David Brower

Conservationist

• Born: July 1, 1912
• Birthplace: Berkeley, California
• Died: November 5, 2000
• Place of death: Berkeley, California

Identification: American environmental activist and writer

Brower, who was vigorously involved in battles concerning environmental issues for more than fifty years, was one of the twentieth century’s most influential and controversial environmental activists and writers.

David Ross Brower served as the first executive director of the Sierra Club from 1952 to 1969. He is credited by many with helping the San Francisco-based organization grow from two thousand to seventy-seven thousand members and developing it into a powerful national organization. He led the club in aggressive campaigns against U.S. government projects to develop wild areas, most notably fights that successfully stopped the construction of the Echo Park Dam, which would have flooded part of Dinosaur National Monument in Utah in the 1950’s, and two different dams across the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon in the 1960’s and 1970’s. His enterprising tactics included full-page advertisements in The New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, which resulted in the Internal Revenue Service reclassifying the nonprofit Sierra Club as a lobbying organization and removing its tax-deductible status.

For more than twenty-five years, Brower focused much of his passion and energy on the Glen Canyon Dam in northeastern Arizona. “Glen Canyon died, and I was partly responsible for its needless death,” Brower wrote in Eliot Porter’s The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado (1963). In the mid-1950’s the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation was planning to construct dams across the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon and Glen Canyon, Arizona, and across the Green and Yampa rivers in Utah. Following the directives of the Sierra Club board of directors, Brower agreed to drop the club’s opposition to the Colorado River dams if the Bureau of Reclamation would discontinue plans to build the two dams in Utah. The bureau agreed to the deal and moved forward to build the Glen Canyon Dam.

Before the dam construction was completed, Brower and the Sierra Club decided the compromise had been a mistake. They blamed their decision on a lack of familiarity with the spectacular beauty of Glen Canyon. (In 1996 the Sierra Club directors unanimously passed a motion by Brower to support draining Lake Powell, the reservoir behind the Glen Canyon Dam, and return the Colorado River flow to the most natural state possible. Brower did not advocate dismantling the dam; rather, he stated, it should be left “as a tourist attraction, like the Pyramids, with passers-by wondering how humanity ever built it, and why.”)

In the mid-1960’s Brower and the Sierra Club successfully led an effort to prevent construction of the Bureau of Reclamation’s proposed Marble Canyon Dam in the Grand Canyon and helped cripple the bureau’s effort to build Bridge Canyon Dam farther downstream in the Grand Canyon. By 1969, however, the majority of the Sierra Club’s board of directors found Brower’s tactics too reckless, both financially and politically, and they removed him as executive director. He then formed the preservation-oriented Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters, both of which flourished under his leadership. He also facilitated the establishment of independent Friends of the Earth organizations in other countries. In 1982, after conflicts with members of the Friends of the Earth’s professional staff and its directors, Brower moved on to form another group, Earth Island Institute, the stated mission of which was to globalize the environmental movement. He returned to the Sierra Club as a director in 1983 and was reelected in 1986 and 1995. In the fall of 1994 Brower helped develop the Ecological Council of Americas to improve cooperation among organizations in the Western Hemisphere that were attempting to integrate environmental and economic needs.

In the 1990’s Brower called on the federal government to replace the U.S. Bureau of Land Management with a new agency called the National Land Service. Its mission would be to protect and restore private and public land in the United States. He also strongly advocated the creation of a national biosphere reserve system.

Throughout his life, Brower pushed the edges of environmental thought of the day. He pioneered ideas and methods to preserve the environment and create a global approach to issues. For many years Brower advocated the establishment of international natural reserves in areas of rich biodiversity and ecosystems. The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has established such a system of World Heritage Sites.

Brower also advocated a method known as CPR to guard against the destruction of natural areas and biodiversity: “C” is for conservation, or the rational use of resources: “P” represents the preservation of threatened, endangered, and yet undiscovered species; and “R” stands for restoration of lands already damaged by human activities. Many of his tactics and ideas seemed radical when he introduced them but later became standard practice among mainstream environmentalists. Russell Train, chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality during President Richard Nixon’s administration, once said, “Thank God for Dave Brower; he makes it so easy for the rest of us to be reasonable.”

Bibliography

Brower, David. Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run: A Call to Save the Earth. New ed. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2007.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “The Sermon.” In Speaking of Earth: Environmental Speeches That Moved the World, edited by Alon Tal. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2006.

McPhee, John. Encounters with the Archdruid. 1971. Reprint. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000.

Porter, Eliot. The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado. Edited by David Brower. Commemorative ed. Layton, Utah: Gibbs Smith, 2000.

Stoll, Steven. U.S. Environmentalism Since 1945: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.