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April 22, 2001, Modesto Bee published an article about Sierra Club board member Chad Hanson. Hanson showed up at a Sierra Club meeting at one of the city's finest hotels in 1997. "Here I had just been elected to the largest grass-roots environmental group in the world and I am having martinis in the penthouse of the Westin St. Francis," said Hanson, an environmental activist from Pasadena.

"What's wrong with this picture? It was surreal." Soon, Hanson was calling the Sierra Club by a new name: Club Sierra.

The article said high-rise offices, ritzy hotels and martinis are but one sign of wider change. Rising executive salaries and fat Wall Street portfolios are another. Put the pieces together and you find a movement estranged from its past, one that has come to resemble the corporate world it often seeks to reform.

"Salaries for environmental leaders have never been higher. In 1999 -- the most recent year for which comparable figures are available -- chief executives at nine of the nation's 10 largest environmental groups earned $200,000 and up, and one topped $300,000."

Further:

"In 1997, one group fired its president and awarded him a severance payment of $760,335. Money is flowing to conservation in unprecedented amounts, reaching $3.5 billion in 1999, up 94 percent from 1992. But much of it is not actually used to protect the environment. Instead, it is siphoned off to pay for bureaucratic overhead and fund raising, including expensive direct-mail and telemarketing consultants. Subsidized by federal tax dollars, environmental groups are filing a blizzard of lawsuits that no longer yield significant gain for the environment and sometimes infuriate federal judges and the Justice Department. During the 1990s, the U.S. Treasury paid $31.6 million in legal fees for environmental cases filed against the government. "

They such hypocrites. It's all about money. It's always about money.