the workforce at all.
They got themselves wrapped around the axle with intersectionality. It became about ‘environmental racism’ with priority on non-whites claiming victimhood instead of protecting the environment. Go woke go broke.
Intersectionality is deliberately designed to divide and hobble a society.
But eventually, it ends up dividing and hobbling the people in the intersectionality movement itself.
That goes for the 57-genders movement, too.
“vibrant” … reinforced racist tropes.”
Yeah, I wonder how that happened?
“Vibrant” was originally a Democrat
dogwhistleeuphemism for “third-world enclave.”And you say it came back and bit them? Inconceivable!
Communists fled to environmentalism after the fall of the USSR; they are aligned with with the SJWs in the objective of tearing down capitalism. The goals have not changed – they are less afraid of staying hidden.
They didn’t actually.
They were always there.
Environmentalism is a good cover for ending private property and replacing it with state ownership.
All of the ‘we are only stewards of the land’ garbage is linked to ending private property and empowering collectivists.
These frauds are never about what they claim. ‘Cause of the day’ constantly, conveniently shifts its superficial focus as needed. It’s never about wolves, polar bears or ‘Palestinians’ — those pretenses mask the true aims, which are destroying freedoms, prosperity and free markets while making themselves into a fabulously wealthy elite.
A good idea becomes a business and then a racket. By virtue of the mindset… SC was in a doom loop vulnerable to intersectionality. The environment within the business became more important than the environment outside the office. In commemoration, I will light a candle … to increase my carbon footprint.
Make it a tire and invite the libs to stop by and put the fire out with their salty tears.
Unions were so effective at having their agenda codified as law that they litterally made themselves useless. Government now oversees “workers’ rights.” Unions continue to exist as your “rackets.” You can add “parasite” too.
As this is especially why government unions are an abomination and should be disintegrated.
So many hate groups out there it is getting harder to get enough publicity to get others to join your cause, so they turn on themselves to prove their superior virtue. And it is only going to get worse.
I don’t for one second buy any of the ny times bullschiff blaming Trump, it is always about money and power.
Somebody somewhere (maybe here) pointed out that regardless of whether Congress is controlled by Democrats or Republicans, every shutdown is invariably blamed on Republicans.
Any woke group will eventually implode. Unfortunately they will have inflicted maximum damage on everyone else before this occurs.
I was a member of the Sierra Club until sometime in the 1980’s, when they were responsible for changing a planned clean nuclear power plant to a dirty coal-fired plant about 20 miles from where I lived.
The Sierra Club made a big China-Syndrome fuss about it being nuclear, and got the government to pressure the company to switch to coal. After the plant was built, I could go outside my house and look up and see the tiny flecks of coal dust flickering in the sunlight. Every day the town would be sliced in half once or twice by mile-long unit trains of coal slowly headed to the plant. I shudder to think of how many million tons of CO2 went into the atmosphere.
I’ve always wondered whether the Sierra Club’s pro-coal attitude was just based on fear and stupidity, or whether the coal industry was supporting them under the table in return for increasing their business. The current Sierra Club people really don’t like it when you draw attention to all the coal-fired plants that might have been nuclear if the Club hadn’t been pushing so hard for coal. They have conveniently short memories and don’t remember when the Club was pro-coal.
Fun fact: Coal plants actually emit more radionuclides into the air than nuclear power plants are allowed to emit. The rationale is that the released radionuclides are not environmentally significant, but nuclear power plants are not allowed to emit the same amount of radionuclides for no other reason than they are nuclear power plants and people expect their (radioactive) emissions to be stringently regulated.
This expansion into social justice warrioring caused the group to lose that singular focus.
This is not surprising. History is replete with single-issue organizations that reach their goals (Women’s Temperance Union, women’s suffrage organizations, various firearms organization like GOA and SAF) and that appeal to people concerned with the single issue, and organizations that start as single-issue orgs and then dissipate their energy by both taking on more causes and reducing their appeal to others by taking on a variety of side issues that are divisive. In this latter category is the Tea Party movement, that started about taxes and spending control, and accrued a variety of other issues, mostly Christian/conservative, that disaffected many members and prevented it from having more universal appeal.
To maintain relevance (and their cushy jobs) single issue organizations often move the goal posts so the work is never done,
“There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.”
― Booker T. Washington
It’s too bad. I worked with the Sierra Club out west when I was doing stuff for a state game and fish department and the forest service. The lady running it wasn’t concerned with cattle grazing on public land, logging or stuff like that. She was interested in making sure all the studies were done correctly beforehand and the contracts were done right. They devolved into fighting every timber contract that came about including one to cull dead beetle killed trees that were a total fire hazard.