A Sierra Club majority comes shining through

Everyone, give a little something extra to the Sierra Club this year. And while you’re at it, hug a club member, the bearded guy in hiking boots with a Dr. Dolittle smile, or the woman with a God-love-a-lizard look in her eyes.

The money and hugs are for their work in preventing a takeover by a clutch of xenophiles intent on turning the club into a modified version of America First Inc., whose aim would have been not so much to protect the environment as to keep immigrants away.

That isn’t what the Sierra Club is about, a fact conveyed in a recent vote that, by an overwhelming majority, rejected the anti-immigration move. It told those who tried to dominate its board of directors that the putsch failed and the club will remain true to its original purpose.

It was a shining moment, to say the least, for those able to think outside the box that wealth and arrogance have trapped us in.

I wrote about the takeover attempt last month and laid on pretty heavily my feelings about super-ethnocentrists whose aim is to close the borders to people who don’t fit the mold of “Americanism,” whatever that is.

In recent years, they’ve begun using the theme of environmental salvation to perpetuate the notion of a selective population.

My column was greeted by a volley of invective that, in effect, proved my point. I was especially amused at being called “a lazy Mexican.” I am actually Basque, not Mexican, and an overachiever at that. But calling me a dirty, overachieving Basque lacks the same lyrical qualities as the original epithet.

Those who agreed with my stance, and there were many, understood that what I was advocating was a world vision of population as opposed to the creation of an island of people looking out for themselves and ignoring the needs of others.

Given our lopsided priorities, it’s little wonder that Americans are looked upon with less than favor by Third World nations.

We spend $87 billion for war while 842 million people around the world are starving. God knows how far that war fund would go in putting food on the table for the millions who lack it.

I don’t think everyone who advocates population control is a racist, but I do believe they’ve got to look beyond preservation of the kangaroo rat to a species as endangered as any of those on a long list I have in front of me: us. We’re killing ourselves, not just by damaging the environment, but by war, disease and hunger.

I wish the Sierra Club would turn its attention to the preservation of humans with the same enthusiasm it manifests in saving other living creatures. Control the flow of those coming to America by helping to improve the conditions in the countries they’re leaving. Declare by referendum that we’re not in the world alone, that the globe is populated by masses not only yearning to be free, but those yearning to be fed, housed and clothed.

In creating the Sierra Club more than a century ago, John Muir, an immigrant from Scotland, intended the beauty of the world to be preserved for all, not just a select few. He never meant the mountains and the lakes and the rivers, and all the creatures that inhabit them, to become symbols of American isolationism.

I live in the mountains that encircle L.A. We are at peace with raccoons, possums, coyotes, deer, bobcats and other creatures. I am less at peace with rattlesnakes, black widows and mountain lions, with which we also share the terrain, but I accept them under certain conditions, those being that they leave us alone. You don’t bite me, and I don’t stomp you or cut off your head. I am not a preemptive killer.

Living where I do is a privilege, and I understand the attendant responsibility of that privilege to coexist with the lives, both large and small, that surround me. That is at least one of the essential codas of the world John Muir was attempting to create and the world the Sierra Club should be attempting to preserve.

The overwhelming vote of the club membership to turn back an effort by a few to change the organization into something it should never be proves that we’re realizing more and more our place as citizens of the world.

In describing the oneness of our species on the planet Earth, Muir wrote that “the sun shines not on us, but in us.”

And, to state the obvious, it’s not just an American sun.

Al Martinez’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He’s at al.martinez@latimes.com.