David Brower: The Making of the Environmental Movement, By Tom Turner, with a foreword by Bill McKibben. University of California Press, 2015. 308 pages.
David Brower was instrumental in saving many US lands from ruination, including: Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument, a free-flowing river in the Grand Canyon, Redwood National park, North Cascades National Park, Point Reyes National Seashore, Mineral King in Sequoia National park, and nearly eight hundred wilderness areas. Sierra Club members may know Brower as the Executive Director who led the Sierra Club from 1952 to 1966. During these years the mountaineering society evolved to become a central pillar of environmentalism in the Nation.
Tom Turner laments that most Americans don’t know David Brower. Hence, this first comprehensive biography. Turner worked with Brower for twenty-years, yet the career biography doesn’t shy away from the complicated nature of a man twice fired from organizations he served and grew (Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth). The biography focus on the career of Brower has little to say about the inner life of Brower, yet the facts alone offer glimpses.
One fascinating battle of non-profit against Government intervention happened when Brower fought to save Echo Park from a dam. During Congressional testimony he put what he called his ninth-grade math skills up against the mathematical computations of the Bureau of Reclamation. The Bureau had claimed that that the proposed dam reservoir would save between 1000 and 2000 acre-feet of evaporation. Brower’s chalk-board figures before Congress demonstrated the math errors. After the hearing, the Bureau’s water saving claim dropped to 250 acre-feet, with Brower claiming the number to be 200. Brower also used the John Muir technique of helping the public to fall in love with America’s wilderness. He took the press on float trips, led hiking expeditions, and turned the Sierra Club into a publishing house that chronicled and illustrated the majesty of wilderness.
It’s hard to imagine that the sharp mathematics at play in the saving of Echo Park didn’t come into play with a similar level of astuteness in the running of the Sierra Club. Board members, including Ansel Adams, seemed to harbor both admiration and frustration for what they saw as haphazard financial management. Turner presents Brower as a man who moved full-steam ahead in his passion to protect wilderness. That energy and momentum would build great organizations, but once those organizations were big enough to need a bureaucracy, his style and was at odds with organizationally processed change.
After being fired, Brower’s job to save wilderness didn’t end. He founded Friends of the Earth and then the Earth Island Institute. In 1982, he was even asked back to serve on the board of the Sierra Club. When board member Dick Leonard asked if he was going to behave, Brower answered: “No.”
David Brower passed away in 2000 at the age of 88. His biography also serves as a history of the battles to save wilderness. The chronicle of wave after wave of desperate measures to save vulnerable lands builds admiration for the stamina and hutzpah of Brower. All the organizations he served and founded continue to protect wilderness around the world and magnify the impact of a great and complicated American.