David R Brower

Obituary - Independent

David Brower, mountaineer and founder of Friends of the Earth, has died aged 88. A notorious curmudgeon, Brower was in a long tradition of American admirers and defenders of wilderness. He was the heir of men like Henry David Thoreau (on the sedentary side) and of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark (on the side which was more obviously his: the extremely active). But it was John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, which Brower would go on to lead for a period beginning in 1952, and to argue with all his life, whose ethic and style defined his lifelong approach to conservation.

Brower fought for twenty years to keep dam-builders out of the canyons of the West (and is credited with saving the Grand Canyon from two dams) and loggers and trappers out of its forests. This work would develop, at Friends of the Earth, to keeping whalers off the oceans and nuclear power stations out of anywhere.

His early career was conservation work in the 19th century grand tradition. Muir had founded the Sierra Club in 1892 as a frankly preservationist body, designed to defend the burgeoning national park movement, and, above all to change the way Americans saw their wildernesses. In contradistinction to the 'Wise Use” movement led by foresters such as Gifford Pinchot, there was to be as little compromise with commercial interests as possible. Ever since, the club's purism has irritated many committed conservationists, but it was the club's ability to compromise at all which infuriated Brower and led to his resigning as director in the late 60s, and eventually to his resigning as an ordinary member in May this year. He once avoided stout resistance of a particular project, but soon regretted it, saying: 'Never sacrifice a place you haven't seen in order to defend one you have.

In September 1969 he launched Friends of the Earth in San Francisco (it had been given its name by Brower's wife, Anne), and a few months later published The Environmental Handbook, a collection of pieces by diverse hands which was in effect the group's manifesto. In late 1970, he came to England, determined that there should be a Friends of the Earth group here, as there was the next year. In London, he met, amongst others, the American, Amory Lovins, then a young Oxford don with a passion for writing and photography, and at that time involved in defending Snowdonia from the attentions of the mining giant, RTZ. Brower suggested that Lovins work the subject up as one of the coffee table books (some of them show-casing work by the celebrated photograher, Ansell Adams) which had proven such a money-spinner for the Sierra Club. The mining issue must have resonated with the older man: he had been involved in defending Glacier National Park, also from copper mining.

It is one of the many paradoxes of conservation that Lovins, who became the archpriest of high-technology solutions to global environmental problems, now works cordially with RTZ, as does another early Friends of the Earth UK campaigner, Tom Burke (who himself progressed from activist t ministerial adviser with a Conservative government). In the 70s, Lovins became in effect Browers' representative in the UK, and began then a devotion which only ended with Lovins' visiting Brower a few days ago, and noting one last deathbed action: a vote cast for Ralph Nader. It was a typically quixotic act.

But Brower's defiance was not often a matter symbolic but useless gestures. Friends of the Earth was from the start effective. It was a freshly-minted organisation for its time. Going well beyond the conservation ethic of the past, it was born as a fully-fledged environmental organisation, devoted to the damage man was doing to the environment, but as much to the harm a damaged environment could do to man. Brower had once considered nuclear power a potentially useful source of clean energy, and then as a visual blight on the wild places where it was sited. It was the issue which led to his finally leaving the Sierra Club. Now, he would campaign against it on every sort of ground, but adding its own potential for invisible, insidious pollution.

FoE struck a chord with a generation reared on affluence and troubled by its fallout, and was the ideal organisation to capitalise on the success of the annual Earth Day, which had been just been inaugurated, albeit by other groups, including the Environmental Defense Fund. FoE's method was as modern as its motives. It was to take stunts and slogans to the streets, TV screens and consciousness of a whole generation, and not merely of youngsters. Partly because the United Nations was taking an increasing interest in the environment, the early 1970s saw FoE soon establish itself in the style it has maintained since: in contact with the powers-that-be, always earnest, only occasionally charismatic, and more devoted to incremental improvements in the environment than suits the more dramatic sort, who gravitate toward Greenpeace.

Brower had set up an institution which was a federation of autonomous groups, and the arrangement alternately delighted him with its anarchy and infuriated him with its unruliness. True to form, in the mid 80s, Brower was in and out of power at FoE, until he finally left in 1984. He would not countenance budget cuts or the managerial discipline which cramped his style. He rejoined the board of the Sierra Club, only to have as bumpy a ride there.

David Ross Brower was born in Berkeley, California on July 1, 1912, and his love of nature partly developed as he took his recently-blinded mother for walks in the Berkeley Hills. A 6' 2” sportsman but a reluctant student, he went on to work in a sweet factory and to develop serious skills in trekking and mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada in the early 30s. He worked for the park service in Yosemite National Park, and soon progressed to publicity manager, where he learned the art of writing, and the blacker art of getting journalists to write, about the wilderness and threats to it.

He saw wartime service, training mountaineers at home and in Europe, and afterward worked briefly at the University of California Press before joining the Sierra Club. In his nearly two decades there, membership rose tenfold and the club's influence was seen in the Wilderness Act and the Wild Rivers Act. At 650,000, its membership was grow a further tenfold.

Tetchy and difficult he may have been, but his reputation for uncompromising stances disguised an openness to a wide range of people. He would go rafting with dam enthusiasts and hiking with loggers. It might be less of a surprise that he supported the late 70s' new wave 'eco-terrorists” of Earth First!, led for a while by the charismatic Dave Foreman, from Arizona, in the image of the fictional Monkey Wrench Gang imagined by the novelist Edward Abbey. 'These people are not the terrorists”, opined Brower, 'The real terrorists are the polluters and despoilers of nature”. More surprising is that Amory Lovins also got Brower's willing support for his close relations with business.

The breadth of his sympathies was emphasised in an eccentric memoir of Bower written by one of America's most distinguished nature writers, John A McPhee, Encounters With the Archdruid. It is a poetic but accurate account of the robust but also friendly relations between Brower and Charles Park, a mining engineer; Charles Fraser, a developer; and Floyd Dominy, a formidable hydrologist and dammer.

Still, he became, if anything, more radical and wide-ranging in his anger as he grew old. His last falling-out with the Sierra Club was over its reluctance to campaign immigration, which he thought was leading to overpopulation. And he believed the Club should be fighting the World Trade Organisation and the danger he believed was posed to the world and even at home (through terrorism) as the developing world grew impatient with economic exploitation. We should remember Oklahoma City.... Cool it! Give the rest of the world a chance, especially the other living things. This is the most important thing we can do," he recently proclaimed.

Brower was fair writer himself, as is demonstrated by a piece he wrote for The National Geographic in 1954. He had been leading the Sierra Club's 48th High Trip, an arduous hike in the Sierra Nevada initiated by John Muir. Accompanied by 140 men, women and children, he led a fortnight's campaign amongst the '14,000-footers”. As the trip began, 'faces radiant but still city-pale ranged our first campfire”. The rest of the piece, using the muscular, enthusiastic language favoured then and now by the magazine, describes mild adventures and youthful flirtations in this 'approachable range. Its peaks stand close. Its forests are open and parklike. Its only troublesome reptile, the rattler, stays away from the high ranges. Only an occasional pioneering bear ever perturbs the camper.