David Brower, 1912-2000

Nature's mightiest defender in these United States died Sunday in Berkeley, California, 88 years after he entered the world. His life thus briefly intersected with that of the greatest green champion of the nineteenth century: John Muir, who died in 1914. The aged Muir and the infant Brower were both alive at the moment of an event that profoundly shaped the imagination of American environmentalists: the flooding of the Hetch-Hetchy valley in Yosemite National Park in 1913.

The inundation of Yosemite's most beautiful feature taught Brower's generation of conservationists that without uncompromising defenders, the industrialization of the West would obliterate everything in its path; even the designation of a national park was no guarantee. As Brower famously put it: "When they win, it's fore ver. When we win, it's merely a stay of execution."

When Brower was born there was but a handful of national parks across the country. The national forests were in their infancy and had yet to be abused by logging. Nature had its eastern champions in the form of Thoreau, Emerson, George Perkins Marsh and Gifford Pinchot. As westerners respectively bred and born, Muir and Brower ranged themselves on a battlefield infinitely greater in scale. Until Muir no one had fought for an entire regional ecosystem as he did for the Sierras. With far more political agility than the flinty Muir, Brower fought for the entire west, then for the environmental stability of the planet.

Muir and Brower knew their mountain ranges first hand. Muir would take a bag of oatmeal and a plaid and hike for weeks. Brower was a rock climber. He made no less than 70 first ascents in the Sierra ranges. He was the first to climb Shiprock in New Mexico, later lamenting that he felt bad about treading on a Navajo sacred site.

As a Sierra Club activist Brower spent the 1930s watching one vast federal scheme after another scar or drown the western landscapes, from the mines abetted by the Bureau of Land Management, to the Hoover Dam on the Colorado River, to the opening of the national forests to corporate logging.

In 1952 Brower became the first executive director of the Sierra Club, at that time a 2000-strong group of well-connected, mostly upper-crust Californians. Before long he was plunged into his own most traumatic struggle, as dire as Muir's over Hetch-Hetchy. The battleground was Glen Canyon, on the Colorado River on the Arizona-Utah border.

The first big dam to go up on the Colorado had been Hoover in 1935, designed to funnel water to ever-expanding Los Angeles and the fields and ranches of Imperial Valley. Dam building was big business and those billions of dollars were predestined to end up in the coffers of corporations, not the bureaucracy. The lucrative contracts for Hoover Dam alone transformed three relatively obscure firms (Kaiser, Bechtel, and Morrison-Kudsen) into corporate Goliaths that have rampaged across the globe, causing ecological mayhem and human misery ever since. Bechtel would build Glen Canyon Dam and oversee the excavation of one of the world's biggest coal mines, Peabody Coal's Black Mesa mine on the adjacent Navajo Reservation. Hoover was California's deal. The Upper Basin states--New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Wyoming--wanted their shot. Their scheme was grandiose, including mega-dams at Flaming Gorge, Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument, and Glen Canyon.

Brower was outraged by the Bureau of Reclamation's plan to erect a dam on the Green River inside the stunning canyons of Dinosaur National Monument in northern Utah. The proposal reeked of the terrible defeat over Hetch-Hetchy in 1913. After that travesty, the Club made a pact: no more dams inside national parks or monuments.

Brower may not have known just how good he was. At hearings on the Upper Colorado Storage Act, the bill that was to authorize the Upper Basin dams, Brower ran circles around the Bureau of Reclamation and its congressional allies, pointing out distortions and outright fabrications in their testimony before the committee. Brower was also a master organizer, generating one of the first great national campaigns in the history of the environmental movement.

But from the beginning Brower's focus was fixed on keeping a dam out of Dinosaur National Monument. At all costs he feared the precedent of Hetch Hetchy. So Brower proposed a compromise. In exchange for keeping a dam out of Dinosaur, the Club wouldn't oppose a dam at Glen Canyon. Indeed, Brower even supported a scheme to raise the height of Glen Canyon Dam to accommodate more water storage.

In hindsight, it seems clear that Brower might well have been able to beat back both dams. A few years after Glen Canyon was authorized, Brower and the Sierra Club crushed a proposal to build two more dams downstream in the Grand Canyon itself, a campaign that made public relations history with 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?"

The Grand Canyon dams were dead the moment those papers hit the street. And so was the Club's tax-exempt status. Brower believed that Steward Udall, then LBJ's Secretary of the Interior, pushed the IRS to take action against the Sierra Club in retaliation

Looking back on it, Brower called the deal his "greatest mistake, greatest sin." In one way or another, Brower has spent the past forty years attempting to atone. Glen Canyon has become a testament to the perils of political dealmaking when it comes to the environment. "Never trade a place you know for one you don't," Brower again and again warned young environmentalists. Glen Canyon steeled Brower, making him not only more militant but more politically creative. He kept more dams out of the Grand Canyon. He engineered passage of the Wilderness Act, setting aside tens of millions of acres of public lands. If it had not been for Brower, Alaska would have become a back lot of the oil and timber corporations.

With the Sierra Club's tax exempt status gone, Brower swiftly shed the sedate manners of genteel conservationism. The fiery stance of today's green militants owes everything to Brower, whose widening areas of concern began to vex his colleagues in the Sierra Club more and more as he threw himself into battles against nuclear power and the big utilities, whose executives were tied into the same San Francisco establishment that had nourished the Sierra Club. On May 3, 1969, in one of the most notorious evictions in American environmental history, the board of the Sierra Club threw out their leader.

Brower didn't slow down. He founded Friends of the Earth, which globalized environmental issues and made arms control a green concern. Ultimately Brower's aversion to compromise proved too much for this organization, too, and he was driven out. Off went Brower to Earth Island Institute where his outstanding creativity as an organizer fostered an umbrella for grassroots activists working on issues ranging from threatened Siberian forests to the plight of the dolphins and turtles. Along with his drive and vision there was always a humanity to Brower markedly absent in many green crusaders. Earth Island became an advocate for environmental justice, bringing social issues--urban population, toxic dumping, the environmental degradation of poor communities--within the purview of green organizers.

In his mid-80s Brower didn't slow up. He launched a drive to be elected president of the Sierra Club's board. To the Sierra Club's Old Guard, conservative and timid, the prospect of Browerian irruption was horrifying. There was open civil war between the Old Guard, mustered around executive director Carl Pope, and the militant grassroots club members in chapters across the country. Brower was beaten off. A few months later he resigned from the board, saying bitterly that it had connived at dozens of betrayals of the environment in the 1990s, when in his opinion Clinton and Gore had done more damage than Reagan or Bush.

Just under a year ago the 87-year-old Brower was in Seattle, ranged alongside demonstrators against the World Trade Organization two and three generations younger than himself and owing much of their inspiration to him. In the spring of this year Brower, battling cancer, returned to the Four Corners region to inaugurate a new campaign aimed at decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam and restoring Glen Canyon. "It's time to correct one of the most egregious errors of the last century," Brower said.

Brower's wife, Ann, who did more than anyone to put the steel in Brower's spine, to bring his soaring ego down to earth, and to teach him the organizing and fundraising possibilities in green journalism and photography, talks about a rock on Brower's desk. It's from the bottom of Glen Canyon and it sat there in front of him as a reminder of what had been lost and what can yet be won. Brower was always an optimist. How could a conservationist not be an optimist and fight through most of the twentieth century? The rock is there to inspire the millions he led and taught.