One of Austin’s chief environmental groups has decided to pull out of Austin’s Earth Day Festival.
(Article by Asher Price, republished from http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/sierra-club-austin-pulls-out-of-earth-day-festival/nq4cL/)
The Austin chapter of the Sierra Club says it won’t participate in the festival, to take place April 23 in the Mueller neighborhood, because of what Sierra Club officials say are the anti-immigration sympathies of the chief underwriter of the festival, Dallas developer Trammell Crow.
Sierra Club board members point to the inclusion of at least three organizations that support tighter immigration controls in the Dallas version of festival, which was founded by Crow.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform, NumbersUSA and Progressives for Immigration Reform are all listed as exhibitors in the Dallas festival. The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, has deemed the groups “anti-immigrant” and traced their ties to white nationalists.
“We consider them hate groups,” said Reggie James, director of the state chapter of the Sierra Club. “It’s Earth Day; it’s not This-Side-of-the-Border Day.”
The groups say they are participating because they have a green message.
“Nobody disputes that population growth is an important contributing factor to environmental degradation, and nobody disputes that immigration and births to immigrants are a fundamental part of population growth,” Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, told the American-Statesman. “If we’re going to meet our environmental goals, we’re going to have to get some kind of hold on population growth here in the U.S.”
The group’s founder has said he wants to maintain a “European-American” majority.
Trammell Crow officials declined to directly comment on the Sierra Club decision.
“This is the largest event of its kind in the world, and our philosophy is to bring in groups and organizations that may never have exhibited together to talk about their sustainability and conservation work and topics germane to the environment,” said Jerry Hess, CEO of Earth Day Texas, the nonprofit that runs the Dallas festival and is affiliated with the Austin one.
He said the Dallas festival has an “open registration policy”: Any group that will “discuss topics relevant to conservation and sustainability” is welcome.
Exhibitors generally pay between $400 and $2,000 to participate, he said.
“We’re working as hard as we can to produce the largest, most inclusive environmental event in the world,” Hess said.
The Dallas Earth Day event is a massive three-day festival, with more than 750 exhibitors and sponsors, from PepsiCo and energy companies to environmental groups like Trust for Public Land. Speakers run the gamut, too, from Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller, who has complained about federal environmental regulations, to Amory Lovins, a physicist and leading environmental thinker.
The anti-immigration groups aren’t participating in the smaller Austin festival, but the Austin Sierra Club says it made its decision because the groups were invited back to Dallas even after Sierra Club raised concerns in the lead-up to the 2015 event.
“We cannot, in good conscience, support an event nor its main funder if it encourages anti-immigrant and racist sentiments,” Damien Brockmann, chairman of the Austin Sierra Club, which has about 5,000 dues-paying members, wrote in a letter to members Friday.
In 2012, Crow donated at least $300,000 to the Farmers Branch Legal Defense Fund to help the Dallas suburb defend an ordinance that barred landlords from renting to immigrants lacking legal status. A federal judge deemed the ordinance unconstitutional.
The Austin event, which organizers say might draw as many as 10,000 people, is sponsored by the city of Austin, a host of environmental groups and H-E-B, among others. Free to the public, it will include sessions on greening your home, recycling and the relationship between international climate agreements and Austin.
“The organizers of Earth Day Austin are longtime friends of the environment and Sierra Club, and they have been clear that no hate groups would be allowed to participate in the Austin event,” Brockmann’s letter continues. “While we applaud their leadership loudly, at the end of the day, as long as Trammell Crow Jr. is courting hate groups to participate in any of his environmental events, the Austin Sierra Club will choose to not support those events.”
Reed Sternberg, who runs the Austin Earth Day festival, said he agrees with Sierra Club on the issue and said he had tried to persuade Crow not to invite the groups to the Dallas event. But he said the Sierra Club decision was misguided, given that the groups aren’t involved with the Austin festival.
Sierra Club has its own tangled history on immigration issues.
About a decade ago, there was a battle for control of the group’s national board, with one faction — called Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization — pushing the club to endorse lower limits on immigration, arguing that new migrants would start consuming more.
The club membership ultimately turned away the effort; recently, in 2013, Sierra Club came out in favor of immigration reform that would have made it possible for many undocumented immigrants to gain legal status.
Crow, who has written about his environmental values from a Republican perspective, is one of the chief donors to green causes in the state. (The Austin Sierra Club said it doesn’t receive money from Crow.)
Other environmental groups have said they will continue to participate in the Earth Day festivals.
The Dallas Sierra Club will participate in the Dallas event.
“We admire Trammel Crow very much for his environmental activism,” said Dallas Sierra Club board member John Lingenfelder.
As it did last year, the Dallas Sierra Club will post fliers saying that it doesn’t share the values of the anti-immigration groups.
“We take the approach of working within the system,” Dallas Sierra Club Chairman Wendel Withrow said.
Read more at: http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/sierra-club-austin-pulls-out-of-earth-day-festival/nq4cL/
