I think with a concentrated bit of effort we can wake up all
of the Americans who have not taken the time to realize
how dumb we have been. In the words of a good friend of mine, "just because you've been dumb doesn't mean you
have to stay dumb." . . .

-- DAVID R. BROWER

The government once had a plan to build a dam that would flood the Grand Canyon. That was less than 40 years ago, and the man who was instrumental in scuttling it, David Brower, has only just died. Filling up the Grand Canyon to produce hydropower? The idea seems almost bizarre today and it is a credit to our society’s evolution that it would seem so.
Saving the Grand Canyon was the most spectacular of Brower’s successes. Others included saving stands of ancient redwoods, the passage of the Wilderness Act and Wild River Act, and putting vast tracts of Alaska off limits to development, as well as smaller parts of Cape Cod. A few weeks after Brower’s death, President Clinton signed legislation preserving parts of the Florida Everglades, another of America’s wild areas that Brower had fought to preserve.

Brower was the kind of man for whom the failures loomed larger personally than the successes, and he summed up his achievements by saying, “All I did was to slow the rate at which things are getting worse.” And failure, he explained, is easier to measure than success: “When they win, it’s forever. When we win, it’s merely a stay of execution.”

His biggest failure was the Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River in Utah. When the Glen Canyon Dam was completed in 1966 it inundated hundreds of square miles of Arizona and Utah. The dam served little purpose past (then unneeded) power generation and it destroyed some of the most beautiful riverine vistas in the country. Brower essentially traded Glen Canyon to keep the Bureau of Reclamation from erecting another dam on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument, upstream from Glen Canyon. The experience of negotiating away priceless wilderness radicalized Brower, and made him unwilling to compromise.

Edward Abbey, in his compelling essay “Down the River” (collected in Desert Solitaire), wrote about a float through Glen Canyon in its last days above water: “The beavers had to go and build another god damned dam on the Colorado.” He fully expected that the Grand Canyon would experience the same watery death. But when the Sierra Club (under Brower’s leadership) ran full-page ads in the New York Times under the banner “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel, so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” it killed the monstrosity.

Brower was a prickly guy and that rare kind of true believer who becomes more radical with age. Like Abbey, Brower compared dam builders to beavers: “They can’t stand the site of running water.” It is a conundrum that the kind of uncompromising stance needed to save wild areas bleeds over to more reasonable projects. For instance the West Side Highway in New York, where decaying docks that supported populations of protected fish are among the reasons that drivers today wait in traffic jams. (This was not actually one of Brower’s projects, but, jeez those jams are irritating.) It is hard for fanatics to disaggregate the needed from the frivolous, and Brower followed some causes too far. But Brower’s extremism also provided cover for environmental moderates. Nixon’s Council on Environmental Quality chairman Russell Train said, “Thank God for Dave Brower. He makes it so easy for the rest of us to be reasonable.”

Brower was born in Berkeley, CA, the son of an instructor of mechanical drawing. Those in search of a developmental explanation for his combative personality might harp on his family history. He lost most of his teeth in an early traumatic fall, and was nicknamed “the toothless boob,” by his family until age 12, when a new crop of misshapen teeth emerged from his adolescent gums. Yet the family was also the source of his intense appreciation for nature. His mother went blind when he was seven, and he credited leading her around and describing what he saw with sharpening his appreciation of the natural world.

He studied entomology at Berkeley, but dropped out to become a mountaineer. He made 70 first ascents in Yosemite, and established many new routes up mountains there. He later said he “graduated from the university of the Colorado River.” He was still climbing the Himalayas into his 70s. During WWII he served as an instructor in the 10th Mountain Division. When he returned from the war he edited the Sierra Club magazine. In 1952 he was named executive director of the club John Muir had founded in 1911, by then little more than a somewhat politicized hiking group. Under Brower’s energetic leadership 7,000 members grew to over 70,000 by the 60s. Immediately after the 1966 ad campaign over the Grand Canyon dam, the IRS removed the Sierra Club’s tax-exempt status. Brower welcomed the attention: “People who didn’t know whether they loved the Grand Canyon sure knew whether or not they loved the IRS.”

But by 1969 his radicalism had got him kicked out of the Sierra Club. The same year he founded Friends of the Earth, today the largest environmental group in the world. There are branches in 68 countries. FOE eventually kicked him out, too. But his motto for the organization, “Think globally, act locally,” lives on. Among the other organizations he founded was the Earth Island Institute.

Brower was friends with Ansel Adams. John McPhee wrote a book about him titled Encounters With the Archdruid (1971) in which McPhee called him the Sierra Club’s “preeminent fang.” He edited more than 50 books. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He worked to save more places than most nature fans visit in a lifetime, including the Northern Cascades in Oregon and Washington; the Great Smoky Mountains in Tennessee and North Carolina, the Red River Gorge in Kentucky, the Allagash Wilderness in Maine. He fought for trees, for porpoises, and against nuclear power and pesticides. He was, without peer, the most important environmentalist of the 20th century.

Brower is famous for saying, “We do not inherit the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children.” The words are chiseled into stone at the National Aquarium in Washington, DC. But Brower claimed he only said it after a third martini to a reporter at a North Carolina bar. The sentiments he wished to be remembered for were more extreme: “We’re not just borrowing from our children, we’re stealing from them – and it’s not even considered to be a crime.”

He ended most speeches on a positive note borrowed from Goethe: “Anything you can do, or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.” Brower managed to alienate many of the people he worked with, but his dreams, many made into physical reality that the living can visit, will live on.