Waterkeeper Alliance

The Waterkeeper Alliance has declared war on America’s farms, and Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. is in charge of the battle plan. Officially, the Alliance is a coalition of more than 160 watch programs for America’s rivers, bays, and shorelines, but this is thin political cover for trial lawyers who see big-money payouts from ruining families who have farmed for generations. The Alliance also notably serves as a platform for Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to maintain his public profile. He has used the Alliance to spread baseless conspiracy theories about children getting autism from vaccines, to obtain taxpayer-guaranteed loans for a troubled solar energy company his investment fund is involved with, and to oppose wind energy projects too close for comfort to his lavish Kennedy-family compound.

Kennedy’s involvement with the group dates back to the mid-1980s, when he was a prosecutor in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. According to Kennedy’s own accounts, he was also a secret heroin addict, disguising himself and visiting Harlem to buy illegal drugs by night. That double life caught up with him in 1984 when he was arrested and charged with heroin possession. As part of a plea agreement, Kennedy was sentenced to 800 hours of community service, which he filled by volunteering at the Hudson River Foundation. This group was later absorbed by the Hudson Riverkeepers, the Waterkeeper Alliance’s flagship constituent group. Today, the Kennedy environmental empire consists of the Alliance, the Hudson Riverkeepers, and the Pace University Environmental Litigation Clinic.

This larger enviro-conglomerate has been a wholly owned subsidiary of Robert Kennedy, Jr. since June 2000; at that time, he began trading on his family name in order to assemble a dream team of attorneys interested in applying the legal model made famous by tobacco lawyers to pork and chicken farmers. Today, the Alliance operates its litigation with assistance from publicly-funded law clinics, drawing criticism from members of both political parties.

About half of the law firms that have contributed attorney-muscle to Kennedy’s crusade have experience suing tobacco companies (the ultimate legal cash cow). In addition to these lawyers’ deep pockets, the Waterkeeper Alliance stays afloat through foundation support, individual wealthy donors, celebrity ski events in Colorado and the Canadian Rockies, and a for-profit company called Tear of the Clouds LLC, which sells Keeper Springs bottled water. A combination of slick marketing and Kennedy cachet has placed this product in supermarkets throughout the Northeast U.S. Every penny of profit goes to support the Waterkeepers and their litigious campaigning.

The central front in the Alliance’s push against modern agricultural practices that make affordable food possible is its “Pure Farms, Pure Waters” campaign, which the Alliance says “combines hard-nosed litigation with education and outreach on sustainable agriculture.” In practice, farmers see more “litigation” than “outreach,” exemplified by the Waterkeepers’ liberal use of the epithet “factory farm” in reference to the thousands of family farms engaged in contemporary animal agriculture. In truth, the “Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations” (CAFOs) that Kennedy Jr. decries as “a reproduction of the European feudalism” are systems that produce more food on less land for less money that can fit into a sustainable farming method.

In 2007, Kennedy Jr.’s eye turned to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, a region with a large chicken farming community. In spite of ongoing efforts by Maryland authorities to improve environmental standards in the Chesapeake region, Kennedy began a campaign to gain access to farmers’ nutrient management plans (NMPs), suing the state to release not only the plans but also information identifying which farmers submitted which plans. Local farmers objected to releasing farmers’ names, justly worried that Kennedy’s legal machine might be looking for a list of ripe targets. Maryland’s judges have tried to balance competing interests by releasing the NMPs without identifying farmers by name. This has not satisfied the Alliance, which still hopes to sue Maryland’s chicken farmers into financial ruin.

To launch their Maryland campaign, the Waterkeepers held an Eastern Shore Poultry Summit, at which Maryland Attorney General Douglas Gansler (who had appointed a Waterkeeper regional director as a special assistant for environmental issues) spoke arguing that “we need to ramp up enforcement” of regulations, including by citizen lawsuit (music to the ears of the assembled Waterkeeper supporters). Kennedy Jr. took the opportunity to decry the effects of Maryland poultry farming as a “milestone of tyranny” and call local officials “corrupt.” According to a report by a Maryland local newspaper, poultry farmers who attended in hopes of seeing “outreach” responded to Kennedy’s barrage of baseless insults by walking out while Waterkeeper supporters gave a standing ovation.

The setback in gaining access to the names of Maryland farmers hasn’t stopped Kennedy’s machine from trying to churn Maryland’s family farms through a meat grinder of lawsuits. The international Waterkeeper Alliance and a regional affiliate (whom a court later dismissed for lack of standing) sued the Hudsons, a fourth-generation farm family raising chickens on the Eastern Shore. With assistance from the publicly-funded University of Maryland Environmental Law Clinic, the Waterkeepers alleged – based on aerial photography – that the Hudsons were allowing runoff from untreated chicken refuse to enter the bay.

Maryland Department of the Environment (MDE) inspectors came to a different conclusion. The MDE found the alleged pile of chicken manure actually consisted of sewage-treated Class A biosolids obtained legally from Ocean City, Maryland, to use as crop fertilizer. The inspectors ordered the Hudsons to relocate the biosolids to a different part of their land, and the Hudsons complied. A subsequent MDE inspection in late January 2010 found that “no animal manure piles were observed outside.”

This did not stop the Waterkeepers. The Alliance filed suit in early March 2010 and did not withdraw the complaint after MDE made its final ruling that the Hudsons had corrected their improper fertilizer storage. What was the Hudsons’ real sin in the eyes of the Waterkeepers? To secure a stable source of income, the Hudsons contracted with Perdue Farms, a large poultry company based in Maryland. To Kennedy and his acolytes, this made the Hudson family farm a “factory farm.” In addition, the contract linked the rectified error and allegations to deeper pockets. It should, therefore, be no surprise that Perdue is named as a co-defendant with the Hudson family.

And while the Hudsons bear their own legal costs, Maryland taxpayers are helping to pay the bills for Kennedy and his cabal. This injustice even drew the ire of Democratic Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley, usually a reliable supporter of environmentalist causes. In a letter to the University of Maryland Law Clinic, Gov. O’Malley said the clinic’s involvement on behalf of the Waterkeepers was a “misuse of state resources” that used “the economic weapon of unlimited litigation resources, namely, taxpayer supported state resources — to potentially bankrupt and destroy a family farming operation which has no recourse to similarly unlimited litigation assets.” The case goes to trial March 5, 2012, more than two years after the Hudson family’s ordeal began.

The Waterkeeper legal machine first rose to prominence in the early 2000s by alleging preposterously high damages from hog processors. They sued a major pork processor with the Sierra Club, the Animal Welfare Institute, and the rabidly anti-consumer National Farmers Union as co-plaintiffs demanding triple damages under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO). Waterkeeper spokespeople claimed their targets could be stuck with at least $10 billion in damages.

The effort didn’t find much sympathy in court. The first major setback came in March 2001 when the initial round of lawsuits was thrown out by a North Carolina judge ruling that the plaintiffs had “failed to state a single claim” warranting a trial, much less a financial award. Kennedy and his cohorts went back to the drawing board and resubmitted their lawsuit, only to have it rejected by a U.S. District Judge for (once again) failing to support their RICO claims. Undeterred, they amended their case a second time, still insisting that RICO applied. This time, Chief U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Kovachevich let Kennedy and company know her patience was running thin: “After detailing the reasons why Plaintiffs did not have a claim under RICO … Plaintiffs again brought a RICO claim, against this court’s advice.” Judge Kovachevich also wrote that Kennedy’s lawsuit “failed to state anything at all, except conclusory allegations that have no support.”

Does the Waterkeeper Alliance want to rid America’s tables of chicken, turkey, beef, mutton, lamb, bacon, sausage, milk, eggs, yogurt and every other animal-based food? Not quite: when Kennedy talks about going after the industry, he’s referring to large-scale (read: deep-pocketed) operations and the family farmers that rely on them for income security. Through contracted production, these companies employ tens of thousands of Americans and offer family farmers security often lacking in an industry where too much rain and too little rain (to say nothing of nuisance lawsuits) are real occupational hazards. These companies (and their contractors) already have to obey countless state and federal regulations, including a whole regimen from the Environmental Protection Agency.

Kennedy seemingly plans to continue suing until he finds a judge who will see things his way; at that point, he hopes existing meat producers won’t be able to absorb multimillion-dollar judgments against them. This would open the market up for sustainable meat producers, whose products are marketed as organic, free-range, or environmentally friendly. Why aren’t these products particularly successful on their own? They cost more – nearly twice as much per pound as conventionally produced pork, in some markets. Of course, it’s not like Kennedy or his millionaire funders and supporters will notice much of a financial hit — it will be middle-class Americans who face a shift from meat to potatoes.

We’re starting with hogs. After we get done with the hogs, then we’re gonna go after the other ones.

Waterkeeper Alliance president Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., December 6, 2000

Pork farmers are … a greater threat than Al Qaeda or Osama Bin Laden.

Waterkeeper Alliance president Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., at the Hog Summit in Clear Lake, Iowa

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement

Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (ICCI) was founded in 1975 to assist low-income Iowans with predatory lending, unscrupulous car dealers, home ownership, and personal money management. Since its founding, however, ICCI has discovered that real power in Iowa lies beyond the city limits. In the last decade, the organization’s priorities have shifted away from defending the urban poor to more politically lucrative attacks against what its activists term “factory farms.” In making this shift, the group also started charging dues for the first time. Once three-quarters urban in its membership, ICCI is now mostly comprised of rural Iowans seeking to hop on the pro-“family farm,” anti-“factory farm” bandwagon.

ICCI is comprised of just 2,000 Iowans, but the frequency with which they protest and lobby is intended by its professional leaders to create the public perception of a much larger membership. They are a tiny but extremely vocal minority who consistently push for sweeping regulations on Iowa’s 90,000 farms — except for the ones owned by ICCI members.

The problem with the “family” and “factory” farm labels is that ICCI writes the definitions itself. ICCI rural organizer Lisa Whelan offered a definition of a “factory farm” to the Council Bluffs Daily Nonpareil in 2004, defining them as farms that “need a permit to operate.” This might be an objective standard if ICCI didn’t proudly take credit for helping to change those same permit laws to suit its own agenda. In its 2002 annual report, ICCI boasted of its efforts to pass Iowa Senate File 2293, which lowered the permit threshold on pork farmers from 4,166 hogs to just 2,500. In most counties a farmer must raise nearly twice that number of animals just to earn the median household income in that county.

Not content with protest-augmented lobbying, ICCI has also pressured judicial officials to interpret the law in questionable ways. In the July 23, 2002 Fort Dodge Messenger, Humboldt County Attorney Derk Schwieger related how ICCI encouraged him to set aside his professional understanding of the law in favor of mob rule. ICCI, Schweiger said, wanted him to certify the legality of a countywide moratorium on new livestock farms, regardless of what the law actually said. In Schwieger’s words, “I was told by ICCI members that I should draft my [legal] opinion according to public opinion … that’s not how this works.”

In a Des Moines Register interview, ICCI executive director Hugh Espey admitted that he has never set foot in a large-scale livestock confinement, the kind of facility his organization decries on a daily basis. For a group that claims to combat threats that supposedly lurk next door, it is unusual that its most vocal agitator has never witnessed the “problem” firsthand.

“Local Control” Hypocrites

ICCI consistently clamors for “local control” of agriculture, which typically translates to the suppression of out-of-state investment in Iowa farms. The model for “local control” is Nebraska, where a law enacted via ballot initiative forbids non-Nebraskans and agricultural corporations from investing in farms there. Less farming capital, of course, means fewer jobs and depressed economic development, a bitter price to pay for satisfying anti-business activists. Even if this kind of out-of-state investment would allow an Iowan to continue farming and maintain a family tradition instead of selling off his land, ICCI considers this a bad trade-off.

The irony of ICCI’s “local control” proposals is that it receives the bulk of its money from large, out-of-state foundations (membership dues comprise the remainder of its budget). One-time ICCI vice-chairman Vern Tigges lamented in October of 2004 to the newspaper Carroll Today, “We don’t have money. All we have is people power, and that’s the name of the game.”

Actual people do indeed comprise ICCI’s membership, but the game has some other names, too: Ford, General Motors, and Standard Oil, to name a few. The giant philanthropies that bankroll ICCI (none native to Iowa) trace their considerable assets back to giant corporations. The Ford Foundation, the General Motors-powered Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, and the Standard Oil-fueled Belvedere Fund (a subsidiary of the Rockefeller Family Fund) all contribute substantially (see “Financials” section).

The Waterkeeper Alliance

ICCI is adept at blurring the lines between its corporate funding and its “grassroots” public image, but the group is more open about its ties with the Waterkeeper Alliance. Led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a lawyer with a lot of name recognition, Waterkeeper is dedicated to suing pork farmers into the ground in the hopes of scoring a tobacco-style legal settlement. In the July 25, 2002 Van Buren County Register, ICCI board member Garry Klicker declared that “Waterkeepers [sic] is one [group] I not only am happy to support, but have joined as well. Robert Kennedy’s strong statements are exactly on target.”

Kennedy’s statements include the 2001 bombshell he dropped in the Los Angeles Times, when he said that Waterkeeper “will march across this country and we will bring these kind of lawsuits against every single pork factory in America if we have to … Whatever it takes to win.” The Des Moines Register reported in April 2002 that Kennedy called pork farmers “a greater threat to the United States and U.S. democracy than Osama bin Laden and his terrorist network.” That same month he also told a television reporter that “the best thing would be if this [pork] industry did leave the country.”

At times ICCI’s hatred of modern animal agriculture drives the group to make some allies that livestock farmers normally avoid. As if the group’s support of the Waterkeeper Alliance wasn’t enough, the roster of speakers at ICCI’s 2002 convention included Michael Appleby, vice president of the Humane Society of the United States (HSUS). Appleby’s fellow HSUS spokespersons have advocated the abolition of all livestock agriculture.

Child Abusers and Serfs?

“I feel an obligation to society in general to stop these people – and I will,” ICCI board member Garry Klicker told the Burlington Hawk Eye in June 2002. Klicker’s rant reveals a dark side to ICCI’s fight against ordinary Iowa farmers:

[Klicker] also doesn’t believe that hog producers who contract with a corporation are true family farmers. “If they are not taking a market risk, they are not farmers — they are employees,” Klicker said. “I personally have problems with farmers getting paid — they are like serfs.” He also is adamant that putting animals in confined spaces is wrong. “My feeling is if a farmer is raising hogs in a confinement, they probably need to be visited by DHS [the Iowa Department of Human Services] because they probably have kids in the closet,” he said.

Sierra Club

Founded in 1892 by John Muir to “make the mountains glad,” the Sierra Club is the oldest and arguably the most powerful environmental group in the nation. But its concerns are no longer limited to the happiness of the valleys. Once dedicated to conserving wilderness for future human enjoyment, the Sierra Club has become an anti-growth, anti-technology group that puts its utopian environmentalist vision before the well being of humans.

This is not your father’s Sierra Club. Some of its leadership positions are held by activists with radical ties and even violent criminals. The Club has done well preserving a “mainstream” image, despite its increasingly radical bent.

The Club’s new extremist priorities are best illustrated in the person of animal-rights extremist Paul Watson, elected to the Sierra Club’s board of directors in 2003. Watson founded the ultra-radical Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) in 1977 after being booted from Greenpeace (which he also co-founded) for espousing violence in the name of the environment. Watson and his Sea Shepherd pirates sail the high seas, terrorizing the fishing industry by sinking ships and endangering lives. “I got the impression that instead of going out to shoot birds, I should go out and shoot the kids who shoot birds,” says Watson (as quoted in Access to Energy, 1982).

In 2003 Watson announced that he was openly “advocating the takeover of the Sierra Club,” claiming to be just three votes shy of controlling a majority of the group’s 15-member board. During the Sierra Club’s 2004 election season, Watson allied himself with candidates endorsing strict limits to legal immigration. Promising to “use the resources of the $95-million-a-year budget” to address both immigration policy and animal-rights issues, Watson actively promoted his chosen slate of candidates — and lost big in a record turnout. Nevertheless, Watson will remain on the Sierra Club’s board until 2006.

Bashing Food Technology

Genetically modified food crops have been heralded for their environmental benefits, including the ability to grow more food on less land, and a decreased need for pesticides. Biotech crops are widely considered one solution for chronic food shortages and starvation throughout the world. Nobel laureates and green activists alike have praised agricultural biotechnology and encouraged its advancement.

Despite all the promise that these revolutionary crops hold for the future, the Sierra Club demands “a moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops and the release of all GEOs [genetically engineered organisms] into the environment, including those now approved.” This technophobic stance falls right in line with former Sierra Club executive director David Brower’s creed: “All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent.” The natural conclusion of this flawed logic is the much-maligned “precautionary principle”; like many other green groups, the Sierra Club uses it to thwart technological progress in the biotech sector. The Club states its official policy on agricultural biotechnology on its website: “We call for acting in accordance with the precautionary principle … we call for a moratorium on the planting of all genetically engineered crops.”

As international food policy expert Dr. Robert Paarlberg has noted in The Wall Street Journal, the “precautionary principle” has run amok, putting millions of lives at risk. “Greens and GM critics,” says Paarlberg, “argue that powerful new technologies should be kept under wraps until tested for unexpected or unknown risks as well. Never mind that testing for something unknown is logically impossible (the only way to avoid a completely unknown risk is never to do anything for the first time).” Anti-biotechnology zealot (and former Council for Responsible Genetics head) Martin Teitel candidly disclosed activists’ “precautionary” motivation in 2001: “Politically, it’s difficult for me,” Teitel told a scientific conference, “to go around saying that I want to shut this science down, so it’s safer for me to say something like, ‘It needs to be done safely before releasing it.'” Teitel added that implementing the precautionary principle really means: “They don’t get to do it. Period.”

The Sierra Club united with Greenpeace and organic-only food activist groups in 1999 to sue the Environmental Protection Agency over its approval of genetically modified crops. In the same year, the Club joined the Union of Concerned Scientists, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and Defenders of Wildlife in petitioning the EPA for strict regulation of corn modified to produce the bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxin. Bt is a naturally occurring insect poison that protects plants from devastating pests like the European corn borer.

The Sierra Club’s EPA petition was part of a coordinated campaign to convince the public that Bt corn posed a risk to the Monarch Butterfly. However, both the USDA and the EPA later concluded that Monarchs were never in any danger. This reinforced the findings of federal regulators who had performed a comprehensive safety review of Bt corn before it was allowed into the marketplace. Yet despite conclusive proof to the contrary, the Sierra Club continues to promote the false notion that biotech corn kills Monarchs.

The Sierra Club is also a member of “Genetically Engineered Food Alert,” a PR campaign dedicated to demonizing genetically enhanced food products. In 2002 the Club co-hosted an event called “Reinventing the Meal: Ecological Food Choices for the 21st Century.” Attendees were urged to only “grow and buy organic food,” shun food from large, modern farms, and avoid foods produced through biotechnology.

According to Nobel laureate Norman Borlaug, widely acknowledged as the “father of the green revolution,” the reckless actions of groups like the Sierra Club may hinder our ability to feed future populations: “I now say,” Borlaug told a De Montfort University crowd in 1997 “that the world has the technology — either available or well-advanced in the research pipeline — to feed a population of 10 billion people. The more pertinent question today is whether farmers and ranchers will be permitted to use this new technology. Extremists in the environmental movement from the rich nations seem to be doing everything they can to stop scientific progress in its tracks.”

Bashing Modern Farming

Biotechnology is just one of the food production practices in the Sierra Club’s crosshairs. The group pushes an animal-rights agenda and maintains a coordinated campaign against what it calls “the growing menace” of modern livestock farms.

It’s clear that the Sierra Club is fond of putting its ideological cart before the scientific horse — if you can use that term without offending the growing animal-rights faction within the organization. Sierra Club activists in Florida endorse PETA’s mantra that eating meat is a form of animal abuse that contributes to world hunger. In 2002, the Broward Sierra News promoted “a vegetarian lifestyle as a way to counter the alleged abuse animals endure to feed a hungry and growing global population.” The newsletter plugged PETA and their message that meat-eating in general, and livestock operations in particular, are a cause of world hunger and animal abuse. Sierra Club chapters in New York and Michigan promote the “Vegetarian Starter Kit” distributed by the misnamed Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (a PETA front group), as a way to fight “corporate greed.”

These chapters also encourage people to sign EarthSave International’s “VegPledge” as a way to “save the Earth” by going vegetarian. The New York chapter of the Sierra Club cosponsored an event with People for Animal Rights in 2002 dubbed “Behind Closed Doors.” The purpose of the gathering was to vilify livestock operations, and appropriately featured Farm Sanctuary co-founder Gene Bauston.

And the Sierra Club embraces those with designs on combining environmental activism with animal-rights dogma. The Club’s board of directors chair Lisa Renstrom explained: “The [Sierra] Club could begin to include animal rights positions in decades to come as members and the American public acknowledge the impact of our high animal protein diet on sustainability.” The Club’s “sustainable consumption committee” issued a report in 2000 that listed “eating less meat” as a “Priority Action for American Consumers,” right alongside “buying a fuel-efficient car.” Joan Zacharias, one of this committee’s leaders, is scheduled to address the “Animal Rights 2004” convention in Virginia. Her influence is seen in the committee’s stated goal of developing “stronger ties with vegetarian organizations.”

The Club’s “Rap Sheet on Animal Factories” lists farms that the Sierra Club has targeted for “action.” What type of action? In the May 2000 issue of Sierra, the Club announced its intention to sue large-scale livestock farms across the nation: “No one [court] case,” wrote Sierra’s editors, “will be a magic bullet … You have to fight on multiple legal fronts.”

On February 28, 2001 the Club announced an alliance with trial lawyer Robert Kennedy Jr.’s radical Waterkeeper Alliance as a “full partner in litigation” against pork companies. That same day, the Sierra Club declared that it had filed multiple lawsuits “across the United States” targeting Smithfield farms. One of the suits filed accused Smithfield of mafia-style racketeering — a charge that was ultimately laughed out of court.

The Sierra Club has sued time and again in its war against farmers. Between 1998 and 2002 it joined multiple lawsuits to prevent the construction of dairy farms in California. In 2003 it filed suit in Nebraska to stop a new hog farm from opening. Filing lawsuits is cheap, especially for Sierra’s well-funded team of lawyers.

Not Just a Club, But a Law Firm

In 1971, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund was founded as a nonprofit law firm to serve as a legal arm to the Club’s grassroots operation. In 1998, its name was changed to the EarthJustice Legal Defense Fund. (It now operates simply as “EarthJustice.”) EarthJustice exists to use the courts as a weapon against businesses and public agencies, in the hope of forcing them to operate in a manner acceptable to the Sierra Club. EarthJustice’s aggressive legal posture regarding everything from livestock farms to mining doesn’t harm the Club’s reputation as much as it might, since few members of the public realize that the two groups work hand in glove. Earthjustice sued on behalf of the Sierra Club 38 times in 2003 alone.

Not even something as critical as military training can escape the Earthjustice legal machine. In early 2004, Earthjustice filed suit to stop Marine training exercises in the Makua Valley (Hawaii) citing concern for supposed endangered species habitat. The Army issued a terse statement in response to Earthjustice’s irresponsible legal maneuver: “To win the war against terrorism and get ready for future battles, the U.S. military must be prepared. The conduct of realistic live-fire training in Makua is part of that preparation.” In 2000, Earthjustice also sued to stop military training on the small, uninhabited island of Farallon de Medinilla, citing concern for migratory birds.

Bashing Ranchers

Just as the Sierra Club is no friend of farmers, it has also made enemies of ranchers. Sierra Club board member Lisa Force once served as regional coordinator of the Center for Biological Diversity, which brags of prying ranchers and their livestock from federal lands. In 2000 and 2003, the two groups sued the U.S. Department of the Interior to force ranching families out of the Mojave National Preserve. These ranchers actually owned grazing rights to the preserve; some families had been raising cattle there for over a century. No matter. Using the Endangered Species Act and citing the supposed loss of “endangered tortoise habitat,” the Club was able to force the ranchers out.

Not to be outdone by its former parent group, EarthJustice has sued the federal government to curb grazing on more than 13 million acres of public land in New Mexico and Arizona.

Suing for Profit

The Pew Initiative on Food and Biotechnology notes that one of Sierra Club executive director Carl Pope’s “major accomplishments” is his co-authorship of California’s infamous Proposition 65. “Prop 65” requires any product containing one of several hundred “known carcinogens” to bear a warning label — even if the chemical appears in concentrations so low that adverse health effects are essentially impossible.

Prop 65 has a “bounty hunter” provision to encourage frivolous lawsuits by trial lawyers looking to cash in on any product containing a listed “carcinogen” and lacking a warning label. Prop 65 “violators” can be fined up to $2,500 per day, per violation, and plaintiffs can collect up to 25 percent of the total take. Between 2000 and 2002, one California group called As You Sow (AYS) reaped more than $1.5 million playing the Prop 65 lawsuit game.

Sierra Club president Larry Fahn is also AYS’s executive director. A self-described “leading enforcer of Proposition 65,” As You Sow functions as a litigation machine, conjuring up lawsuit after lawsuit. The group has sued everyone from scuba gear manufacturers and retailers to the makers of nail care products.

Under Fahn’s leadership, AYS routes its Prop 65 money to some of the most radical groups around, including the Rainforest Action Network and the Ruckus Society (both co-founded by Earth First! godfather Mike Roselle), as well as California affiliates of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Waterkeeper Alliance and David Brower’s Earth Island Institute.

Another group funded by AYS is called Environmentally Sound Promotions — it’s run by Earth First! organizer Darryl Cherney. On a 1990 CBS broadcast of “60 Minutes,” Cherney made it clear where his Earth First! sympathies lead him. “If I knew I had a fatal disease,” Cherney said, “I would definitely do something like strap dynamite to myself and take out Grand Canyon Dam, or maybe the Maxxam Building in Los Angeles after it’s closed up for the night.”

Despite this web of extremist connections, few seem aware that the Sierra Club has institutionally embraced the most radical side of the green movement.

About Us

This site, created by the Center for Organizational Research and Education (CORE), is committed to providing detailed and up-to-date information about organizations and activists. We have analyzed scores of media clippings, official statements, and government documents to create this database. The organizations we track on this site are tax-exempt nonprofits, many of which engage in […]

Garry Klicker

Board member, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement; hog farmer