An uncompromising
champion of the wilderness since the '30s, he has set the pace
for today's environmental crusaders.
Since he was a child,
David Brower has been coming to the meadows on Grizzly Peak in
the hills above his Berkeley, California, home. The first time
his father brought him along, he says, "I remember thinking how
wonderful it was that the hills just went on and on." But now,
on an otherwise clear and sun-warmed day, the golden green waves
roll away into a belt of smog hunkered down over the Sacramento
Valley. Only after a rainstorm can Brower still see 135 miles
east to the snow-peaked Sierras, where he spent his youth
climbing mountains. In the foreground, patches of suburbia
contrast with the remembered scene of his childhood. Behind him,
a thicket of antennae crowns Grizzly's summit, Nearby is a
pastured vale where a new housing development may go up. "I'd
like to declare open season on developers," says Brower, "I
hasten to to add I don't want to shoot them. Just tranquilize
them."
His opponents would wish
the same fate on him. Now 77, Brower, a native of Berkeley, has
devoted his life to battling developers, dammers, loggers and
anyone else who regards nature's bounty more as an opportunity
than a gift worth preserving. While others have made their mark
by laying hands on the land, Brower has made his by defending
it. The river that still flows unhindered, the redwood that
still stands --- these are his monuments. In his just published
autobiography, For Earth's Sake, Brower looks back over a
pioneering conservation career that began before most people had
even heard the word ecology. He led an early successful
fight to save the Grand Canyon from dams and played a key role
in establishing the national wilderness system. This month the
Earth Island Institute, which Brower founded, won a major
victory when the three biggest U.S. tuna canners agreed not to
buy tuna caught with methods that also kill dolphins in huge
numbers. Twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, he has been
praised as a visionary and condemned as an extremist. But he has
never been a man who could be safely ignored.
"The guy is a giant who
stand in a unique position among all generations of American
environmentalists," says Denis Hayes, the organizer of Earth
Day. "He's got his combination of boldness, genius and
sensitivity, and he wears them publicly. He's a real hero for
our times."
Brower has earned his
stature, as well as a reputation for implacable stubbornness, by
refusing to surrender an inch of wilderness. "He's very bright
and very persistent and a most incredible partisan," says
novelist Wallace Stegner, a friend from Brower's days as head of
the Sierra Club. "When he gets into a battle, he's locked like
the old cartoon bulldogs on the backside of the opposition." In
Brower's view, such resistance is proportionate to the threats:
ozone depletion, nuclear proliferation, toxic waste, vanishing
forests, disappearing species. "Since I showed up in Berkeley,
our population is four times what it was in all previous
history," he says. "you have to close your eyes to all the
danger signals to think you can get away with that."
Yet Brower has never been
shrill. "For all his harsh words, he has a very gentle voice,
and I think that's why people listen to him," says writer Laura
Takeshita. Discourse with Brower is always a wide-ranging
campfire talk, punctuated by the frequent crackle of wry humor.
Running through it all is his concern for future generations.
"There are some gains, yes," he says. "But there is an enormous
loss. [My children] are damn well not inheriting anything like
what I inherited, and their children are inheriting much less.
Brower's inheritance
included the unspoiled reaches of the High Sierra, which he
first encountered on a family car-camping trip at age 6. His
father, Ross Brower, taught drafting at the University of
California Berkeley until 1920, when he lost his job and the
family lived off the income from rental apartments he owned. One
of five children, Brower was only 7 when his mother, Mary Grace,
lost her eyesight to an inoperable brain tumor. During their
trips to the mountains, Brower discovered a deeper appreciation
for natural beauty by acting as her eyes. "you begin not only to
look more carefully for yourself, but also to look for her," he
writes in For Earth's Sake, "to see for her what she once
saw and loved."
A butterfly collector in
boyhood, Brower studied entomology at Berkeley, but dropped out
in 1931 after two years --- a decision he still regrets despite
nine honorary degrees. For four years he did clerical work for a
candy company in San Francisco while spending all his spare time
in the mountains. After joining the recreation-minded Sierra
Club, he went to work in 1935 as publicity manager at Yosemite
National Park. There he continued climbing mountains, and in
1939 led the first ascent of New Mexico's treacherous Shiprock.
Two years later, Brower
was elected to the Sierra Club board of directors and also
became an editor at the University of California Press, where
his officemate was fellow editor Anne Hus. They became friends,
but she was still involved with a prior suitor in 1942, when
Brower enlisted in the Army and joined the legendary 10th
Mountain Division. Three months later he proposed by mail and
they were married on May 1, 1943. As a lieutenant, Brower
trained troops to scale cliffs, skills he and they would later
use to surprise troops in Italy's Apennine mountains. Brower was
awarded a Bronze Star.
In the flush of postwar
euphoria, few Americans worried about what an expanding economy
might do to the country's natural heritage, but Brower had
already begun to ask troubling questions. "When I was first
married to him, the things he believed were really kind of
un-American," says Anne. "You don't question growth if you're a
good American." After the war, Brower became editor of the
Sierra Club Bulletin and then executive director of the
organization in 1952. His first campaign, against the Bureau of
Reclamation, marked the arrival of environmentalism as a
political force.
Since 1950 the Sierra Club
had been concerned about the bureau's plans to exploit the
Colorado River watershed as a source of water and hydroelectric
power for the development of the arid Southwest. Over the next
two decades, Brower opposed the bureau's plans to build dams in
Colorado and Utah's Dinosaur National Monument, Arizona's Grand
Canyon and Arizona and Utah's Glen Canyon --- and succeeded in
defeating the first two of these projects. His strategy set the
pattern for all his conservation battles to come. Traveling down
the Yampa and Green Rivers, he filmed the beauty of Dinosaur's
stark sandstone canyons to show others what would be lost. To
counter arguments that the rivers were inaccessible and unsafe
for recreation, the Sierra Club organized raft trips. Brower
also recruited Wallace Stenger to edit This is Dinosaur: Echo
Park Country and its Magic Rivers, the first Sierra Club
book advocating preservation of a natural treasure.
At the moment of victory,
though, Brower also mad a decision he has regretted ever since.
By the time the issue of the dams reached Congress, legislators
were offering a compromise: Scratch the Dinosaur dams in return
for Glen Canyon. "We has enough votes to block the thing," says
Brower. "The Sierra Club was the keystone of the arch." But the
club's board of directors voted to accept the compromise. "I
shouldn't have gone along with it," says Brower. "If we had kept
up our opposition, [Glen Canyon] would have failed, I am quite
sure." Later, rafting through the canyon before its destruction,
Brower understood the magnitude of the loss --- but by then the
project could not be stopped.
A decade later, when the
Grand Canyon dams came up for review, Brower was no longer
willing to cut deals. He placed a controversial full-page ad for
the Sierra Club in the New York Times headlined: NOW ONLY
YOU CAN SAVE GRAND CANYON FROM BEING FLOODED . . . FOR PROFIT.
That move still rankles former Bureau of Reclamation chief Floyd
Dominy. "Dave Brower managed to give the public the image that
the dam was going to impinge on the park," says Dominy, who says
that the lake created would not have encroached on the park
itself. "It was Dave Brower's deliberate misrepresentation of
the facts. He's a damned liar."
Brower denies the ads were
misleading, but perhaps the greatest irony is that, at the time,
he argued that nuclear power plants would soon make
hydroelectric projects unnecessary. Years later, Brower would be
one of the first to decry the dangers of nukes. Today, a
coal-fired plant provides power for a grid that feeds Phoenix,
"Dave Brower wanted a steam plant," says Dominy. "He got one,
and now there's smog over the Grand Canyon. If I'd've got my
other dam built, you wouldn't have smog."
Under Brower's leadership,
Sierra Club membership grew from 2,000 to 77,000, but his
uncompromising militance eventually brought him to grief. "He
was extremely imaginative and very active, and he didn't like
caution and he didn't like to wait," says Stenger, "with the
result that he got into trouble with the Sierra Club board and
has been in trouble since." The crisis grew out of Brower's
decision to have the club publish a series of elegant and
eloquent coffee-table books, showing the genius of photographers
such as Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter. The aim of the
award-winning books was to "lead people to fall in love with a
place," says Brower. "Then in the text they learned the threats
to it, and what they could do about it."
Unfortunately, by 1969 a
large unsold book inventory was putting a severe strain on
Sierra Club funds, yet Brower resisted austerities, to the
dismay of even his staunchest supporters. During an internal
dispute over the club's position on the proposed Diablo Canyon
nuclear plant, Brower's resignation was accepted. "[The club]
was his family," says Anne. "To lose that job was very painful."
Rather than mourn, Brower
chose to organize Friends of the Earth (POE) to pursue his
increasingly global vision of environmentalism, including
opposition to nuclear weapons --- an issue that the Sierra Club
had been reluctant to take on. But by 1984, FOE was in dept and
staffers were complaining about Brower's autocratic management.
"He can preach the gospel, but it's better to let someone else
handle the collection plate," says Geoff Webb, a former FOE
director. "All that time you spend fighting the board of
directors is time not spent fighting polluters. I think Dave
sometimes lost sight of the real enemy." When the FOE directors
tried to move the organization to Washington, D.C., Brower sued
unsuccessfully to block their plans, then in 1986.
In Retrospect, admits
Brower, "I would have learned a little nit more about how to
listen to other people and how to make them feel part of my
decisions. I flunked in schmoosing." Some wounds have healed,
and Brower is today an honorary vice-president of the Sierra
Club. He also co-directs the San Francisco-based Earth Island
Institute, which he founded in 1982. The institute's projects
range from saving the sea turtles to encouraging land
restoration in Central America, and so far the organization is
healthy. Brower's latest plan is to promote an "international
Green Cross" to restore environmentally devastated areas ranging
from Amazonian rain forests to U.S. inner cities.
To promote these causes,
Brower travels constantly. When he's not "burning jet fuel," as
he admits, he lives with Anne in the modest redwood house they
had built in 1946, with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. They
have raised four children: Ken 45, a writer; Bob, 44, a mover;
Barbara, 40, a professor of geography; and John, 38, a gardener
and woodcutter.
Looking back on his
career, Brower says, "We never win any permanent victories in
our movement; all we can get is a stay of execution. The guy who
build the dam wins the permanent victory." But, he adds, "the
whole idea of just making sure that there is as much beauty when
I leave as there was when I came --- it's just an ethic, I
guess. I just thought, that's what you do."
__________
Brower,
Montgomery. "David Brower." People Weekly. VOL. 33,
No. 17, 1990.
pp. 103-106.
-----
--- All material is copyright protected ---
