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Is $26 million worth the reputation of a venerable, 1.4 million member environmental group?

The Sierra Club may be about to find out.

Last week’s revelations about the 120-year-old organization’s hushed financial marriage to the natural gas industry – and its just-as-secretive divorce – have left some long-time supporters feeling angry, betrayed or misled. The news cut especially deep for activists who have spent years fighting the spread of shale gas drilling in states like New York and Pennsylvania.

The Sierra Club quietly accepted $26 million in donations from gas industry interests from 2007 to 2010 – years when the group’s national leaders were talking up gas as a cleaner, greener “bridge fuel” alternative to coal.

“I think it betrays all the grass-roots volunteers,” said Kate Bartholomew, a gas activist who is also an elected member of the executive committee that oversees the Sierra Club’s statewide chapter in New York.

The leaders should have opened up sooner, Bartholomew said.

“How do you hide $25 million?” she asked. “How do you not know where it comes from? That was my first response.”

New York state anti-fracking activist Walter Hang, president of the environmental data service Toxics Targeting, called the disclosure “incredibly embarrassing.   It basically looks like they’re shilling for the No. 2 natural gas producer in America.”

On the other hand, some greens are lauding the Sierra Club’s current leadership – in particular, Executive Director Michael Brune – for coming clean. And some hope the group, finally unburdened of its secrets, will be liberated to become a full-throated ally in the fight against fracking.