David Brower is an eminent creator of the modern
environmental movement. He is President of Friends of the Earth, an
environmental organization with an active international membership. He was
the first Executive Director of the Sierra Club. Under his leadership the
Club developed a professional staff, strong lobby, and an expanded book
publishing program. These efforts were essential to the Club's becoming a
major national force.
Through the book publishing program
David Brower introduced to the American public the spirit of nature,
the work of many unusual people who interpreted that spirit, and the
predicament that our environment faces.
At this year's [1977] Annual Dinner he
was awarded the John Muir award "for his vision and determination to make
the enjoyment, appreciation and protection of the earth's resources a major
force inour society."
We talked to David Brower about his
lifetime of work as an environmentalist. Thirty-eight years ago he was the
first editor of the Yodeler. He told us that he and other Bay Chapter
members began the Yodeler because they were "needled" by
MUGELNOOSE, a newsletter brought out by the southern California rock
climbers and mountaineers. The Yodeler was a mimeographed sheet then,
but it dealt with some very important issues, such as the battle over Kings
Canyon.
ROBIN FREEMAN: So at that time
the Sierra Club was largely a group of people who spent a lot of time in the
outdoors.
DAVID BROWER: I think that was
true. The Sierra Club is still operating on the thesis that John Muir set up
for it. Robert Underwood Johnson told Muir to get his mountaineering friends
together and form a club, and they could probably save the Sierra from the
ravages of the sheep men, the loggers and the other exploiters. The
important thing was that the people who formed it and set its policy were
people who had been out in the mountains a great deal themselves and so they
had the feel of it. I think it is something that is not replaceable by any
other approach. At Friends of the Earth (FOE), we purposely set out not to
have outings so that we souldn't appear competitive with the Sierra Club.
FREEMAN: How is the FOE
approach different?
BROWER: Simply without outings
we have a lot of people who are concerned about politics, the litigation
work necessary to protect the things that we care about, but they don't have
enough of the basis of personal experience in the places and the kinds of
things they are defending. It is very easy then for FOE to concentrate more
on the usual mechanical list of what is going on in civilization without
quite understanding or feeling emotionally or intellectually involved in the
spring of all life which is back in wilderness. The city is a refuge, a
temporary shelter from the more adverse parts of the environment we really
should not forget to contend with.
ANDREA ENTWISTLE: Are you
saying, then, that it has been a detriment because FOE doesn't have an
outings program?
BROWER: It has not established
us to understand as much as I would like to understand. I learned about
conservation through my own wilderness experience. I became a
conservationist because I saw what was happening to the places that I liked
to go to when I was away from the city. FOE does not have a basis of
membership form that kind of people. We are more urban, I think.
We have not quite appreciated in my
view the overall importance of the wilderness. Some people appreciate the
wilderness as a nice place to go on vacation. Others agree with Wallace
Stenger when he calls it part of the geography of hop --- you might not
always be there but you always hope to get there where ever it may be.
But it is certainly a lot more than
that.
One of the things that finally
occurred to me after being involved in wilderness sixty years was to see how
important it is to the life force itself. If we look into life started on
the planet and what shaped it and the beautiful complexity of it all, we
find that wilderness was the shaping force. If we squeeze the age of the
Earth down to the six days of creation, it becomes rather handy the way you
have creation beginning Sunday midnight, there is no life until Tuesday
noon, and then life blooms more and more complex as DNA works its way
through the environment, through the earth. When you get into the sixth day
there is something like 10 million different species that original little
bit of DNA that has spread and diversified. It has become more and more
beautiful and complex and stable.
It isn't until the last 1/40 of a
second of that week that we get into the industrial revolution and start
doing things with our DNA that have never been done before. But the
important point is that throughout all life's tenure on earth it has been
shaped and honed and perfected by the force of adversity within wilderness
each working on the other. And it is that force that makes it possible for
us to be alive, to function, to have our existence and to have our
structures. It is the forces of adversity in wilderness which enable us to
have 120 million rods in each eye, all hooked up to the brain so that we can
behold creation, and to have the instructions for how those 120 million
cells are formed, what they are made of, when they start going, when they
stop, what the circuitry is and what they go to --- all dominated by the one
bit of the most concentrated instruction on earth, DNA. If we consider the
very minimum for each of us when the two half cells came together when each
of us started, and the DNA in those two half cells is the instructions which
make everything possible including the 120 million rod hookups in the eye,
and realize that for all 100 billion people who ever lived that DNA would
fit in a drop of water, then we know it is quite concentrated and
miraculous. And when we realize that this DNA was informed by wilderness,
not by civilization, not by our own ability to reason things out, then we
have quite a different appreciation for what wilderness is. And we can see
how stupid it is to wpie out the last vestige of it before we learn what it
means, before we have understood what Nancy Newhall was saying, that
wilderness holds the answers to questions we have not yet learned how to
ask. This is one of the things that too many organizations are losing. The
Sierra Club is losing a little bit of it, the Wilderness Society has lost
some, FOE hasn't picked up enough of it. There needs to be a resurgence of
interest in what wilderness is about. I get all fired up as I think about
this transcending value of wilderness. When people in the Park Service, the
Forest Service, the other agencies and the corporations look upon the
wilderness as just the place for the hardy wealthy few to exercise their
muscles, or when the Forest Service evaluates it by counting footprints ---
the people who would do that, would as I say, evaluate the Mona Lisa by
weighing the paint.
ROBBIE BRANDWYNNE: In your
personal values do you see a pattern emerging over the years that moves from
wilderness problems into urban problems?
BROWER: Well, maybe not a
personal pattern, but I think I got the idea from one of my principle
coaches, Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society, that battles for the
wilderness are fought in the city. If you live in the wilderness, if you
live right next door to it, you have it coming out your ears and you don't
see the danger.
STEVE RAUH: But how can we
bring an even greater sense of the wilderness ethic to the people of the
city? As you mentioned, it is harsh to walk through downtown San Francisco
because there is nothing to walk by. Some cities are nice to walk in.
BROWER: We had a brief visit to
Dubrovnik in Yugoslavia. In the old city there are no cars. The streets are
paved with limestone which gets polished to marble by human feet. Your see
images distorted of the buildings and people reflected in what they have
polished with their feet. The sound you hear is the sound of voices, and it
is quite beautiful. I think that if American cities were to become that
beautiful again, people would enjoy them more. They would not feel they had
to go out and rescue themselves in the wilderness. But they would still want
it because there would be times when they would want to have the change.
FREEMAN: You have made a
contrast between the tremendous amount of information we have in DNA and the
amount of information we have through rational civilization. How could you
get that little piece of information that you just passed on to us to the
massive group of people that needs it?
BROWER: I think I don't have a
good answer to that. You try to get it to a few people who will be
influencing a lot more people. That's what we were doing in Sierra Club
books. We took the big jump in This is American Earth. Adams and
Nancy Newhall came together to make what I think is an extraordinary
statement. What we tried to do with that book and others like it was to get
to the taste makers. We produced a major effect with that series of books.
They were expensive and toward the end of my years with the Sierra Club as
an employee they were rather devastatingly badmouthed by the people who
didn't like me in the Club. I think they had an enormous amount to do with
the changing of attitudes in this country. The point with that series of
books was to try to get people to love what was in the wild places without
having to go there, to find out what is threatening them and to learn what
can be done about them. It was a way in which a little club like the Sierra
Club could make quite a dent, and did.
FREEMAN: We asked Pare Lorentz,
the WPA film maker who made The River what he would do if he had all
the time and money in the world. He said that he would make a film about
nuclear energy. If you had all the money and all the resources what would
you want to do?
BROWER: I think we need a
superb film to fight nuclear proliferation. If we don't fight that and win
all the rest is academic. We can all go and have a lot of Tangueray martinis
and go out in a swoon. It's a matter of stopping it first and foremost right
here in the United States, not just the weapons, but also the reactors. I
heard Arjun Makajani, a bright young scientist from India, talk to an
audience up at the Habitat conference in Vancouver. He said if ending
nuclear proliferation means that you stop any of the nonnuclear club from
having nuclear technology, it's no good. Within ten years the Third World
can have it all. But if it means that you are willing to stop then we are
willing to stop. Now he couldn't speak for Indira Gahndi, I'm sure; but I
think he spoke a third world attitude. Makajano told the audience in
Vancouver with some emotion. "We don't trust you. You were the people who
dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You were the people who dropped
the napalm on the little children. We don't trust you. But if you would pull
away from it, it would change our whole attitude."
I believe him, I think that we can do
it. Our best route is what Amory Lovins has described in "The Road Not
Taken." It was in Foreign Affairs. We've reproduced it and it's been noted
all over the world. What Amory has come up with is that if we decide fifty
years from now that you want to be in a world that is living totally on
renewable energy --- wind, hydro, direct conversion, indirect conversion ---
we can do it. If you are willing to settle for the kind of energy demands we
had in 1963 when we were using only half the electricity we now use, and we
were at least half as civilized, then we could get by with about one quarter
of our present per capita energy use. If you foresee that, and begin to make
the adjustments to meet that goal, then you've absolutely pulled the
economic props out from under all the ridiculous things we're fighting, more
dams, more strip mining, more reactors.
FREEMAN: What do you think
you'd like to see the Carter Administration focus on?
BROWER: First, take a lead in
ending nuclear proliferation. Mr. Schlesinger is attempting to rescue the
breeder the breeder reactor , or undertake reprocessing for the world, or do
any of the other things to help an ailing industry get on its feet at public
expense. I think that if he would let the nuclear industry die the death it
ought to die for economic reasons let alone environmental reasons then we're
out of that woods.
I'm just delighted with Mr. Carter's
statement eliminating or delaying certain dams. I hop we and the Club praise
him for what he did.
I'd certainly like to see him carry
out the long list of fine campaign promises. I think that we should
glance from time to time through these promises and say to him: "We see you
are making progress on some, ad we're grateful for that. How can we help you
make progress on some of those where you haven't done anything yet?"
FREEMAN: No one came up to you
and said here is your official title and this is your job. You've taken it
upon yourself to do that. Why aren't people like yourself in a similar role
of power, like the President?
BROWER: I'd be happy to counsel
people who run for office; that's my role I think. I can do this best from
the outside, where you can fleet-footed and move a lot without too much red
tape. FOE is small, poor, flexible and I think that that's a good role.
FREEMAN: We tend to think
attorneys, generals and industrialists make good leaders. That's just a
cultural assumption. People who have a whole view of the planet would
probably make good leaders --- I wonder why we don't think that?
BROWER: I don't know. I have a
partial answer. I remember that 20-25 years ago U used to worry that there
wasn't more ecological sense in management. I saw that people interested in
ecology were primarily loners. They like to get off and watch how nature
works --- by themselves, for themselves --- and not so much for a group.
They came out ti be poor politicians.
I think that the people who do come up
in the positions of leadership in government and industry are people who
have a great deal more concern for other people. Out of that concern for
manipulating other people they think they can handle the complicated job of
running a civilization. The problem the radicals faced early in the decade,
when they wanted to shut the system down is that they didn't realize what
would happen if they shut it down. If they shut these manager out --- who
were interested in people and making money off of them --- it would shut
down the system on which most of the world's population is dependent. There
would be possibly one or two billion casualties, I figure you've got to fix
the system while it is running. The best you can do is try to install in
these people who have got this ability to organize organize and administer
and manage money and manipulate people, a few of these ecological
imperatives. You've got to acquaint them with natural law, letting them find
out that it's not a law that you write, but it's the law that neither you
nor they can break without paying the consequences. American Institutions
used to be required subjects in the University. I would like to have
Ecological Institutions as a required subject. You've got to know how the
world works before you go out and mess around on it.
ENTWISTLE: So what you're
saying is if you teach people how the world really works, your goal is to
make them understand that they fit into the world rather than exploit it.
BROWER: To jump ahead of your
question, I certainly don't think people who understand would want to build
reactors any more. The thing we need right now would be solar panels on the
roof, heat pumps. There are many jobs, there's a lot of money to be made in
things that are needed.
I myself have chosen not to attack the
profit motive, because I think in one form or another, it is a manifestation
of self-interest that is the primary driving force in everybody. I think the
important thing is to try to get the management ability that runs
corporations or runs non-corporations, whatever enterprises they have in
Russia --- get the people who do that to find ways to make profit, or get
their brownie points, as a substitute for dollars, out of something besides
damaging the environment. Once the challenge is accepted, so that people
will say, "Yes I want to do this and still abide by natural law," then we
can make it. This goal is not that unattainable, to go back to what I said
earlier. Making the Armory Loving point, that if we pick a target of where
we want to be 50 years from now and start working backward, and making sure
that we don't do anything now that precludes our getting there, we have a
chance of getting there. That is retroactive planning in a different sense.
Right now we are not quite willing to say where we want to be. A livable
world is not the kind of world that we will get by default. There is an
opportunity, I think, to fix things. I remember Howard Zahniser's philosophy
which is neat: "I don't consider what we are up against as problems, they
are opportunities." Make that switch and you can go along with Pogo: "We are
confronted with insurmountable opportunities."
RAUH: Earlier, you were talking
about the role that environmentalists play in relationships to the people in
power. The question I have is, what is our role in a legislative battle
where people often ask for a compromise?
BROWER: I have been pretty hard
nosed on compromise all along, and had to argue with some people in the Club
who were not. My favorite opponent in all this was Bestor Robinson, who
would often come up with a compromise in advance, If you start with the
middleground then you only get a quarter of what you needed. My own feeling
was best expressed when Mo Udall asked me in the Grand Canyon hearings,
"Wouldn't you just settle for a little dam, just a teeny weeny dam only 100
feet tall, in the Grand Canyon?" I said no the Grand Canyon isn't mine to
compromise. I've said on occasion, "We will let you build all the dams you
want in the Grand Canyon provided you build a separate but equal Grand
Canyon somewhere else." That is a fair compromise. But you don't take the
only Grand Canyon, and say I will let you dam it because it is convenient to
me now, or because I think I will get a few trading points if I let you. I
haven't any right to trade that which belongs to the world, to all the
coming generations for anybody.
I was once guilty of saying, "Well,
yes, let's compromise; let's build reactors instead of Echo Park dam," I was
pro-reactor for 23 years before I became a born-again anti-nuclearist. I
would rather not confess how many years it took me to understand that the
world cannot endure that exponential growth curve.
RAUGH: Right now with the
increase in energy the quality of life might very well be going down and
what we are saying is that we don't want to compromise the quality of life
for quantity.
BROWER: When I was sharing a
platform with Jonathan Ela in Cleveland, and we were debating the chief of
research for SOHIO, Jonathan made a very good conservation speech and I made
mine. The SOHIO man spoke and pointed to a display of Ford energy curves. He
said: "We have abandoned the historical growth curve. We know in the energy
business we cannot get there. We are settling for this middle curve." I
replied that we ought to have a negative growth in energy. We have to have a
growth in energy conservation if anything. He joined, "You can't keep up the
standard of living that way." We were at the University Circle, University
of Ohio, and it was nighttime. I replied: There are 500 of us here. There is
not one person in the entire audience who would dare walk from this
auditorium after the performance to downtown Cleveland. I don't call that a
standard of living. Fifteen years ago there wouldn't be person who would
have hesitated to take such a walk. So we about doubled our use of energy
twice in that period, and we have somehow driven hope out of the city.
I never had to think about walking at
night in San Francisco or Berkeley. My wife could cross the campus any time
she wanted to when she was going to school there. You wouldn't dare do that
now. What have we done except destroy hope? More energy, more things for
some people, less for others. Teenage blacks forty percent unemployed in the
Bay area. What the hell did we expect was going to happen? Are we going to
solve the problem with more police? We are going to solve it with jobs,
something useful for people to do and some hope once again.
RAUH: So the environmental
movement is often perceived of as closely tied with economics, but, in fact,
it is closely tied to humanism.
BROWER: It is more and more, I
think now. Somehow we got assigned some jobs that we weren't cut out to
carry out. Earth Day came and suddenly we were getting the National
Environmental Policy Act through. The SST was blocked and we were getting a
few things our way. The people who were not getting things their way asked
why we weren't worrying about their problems. We had hardy learned how to
carry our own. We were scolded because we weren't doing enough for labor. We
still are not doing enough for labor nor is labor doing enough for us. We
have to work that out.
FREEMAN: One of my interests is
architecture. In terms of visual images, a very strong image is the
environment around us. So strong that we relate to it as a subconscious
thing. What role do you see architecture having in terms of the sensuous
quality of the building?
BROWER: First, I think that
architects had better heed Garret Hardin. He had been studying various kinds
of architectural plans and commented that as far as he could see, architects
were not aware of the sun. Moreover, architects need to get into some energy
accounting. Architects alone could prelude the reactor program, by building
and rebuilding with energy accounting in mind. Architects could be the
heroes. But they can't do it alone. If you are an architect and you would
like to be hired you have got a strike against you that you can't tell the
man who is hiring you what you want him to do --- yet.
FREEMAN: Right, well what about
the aesthetics of the buildings also in terms of carrying a message of the
quality of the wilderness?
BROWER: The architecture that I
am more concerned with, I suppose,
is still the functional. Around the
aesthetics what the buildings should look like I don't know.
ENTWISTLE: People respond to
the wilderness and if the architect repeats the message of the wilderness
somehow, however that is translatable into the building, then maybe we are
doing what you talked about before. People don't have to go to the
wilderness to have the feeling they should have walking around in the city.
BROWER: While we are talking
about architects I would like to praise what Ted Spencer did in Yosemite
Valley at Yosemite Lodge. There you have the indoor-outdoor feeling. They
built beautifully around beauty, creating an unostentatious structure that
celebrates the beauty of natural things everywhere you go. That may be the
sort of thing you have in mind, and I would like to see more of it.
BRANDWYNNE: Of course it is
getting to the point where building is so expensive that private citizens
aren't doing so much of it and agencies are doing more and so they are more
accessible to people who are trying to wield the kind of influence you are
talking about.
FREEMAN: That is a good point.
BROWER: I would also hop we
could get those who finance new structures to recognize their long term
function, the cumulative cost of energy, and how much they had better invest
now to avoid that.
FREEMAN: My experience in
Berkeley city government is that the public forum is such a blunt tool . . .
.a den of hostility.
BROWER: If you want good
decisions for the Bay Area, push my idea that we make a Regional Government
headquarters on Yerba Buena Island. Tell the Navy to go somewhere else. We
don't need them there. Alameda, maybe. It would be nice to set an example of
what a region could do.
Have you been to Yerba Buena and gone
to the top to look around the whole Bay Area? There you realize that this
whole region is something that should be thought about as an entity. We all
love this region and we wouldn't leave it if we could help it. Let's govern
it from the middle where you can see all the consequences at once.
RAUGH: The Golden Gate
Recreation area has been a step towards better regional thought.
BROWER: I wanted an
environmental university in part of it --- at Forte Baker. Fireproof the
buildings, but keep that nice little cove's feel. You could get people to
come from all over the world to go to school there and learn how to put
environmental conscience into their field. This is what I want to see there,
but nobody is listening.
FREEMAN: What would you like to
see the Yodeler do?
BROWER: I wouldn't mind seeing
the Yodeler do what I always wanted Not Man Apart to do. I
want to see a Bay Area environmental weekly. Look, you've got 25,000 members
in the Berkeley Chapter. So you have as much as our whole membership. You've
got that circulation. With that sure thing you can do something that the
Bay Guardian and some of the others can't quite do. You've got your
organizational foundation, and you can get more photojournalism in it (which
has gone by the board since Life and Look died). You've got
the opportunities to make the exciting.
FREEMAN: I have have been so
impressed by your prose. It seems you must think that way. I like to think
that your writing is in the American transcendental tradition. I have been
anxious sitting listening to you because as tremendously important as you
have been, I keep thinking well why isn't this the Oval office. I mean not
that that would be the right place to govern something from anyway, but I
have been impressed with your overview which includes the responsibility you
take in the simple terms of automobiles and jobs. You see that also and also
a grand overview.
BROWER: You are very kind and it would
be nice if something like that would happen.
__________
Brandwynne, Robbie,
Andrea Entwistle, Robin Freeman, and Steve Rauth.
"A conversation with David Brower." The Yodeler:
Environmental News.
1977. pp. 1, 6-7.