Sierra Club and the Issue of Trust : Dispute over environmental report card rubs some raw nerves

Simplifying the complexities of life is a continuing human necessity. Education is measured A through F. Problems are ranked on a scale of 1 to 10; movies and restaurants by one to four stars.

At their best, such systems of simplification can provide a means of comparison and shortcuts through a jungle of conflicting data.

At their worst, they promote simplistic thinking and can even become exercises in duplicity.

The poles are separated by the trustworthiness of the analyzer.

The Sierra Club, nationally and locally, has generally enjoyed a high level of trust.

Whether one agrees or disagrees with its stands, the club leadership is assumed to have intellectual integrity. But the environmental report card recently issued by the San Diego chapter of the Sierra Club has called some of that trust into question.

One well-respected member of the chapter’s executive committee says that the final scoring method was influenced by politics to help San Diego City Councilwoman Linda Bernhardt fight a recall effort.

If the allegations are true, they seriously undermine the local chapter’s credibility, which is the key to its environmental effectiveness.

Mark Zerbe, a Sierra Club official and former head of the local Common Cause chapter, says that the early draft was “modified” to give Bernhardt the best score.

Other members of the leadership deny this. They defend the study’s credibility and say that the method was devised to address criticism of last year’s report-card method.

Specifically, the issue was whether to adjust the raw voting score by subtracting points for council member absences.

Using the raw score, Bernhardt would have come out second; after subtracting absences, she had the highest environmental score.

Zerbe also claimed that the vote tally was cut off in August to protect Bernhardt from damaging subsequent votes.

Such report cards will never be free of criticism.

The winners use them to political advantage; the losers dismiss them as politically motivated.

The chapter is to be commended for the prodigious amount of work involved with sorting out 18 months of voting records of the San Diego City Council.

Who among us has the time, or the inclination, to identify 66 environmentally important votes and how each council member voted?

For the average voter, it can be useful to know that Bernhardt, Bob Filner, Abbe Wolfsheimer and John Hartley tend to vote the way the Sierra Club thinks they should; that Judy McCarty and Bruce Henderson don’t. And that Mayor Maureen O’Connor’s environmental record has, perhaps, slipped.

The report card dispute may be no more than an honest disagreement over method and an example of the distortions inherent in simplification.

But, if politics played a role, then the chapter needs to re-examine its purpose.