The Man Who Built the Sierra Club, by Robert Wyss

THE MAN W HO B U I LT THE SI ERR A C LUB A

L I F E

O F

D A V I D

R O B E R T

B R O W E R

W Y S S

Introduction

In the spring of 1966, David Brower traveled to a Colorado River canyon he considered again. Wipe out wilderness beautiful—and increasingly repulsive. The and the world is a cage. place was Glen Canyon, and it was being David Brower, in Hal Wingo, drowned. He met Life magazine writer Hal “Close-up, California’s Wingo and a photographer, and as they hiked David Brower” portions of the valley, Brower talked about two of his greatest conservation battles.

One was his ongoing protests over the Glen Canyon Dam, the water behind which was now flooding 186 miles of the Colorado to regulate its use for hydroelectricity production and storage and to supply water to thirsty southwestern states. The hikers reached Cathedral in the Desert, a beautiful, cavernous amphitheater of pink Navajo Sandstone, bathed in sunlight, the trickle of a waterfall cascading into a pool bordered by lush green moss and hanging gardens. Brower had only belatedly discovered the canyon’s beauties, and he had been pleading for the dam work to halt and for the flooding to cease. But his desperate appeals to federal officials, even Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, who could be both a friend and an enemy, met with stony rejection. For three years, water had been pooling behind the new dam, and it would soon submerge the cavern. “This makes me pretty damn sick,” said Brower. “Glen Canyon is the greatest loss of scenic resources anywhere.” Closer to the dam, similar landmarks in this brilliant slip-rock country were already buried under hundreds of feet of water. “I just hate the deception of it,” he added. “Down under that In wilderness, the world

gets put to its own music

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water, some of the most beautiful scenery ever created is gone.” Brower was also clashing downstream with federal dam builders in the Grand Canyon. Engineers wanted to erect one dam that would back up the raging Colorado for 50 miles and a second that would back it up for 93 miles.

“If the Grand Canyon dams really had to be built to ensure the nation’s survival, or even a region’s, there’d be something to argue about,” he told Wingo. “But they are absolutely not necessary.”

The Colorado, declared Brower, was already overregulated, overdammed, and overchoked. At least some of it needed to remain free and wild.

The resulting Life story hailed Brower as America’s “No. 1 Conserva­ tionist.” The lead photograph depicted the fifty-three-year-old Brower glancing up, his face still ruggedly handsome, his silver hair tousled and whipped by the wind. He was the California city boy who had forged the Sierra Club into a national environmental force. The primary headline touted Brower as the “Knight Errant to Nature’s Rescue.”1 The article failed, as many others had, to capture the complexity and paradox of David Brower. Brower would always believe that failure to stop construction of the Glen Canyon Dam was his greatest mistake as an environmental activist and that the loss of the spectacularly scenic canyon defined the later years of his conservation ethic. What Life overlooked, most importantly, however, was that the decision to erect the dam was tied to conservation’s greatest victory to date against dam builders. Brower had led an effort that had successfully blocked the construction of two dams on a Colorado tributary, the Green River, in a national park sanctuary, Dinosaur National Monument. This was a triumphant moment for conservationists. It finally established a basic principle for conservationists, one that become so inviolable that politicians would find it virtually impossible to overcome in the future. All federal land, set aside as a national park or monument, was now off limits to dams or other development. That happened in 1956, and Brower emerged as a national conservation leader; the movement flourished and gained strength as a national political force.

A decade later he capitalized on that principle and power by fighting and eventually defeating the proposed Grand Canyon dams. It was an even greater victory than Dinosaur. Yet the price that had to be paid was also 2

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great. On behalf of the Sierra Club and as the acknowledged leader of the conservation moment, he agreed to trade the two Grand Canyon dams’ hydroelectric units for a coal-fired, electric-generating plant six miles east of Glen Canyon Dam. Air pollution soon fouled the skies, extending to the Grand Canyon, evolving into yet another contributor to the twentyfirst century’s greatest environmental challenge—climate change.

Over the years, David Brower has been called many things—tireless, unyielding, passionate, visionary, bold, influential, uncompromising, handsome, charismatic, opinionated, and articulate. He became a circuit-riding prophet, the environmental movement’s conscience who defined conservation and environmentalism from the mid-1950s until his death in 2000. He was an angry trailblazer responsible more than any other for turning environmentalism from hiking and bird-watching into a social and political force.

Those same admirers also called Brower stubborn, contentious, controversial, irascible, impossible, polarizing, impolitic, impolite, and a notorious curmudgeon. He on occasion would willingly stretch facts into falsehoods, was so unwilling to tamp down his views that he destroyed lifelong friendships, and refused to take orders even from those in institutional positions above him. He was frustratingly independent.2 And yet he did all of this for one selfless reason—to sustain the earth’s natural environment. He wanted to save as much of the planet as possible from humans. He wanted to preserve what remained of the natural world and safely pass it to future generations.

He was forty years old in 1952 when he began this quest as the Sierra Club’s first executive director. He was the first full-time employee for this San Francisco–based hiking club that at the time had only six thousand members. When he left the club in 1969, it had seventy thousand members around the nation. He inherited a club known more for its social outings and summer hikes than for its advocacy. The nation’s conservation movement was small, splintered, and ineffective. Engineers built dams seemingly wherever they wanted; foresters chopped the nation’s trees with little restraint; even in the national parks, the rangers with the funny broad-brim hats were best known not for conservation but for entertaining visitors by feeding garbage to the bears.

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By 1969, all that had changed.

Dam construction was off-limits in national parks and almost everywhere else; logging was limited in national forests; and new national parks ranged from the California redwoods to the coastal dunes of Cape Cod in Massachusetts. Brower and the burgeoning Sierra Club were instrumental in this political and ecological transformation. Brower played a key role not only in Dinosaur and the Grand Canyon but elsewhere as well.

He fought, for example, to protect the wilderness of Washington State’s North Cascades and to prevent further logging of coastal redwoods. He espoused the concept of wilderness protection, and he helped win congressional legislation to protect the nation’s wild lands, resulting in the landmark Wilderness Act of 1964.

Brower succeeded because he made people care. “Brower’s eloquence in conversation, at the podium, or wielding a pen is purely captivating,” wrote Stephanie Mills, an acolyte. “Like any great bard’s, his voice has a range and wit. He called for the preservation of homely necessities like topsoil, and of conspicuous glories like the Sierra and the sliprock country with equal conviction.”3 He was also a genius in using the media to promote his causes. No commercial book publisher would take the risks that Brower did to produce a series of nature books. Paul Brooks, who published Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, told Brower that such expensive books would never sell. Yet some of them sold more than 1 million copies. Brower’s friend Ansel Adams produced the first books, filling them with stunning black-and-white nature photographs. Later came books by Eliot Porter, featuring color photography that was so rich and deep that readers found them irresistible even though they would cost the equivalent of $200 to $250 today. Brower produced books, posters, calendars, and films that told stories of nature’s wonders while drawing in thousands of new members to the Sierra Club. So did the newspaper advertisements that campaigned for the redwoods and Grand Canyon. Brower did not invent the concept of political advertising by advocacy organizations, but he used it in a way never seen before to win over sympathizers and outrage opponents. When dam supporters claimed it would be easier to appreciate the canyon walls on a power boat atop a 4

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Grand Canyon reservoir, Brower responded with an ad that asked, “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?”4 Brower was shy in personal situations, sometimes even brusque. But his movie star looks, his gift for words, and the charm and charisma that he could flick on were irresistibly seductive. He developed political alliances with such powerful personalities as Supreme Court justice William O. Douglas, writer Wallace Stegner, and Interior Secretary Stewart Udall.

They did not always agree with him—especially Udall—but there was mutual respect. He inspired individuals and large audiences. Over time, he developed a special talk for the lecture circuit that was particularly effective at college campuses. In it, he squeezed time into seven days. Life arrived on a Tuesday. Neanderthals came at eleven seconds before midnight on Saturday. The Industrial Revolution happened one-fortieth of a second before midnight. The message—we must all be wary as the earth’s stewards: “We ought to learn to ask, before starting a vast new project, what will we gain if we don’t build it? What will it cost the earth? One thing it will cost is wilderness.”5 In 1952, Brower, at the time a registered Republican, a major in the U.S. Army Reserve, and a supporter of nuclear energy, was willing to compromise on a range of conservation issues. He supported a number of dam projects early in his tenure: “Merely to say ‘we’re against all dams until . . .’ does nothing but lump us as aginners [sic] with no specific alternative. It’s a sure formula for being ignored by all hands, including other conservationists,” he told the Sierra Club board of directors in 1956.6 Over time, Brower’s perspective shifted. There were many reasons for this shift, often tied to his clashes with dam builders, foresters, and park rangers, but it ultimately came down to Brower’s realization that protecting what was left of the earth’s wilderness was paramount. A loss of wilderness was not just a campaign defeat; it was a loss to future generations forever. But Brower’s increasing refusal to negotiate compromises would infuriate opponents.

One of them, Colorado congressman Wayne Aspinall, once called him “an utterly unreasonable man who would never compromise on anything.”7 What especially set Brower apart from others was the fervor and risk that he brought to his task. He was a gambler, a risk taker, a maverick. When 5

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he was in his twenties, he often put his life at risk by climbing mountains; he was credited with 130 first ascents of peaks.8 When he was older, he insisted that others gamble with him. Edgar Wayburn, a friend and colleague who eventually became a critic, said Brower “demanded absolute self-rule. One of his most used expressions was ‘follow me,’ ” a slogan that works only when the leader has absolute control.9 Brower of course did not. The nature books he produced, for example, were an incredible financial gamble and one that succeeded—that is, until the market changed.

Brower stubbornly resisted acknowledging that adjustment. He was never a strong financial manager, and as Sierra Club deficits mounted, many of his friends worried he was bankrupting the organization. But even as the red ink spread, Brower refused to cut back on publishing expensive books if that meant reducing the Sierra Club’s mission and doing less to save the earth. Commitment and righteousness can be positive attributes for an advocate. They can also be self-destructive when they become absolutes, especially when they are directed against allies and friends.

For many years, magazine and newspaper writers and filmmakers painted Brower in one-dimensional portrayals. To them, he was a heroic crusader and a fierce advocate for the environment who would not give in to others at the Sierra Club more willing to compromise. Yet to other people he was an irresponsible renegade, willing to sacrifice humanity for the sake of a forest. If only Brower, this driven, enigmatic man, were that simple, his fall from Sierra Club grace so neat, and his efforts on conservation’s behalf so monochromatic or short-lived.

Life magazine did get it right in 1966, though, in declaring that Brower was then at the apex of his power. He was the premier conservationist of his generation, perhaps the greatest ever. He was the heir to Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, the contemporary of Rachel Carson and Jacques Cousteau. Having already established the foundation that we call the modern environmental movement, he was on the cusp of greater glory, success, and achievement. Three years later he was gone, removed from the helm of the Sierra Club and the throne of environmentalism that he had crafted. His plummet was fittingly complex, a tale as rich, deep, and idiosyncratic as the man it befell. He lingered another thirty years, more a sage than a messiah.

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