David Brower

(July 1, 1912 – November 5, 2000)

David Brower was long-time Executive Director of the Sierra Club, and went on to found Friends of the Earth and the Earth Island Institute. He was one of our most forceful and uncompromising environmentalists.

The late Doug Tompkins, founder of the North Face outdoor clothing line and responsible for protecting millions of acres in Chile as National Parks, said of Brower: “I think his place in history will only get more important as we move into the future. He’s a legend.” In fact, Doug often quoted Brower in saying that his conservation work was “to pay my rent for living on the planet.” We could all do well to emulate that.

First Executive Director of the Sierra Club, frequently quoted John Muir, and encouraged modern recognition of his legacy.

David Brower was a leading figure in campaigns to keep dams out of Dinosaur National Monument and the Grand Canyon; and to promote establishment of the Wilderness Act of 1964, and Redwood and North Cascades National Parks.

Brower, when asked in an interview how he was introduced to wilderness, said: “Through the reading of John Muir. Muir told me about wilderness.”

In documentary films and writings, Brower encouraged others to appreciate and protect wilderness. Brower created the Sierra Club’s Exhibit Format series of coffee-table books – the first of their kind. Beginning with This is the American Earth, featuring photographs by Ansel Adams and other photographers, and with evocative text by Nancy Newhall, the series moved to color photography and became very successful in introducing the public to the ideals of wilderness preservation. Brower deeply understood the use of the media (large, coffee-table books with lots of pictures, as well as films, posters, and other media). (Unfortunately, the Sierra Club no longer publishes Sierra Club Books.)
Brower wrote many essays and book introductions for the Exhibit Format series, including introductions for the 9th book in the series, Gentle Wilderness, featuring photographs by Richard Kauffman and text by John Muir. That book incorporated extensive excerpts from Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra. Brower also wrote the forward to the Sierra Club Library edition of Muir’s My First Summer in the Sierra.
Brower helped to institute a series of Biennial Wilderness Conferences (conceived by Ike Livermore), and frequently published proceedings from these conferences.
David Brower at Hetch Hetchy, May 27, 2000
Two Yosemites (YouTube). The film depicts two “crown jewels” of Yosemite National Park: Yosemite Valley and Hetch Hetchy Valley on the same day. In Yosemite Valley, trees, meadow grasses, wild flowers, waterfalls, and wildlife are all available for public enjoyment as part of the national park experience. However, the only two human visitors [Dave Brower and professional photographer Philip Hyde] to visit Hetch Hetchy Valley on this day are met with a grotesque “moonscape” of a field of stumps, and a sandstorm from the barren landscape. This contrast was despite San Francisco’s grandiose claims that the beauty of Hetch Hetchy would be “improved,” and its never fulfilled promise that public recreation on the reservoir in the form of boating and swimming would be available. Dave Brower’s classic film was one aspect of his fifty-year effort to encourage the restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley. Brower stated: “From his earliest Sierra days John Muir [saw] the importance of building a constituency to protect Yosemite. If people knew about a special place, they would want to protect it.” [Foreword by David Brower to Muir’s book, The Yosemite, p. xv, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco, 1988].

In an interview six months before his death (May 27, 2000), Brower said: “I think this [damming the Hetch Hetchy Valley] is one of the biggest mistakes ever made in California, and I just want to see it back the way it was, the way I learned from John Muir, the way he wanted to see. And, I got the idea from him, and I can’t break that idea. When I read what John Muir had said about Hetch Hetchy, I felt as desperate as he did. And, I didn’t think anything could be done about it. So, I just gave up. But, that was the last time I gave up on anything (laughter). Back when I first saw this (O’Shaugnessy Reservoir), I thought it had been destroyed for all our time, and I’m sorry I gave up that soon. We have to re-think what rivers are about. Muir knew why they existed. And, I’ve learned since then that rivers have a purpose. One of the purposes is to flow from the mountains to the sea. And, they shouldn’t be interrupted in their way.” A few months later, in August, 2000, Dave Brower gave a presentation at the Yosemite Association’s annual meeting at Wawona, only a few months before he died in November 2000. He was sitting in a wheel chair at that time and spoke from the heart about Hetch Hetchy’s restoration.

On his death in 2000, Dave Phillips, Executive Director of Earth Island Institute, said, “Dave Brower is a latter-day John Muir.” Of course, as his son Kenneth Brower says, “He got a lot of that “Muir reincarnate” stuff from the press, especially with his early Sierra Club victories against dams in Dinosaur National Monument and Grand Canyon. He was flattered by the comparison, of course, but not crazy about it. He preferred to be the first incarnation of Dave Brower and the first coming of himself.”

Russell Train, head of the Environmental Protection Agency under Nixon, said: “Thank God for Dave Brower, he makes it so easy for the rest of us to look reasonable.”
Brower was one of four modern environmentalists who shared Muir’s vision profiled in the recent National Geographic Society book, John Muir: Nature’s Visionary by Gretel Ehrlich.

After leaving the Sierra Club, Brower founded Friends of the Earth, co-founded the League of Conservation Voters with Marion Edey, and later the Earth Island Institute. In his last year of his life, he was a founding board member of Restore Hetch Hetchy, a campaign organization urging the restoration of the valley that Muir fought a losing campaign to save. John Muir inspired Brower to advocate restoration of Hetch Hetchy Valley (off-site link).
An excellent documentary film telling the story of Brower’s life, and using many of his 16 mm movie images of wild places from the 50’s and 60’s, is Monumental: David Brower’s Fight for Wild America. (YouTube Film Trailer)
Like any human being, David Brower was not perfect. In his latter years, he tended to fall asleep at Sierra Club board meetings. He liked to pontificate. History has shown that he was clearly wrong in his positions about prescribed burning for Giant Sequoia Forests (absolutely necessary for re-seeing of the trees), and about the necessity of captive breeding for California Condor (which have now be returned to the wild in many places as a result of captive breeding).
A great song has been written about him: “Dave Brower, Knockin’ Down Dams”by Bill Oliver on his album Friends of the River.

The postage stamp from the Pacific island nation of Palau came from that country’s 1999 special stamp collection featuring “Environmental Heroes of the 20th Century.” In addition to David Brower, this panel of stamps also featured Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, Ding Darling, Jacques Cousteau, Roger Peterson, Prince Philip, Joseph Wood Krutch, Diane Fosse, Al Gore, David Attenborough, Paul McCready, Sting, Paul Winter, Ian MacHarg and Earth Day founder Dennis Hayes.

Favorite Quotes

“We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.”

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“The wild places are where we began. When they end, so do we.”

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We have to develop, and soon, a deeper devotion to conservation as an ethic and conscience in everything we do, whatever our field of endeavor. We have to be willing to spend gladly as much on saving things here and abroad as we have been willing to spend, too often without a shudder, on destroying things here and abroad. The war we have to fight is the war against smugness and apathy about what is happening to the land. We cannot go on fiddling while the earth’s wild places burn in the fires of our undisciplined technology. We cannot be frightened out of our spirit or counseled out of using our strengh, or spend our funds defaming people. These are games people can no longer afford to play. We are going to build an arena for a better game, a rewarding one in behalf of our one last ecosphere.

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The people who are destroying the life-support system are radicals. People who use all the resources they possibly can in the name of national security—that is radical. The people trying to correct that are the conservatives. Someone got the names mixed up.

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“Truth and beauty can still win battles. We need more art, more passion, more wit in defense of the Earth.”

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“All technology should be assumed guilty until proven innocent”

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I feel it imperative to go in the direction of an Earth National Park. I feel it imperative to go in the direction Aldo Leopold, Paul Ehrlich, William O. Douglas, Stewart Udall, Joseph Wood Krutch, and George Wald have been talking about.

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“There are many ways to salvation, and one of them is to follow a river.”

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“Keep your rivers flowing as they will, and you will continue to know the most important of all freedoms-the boundless scope of the human mind to contemplate wonders, and to begin to understand their meaning.”

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“Let man heal the hurt places and revere whatever is still miraculously pristine.”

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Don’t expect politicians, even the good ones, to do your job for you. Politicians are like weather vanes. Our job is to make the wind blow.

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“Have fun saving the world, or you are just going to depress yourself.”

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To me, God and Nature are synonymous, and neither could wait billions of years before man showed up to decide what to look like. I like mystery, the unending search for truth, the truth of beauty. I would have no use for pearly gates and streets of gold if canyon wrens were not admitted.

David Brower

Favorite Quotes

Further Reading