Sierra Club Bulletins & Their Shift from Recreation to Environmental Advocacy, Publications Archive from 1941-1962

Sierra Club Environmental Advocacy

Archive

Sierra Club Bulletin issues and the 1957 Sierra Club: A Handbook, spanning February 1941 through December 1962, preserve a sustained run of the Club’s own printed advocacy from the period when western mountaineering and recreation culture was yielding to organized environmental politics. The June 1952 issue marks that transition with unusual directness, leading with “Can We Keep the Mountains Clean? In story and pictures, the answer is Yes,” while the surrounding numbers carry the Club’s San Francisco imprint and a broader conservation print world of Yosemite, Sequoia, Arctic wilderness, the Olympic Peninsula, and California natural history. The late 1940s and early 1950s were shaped by postwar dam construction, timber cutting, road building, and mounting recreational pressure on mountains, forests, and parks. As World War II gave way to a new contest over whether western public lands would be managed for extraction and development or for preservation, these Sierra Club publications trace the Bulletin’s movement away from a primarily club and outings-centered publication toward a more public conservation voice, a shift that became unmistakable under David Brower in the 1950s.
Sierra Club Bulletin Archive. San Francisco, California: Sierra Club, 1941-1962. Group of 10 paperbound Sierra Club publications, including nine issues of the Sierra Club Bulletin and one issue of The Sierra Club: A Handbook.
[1] Sierra Club Bulletin. Vol. XXVI, No. 1. San Francisco: Sierra Club, February 1941.
[2] Sierra Club Bulletin. San Francisco: Sierra Club, June 1952.
[3] Sierra Club Bulletin. Vol. 39, No. 6. San Francisco: Sierra Club, June 1954.
[4] Sierra Club Bulletin. Vol. 40, No. 8. San Francisco: Sierra Club, October 1955.
[5] Sierra Club Bulletin. Vol. 41, No. 10. San Francisco: Sierra Club, December 1956.
[6] The Sierra Club: A Handbook. San Francisco: Sierra Club, 1957.
[7] Sierra Club Bulletin. Vol. 43, No. 9. San Francisco: Sierra Club, November 1958.
[8] Sierra Club Bulletin. Vol. 44, No. 7. San Francisco: Sierra Club, October 1959.
[9] Sierra Club Bulletin. Vol. 45, No. 9. San Francisco: Sierra Club, December 1960.
[10] Sierra Club Bulletin. Vol. 47, No. 9. San Francisco: Sierra Club, December 1962.
The run follows the Sierra Club from the prewar February 1941 number, through the June 1952 clean-mountains feature, into the 1954-1956 years of the Echo Park fight, and onward to the 1960 and 1962 issues from the period when the Club’s conservation work had become more public, legislative, and nationally organized. Back-cover advertising places the Bulletin within a larger western conservation print network, with notices for books by Cedric Wright, Don Moser, Robert Marshall, Francois E. Matthes, Hans Huth, and A. Starker Leopold, alongside imprints for Sierra Club Books and University of California Press. Light rubbing and edge wear throughout; 1941 issue with verso staining; several issues with handling creasing and wear; 1960 issue with ownership inscription to upper cover; contents generally clean and legible. Overall good condition. A Sierra Club periodical archive from the years when Club publishing became a printed record of postwar environmental advocacy in the American West.

Item #23283

Price: $485.00