Please tell me about your time in Puerto Rico as a boy and how you relate to the land.
My uncle owned a house in Yunque National Forest that we used to celebrate major holidays, from Three Kings Day to Mothers Day and Holy Week. My family used to go camping together as Boy Scouts.
My mom was an influence. She was a nun. Even though I am not always focused on religious rituals and her call for service, she was a nun. She was also a scientist and had an ecology club at the school I attended. She was a teacher at the school, and we did recycling back in a time when there wasn’t much.
What is the organization’s approach to balancing climate change and conservation?
Both are one and the same to me. The Sierra Club has focused a lot over the last 10 years on becoming an organization that places justice and equity at its core. This is important because the environmental movement and environmental justice movement have not always worked together.
We want to make sure we are invited to any place we visit. There should also be a strong emphasis on bottom-up organization. That there is a spirit and solidarity and that everyone is included. We also need to share our resources. It’s this commitment to transformation at the Sierra Club that allows for us to be better allies than partners so that we can lead the movement rather than just leading it.
We are an organization that strives for better allies than what we have been in past. Recognizing where we might have caused harm in the history is part of that process.
While conservation and climate changes are often referred to as the same thing, we are now seeing that these two things can sometimes be in conflict. How do we evaluate the relative merits and benefits of each of these causes?
The greatest threat to humanity’s history is the climate crisis. There is no doubt that everything humans do has an effect on the natural world. Science is the best guide when it comes to developing strategies and taking action. Renewable-energy projects can have negative and positive consequences. These are far less than those for fossil fuels.
