Dear
HCN,
High Country News
publisher Ed Marston reacted to Sacramento Bee
reporter Tom Knudson’s unflattering “Environment, Inc.” series on
the fancy finances of the professional Green movement (HCN, 6/4/01:
Environmentalism meets a fierce friend) by declaring
“environmentalists must be led by relatively well-paid leaders
backed by professional staffs,” just like their corporate PR
enemies.
Marston felt obligated to defend Sierra
Club against Knudson by noting that Sierra Club is “crammed into
very modest offices in a seedy part of San Francisco.” Also crammed
in those offices is the Sierra Club Foundation (SCF), which exists
only to support “charitable activity of the Sierra Club through
grants on a project-by-project basis,” a purpose for which it
collected $23 million in 1999.
Where that money
came from is known only to IRS inspectors, as are the reasons why
SCF is allowed to forward tax-free funds to Sierra, which lost its
tax-exempt, nonprofit status way back in the ’60s. Where the money
went is public record – $13.4 million in grants to Sierra Club and
its chapters, including $2.8 million in unspecified “various
grants.” That’s nearly a quarter of “Sierra, Inc.’s” total budget
of $58 million.
SCF’s 1999 executive director,
John DeCock, drew $104,029 in annual salary for a whopping 35-hour
week. Don’t think DeCock, or his tiny, $119,000-a-year staff (aside
from the four officers, paid $257,000), slaved to raise money. That
was left to professional fund raisers * who were paid $1.53
million.
What of the Nature Conservancy, which
Knudson praised and Marston criticized for having “high-ceilinged,
high-rent quarters in a much better part of
town?”
In 1998, the last year for which I have
their “nonprofit” Form 990 tax return, TNC scraped down $744
million in “revenue, gains and other support,” including gains of
$130 million on securities (significantly, not land) transactions
that totaled $1.36 billion, as well as $153 million in government
contracts. TNC’s expenses were $362 million for that same
year.
Is an outfit that enjoys revenues double
expenses really “nonprofit?” That might be a question for the more
than 480 TNC employees with salaries over $50,000 in
1998.
Ed is right about one thing … Greens are
“no longer a puny movement struggling to get the attention of the
American public.” Now they are an elite cadre of professionals,
with, as Knudson reported, $3.5 billion per year of mainly tax-free
funding available. Seems to me that with that much tax-free,
“charitable” loot, we should have been swilling our free-range tofu
and soy milk at Ralph Nader’s coronation.
But we
didn’t. Maybe there are still things that money can’t buy. Marston
provides part of the reason why not when he states: “We in the
environmental movement still see ourselves as a beleaguered
minority fighting against all odds to change the American
West.”
Like Ed, I can’t understand how access to
$3.5 billion a year could leave anyone “beleaguered.” Unlike Ed, I
do understand this: Greens remain a political minority in an
American West, and in an America that doesn’t want to be changed,
and won’t be bought.
Dave
Skinner
Whitefish, Montana
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Greens are still a minority.
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