27 Years of fighting for the planet with the Sierra Club, Interview with Bill Corcoran

As Bill approaches the end of his time working for the Sierra Club, I sat down with him to talk about what he’s learned in that time, hear some stories, and look at what’s as true about the Sierra Club as ever. 

 

Bill started as a front desk volunteer at the chapter offices. He then worked for the chapter and as the Southern California Regional Rep for that national field team on the Tejon Ranch settlement, the Sequoia National Monument, and the OC Toll Road campaign, before being hired by national and eventually running the Beyond Coal Campaign. 

 

In this interview, Bill reflects on the power of a bright-line goal to organize around. He talks about how to be in relationship with each other and our members. We discuss the ways in which the Beyond Coal campaign has transformed the Sierra Club, and also the qualities of the organization that remain as strong as ever. 

 

I wanted to make time for this conversation because of the deep respect I have for Bill. Both in my limited interactions with him, and in the deep respect I hear from everyone who’s worked with him. 

 

I hope you’ll listen and enjoy this conversation as much as I did.

 

Jonathan Howard · 27 Years of Fighting for the Planet with the Sierra Club, Interview with Bill Corcoran

 

Morgan

 

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Transcript

 

Morgan 

I reached out because I saw that you are leaving the club at the end of the month. And when I talk to people who have been involved with the Angeles chapter for a long time, they almost all remember you, and feel those who remember you always speak highly of you. You volunteered with the chapter, worked for the chapter, worked for national as a field rep, and then worked for the Beyond Coal campaign. What did I miss?

 

Bill  

Thanks, Morgan. I was drawn to the Sierra Club, through my volunteer work with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance in the early to mid 1990s. This is during a time with a lot of revisionist history being written about the so-called frontier. And really it was the beginning of the analysis of white settler colonialism in the West. So it was a fascinating time to get engaged. 

 

I lived in LA and wanted to connect with the Sierra Club, so I volunteered in the front office. I also went to the West LA group once, a long time ago, when I was active with the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance. I was told when I showed up that I had talked with the wrong person before coming to the meeting. The group did not do letters in their group meetings. But I persevered and walked out with 27 letters from folks in the meeting. So it was an interesting introduction, but it didn't put me off because I understood the power of the brand and the power, the scale of the organization and its unique connection of local activism and federal activism. 

 

So yeah, I started out, you know, as a volunteer in the front office alphabetizing the regional group newsletters and doing whatever. And then there was the salvage logging rider in Clinton Gore days and this was an attempt to open the forest up to loggers being able to go in and haul down trees from fire burned areas. So that was a big and interesting fight. I had a contract to do that to the California wilderness coalition and was housed in the Angeles Chapter Southern California field office. And then I think I backed into some weird hybrid job at the time where one was half national and half chapter that was your first full invisible to me what this what this was, but now it's some sort of guinea pig without knowing it. And then I decided that's not for me, and then kind of backed into a for a while, month to month and then eventually part time job with the Angeles chapter. That thing grew into a full time job. And I don't think I had a job interview anywhere along the way there, it just kept coming together. And at that point, the national office and the chapter we're in the same suite of offices and I was able to begin to interact with and receive mentorship from the national staff as well and found that to be very, very helpful in my career trajectory, particularly working with Jim Blundqvist, who was at the time the Southern California field rep and had been in with the club for a very long time as leading as Pacific Northwest office and then stint in DC as the organization's public lands lobbyist and married to Rose Capelchinski (sp), who had also worked for Sierra Club and then went on to her political career ending up you know, working for Barbara Boxer. So that plugged me into a much bigger world. And he (Jim) understood how the organization works, you know, from local to national level. So it was an ideal mentorship.

 

Morgan

So he had been there for decades. It sounds like by the time he met him, yeah,

 

Bill

He had started working back in the 80s. And and when he left, he came into my office and said, I'm leaving and you should apply for my job. And I somehow then wound up in the field department as the Southern California Regional Representative. And then that went on for a while and then I moved into the beyond coal campaign when then Director Bruce Nillis recruited me into the campaign in 2009. So that's the potted history of my path. But it was a very good way of entering the organization so that I have the experience of being a volunteer. So for example, I know what it feels like to sit at a desk and you're going through some administrative tasks as a volunteer and then people are talking over your head about where they want to go have lunch and talk about some interesting topic, you know, but no one invites you. And so that really stuck with me too –  how how do we welcome in and support and engage volunteers who show up, it's really important. That's the heart and soul of the organization. Yeah,

 

Morgan

As a side note, I make a point of including our front desk volunteers and all of our kind of standing meetings and conversations for just for that reason.

Thinking about your time at the chapter, what work are you most proud of?

 

Bill

I did a lot of public lands work at the chapter. And it was a time when there were some good opportunities to do that. We had an ancient forest Task Force and so that was a conduit to work on giant sequoia issues on Sequoia National Forest and so being able to contribute to the ultimate establishment of Giant Sequoia National Monument on Sequoia National Forest was very rewarding even though the protection of sequoias and particularly aggravated by climate disruption now continues to be a live topic up until this very moment. But it was really rewarding to at least stop logging, misguided logging projects on the forest particularly that impacted the probe and to work in coordination with other chapters on that. You know, in my days working on the Tejone Ranch conservation agreement goes way back to the time I was at the chapter when the issue was beginning to emerge. And I think the biggest thing and most interesting campaign I got to help work on was the effort to stop the toll road through San Onofre State Park and through the backcountry east of San Clemente. And that was where I had the great fortune to work with Elizabeth Lamb who was then on the field staff for the Sierra Club. And, you know, we ran I think, an amazing campaign on a shoestring but it was in the days of direct mail and so, you know, we would mail and phone chase and create events and just build a lot of momentum and also really leaned into building the biggest attempt possible to push back on the toll road agency in southern Orange County. And I feel that we really shifted the politics and transformed the debate around the future of sensitive lands in that part of the county. So that to me was the most rewarding is a holistic, kick ass campaign with many partners that took about 10 years I think from the time sitting in the Angeles Chapter volunteer Paul Carlton's living room in San Clemente. And then after I moved off of the campaign, the 1000s of folks who turned out in a coastal commission hearing to watch the project get voted down. Yeah. So the Toll road really sticks out for me. 

 

Morgan

Sounds like that might have also been one of the most fun, by how you talk about it.

 

Bill

It was a great time. I will always remember Julia Dewese who was a middle school teacher with a couple of kids in San Clemente and she had volunteered and I just remember this one night where you just saw the light go on in her eyes when she realized ‘oh, I can beat City Hall’. And that to me is ‘the organizer eye’, when you see folks flip the switch internally and realize they can't make a difference. And so being able to support that transformation, but tether it to winning time bound, tangible victories that both benefit the community and people in the more than human world, but also set up the next transformational campaign. I think that's the brass ring you want to reach for in a campaign and I had a chance to do that with many wonderful people. 

 

Morgan 

When I got involved with the Sierra Club in oh seven through the serious student coalition Sprog program, the you know, the hallmark of that training is sort of the strategy, like, strategy framework. How do you define strategy versus tactics? But really, it's the o-c - O-C model. Did you teach this?

 

Bill

No, tell me tell me about CC square.

 

Morgan 

Oh, yeah. O-c O-C I ad infinitum. Not Orange Count, but ‘organization-campaign’. And so you start with a little organization and you run a little campaign and that if you do it well, that campaign grows the size of the organization to medium sized. Oh, and so you can run a medium sized campaign and that gets you to a larger O, and so on.  I know this concept comes out of the deep Sierra Club trainings curriculum. Anyway, to segue into your organizing ‘eye’ and really helping to like, inspire and recruit and recruit and cajole people to become organizers. I'm curious how you used trainings within our members. 

 

Bill

I'm a big believer of ‘training through campaigning’. I'm less about just the general skills lab kind of thing. And I think it's much more from my experience and predilections that when you have a campaign that has picked a high enough profile fight, and drawn bright lines, and determined that it's important to build the biggest tent possible to build and project power to win, and you have clarity about the decision maker that when when those and that you're escalating the projection of that power over time, so that you're not just bumping along but you're you're you're really pressing this bright-line decision in a time bound way, with increasing urgency… if you do that work authentically, with volunteers on a community that that's how they're really going to learn and apply it and find out for themselves that it works. 

 

So that was a big part of our toll road campaign was run, and part of the ethos that Elizabeth Lamb brought to the work. And it was a real focus on meaningful volunteer engagement, where you learned how to create events, how to make them up so that you can continue to have momentum how to leverage the hell out have a pretty arcane Army Corps of Engineers hearing process about special area management plans, the infamous SAPS. I think it's in the, in the trenches that the training really clicks and happens. But it's very important in a campaign, the folks on the ground aren't treated like a faucet, you turn on and off, in that kind of mobilizing way though mobilizing is really important when you need it. It’s best when there's an earned sense of co-ownership and engagement. So that when you leave, as you know, you're always going to end up finishing the campaign and accepting that there's increased civic capacity wherever the campaign has been to take on the next fight, because that's how democracy can actually flourish.

 

Morgan

So speaking of big campaigns, you've obviously worked on the beyond coal campaign. A lot and while you're not someone to take credit for starting that campaign. I wonder if you could help introduce it. How did the Sierra Club come to take on the beyond coal campaign? And what did that mean for the organization?

 

Bill

The genesis of the Beyond Coal campaign is a classic Sierra Club story, basement meetings and entrepreneurialism and an aha moment. So let me tell you what I mean by that. In the early 2000s, there was an effort underway by developers to build some new coal plants in the upper in the Midwest, and Bruce Nilles, who was then I believe, with the environmental law program in was in Madison, and Verena Owen who is still my co lead on the beyond coal campaign, began meeting with some folks to figure out how are we going to tackle and win these proposed coal plants? At the same time, what you had was the Dick Cheney secret energy Task Force. They were hoping that the US would build 200 new coal plants in the country. And it was clear that if that happened, we would lose all hope, meeting our climate goals, as well as all the pollution from these plants that would impact communities across the country, primarily marginalized ones. 

 

Morgan

And climate was already a big priority for the club at that time?

 

Bill

It had become that in 2005 when there was a year long process by which the club identified climate as its priority, and that's around the time. That's right. So here were a few people getting together figuring out how we're gonna stop these proposed coal plants. In the meantime, you got the Cheney energy Task Force and 200 proposed coal plants climate game over if built. And so volunteers and staff were working on this and had the aha moment that we really need to stop playing ‘Whack a Mole’. And we have to go after every proposed coal plant in the United States. And it was that clarity of that bright line that attracted the beginning of the funding that allowed the campaign to scale. And so it grew pretty quickly, and it stopped virtually every proposed coal plant in United States. Then in 2009, the decision was made, ‘All right, if we're now going to stop digging the hole deeper and start filling in the hole.’ So we need to start retiring existing coal plants. And that was the place in the US economy where you had these large centralized sources of immense climate pollution that you could reach in and close down. And so that audacious goal of closing every existing coal plant in the United States by 2030 was hatched. And that became the big pivot for the campaign in 2010. And that's around the time I rolled into it and I think September 2009 was right at that pivot point.

 

Morgan 

And that's also when the Los Angeles like LA DWP 100% clean energy campaign got involved because you needed to get cities like LA just to cancel their existing contracts. Right?

 

Bill

Right. I became the Southwest rep for beyond coal. Again, picked into a guinea pig role of figuring out what the campaign rep position was and what should it look like. Yes, one of my first charges was, how do we move DWP and get these coal plants closed down and build clean energy. So yeah, that was one of my first charges right out of the gate.

 

Morgan

How do you think the coal campaign really changed the Sierra Club?

 

Bill

It in many ways transformed the Sierra Club. Why do I say that? The modern environmental law program that we have at Sierra Club is a product of the Beyond Coal campaign. We were involved in so much litigation all over the country that we needed to build our internal ranks of lawyers. So we went from being a fairly small shop that managed a lot of local counsel into a significant part of the organization that oversees litigation and regulatory dockets all across the country for the coal campaign and now for other campaigns. So it also set the model for that for beyond dirty fuels, clean transportation for all etc. 

 

The other thing that demonstrated was that the organization could successfully scale a very focused and ambitious campaign and execute on it, and that attracted funding. And it also I think, helped to transform what I think is often often in the past and my experience, other organizations would look at the Sierra Club and say ‘Oh, that's the rabble rousers, and when we need to turn that tap on we'll do it and we'll throw a little money your way to do that’. And in my experience, this campaign transformed people's understanding and expectations of what the organization can and really needs to do, again, because of its unique ability to leverage from the most local activism to Capitol Hill, and all stops in between. 

 

Morgan 

Is there like an emblematic beyond coal fight that exemplifies kind of the best of the Sierra Club? 

We know the stats, we know the hundreds of coal plants that we've stopped. But I would love to hear you bring us into the mind of Bill Corcaran helping to manage all this. What's the campaign that exemplifies ‘this is how we do it’?

 

Bill

Yeah, thanks. Thanks for the question. The Read Gardner coal plant that no longer is standing, that the read Gardner coal plant was about an hour northeast of Las Vegas on the way toward the British Virgin River Canyon, if you've ever driven up through that amazing road and the plant, just north of Lake Mead had been built directly adjacent to the land of the Moapa band of Paiutes. And the plant was operated by NV energy, which was eventually bought by Berkshire Hathaway Energy and so at some point became Warren Buffett's coal plant in Nevada. And we very early on got involved in fighting an expansion of the coal plant and then flipped over to how are we going to close this thing down. I had the opportunity several times, and of course our organizer on a daily basis, to work quite closely with the Moapa Paiutes and to learn how the not only the pollution from the stacks of this coal plant which is directly adjacent to their town, affected them, but the coal ash because the company would dump coal ash on roadbeds and then had it in pits that aren't covered. And so when the wind blew I blew the ash over the community, sometimes obscuring it completely. So these were folks who had coal ash in their streets and it was corroding their cars and the coal ash that was airbound in the smoke itself, which just had terrible impacts. On the public health of the Moapa Paiutes. And of course, not one of them really had a job at the plant. And these were folks who'd already been displaced from where the plant was built, and then where whites had taken their land over closer to the river valley a little further east. So not only that, they lost those lands within a coal plant dump next to their community. And so we worked for a number of years to facilitate and support leadership by the Moapa band of Paiutes. And to pick every fight we could with NV energy – in the courts and regulatory processes, both federal and state. And at some point, Senator Harry Reid took an interest in this plant, and he had his own connection to some folks on the Moapa Paiute Band and also wanted to leverage Berkshire Hathaway energies purchase of the plant. He wanted to leverage that and figure out how to close it down. So we also got involved working with some of his folks. I got plugged in right away to how Nevada politics actually work, and how legislation actually gets done. We passed one of the first, first big clean energy bills in Nevada that also set the groundwork for closing the Gardener plant. And so we finally prevailed. Earth justice took a big role in this as well, working on the coal ash issue. And I'm just happy to say that it's shut down and gone.  And what happened was once we also shut down Navajo Generating Station right and got LADWP out of that plant, which is my other favorite plant story, but we don't have to pay for that one. But it opened up one space on our transmission line that runs right by the mob and the pirates. And so LADWP into a contract to develop solar on the Moapa land that they fully supported. And then because we got LADWP to cancel their coal contract, there was room for the solar power to come into LA. Of course, there were lots of bumps and twists along the way. But there was a very bright line which is that this damn coal plant has got to go, and the injustice of this is intolerable, and it's urgent for people to act. And for me personally, the highlight of the end was when I got a call at the office in Koreatown, and this person said, Senator Reid is on the line. He thanked me and the club for all the work and it was a beautiful experience from beginning to end on a really harsh and unpleasant topic.

 

Morgan 

Thank you. I can picture it.

 

Bill

Next time you're driving toward all points on the north rim Grand Canyon, Southern Utah, Salt Lake. Just as you’re about to go by the Moapa Paiutes gas station and fire workstation, you will see some solar panels on the left and you will not see are some coal smoke stacks.

 

Morgan

A couple more questions. What advice do you have for Sierra Club members who really believe in the mission and want to advocate to both enjoy and explore but also protect our living planet? 

 

Bill

Where to begin? I guess I want to start in a way that might be surprising. But from my perspective, the work at this juncture, you know, maybe you've heard the phrase ‘the poly-crisis’. The notion that we're not just facing the ecological crisis, the climate crisis or the crisis of exploitative capitalism. These are all a poly-crisis. And to me, they're a crisis of the human spirit. The question is ‘what is my role in repair reparation, in relationship? You know, when I came into the work, I felt a lot of anger about what was going on. And that can be a fuel for a while, but only for a while. And I think between maturing and a very long Zen practice that not by coincidence is the same length as my time at Sierra Club, that I've just come more and more to appreciate the essential foundation of really inquiring what it means to be in relationship. Of course, that's different for each of us with our identities. But it is a common human challenge. And one that's poorly met right now. I think doing that kind of work is fundamental. To then really assess, ‘okay, what do I want to work on and why and what would it look like to make a difference, to make that change in the world and who does it bring along and who doesn't?’ That's fundamental. 

 

Then I would say, be ambitious. Don't don't just assume I gotta go for the half-loaf. Be really ambitious,  that's what the moment needs. But it has to come from this place of real self inquiry. To be ambitious, and to persevere and to know that these fights take a long time and even when you win, those wins might be reversed. And so you're not only working for what's immediately in front of you, but what what what for generations you'll never know. You know that you're securing a more habitable and just planet. So the 

 

Be really clear about the choice. Because if you're not clear about the choice that decision makers have to make, the public will never be. ‘If you're explaining you're losing’, as Jim Carville said and he's right. So I think it's also very important to have a very bright line drawn, and to understand and take the time to understand how you are going to build an ever broadening group of people who can target a very clear decision maker in an increasingly urgent way to act? It won't always work, but it's pretty much the formula. I think you know this, but it's important to not confuse press releases with action. The press is important, but it's more important to get out there and project power. That can look like all kinds of things. 

 

I said, don't go for the half-loaf, go for the full loaf, but I would also urge folks to understand that it's rare that you're gonna get everything you want. And so knowing when to hold them and when to fold them, I think is also an important mark. Because the way I was mentored and the way I've experienced it is to bite the hardest you possibly can, get the best win you can, that doesn't shut down the opportunity to get further wins, and then go for the further win. And rinse and repeat. So I think that's really important as well. 

 

And then this is my last point in this very windy disquisition. But, you know, in building a big tent on the shadow side of that is infighting. And I think that infighting among environmentalists is just a terrible shame because it's hard enough swimming upstream. It's hard enough, very, in this culture, to fight for the values that we espouse. It's hard anyway. And so when we infight, and if it comes from a place of ‘no, it has to be my solution, 100% versus another one’, then I think you're just yielding the field to your opponents. So this is a question again of relationship? What's the culture I want to live in and create and how is that reflected in how I do my advocacy? So, you know, those are the thoughts that come to mind. 

 

Morgan

The last question i wanted to ask. What would you say has been true about the Club in your time here? What endures and spans all this? 

 

Bill

This unique combination of national, local, volunteer and staff. 27 years a staffer, oh my goodness. If it’s done right, everyone can keep each other honest. At the national level, it’s informed by the details at the local level. At the local level, it’s informed by the ambition and larger aggregating needs of the national perspective. And when it’s held with integrity, it’s a wonderful, unique thing in the movement. 

 

And there’s this quality that we are ambitious, and we push hard, but we also know when to take a win and move on. And that can be a hard decision to make, but there are opportunity costs to consider. That pragmatism, born of ambition, and that local and national dynamic are the two that stand out for me at this time. 

 

Morgan

You’ve worked for the Club for 27 years, coming to an end at the end of this month. What else would you like to share? 

 

Bill

This is a time when there’s a lot of tension and stress within the organization. There’s a lot of stuf fpointed at Ben Jealous as the new ED. I hope that, in the spirit of what I said earlier, we can really consider how we’re in relationship together. Let’s not confuse our opinions with the truth. That’s just a good human skill anyway, but particularly in an organization, I don’t think it can survive and do its best work if success is measured as ‘my point of view has prevailed and others have been diminished in the process.’ It doesn’t mean that everyone has to agree with everything that the management is doing, but I hope it can be expressed in a way that brings everyone together. What kind of world do you want to live in, and are you helping to manifest it right now? I ask myself that a lot,a nd really matured a lot over my time at the Club. I’ve really come to appreciate this fundamental principle of being in relationship - it is the antidote to the alienation and hyper-individualism that we’re seeing in our culture. It can poison our institutions and we shouldn’t be a place that’s poisoned like that, we should be a place offering the antidote to the ills of our world.