GUILDERLAND — Aaron Mair was elected this week as the Sierra Club’s first African-American board president.

Mair, a Guilderland resident, has been championing environmental conservation, particularly for underserved communities, for more than three decades, and hopes to blaze a new trail as president of the 2.4 million-member national conservation club.

Mair moved to Albany in the mid-1980s, fresh out of graduate school, when he was offered a job with the state’s Department of Social Services.

“When you get a job, you want to look for a place to settle and I had two options — the suburbs or the city, close to my office,” said Mair. “The concept of giving back and helping families in the urban community was a strong value that I was raised with.”

His father, he said, was a union worker and an advocate, and, as a result, Mair was raised understanding that civil rights and social organizations are critical aspects of any community and of the nation as a whole.

“It’s not about one group, it’s about threading all of America together,” said Mair. “Being an advocate for the dispossessed, disempowered, and the poor was logical for me.”

He said he saw that Albany had a troubled inner city and he and his wife, who was a teacher, decided it would be a good idea to live in a high needs school district where they could both be fully engaged with the community.

“Just as I was raised in an environment of activism, I could have raised my children in an environment of comfort,” said Mair. “A lot of parents seek to raise their children in a bubble, and, as a consequence, when the children grow up, they have a blindness or insensitivity to those in need.”

He did not want his daughters to have that blindness; he wanted them to realize how fortunate they were.

He and his family settled in Arbor Hill.

Located in the middle of Arbor Hill was the Albany New York Solid Waste to Energy Recovery — ANSWER — incinerator plant.

The plant was to become Mair’s first cause, and the one that would ultimately lead to his involvement with the Sierra Club.

The incinerator, he said, burned garbage, and, at the same time, freed up landfill space, and provided electricity and jobs to the city.

“At least, that’s how it was billed and sold by the politicians,” said Mair. “Any time you go into a poor community and promise jobs and something for free, it appeals to the people’s hope and they are acquiescent.”

Residents of poor communities are often very trusting of politicians and they believe that people want to help them, he said.

“They aren’t aware that they need to participate and educate themselves,” said Mair. “That’s why you always see these weird things happening in poor communities.”

The incinerator was built and, he said, there were no jobs for the people who lived in Arbor Hill, because the politicians had neglected to mention that employees would need to be union members and have contracts.

There had also been a misrepresentation about the free energy and electricity, said Mair, as the electricity was funneled to buildings in the capitol complex, and not to the urban residents.

Additionally, the city was getting paid to burn waste from surrounding cities and towns. It became a regional waste facility, and none of the money was put back into Arbor Hill.

The technology that was installed and implemented may have been “state of the art” to the people who built it, he said, but the analysis failed to reveal what would happen if the incinerator did not operate at the proper capacity, or if the material it burned was inappropriate.

“It didn’t review what would happen if the garbage was too wet or too raw,” said Mair. “It didn’t mention particulates flying into the air.”

The harmful effects of the burning garbage fell entirely on Arbor Hill, he said.

“This community was always under a dark gray cloud and the people were inhaling, ingesting, and absorbing chemicals,” Mair said.

The plant was burning old pharmaceuticals, such as chemotherapy agents, that could destroy tissue, he said; it was burning vats of mercury and other heavy metals.

“It was so bad that the employees working inside the plant would have to rotate out every couple of weeks to keep their blood metal levels down,” said Mair. “Yet no one seemed to care about what was happening to the residents.”

Mair took it upon himself to organize a movement to shut down the.

“I gathered a committee together and reached out to other local allies,” he said.

He got various neighborhood associations and environmental groups involved, and linked up with the New York Public Interest Research Group.

A local member of the Sierra Club encouraged Mair to present his case and ask for technical and financial support, so he went to its state headquarters in New York City to do just that.

“We were rebuffed; we assumed it was because of our color, because they suggested we go to the NAACP instead,” he said of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

He said the member who had invited him to make his case was shocked.

“He said it was the first time he had ever seen them turn their backs on the community,” said Mair.

The statewide club refused to help, but, Mair said, some local members pulled money together independently to put toward the cause.

After a massive demonstration, held on Martin Luther King Day, the governor at the time, Mario Cuomo, said that a health study would be conducted on the incinerator plant, and, if it failed the tests, it would be shut down.

It did fail, and the plant was shut down, roughly a decade after it had been put into operation.

Mair didn’t stop there, though.

“I said, ‘You’ve harmed a lot of people and now you need to provide for those people,’” he said.

He won his case and a settlement of $1.4 million, which he donated back to the community, founding two environmental organizations, he said.

Changing the culture

“After that was all situated, I thought back to the determination of the few local members of the Sierra Club, and it inspired me to join the organization myself,” said Mair. “I wanted to change its culture, because, at the end of the day, people should only see green; they should see the environment for all people.”

He called his journey to change its culture “rocky.”

In 1996, he was asked by a chapter chair to lead the club’s Environmental Justice Committee, based on his success with the incinerator shutdown.

“She told me that they could not teach me much, but I could teach them,” said Mair.

He rose up through the ranks to become the chapter chair of the Atlantic Chapter, New York State branch. At that time, there were approximately 41,000 Sierra Club members in the state.

“I spent that period fighting for diversity, equity, and inclusion,” he said. “I fought to get the club to start working with inner-city communities and to understand their unique issues with the environment — environment knows no color.”

After almost a decade of fighting to transform the chapter, he was chosen to join the national Environmental Justice Committee.

“We tried to use the experience that began with the inner city community in Albany as a model,” he said. “It’s not just about blacks, there are poor whites, too, like the miners in West Virginia and Kentucky — they are struggling just as badly.”

In 2005, Mair was also selected to work on the National Diversity Committee and he made an effort to focus not just on diversity in the communities that the club helped, but within the organization and among its volunteers, as well.

“I really went after the choke points that allowed the inequality to exist,” said Mair. “I began to develop influence and support within the organization.”

Eventually, he said, he was asked to run for the national board, because the club wanted someone who was grounded in the rich diversity training it had been doing.

The board of national directors is the legal club and consists of 15 members, he said.

“I was surprised and shocked when I got elected to the board five years ago,” said Mair.

He was shocked again when, earlier this week, the board elected him president.

Muir’s legacy

“I am right now in the shoes of John Muir,” he said. “In 123, years it is the first time a person of color has filled these shoes.”

One-hundred-and-eight years ago, Muir stood in Yosemite National Park with President Theodore Roosevelt, and showed him what “wild America” was losing to modern development.

“That was the beginning of our modern conservation movement and now even that is no longer sacred,” said Mair. “The game is still the same — exploitation of natural resources for the benefit of the few at the expense of many.”

It is now no longer just about saving patches of land, he said — it’s about saving the planet.

“Now is the time when diversity really needs to be in place, because we all have to pull together,” he said. “We need to save our species as a whole — it’s that dire right now.”

Mair believes the leader of the nation’s most influential environmental conservation organization and the head of the world’s most influential nation — President Barack Obama — need to stand together at Yosemite once again and recommit.

“I need him to stand with me and witness the browning of the grass and trees and the melting of the glaciers.

Isn’t that an image?” he asked. “From two white men born with silver spoons in their mouths standing there over 100 years ago to two black men born into working class families standing there now.”

That image, he is convinced, would inspire Americans to do the work that is necessary.

“The leadership in Washington right now is all about smog and haze and we need clear skies and clear vision,” said Mair. “We need to model that and it can’t be done without a diverse and equitable movement.”