DAVID BROWER
by Montgomery Brower
PEOPLE WEEKLY
April 30, 1990
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 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 a 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 stands 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 at 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 and
rout German 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
than executive director of the organization in 1952. His first campaign,
against the U.S. 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
, the first Sierra Club book advocating preservation of a natural
treasure.
At the moment of victory, though, Brower also made 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 had 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 Stegner, "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 (FOE) 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 debt 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 resigned in 1986.
In retrospect, admits Brower, "I would have learned a little bit more
about how to listen to other people and how to make them feel part of my
decisions. I flunked in schmoozing." 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 Islands 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
builds 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.
