New Sierra Club Director Seeks Focus on Most Pressing Needs

Douglas Wheeler, appointed Tuesday by the Sierra Club as its new executive director, called on the 358,000-member organization to focus its resources on the nation’s most pressing environmental problems and reach an agreement with similar groups not to duplicate efforts.

“We have to assess the successes of past efforts and attempt to focus somewhat on what is now a very diverse and varied agenda,” the 43-year-old Wheeler said. He commented in a telephone interview from San Francisco after the club announced his appointment to succeed J. Michael McCloskey.

At a time when environmental issues are becoming more complex and solutions less apparent, Wheeler also proposed a kind of summit among the leaders of the nation’s major environmental groups in an effort to concentrate each group’s efforts on the environmental issues in which it has the most expertise.

Wheeler, a lawyer and president of the American Farmland Trust, an organization devoted to protecting agricultural resources, will become executive director of the 93-year-old Sierra Club on July 1. McCloskey, who became executive director in 1969, will become chairman of the group founded by John Muir.

Wheeler said the group will continue its interest in such traditional environmental issues as clean air, clean water, national park preservation and land-use. He also called for greater activism at the local and state levels.

“We will continue to be active in Washington, as we must. But lots of these issues--land-use is a good example--will be dealt with closer to home.” He said the Sierra Club’s 15 field offices throughout the United States enable it to influence the outcome of environmental decisions at the state and local levels.