Dave Scott

Dave Scott
Residence
Columbus, Ohio
Nominating committee candidate
Member Since
1990
Life member
Occupation
Attorney (retired)
Sierra Club Leadership Positions
  • Board Director (2009-2015, 2016-2022)
  • President (2013-2015)
  • SC Vice President, VP for Conservation, VP for Campaigns and Programs (2010-2013)
  • Treasurer, Finance Committee Chair (2018-2020)
  • Investment Committee (2013-2015, Chair 2018-2020)
  • Conservation Policy Committee Chair (2016-2018, 2021-2022)
  • Wildlands and Wilderness Team (2022)
  • Mission Strategy Advisory Committee (2008-2009, 2010-2013)
  • Conservation Governance Committee (2005-2008)
  • Sustainable Planet Strategy Team (2002-2004, Chair 2004-2005)
  • Great Lakes Ecoregion Chair (1998-2002)
  • Midwest Conservation Committee Chair (1999-2001)
  • Ohio Chapter Chair (1999-2002)
Email
davescottsc@gmail.com
Statement

We are now summoned to a long twilight struggle, a fight to stop climate catastrophe, biodiversity collapse, and threats to democracy. Sierra Club has a 131-year history of environmental victories. We need wins more than ever, and I can help get them.

I bring proven leadership. From 2009 until 2019, my colleagues elected me to the Board’s Executive Committee seven times. I know what makes campaigns succeed: I was VP for Campaigns and later President as our Beyond Coal Campaign ramped up. Since its launch, 70% of US coal plants have retired or been slated to retire, preventing millions of tons of CO2 and other pollutants.

I became a Sierra Club activist because Sierra Club fought to protect places like wilderness Alaska, the Mojave Desert, the Everglades and Great Lakes. As a lawyer, I knew the Club’s proud legacy of developing conservation law. As an Executive Committee member, I had final responsibility for Sierra Club’s litigation program for seven years. Even under Trump, we got crucial wins. We’ve upheld pollution laws, protected wolves and grizzlies, and exposed Trump EPA and Interior leaders’ corruption.

As Treasurer, I got more funds directed to state chapter work, Arctic Refuge protection, and our crucial effort to defeat Trump. As President, I visited our chapter leaders, testified at EPA hearings, represented Sierra Club at a UN Climate Conference, spoke at the Wilderness Act’s 50th anniversary celebration, and presented our first award honoring Environmental Justice heroes.

Our effective national, state and local advocacy must continue and grow. We must speed the transition off fossil fuels, elect environmental champions, and make officials' vows to protect 30% of lands and water by 2030 reality. We must demand corporate accountability and end the environmental racism that’s poisoned communities like Flint. Above all, we must protect the democracy that makes citizen activism possible. I know this organization as only someone who’s served as its President, Vice President and Treasurer can. With your vote, I’ll help us win.

ENDORSEMENTS

Vice President and former Our Wild America Campaign leader Marion Klaus; Director and former Vice President Ross Macfarlane; John Muir Award honorees Don Parks, Dick Fiddler, Vicky Hoover; California-Nevada Desert Committee Chair Joan Taylor; Former San Francisco Bay Chapter Chair Becky Evans

Election Forum Responses

Candidates were asked ten questions to give voters more information about relevant issues. You can view the responses of all candidates to a question by clicking on the individual questions below.

Question 1

Question 1

How do you practice anti-racism?

I’ve practiced anti-racism in my legal career since it began 35 years ago. My work started in Appalachia, a place with its own severe challenges.  But for 15 of those years, I worked as a poverty lawyer in three large Midwestern cities, and focused on access to health care, housing – survival needs. My clients were disproportionately Black and disproportionately single women with children. When welfare reform became law, I persuaded county officials to adopt the most compassionate rules permitted. I’ve also done successful housing discrimination work.

In the latter part of my career, I shifted to enforcing disability protection provisions of the Civil Rights Act and Fair Housing Act. There too, a large number of my clients have been Black. I’ve presented training sessions on those laws for other attorneys, public officials. and the Ohio Civil Rights Commission, as well as Voting Rights trainings. I know firsthand the overwhelming daily challenges people face because of their race and disability status.

That experience helped me be a more effective director in my 12 years on the Sierra Club board. As Sierra Club VP, I approved the Club’s commitment to following the Jemez Principles, centering our environmental organizing work on what frontline communities say they need from us. That organizing principle builds trust and helps us win. And over ten years ago, I joined board colleagues in voting to begin Sierra Club’s commitment to racial justice and social equity, and I’ve voted to make that commitment reality every year since.

Question 2

Question 2

How do you think we can better retain more staff and volunteers, and recruit and retain them into higher levels within the organization, who are from marginalized communities or who are otherwise underrepresented?

The best way to find out what people need is to ask them, in a way that ensures confidentiality. And to keep asking them on a regular basis. That both means the employees we have and people in marginalized communities who don't work for Sierra Club. There are also a number of experts who can help a nonprofit with retention and promotion of persons from marginalized communities – we can tap the best available resources. We can create an organizational culture where successful recruitment and retention is an expectation and our progress is measured. We can make it clear that insensitivity or discrimination against marginalized people will not be tolerated in any part of the Sierra Club. And of course, one way to retain people from marginalized communities and create a place where they want to advance is to create the best possible workplace for all of our employees.

Question 3

Question 3

What environmental issues are pressing in your community, and how do they intersect with economic, environmental, and racial justice? What tensions at work make the problem so difficult to solve?

I live in Columbus Ohio. Like too many places in America, Columbus is two cities – one affluent and mostly white, one struggling and predominantly Black. With the two parts often geographically divided by the location of 1960s interstate highways. Issues that arise here include the underappreciated public health hazard from automobile air pollution and other sources, the proximity of low-income Black neighborhoods to noxious places like a sewage treatment facility, and marginalized people living in old and substandard rental housing stock that creates its own environmental health hazards. In terms of racial and economic justice, those problems combine with a history of police violence, underfunded schools, and inadequate public transit and public housing programs.

What tensions make these problems so difficult to solve? One is that they spring from large disparities in household income and assets, and those are not problems cities alone have the resources to solve – although there is much that cities and states can do. Another challenge is the widespread history of single-family zoning that helps keep people priced out of better housing and safer neighborhoods, as well as a history of neighborhood segregation by race and income that make it harder for non-whites to move into even accepting neighborhoods, because they don't see many people of their own race. Columbus needs to do better, and I’m hopeful it will.

Question 4

Question 4

What equity issues do you believe Sierra Club is overlooking and needs to engage on?

Challenging as it is, voting rights and democracy protection top my list. Not that we aren't aware of those already, but because progress on everything else depends on them. If America’s marginalized people and their allies are denied effective representation through the wide array of obstacles we’re now seeing enacted into law, our system fails them. Racial and gender rights diminish or disappear – including abortion rights – and  autocracy by a minority wins. There’s a range of things we can do to work with allied groups on voting rights and democracy protection, but none is more important than a strategic Sierra Club Political Program that can target resources where we can make a difference – as environmental groups have done in New Mexico and Colorado elections.

I also believe that we as an organization and our society as a whole must develop a concept of moral rights that extends to future generations and the other species who share this planet. Not in any extreme sense, but we need to recognize that the choices we make now – the downward spiral of climate stability and biodiversity that’s now well underway – will have extreme impacts on both marginalized people now living, but all humans and living things to come. Through no fault of their own. 

Question 5

Question 5

We have competing fundraising priorities between National and the Chapters. How do you recommend we address this tension?

I recognize this problem, and as a board member, I took some steps toward solutions, although more needs to be done.  In 2020 and 2021, I chaired a board-appointed Chapter Funding Task Force with staff and volunteer leaders from both small and large chapters. The board approved our recommendations to cover increased chapter personnel costs, to provide more certainty in national project fund-sharing with chapters, to provide money for attending trainings and other expenses chapters incur, and to provide more support for small chapters. As longtime chair of the Board’s Gift Acceptance Committee, I also consistently tried to help chapters get needed money.

We can do more. One piece of this has to be the national organization sharing more money with chapters, just because it’s easier to raise large sums on a national level – both from major donors and from our roughly 100,000 small monthly Wilderness Guardian donors. We should reconsider some restrictions on when chapters can send notifications to all their members. And we should add more staff dedicated to chapter-level fundraising.

Question 6

Question 6

The Sierra Club is a vast and complex organization by any standards, and it is unusual in that both staff and volunteers are central to the mission of the Club and its day-to-day operations. Tell a story about a time you navigated or attempted to reform a bureaucratic system, and what you learned from the experience.

Again, I’d cite my work chairing the Chapter Funding Task Force in 2021 and early 2022, and I'm glad to say it was a positive one. The task force included a good cross-cutting mix of chapter directors and senior volunteer leaders from large and very small chapters, Finance and fundraising staff, and a board colleague.. Because of the informed input I got from the chapter staff and volunteers, we had a number of consensus recommendations,  most of which were incorporated in the board-approved annual budget.

What did I learn or relearn? That it’s essential to have the right people in the room. The chapter representatives were knowledgeable about not only their own chapters but the concerns of other chapters. My board colleague posed constructive questions and played a key role. Senior Finance staff  knew a lot about problems common to chapters and worked hard to be helpful.  It also helped to have task force members who were recommended by chapter leaders and worked cooperatively towards a common goal.

I’ve chaired a lot of time-limited Sierra Club task forces. Whether those succeed or struggle depends upon members who know the problem we’re addressing or how to get needed background. And most of all, on people who will work collaboratively towards a clear set of goals.

Question 7

Question 7

Tell us about a time you managed or navigated a conflict within Sierra Club?

In 2010 I was Vice President for Conservation, the lead volunteer on conservation issues. President Obama’s 2009 economic recovery law included a major funding for new solar projects. Sierra Club had a strong internal divide over one proposed project in California’s Ivanpah Desert, home to many endangered tortoises and other wildlife. Many of the Club’s desert activists, legal and conservation staff members believed that we should sue to try to force the project’s move to degraded land along the freeway. Top staff disagreed. I believed we should sue, a belief reinforced by several LA Times articles after Ivanpah’s completion. For reasons I understand, the board voted not to. I later went with senior staff to visit a small community in the desert and hear the concerns (and anger) of desert activists.

To be clear, nothing about this dispute was easy. By 2010, the need for a massive shift to renewable energy was glaring. After the board voted against a lawsuit, I worked to develop a process policy that would ensure a few things when chapters wanted to oppose renewable energy projects. First, real dialogue between Sierra Club’s national campaigns and chapter leaders and activists; second, senior volunteer representation on a new panel that would decide when disputes should be directed to the full board’s agenda. Processes always need to be reviewed later, but Sierra Club needed a clear process then, and my work made it happen - - even though I’d opposed what turned out to be a disastrous project.

Question 8

Question 8

Please describe your successes and failures regarding your work within your community as an agent of social and political change -- specifically those supporting environmental justice goals.  What did you learn from them and how has your philosophy about how to create change evolved because of your experiences?

One example was my work several years back in an effort to safeguard the state of Ohio’s right to protect the Lake Erie shoreline, a right that also protects public access.  Many Great Lakes states faced the same issue, Michigan included. This is an environmental justice issue in that many Black and other marginalized people fish and pursue other recreation activities at the lake. The problem arose when wealthy lakefront property owners banded together and claimed that their deeds gave them absolute property rights extending into the waters.

I worked with leaders from other environmental organizations, and we got a large number of constituent calls to key committee members in the state legislature. We were able to overcome well-organized and well-funded property rights groups. What I learned strategically was that those state committees could be influenced more readily than I expected – by targeting constituent contacts. I learned that on many issues, state legislators did not hear from constituents that often. From the opposition, I first learned the visual impact of packing a hearing room with people wearing the same tee-shirts.  I also learned the value of working with leaders from multiple groups – in that case, birders, anglers and many others.

Question 9

Question 9

What is your experience with the political process, including campaigns, elections, and the legislative process? How do you think Sierra Club can build its political power?

I've done volunteer work on campaigns for my entire adult life, including door-to-door canvassing in New Hampshire’s presidential primaries. I’ve also had a role in Sierra Club’s political candidate endorsement process for many years. I interviewed 2006 US Senate candidate Sherrod Brown and other candidates for the Ohio Chapter. Since my 2009 election to the national board, I’ve voted on revisions to our extensive Political Endorsement Guidelines, working with members of our national Political Committee. I’ve also voted on our national Political Action budget, including our major effort to turn out environmental voters in the critical 2020 election – an effort I supported as Treasurer. I also approved some time-sensitive political program decisions in my role as President.

How can we build political power? First, through our environmental advocacy at the local and state level: people are more likely to listen to us if they know who we are –  if they see us working for them in the community. Second, through expanding our efforts to put all materials in both English and Spanish and take other steps to make them accessible. Finally, at the national political level – in presidential contests and in key Senate and House races – we need to work with allied groups and target resources effectively. We can’t match what Big Oil and tech billionaires spend, but we can win elections by working hard, working smart, and mobilizing our greatest asset – our membership.

Question 10

Question 10

Tell us what you have learned about yourself – your strengths, weaknesses, and values – through your involvement in the Sierra Club?

Strengths. Since the mid-1990s, colleagues have entrusted me with leadership roles in almost every Sierra Club entity I’ve served on, including president, vice president and treasurer of the national club. I’ve taken on not only those public roles, but many others where some task had to be done. I try to be thoughtful. I work hard. I know that people want and deserve to be respected and heard. I know a lot about the Sierra Club. And I write effectively: over the years, I’ve had 15 letters or op-eds in the NY Times, many on environmental topics, and many more in my local newspaper.

Weaknesses?  It’s easy to overcommit,  and I need to take time before responding to requests. Also, it  can take a real effort to balance my commitment to doing what I believe is right and still striving to be collaborative with those who may sharply disagree. Voting patterns invariably appear in any committee, the board included. If I'm reelected to the board, I will strive to bridge gaps as much as I can. I see that as an especially important need on this board.

Values. One thing I’ve learned is how strongly I value the mutual respect, personal relationships – the friendships – that develop on a hardworking board like Sierra Club's. I care about people – respecting what they believe and how they feel. I will always do my best to implement that value. That I promise you.