CONVERSATION -
A MATTER OF THE SPIRIT
A CONVERSATION WITH DAVID BROWER
by Robbie Brandwynne, Andrea Entwistle, Robin Freeman, and Steve Rauh
YODELER: Environmental News, June 1977
Sierra Club - San Francisco Chapter
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 in our
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 wouldn'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 Stegner when he calls
it part of the geography of hope --- 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 when 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 from 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
forces 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
existences 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 wipe out the last vestiges 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 exciting 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. You 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 decision makers and 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
old hiking 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 out 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 form 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. Makajani 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 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 just 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 hope 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, and 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 direct 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 be
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 too --- 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 I 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 to 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 managers 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 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 a required subject 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 in 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, but can I 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.
RAUH: 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 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 to have a negative growth in energy. We have to have a growth in energy
conservation if anything. He rejoined, "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 this 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 a 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 hardly 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 hope 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.
RAUH: 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 this exciting.
FREEMAN: I 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.
__________
Brandwunne, Robble, Andrea Entwistle, Robin
Freeman, and Steve Rauth.
"A Conversation with David Brower." The Yodeler: Environmental
News.
1977. pp. 1, 6-7.
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