Digital Environmental Movement

This page covers the established environmental advocacy sector: large membership organizations and their affiliated foundations, working through litigation, lobbying and campaigning. The youth climate mobilizations of the past decade are covered on the climate-justice page, and the distinction is not stylistic — the two operate at completely different scales and through different mechanisms.

Scale

The Sierra Club and its affiliated foundation illustrate the sector’s size, and its structure.

Fiscal year	Sierra Club	Sierra Club Foundation
2022	$167.5M revenue	$87.7M revenue
2023	$173.4M revenue	$89.1M revenue

The two are separate filers with separate tax status — the Foundation’s ruling dates to June 1962, the Club’s to December 1968 — and the Foundation’s expenses exceeded its revenue by roughly $25 million in each of these years, consistent with a grantmaking body drawing down assets.

For comparison, the largest organization on the gun-reform-youth-movement page reported revenue under $8 million in its best year. The environmental sector is one of the most heavily resourced in American advocacy, and that fact does more to explain its operating methods than any account of its social media strategy.

Relationship to the youth movement

Fisher and Nasrin’s study of the youth climate movement’s coalitions is cited here for the boundary it helps draw. The youth mobilizations were not organized by these institutions and in several cases were organized in explicit contrast to them; a page that treated them as one movement would misdescribe both.

What was removed

The previous version described this as a “digital environmental movement” that “shifted from traditional institutional channels to internet-based organizing” beginning in the mid-2000s, with a chronology and a set of impact claims. The filings above show institutions that predate the internet by decades and remain institutionally organized; the framing was wrong, not merely uncited, and both it and the founded field, which read 2006, have been removed.