Susan Merrow, 43, is president of the Sierra Club, one of the nation`s oldest environmental groups. Founded by John Muir in 1898, the club has grown from 182,000 members in 1981 to 560,000 members now. Merrow presides at a time when a new oil shortage looms, and oil companies are once again looking to America`s wilderness and coasts to increase production. In August, shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait, Merrow and her board of directors voted to place a full-page ad in the New York Times calling for conservation instead of increased oil production. An English major who was graduated from Tufts University, Merrow is married and the mother of a 13-year-old daughter. She talked with Chicago writer Nina Burleigh in the Sierra Club office.
I grew up in Massachusetts and spent every summer up in Maine on the coast. I had a real strong feeling about it. Coastal Maine is a very magical place. I had a sense that there were beautiful wild natural places that should never change.
I suppose that would be the thing that made me vulnerable to the Sierra Club message.
In 100 years, I am only the third woman president of the Sierra Club. We sit for one-year terms. You can get a lot done in a year. (Her term expires in the spring.)
My husband and I are products of the first Earth Day back in 1970. We had our consciousness raised to the fact that the kinds of natural beauty we valued were finite. I guess what motivated me to get involved in the Sierra Club was mostly the feeling that the resources and natural beauty of the world were being depleted rapidly and that somebody had to do something about it.
We had read about the Sierra Club in 1970 and picked up a brochure at a small county fair in Connecticut. We learned about the legal defense fund and their litigation efforts, and we thought, ”We will support this by sending off a check every year and feel good about it.”
I had no notion of getting involved any other way than as a volunteer. I didn`t think we had anything else to offer. Then we received a notice about a local group meeting, and we decided to go and see what it was about.
After that meeting, I think we volunteered to bring sugar and cream to the next meeting. Then we volunteered a little more. Pretty soon, I began to keep the group records.
By 1979 I was involved in committees and was elected to the national club council. In 1984 I was asked to run for the board. It was a classic case of if you never say no, there`s no limit to where you can go. I kept accepting offers and requests as they came up.
Few women have become president of the Sierra Club. The only reason I can think there have been so few women directors is it may be that women tend to be more self-effacing. You have to go out and campaign to get on the board and count your votes to become president. Also, in order to be president, you have to commit an enormous amount of time and energy, which until recently it`s been harder for women to do.
The first New York Times ad we ever ran is reputed to have turned the tide (against) efforts to build a dam in the Grand Canyon. We use those ads
(in the Times) very seldom, but if we do, we try to speak out very boldly.
The modern Sierra Club was born with that full-page ad in the New York Times in 1968, when there was a threat the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon was going to be dammed. (Dams were proposed in Bridge and Marble Canyons, which would have flooded areas just outside the boundaries of Grand Canyon National Park.)
At that time, the Sierra Club was a tax-exempt organization, but not anymore. As the story goes around the campfire, we were served notice by the federal government that we were going to lose our tax status after that ad appeared. Losing our tax status was probably the best thing that ever happened to us because then we could speak out boldly. We no longer have to worry about losing our tax status.
We placed the most recent ad in August because with the present situation in the Middle East we anticipated that the oil companies would start trying to drill again. We have been talking for years about the fact that if we are going to continue to have the oil monkey on our back, one day we are going to go to war over oil.
While most people think that to develop domestic sources will solve the problem, we feel the cheapest barrel of oil is the barrel we save. Our conservation efforts have been an embarrassment, when you consider what Japan has done since the mid-`70s: They are totally dependent on foreign oil. They continue to find ways to conserve. They produce each unit of gross national product at half the energy we do.
The oil companies will say: Drain America first-the Arctic, Connecticut, George`s Bank.
Conservation is very much an issue. To start decimating some of our finest wilderness and most pristine environments without having made any sort of serious effort on efficiency and conservation is a disgrace.
Since the beginning of the Reagan administration, according to Sierra Club research (published as a report, ”Wasted Energy,” by Brooks Yaeger), the federal government`s investment in alternative energy has been cut by 70 percent.
In most European countries, people pay twice as much for a gallon of gas as we do. We are used to having cheap gas.
We had eight years of a Reagan presidency to whom conservation was anathema. He equated it with ”freezing in the dark.” We haven`t seen much of a conservation effort coming out of the Bush administration.
Right now, the single biggest important thing we could do is have more fuel-efficient cars. It is one of the most important ways to achieve fuel efficiency and not suffer these lifestyle changes that everyone is so worried about. There are enormous efficiencies to be gained, and the technology is there. With just a few miles per gallon increased fuel efficiency we could equal each year the oil that we were importing from Kuwait.
The oil-burning issue is now sort of two-pronged: We are raising it first to protect the wilderness and the pristine ocean ecosystems, but in the long run we also have global warming. The largest single contributor to global warming is the burning of fossil fuels.
Oil conservation has always been a priority. It is one of half a dozen top priorities. I guess it has moved higher on the agenda now that the threats are so immediate.
The Sierra Club is not against progress. During the 1970s when we were forced to be conservationists, the gross national product grew every year.
Some of those efficiencies are still in effect in our daily lives. We don`t even notice them. The fact that I can buy a much more energy-efficient refrigerator than I could 20 years ago hasn`t changed my lifestyle a bit.
Let`s make all the changes that don`t affect our lifestyle first and see how far we get. It`ll be significantly far. Then let`s talk about freezing in the dark. We can go a long, long way without feeling lifestyle changes.
The Sierra Club believes in using all lawful means to carry things out. Groups like Earth First and Greenpeace take to the streets, and that`s an important role to raise consciousness. Public policy has been our niche.
We are involved in a new kind of direct action, by trying to organize people as consumers. Over the past couple years in a few places where the regular public policy system didn`t work, direct consumer action had an effect, as in the case of Alar, the preservative put on apples.
Internationally, we don`t have chapters, but I have tried to focus us outside the U.S. There is great concern for the tropical rain forests.
Our biggest success so far has been we have persuaded world lending institutions to attach environmental criteria to their loans. Heretofore their loans have often gone into enormously environmentally destructive projects. The barriers, the borders between countries are becoming transparent environmentally. Pollution doesn`t respect those boundaries.
There are times when we work with industry. We find there are sympathetic industries, environmentally conscious and sound industries. Sometimes they want to change.
For a long time we will be on the opposite side of industries that exploit natural resources. Some of our biggest issues early on were over public lands, making sure these special, wild places were protected. Often, our competition in that are industries that drill or mine, or ranchers or loggers.
Around Earth Day you probably saw full-page ads in papers such as ”We are Atlantic Richfield and we love the environment ” or ”We`re from Amoco and we love the environment.”
A lot of industries tried to paint themselves green, and I can`t say they are not sincere. They also recognize that they have a serious problem and cannot survive as visibly environmentally destructive corporations, so they are trying to appear more environmentally conscious.
I have seen a change in some corporations in that they want environmentalists to sit down at the table with them. But we have to believe that it`s not just a public relations effort. The Sierra Club, with 100 years of history, is particularly vulnerable to corporations who want to ally themselves with us just because it looks good.
The issue of who to take money from has begun to come up. Up until a couple of years ago, the question of whether to take money from corporations was never a problem because nobody wanted to give us any.
This last Earth Day, all of a sudden people were coming to us with huge sums of money. McDonald`s offered us three-quarters of a million dollars to put out a booklet for youth.
But it would have been a booklet with the Sierra Club logo and the McDonald`s logo side-by-side. It would have been a good message, but we turned it down because we don`t want the Sierra Club name to be used to lull consumers.
The booklet would have been about recycling. But the best thing you can do about trash is reduce it at the source, and the notion of a fast-food restaurant where you go in and sit down and use plastic utensils and throw them away is inimical to the idea of source reduction. It was a very difficult decision. The board was quite split over it. We really wanted to do something with youth.
Out of that experience has grown a committee that looks at potential gifts and tries to screen them for what the intentions of the donor are and whether they are known polluters or not.
