Sierra Club leadership fires back on immigration

Monday, March 26, 2001 | 11:24 a.m.

The leadership of the Sierra Club fired off a new salvo last week on immigration -- a topic that has divided the environmental organization.

A faction of the group, widely considered one of the nation's most powerful advocates for the environment, wants to curb immigration to help control population growth in the United States. The faction has spearheaded a ballot question for the organization's 500,000 members that calls for the club to work toward stabilizing the U.S. population.

The Sierra Club leadership -- and many grass-roots activists -- oppose the effort, calling it a thinly veiled attack on Hispanics, Asians and others who have boosted the nation's population in the past 30 years.

After the dissident faction released a study saying that at least half of urban sprawl in the past few decades could be attributed to population growth fueled by immigration, the leadership fired back with a study that says only about 30 percent of urban expansion was caused by population growth.

The issue directly concerns the Las Vegas area. The dissident faction says the 86 percent population growth rate for Clark County during the 1990s, as measured by the Census Bureau, has turned thousands of acres of once rural land into urban development.

Much of that growth, they argue, has been due directly and indirectly to immigration.

The club's official website also calls Las Vegas a sprawl-bound city, the third worst for sprawl in the United States for a city its size.

But the answer to controlling sprawl is through better land-use policies and higher population concentration in urban areas, the club said, echoing its standing arguments. The "white paper" study posted on the website makes no direct reference to the dissident ballot initiative or to immigration.

Carl Pope, the Sierra Club's executive director, said that the group will not refer to immigration because of a 1996 decision by the club's directors to forgo any stand on the issue. The stand of the organization is to call for global population stabilization, not to direct that effort within U.S. borders, he said.

But with the release of census numbers from last year's door-to-door count and population estimates soaring worldwide and nationally, the issue of population growth is on the front burner for many of the organization's members, Pope said.

"We have been under a lot of pressure to address the issue with more intensity than we have," he said.

Population growth and sprawl are important issues, he said, but immigration isn't the dominant factor.

"It doesn't matter where the people come from or how they got there," Pope said.

Dissident club members disagree.

"We've got agreement that population is an important component of sprawl, whether it's 30 percent, 50 percent, 80 percent or whatever," said Bill Elder, a club member in Washington state and a member of Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization. "The problem is that the leaders, the current leadership of the club, seems intent on avoiding recognition and discussion of the need to stabilize the U.S. population."

Elder criticized the club's prohibition on discussing immigration's role in population growth.

"It's important to honestly and openly debate issues that are important to the future of the environment of the United States," he said.

The club's white paper, which says most of the problem of sprawl is caused by land-use policies, is based on the work of Cornell University researcher Rolf Pendall.

"It is clear that population increases are not the only contributor to sprawl," he said. "Increasing population growth is most problematic when it happens in regions with poor land-use decision-making. In those regions, our open spaces are being devoured at the highest rates in the nation.

"In fact, the research that I've done suggests that local government measures to cap population growth ... tend to exacerbate sprawl," he said. Urban areas that put a cap on the number of new housing units that can go up "make people move farther out to seek housing."

"Localized measures to combat population growth can backfire," Pendall said.

Leon Kolankiewicz, a former Orange County, Calif., land use planner, co-wrote the earlier study, which said population growth and immigration policies drive urban development.

Kolankiewicz said that his numbers don't radically conflict with Pendall's research. He noted that Pendall still says 30 percent of sprawl nationally is driven by population growth.

"Something that causes 30 percent of anything is certainly a significant factor," he said.

Some Sierra Club members who oppose the ballot initiative have suggested the effort is driven by dislike of ethnic minorities.

Kolankiewicz, a Sierra Club member, said he is not racist.

"One of the ironies of all this is that I myself am married to an immigrant," he said.

But Kolankiewicz argues that unchecked immigration will result in population growth that will double the American population to more than 550 million by the end of the century. That jeopardizes the environmental resources of the entire country, he said.

"For environmentalists to ignore this is an ominous sign of where we are heading," he said.