Biography | Michael Brune — The Sierra Club Chair He Took in This Wells Fargo Block

The Club did not hire him in Oakland. In March 2010 the national office still sat on the second floor of 85 Second Street.

On 20 January 2010 the Los Angeles Times reported that the Sierra Club had named Michael Brune, then 38 and coming off seven years as executive director of Rainforest Action Network, to succeed Carl Pope.

Pope stayed on as executive chairman. Brune started in March.

The building is the old Wells Fargo block at Second and Mission, finished in 1897 for the express company, repaired after 1906, and used for a time by the California Supreme Court.

Sierra Club's own office chronology puts the national headquarters here from 1996 to 2016. The 2010 Form 990 lists Brune as principal officer at this address.

He inherited an organization that had taken more than 25 million dollars from natural-gas interests, most of it from Chesapeake Energy, to fund the Beyond Coal campaign.

He later wrote that he learned of those gifts after he arrived. In 2012, once Time reported the money, the Club publicly stepped back from treating gas as a bridge fuel.

The work of those first years started in this South of Market loft, not in the Oakland tower the Club occupies now.

Photo: unknown photographer, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons