Tom Turner - David Brower: The Making of the Environmental Movement

David Brower, for all the reasons this fine book makes clear, was a very great manalong with his Sierra Club predecessor, John Muir, quite likely the most important conservationist in twentieth-century America. And thats because he figured out how to do the hardest thing for any movement leader: capture the attention of a large enough slice of the public to change the American zeitgeist and thus allow a new set of political possibilities.

Muir had invented a new grammar of wildness in his early trips to the Sierra, a brand of stunned sublime that was unlike anything that had come before and that infected people almost immediatelynot most people, perhaps, but for the purposes of, say, protecting Yosemite, there were more than enough who could imagine climbing a pine tree in a storm. But there things lingered for more than half a century, with Muirs Sierra Club the perfect example: it never seemed to really get beyond its status as a hiking club for Westerners with some elite conservation work on the side.

Then came Dave Brower, one of those rare lifelong learners. He went from mountaineering ace to wilderness devotee to the heir of Rachel Carsons fears, and as the 60s progressed he managed to keep pacehe understood intuitively that Muirs homely ecological insight about everything in nature being hitched to everything else applied also to politics: that population and pesticides and nuclear bombs were linked with wilderness and species conservation. Hed been in Berkeley since his boyhood, of course, but he was open to the new meaning of Berkeley as the 60s wore on; he understood change and was comfortable with it. Excited by it.

Which most people in positions of power and influence are not. Its so sad to read about the lesser men who dominated the Sierra Club in those days, unable to understand that they had as their leader a truly remarkable visionary who was changing the world in front of their eyes. They were happier to stick with the old, and so they did, casting Brower out in what is arguably the worst management decision any nonprofit organization has ever made (and one that the club is only now recovering from, under the inspired leadership of Mike Brune). But if it cost the Sierra Club, it didnt derail Brower, who was fully freed to be John McPhees archdruid, and to argue and push and prod and provoke and excite with everything he had. And so: Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute and a hundred grand battles. I remember seeing him, near the very end of his life, in an eighth-of-an-acre community garden on the Lower East Side of New York, fighting alongside the impoverished local residents to save their vegetable patch from encroaching development. It was a long way from Glen Canyon, and it wasnt.

I remember, too, a lovely week with Dave and Anne in Yosemite Valley. I was conducting a long interview with him for Rolling Stone; it was a pleasure for him to reminisce, pointing out all the routes hed pioneered up the steep granite from the valley floor. But he never looked back for long; he used the occasion to instruct me about what needed to be done in the looming twenty-first century, that it had to be a time when restoration and repair became the watchwords. At the time I thought of myself solely as a writer, but as Ive gone on to be a small-time organizer as well, his words have often echoed in my head.

And more than his words, his great, indomitable spirit. That thatch of hair, that broad smile, that bubbling stream of conversation. It drew you in. A truly great organizer is a person whom others want to be around, who lends energy to everyone he comes in contact with. That was BrowerI remember that he startled me by saying that as far as he could recall, hed never spent a night outdoors alone, not in all those endless first ascents. He lived for connection, for contact, for gregarious exchange. And if he wore some people out (the Sierra Club board chief among them), he drew far more in to the great fight.

It was in his time that the real contours of that fight became clear. No single mountain range, not even the Range of Light, was terrain enough; the entire planet was at stake. Brower figured that out before almost anyone else. He was a friend of the earth indeed.

Bill McKibben, 2015

PROLOGUE

A Tense Meeting in the Mountains

It is a crisp, bright, clear Sierra Nevada morning, September 15, 1968. The Sierra Clubs board of directors is having one of its quarterly meetings in the meadow behind Clair Tappaan Lodge in the mountains 170 miles or so east of San Francisco.

The air smells of pine, cedar, and fir. The lodge, whose floors creak and are scarred from thirty years of pounding by ski boots, is used mostly for winter skiing parties. The club maintains and operates its own modest ski run, Signal Hillstill served, at this time, by a rope towabove and behind the lodge. It is a ramshackle affairhalf a century later the clubs website description uses the word rustic twice in one paragraph. Visitors sleep in dorm-style rooms in their own sleeping bags and must do a choredishwashing, floor-sweeping, snow-shovelingeach day. Meals are served in a big dining room where diners eat at long tables, sit on benches, and serve themselves from bowls of salad; big, steaming trays of spaghetti; and other such communal fare.