And All the Trees Were Singing

I was walking up a trail in the Santa Monica Mountains the other morning on a day that marked the end of flood season and the start of fire season when a tree jumped out and hugged me.

It was a strange experience and I’ve got to tell you frankly that for a moment it scared the hell out of me even though I am a tough, macho kind of guy with great physical strength and in no need of Viagra.

Despite that, however, I found myself instantly thinking of those trees in the Wizard of Oz that tried to kill and eat Dorothy and Toto in the Evil Forest and sent the Tin Woodman screaming and clanking up the trail, oh my!

But then I noticed that the tree that was hugging me was singing with joy, and then it struck me: The Sierra Club was back in business. Nature was elated and so was I.

That very day, the club had announced results of a vote that rejected a clumsy, right-wing effort within the 550,000-member organization to veer away from environmental concerns into the business of border-guarding.

A small group of super-ethnocentrists wanted the club to endorse restrictions on immigration into the United States, an effort not aimed at Brits or Danes but at those brown-skinned people from Latin America who talk funny.

The effort was defeated by a 20% plurality, the majority voting instead to remain neutral on the issue of immigration and concentrate instead on saving us from polluters and tree-killers.

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When the referendum was first announced last October, I saw it as yet one more punch to the heart of those who have migrated to the United States seeking what we’re all seeking, the good life.

It followed other efforts in California to dehumanize the immigrants through Propositions 187 and 209 and, as though planned, had arisen simultaneously with Proposition 227, all of which are aimed at kicking ‘em out of school, eliminating their health services, cutting affirmative action and making ‘em stop talking funny.

This irked me to the max, and I’d have burned my Sierra Club membership card, but I couldn’t find it. “If you were better organized,” my wife said, “you could get to things faster when you wanted to burn them.” I burned it spiritually instead.

I wasn’t alone. Adam Werbach was prepared to resign as president of the Sierra Club if so-called Alternative A won. He was quoted as saying, “I’m Jewish and can’t sit on the sidelines and single out a people.”

L.A.’s Luis Quirarte, chairman of an inner-city unit of the huge Angeles Chapter, saw the immigration vote as “an open grave” for the club. After a membership of 20 years, he had his resignation written out and waiting.

Happy that the measure lost, Quirarte is still worried. “It’s not dead yet,” he said the other day. “Like TB, you can contain it but never really cure it. The right wing spent a million dollars trying to take over the club. They’re not going to give up that easily.”

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Executive Director Carl Pope doesn’t believe those who voted in favor of turning the Sierra Club into a tool of the anti-immigrationists were all right-wing nuts, although, he admits, some of them were.

“Most were the same kinds of people who 20 years ago wanted to keep New Yorkers out of California,” Pope said. “They’re nativists who focus on numbers, not people.

“The right-wingers weren’t trying to take over the club, but were trying to use it. If they had won, they could say the Sierra Club supported their efforts to limit immigration and they’d be the good guys.”

I heard from those Good Guys last October when I came out against the impending referendum. They called me, among other things, a “punk Mexican” for supporting “the border filth.” (Actually, I’m a punk Basque, but that doesn’t have the same lyrical qualities.)

Through anonymous telephone messages, e-mail and regular mail, the Good Guys made clear their position on Latinos generally by the nature of their invective. So while I sing with the trees on the result of the Sierra Club’s vote, I wish its message had been stronger.

And I wish that those honestly concerned about world population had understood this measure for what it was, at best ill-conceived, at worst hateful, and had joined in throwing it back into the faces of those who in the first place had spat it into ours.

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Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com