Sierra

About Sierra

Overview

Sierra is the bimonthly magazine of the Sierra Club, published from Oakland, California. Described as the storytelling arm of the Sierra Club — the United States' oldest, largest, and most influential grassroots environmental organization — it is a national print and digital magazine publishing award-winning journalism and cutting-edge photography, art, and video dedicated to protecting the natural world. Combining features on green living and outdoor adventure with reporting on threats to the environment, Sierra brings together leading journalists, photographers, and filmmakers to convey the ideals at the heart of the Sierra Club's mission.

Few magazines in America have so direct a lineage to the birth of the conservation movement. Sierra descends from the Sierra Club Bulletin, the monthly magazine the club began publishing in the 1890s — which means the magazine's publishing tradition stretches back more than 130 years, to the decade when the American conservation movement itself was born.

Roots in the Sierra Club Bulletin

The Sierra Club was founded in California in 1892 by the naturalist John Muir — the writer and activist often called the father of the national parks — along with colleagues including the editor Robert Underwood Johnson, the organizer William Colby, and the geologist Joseph LeConte. Within a year of its founding, the club began publishing the Sierra Club Bulletin, a monthly magazine carrying articles on conservation, outdoor recreation, and the natural history of the American West.

The Bulletin was the movement's chronicle in its formative decades: it recorded the campaigns to establish and defend the national parks, the club's outings in the Sierra Nevada, and the development of American conservation thought. Over the 20th century, the Bulletin evolved — through various titles and formats — into the modern Sierra magazine, carrying the same institutional DNA forward into the age of climate crisis and digital media.

The Publisher: Sierra Club

Sierra is published by the Sierra Club, founded in 1892 and headquartered in Oakland, California. With its millions of members and supporters, the club is the nation's largest and most influential grassroots environmental organization, devoted to the study and protection of the earth's scenic and ecological resources. Its history is inseparable from the history of American environmentalism: the creation of the national park system, the Wilderness Act, the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, and the modern climate movement all bear the club's imprint.

The magazine serves as the club's storytelling arm — the place where the organization's campaigns, values, and vision are translated into narrative, imagery, and argument for a national audience. While the club's activists work in courtrooms, legislatures, and the streets, Sierra works on the page and the screen, making the case for the natural world in the language of journalism and art.

What Sierra Covers

Sierra's editorial scope reflects the breadth of modern environmentalism. Its features and reporting cover threats to the environment — from fossil-fuel expansion to habitat destruction to the extinction emergency — alongside green living, outdoor adventure, and the celebration of wild places. The magazine's journalism holds polluters and policymakers to account while its photography and art inspire wonder at the natural world the club exists to protect.

This dual mandate — witness and advocate, critic and celebrant — gives Sierra a distinctive voice in environmental media. It is neither a detached science journal nor a mere activist newsletter, but a magazine that believes rigorous reporting and passionate advocacy belong together. Its contributors include leading environmental journalists, photographers, and filmmakers, and its pages have carried some of the most influential nature writing and environmental photography of recent decades.

The Magazine Through the Decades

Sierra's character has shifted with the eras of American environmentalism. In the 1970s — the decade of Earth Day, the Clean Air Act, and the backpacking boom — the magazine was, in its own later description, "a backpackers' mag — the Outside of its day, before Outside existed." It spoke to a generation discovering wilderness recreation and ecological consciousness at the same time.

In subsequent decades, as the club's agenda expanded from wilderness preservation to encompass environmental justice, climate action, and the intersection of social and ecological concerns, the magazine expanded with it. The glossy bimonthly that readers knew for decades balanced outdoor adventure features with hard-hitting environmental reporting — a formula that made it one of the most widely read environmental magazines in the country.

The 2021 Redesign

In 2021, Sierra underwent its most ambitious reinvention in decades. Announcing "the latest evolution of Sierra," the magazine ditched the conventional magazine structure — tidbits at the front, features in the middle, tidbits at the back — for a deconstructed format designed to reflect how readers actually consume media in the internet age. Recurring departments were sprinkled throughout each issue rather than corralled into front-and-back matter.

The redesigned departments included Notes From Here & There, recommitting the magazine to storytelling from the front lines of environmental activism and the edges of outdoor recreation; Culture Desk, an expanded arts and letters section critiquing how mass media and consumer culture intersect with environmental issues; Findings, a robust science section investigating the natural world and the latest technologies for addressing the climate crisis and the extinction emergency; and The Lookout, a dashboard for activist readers to advance Sierra Club campaigns — a conscious return to the magazine's 1890s Forestry Notes and 1960s Washington Report. For the first time in decades, poetry returned to the magazine's pages, under the curation of poetry editor Aimee Nezhukumatathil, author of World of Wonders.

Journalism, Photography, and Art

Sierra has long treated visual storytelling as central to its mission, not decoration. The magazine publishes cutting-edge photography, art, and video alongside its journalism — work that has won the publication and its contributors major recognition. In the tradition of the club's historic association with landscape photography (Ansel Adams was a Sierra Club member whose work the club published and championed), Sierra continues to pair words with images of exceptional power.

The magazine's 2021 evolution explicitly embraced new forms of 21st-century nature writing — "blurring the lines between the wild and the human, celebrating nearby nature as much as remote wilderness, and revealing the intersections between social justice for people and ecological justice for the rest of life on Earth." That editorial philosophy — that nature writing must encompass cities as well as wilderness, and justice as well as beauty — positions Sierra at the leading edge of contemporary environmental thought.

Serving the Club's Members — and Beyond

Sierra is published bimonthly — six issues a year — and distributed nationally in print and digital editions. For Sierra Club members, it is the tangible, regular expression of what their membership supports: a window onto the campaigns their dues fund and the wild places their activism defends. For non-member readers, it stands on its own as one of America's leading environmental magazines.

The magazine's national scope — it is classified as a national consumer magazine — reflects the club's own transformation from a California hiking club into a nationwide grassroots force. Its readers include activists, outdoor enthusiasts, policymakers, and anyone drawn to the intersection of nature and public life.

Why Sierra Matters

Sierra matters because the stories it tells are the stories on which the future of the natural world depends. Environmental protection is, at bottom, a contest of narratives: whether the public sees wild places as worth defending, whether it understands the stakes of the climate crisis, whether it connects its daily choices to planetary consequences. For more than a century — from the Bulletin of the 1890s to the redesigned Sierra of the 2020s — this magazine has been one of the principal instruments through which the American conservation movement has told its story.

Its endurance is itself a statement. Magazines come and go; movements that sustain a publishing voice for 130 years are rare. Sierra's longevity testifies to the Sierra Club's institutional depth and to the abiding American appetite for writing about the wild — an appetite John Muir first fed in the 1890s and that Sierra continues to feed today.

Reading Sierra

Sierra is published at sierraclub.org/sierra, where current issues, features, photography, and video are available alongside the magazine's digital editions. Sierra Club members receive the magazine as part of membership; subscriptions are available to all readers.

As the magazine's editors wrote at the 2021 relaunch: curiosity remains, as ever, the most important point on the editorial compass. For readers who share that curiosity — about the wild world and the fight to protect it — Sierra remains essential reading.

Visit the official Sierra magazine website.