Wouldn’t you know it. Follow BI around long enough and you come across family—if only the kind of family you see at funerals and weddings. Oracle finally brought us together again with its sustainability theme at last week’s OpenWorld.

The Sierra Club and I used to be close. My mother led San Francisco Bay Chapter hikes, and much later I found myself deep in greenhood as an editor and organizer. So imagine my surprise, having left “home” so long ago, to witness one-time Sierra Club president Adam Werbach on a panel of environmentalists on a stage. They debated “the economy or the environment?”

The three of them—Werbach plus natural-capitalism advocate Hunter Lovins and Rainforest Action Network founder Randy Hayes—faced off with four business people, representing the supposed monolith once known at my house as the enemy.

I’d never noticed Werbach’s wide mouth. I noticed it as he smiled, which he did often up there hunched over at the table, making little jokes with Hayes and Lovins as the event began. All three seem accustomed to the stage. After all, public speaking is their lifeblood, their source. Their bodies and faces, all graying now, also signal certitude. They can joke because they are forgiven, like reconciled Catholics. Science is on their side, and so are most audiences, and they love it all.

I had to wonder, then, about the way Werbach blasted the guy from Fiji Water, purveyors of bottled water shipped to North America by tanker. Rob Six, VP of corporate communications, had dared to tout Fiji’s reduced carbon footprint as part of the solution. Werbach called that a “lie” because he felt it was actually a small reduction of extravagant waste.

Werbach is of the David Brower school of shooting for the stars. Brower, of course, was a great Sierra Club leader. As the club’s first executive director, he launched the book publishing operation. Make people see the natural wonders, he argued, and they’ll fight for them. So—the story goes—he grabbed a vast “fire fund” accrued over decades by leaders of the club’s rustic Clair Tappaan Lodge and used it for capital. The club never restored the fund, but business is business when you’re shooting for the stars.

If Werbach’s “lie” charge reminds you of Dick Cheney’s pooh-poohing of individual Californian’s ability to reduce power consumption significantly during the 2001 crisis, you’d be wrong. Cheney was just cynical. Werbach is just out to promote himself with noise.

Business is finally catching on. Green is going secular. You can thank Al Gore, Hunter Lovins, her ex Amory Lovins, Katrina or more likely writer Paul Hawken and others. You can turn away from Werbach and his fellow Dark Green leaders.

Fiji Water is not a poster child for sustainability, I know. But let’s appreciate what they’ve done. What else do you suppose they’re going to do, shut it all down? Sure, have the PR people draft one last letter to shareholders: “Here’s your money. Go invest in Green.”

We shoot for the stars because it’s inspiring. But while we’re at it, we wander among the street lights and shoot for the targets we can hit. So, Adam, don’t look down from your mountain and piss on those who try.

I listened to the yammering in Sierra Club committee meetings 20 years ago, before I got into technology, and thought that the “real” world knew better.

One little incident convinced me. At one meeting of the group overseeing the Sierra Club’s old ski lodge, Clair Tappaan Lodge, someone wanted to change the name of a room, the Puce Room. A woman who’d just redecorated in there wanted to rename it after the just-passed folk singer Kate Wolf.

I really liked the old name, especially apt for the room’s cold concrete walls and rusty dripping pipes. The committee, though, was about to approve the change. Then at the last minute, the mischievous manager piped up. “Ted has been in touch with a group that’s all upset with changing the name.” I had joked to him earlier that morning that I wish there were such a group.

I played along. “Yes,” I said deadpan, “they call themselves Traditionalists for Puce, and they’re really pissed off.”

I heard throats clear and papers ruffle. Something had changed. A few minutes later we voted: 7 to 1 for keeping the old name.

Legacy

In the years since, that committee continued to fiddle with the dining hall and micromanage staff. But they seem to have one significant legacy: the Club’s national board of directors has adopted their methods.

Now under consideration, about to be passed: Project Renewal. It’s the fourth or so in a years-long string of plans, reports, frameworks, strategies and schemes cooked up by consultants.

It is admirable in some ways. It institutes metrics for communications, by which I hope some of the nearly unreadable newsletters will improve.

Unfortunately, it does some things just as well as the worst of the business world. It scrubs out the best in favor of the top-down business world’s worst. Like so many poorly led businesses, this organization’s leadership doesn’t know how the place really works.

The deflowering

The flower of the Club, the force, the perfume, the motivation that kept people up all night at kitchen tables to complete work by deadline is about to become as corrupt and dysfunctional as the worst Bush-era federal agency. Something called “coordinating pairs” puts handcuffs on volunteer committee leaders—arrested, in effect, by paid staff. It’s just one example.

I assume the hope—the covert hope—of those who know what they’re doing is that one by one the arresting staff members will see their volunteer counterparts succumb to authority.

Did anyone cry out? Did someone mention the Obama phenomenon, with its surging forces eagerly signing on? Yes, wise leaders did. The Sierra Club, after all, helped show the world that structure’s force. But that was a long time ago before consultants knew that forces driven by emotion wouldn’t work.

Bravo, Sierra Club. You’ve learned a lot from the real world.