Unbridled Activist

An interview with Sierra Club president and UC Davis alumnus Larry Fahn ’76.

Larry Fahn is the 50th president of the Sierra Club, America’s oldest and largest grassroots environmental organization. A Sacramento native, Fahn joined the Sierra Club while an undergraduate at UC Davis, and for more than 25 years has held various local, regional and statewide posts with that organization, working on dozens of regional and statewide initiatives and referenda affecting a wide range of environmental policy issues. First elected to the Sierra Club’s national board of directors in 1999, he was re-elected in 2002. That same spring Fahn was elected by his fellow board members to serve as the national vice president for conservation; in May 2003 the board elected him president.

Q: You’ve been a member of the Sierra Club since age 19. What sparked your passion for the environment, and what has kept it burning for three decades?

A: Issues! In college I got involved in the effort to halt the spread of offshore oil drilling along the California coast. That was spurred by the huge spill off Santa Barbara, which despoiled the beaches and killed thousands of birds and other wildlife. I also saw the threats from the proliferation of nuclear power plants in California and worked on a successful citizens’ initiative to stop more plants from being constructed in the early ’70s.

I’d long been troubled by the travesty of clear-cut logging that I observed during backpacking trips into the Sierra. Those three issues were the motivation for my early activism.

Since then, new issues have constantly come up; for example, the proliferation of toxic chemicals from a wide variety of sources. Global warming has become increasingly important. Many if not most of the glaciers in the Sierra have retreated and are gone. Experts tell us that in another 10 to 20 years Glacier National Park in northern Montana will be without any glaciers at all. Exploitation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—America’s Serengeti—by oil and gas drilling has been an issue for two decades now, and the risk, from the Bush administration, is greater than it’s ever been. I want the next generation to be able to have the same pristine wilderness and wildlife adventures that we have had the good fortune to experience.

Q: In what ways has the environment improved over recent decades?

A: For more than 30 years, we’ve made real progress cleaning up America’s air and water and toxic sites, but the Bush administration is taking us back in time—when polluters could just dump toxic wastes into our waterways, when rivers caught fire and when toxic pesticides were killing bald eagles. That was before we really understood what lead was doing to our kids, what mercury does to pregnant women and what DDT does to wildlife. What we’ve learned since then is that if you want to protect people’s health and safety, you’ve got to protect the natural environment and that we all must take responsibility—individuals, corporations and government—local, state and national.

We believe there’s no reason we should still be living with polluted air, water and land. We know there’s a better way—and that’s to use modern technology to upgrade power plants and make more fuel-efficient cars, to enforce and strengthen the laws that protect our air and water and wildlife so as to preserve what’s still wild in America as our children’s legacy.

Q: What do you say to someone who recognizes the problems but feels ineffectual?

A: Join the Sierra Club and get involved. We’re a network of 750,000 of your friends and neighbors working together to protect local communities and the planet. We offer strength in numbers and a sense of community. And we provide a broad range of opportunities for people to make a difference, from writing a letter to going on a service outing (cleaning up streams, parks, coastlines and trails) to attending a town meeting. We also let people know how the choices they make as consumers can help protect the environment—buying and driving a hybrid or other fuel-efficient car, for instance, or installing a home solar energy system. There’s something for the person who has only a few minutes a week and for the person who has substantial time to give. It all helps.

Q: What one thing would you like to accomplish during your term as Sierra Club president?

A: To help convince the American public of the importance of electing a pro-environment Congress and president in 2004. And it shouldn’t be a partisan thing. I would very much like to see Republicans find their way back into embracing environmental protection. They are, after all, the party of Teddy Roosevelt, one of our nation’s greatest conservationists, who was a friend of the Sierra Club’s founder and first president, John Muir. President Nixon, during his term, established the Environmental Protection Agency and signed the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act and the Clean Air Act. Conservative and conservation are words that share the same root.

But we need to inspire Americans of all political stripes—Greens, Independents, students, Libertarians and the disaffected—who care about environmental issues and emphasize that voting can make a difference. The closeness of the 2000 election should be a wake-up call to us all, and with a strong grassroots mobilization effort, the Sierra Club plans to help turn things around in 2004.

Q: You attended the World Trade Organization Ministerial Conference in Cancun this September. Why?

A: We were there to educate the trade delegates, the press and the public about how, under their current form, these multilateral trade agreements, including the WTO and the FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas), represent a threat to environmental protection efforts here at home and around the world. While promoting the interests of multinational corporations and business interests, they undermine local laws and regulations that protect the health and safety of Americans. Most of these trade rules are developed and enforced behind closed doors, without the benefit of public comment and scrutiny. We held press conferences and spoke at delegation events to point out how misguided this approach to international trade really is.

Q: You are the executive director of As You Sow, the nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting corporate responsibility. Is holding corporations accountable for their impact on the environment now the most viable way to ensure some measure of success in solving the problems we face?

A: It’s one of the ways we must try. Today some of the largest economies in the world are in the hands of multinational corporations, which too often place short-term profits ahead of the public good. The Sierra Club is taking a two-pronged approach to the issue of corporate accountability. We have launched our own family of mutual funds (www.sierraclubfunds.com) that meticulously screens companies’ environmental and social records before investing, to make sure that the companies are good environmental stewards. We think that the recent spate of corporate scandals will result in a huge increase in socially and environmentally responsible investing by consumers, pensions plans, retirement plans, etc. Sierra Club’s mutual funds, which have the toughest environmental screens in the socially responsible investing business, should be a major beneficiary of that increase.

In addition we are purchasing shares of other publicly traded companies that might need some behavior modification. As shareholders we can dialogue with corporate management to help improve their environmental performance and use the tool of shareholder resolutions in proxy statements and at the annual meetings to help encourage positive change. Shareholder activism is a growing trend, and the Sierra Club, with its hundreds of thousands of members—many of whom have mutual funds, retirement plans and other stock investments—is poised to be a leading player in that effort.

Q: Does the president of the Sierra Club ever get to go hiking? How do you recharge your commitment?

A: You bet. The greatest part of my job is traveling around the country meeting like-minded environmentalists who are activists in Sierra Club chapters and local groups. They often take me to their favorite spots for a hike. Last year I saw grizzly bears in the wild—even saw a pair of wolves chase off a grizzly from a kill—in the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone. This past summer a few Florida chapter leaders took me on a hike at a state park near St. Petersburg, where we happened upon a family of manatees browsing on marsh weeds no farther than 20 yards from the shore where we were hiking. These kinds of experiences make the stress and the wear and tear of my hectic travel schedule more than worth it.