Environmentalists’ Friends of the Earth Rocked as Founder Feuds With Directors

For 17 years, Friends of the Earth has sought to “sustain the Earth.”

Founded by David R. Brower, who is viewed by many as the 20th-Century successor to the legendary conservationist John Muir, Friends of the Earth has been one of the nation’s leading environmental organizations.

It was among the first to make the dangers of acid rain a political issue and to challenge the leasing of vast acreages of federal coal and oil reserves to private companies at below-market rates.

It encouraged and published Amory Lovins’ seminal treatises on “soft energy”--decentralized power generation.

It helped set the anti-nuclear power agenda adopted by larger conservation groups, and more recently it has led the movement in a campaign against the ultimate environmental catastrophe--nuclear war.

Now, however, the continued existence of the organization that has preached “planetary sustainability” is itself at stake.

Beset by a $550,000 debt and sharply declining membership, Friends of the Earth is locked in a wrenching family feud over budget cuts, staff layoffs and a decision to move its headquarters from San Francisco to Washington.

The austerity moves have split the 16-member board of directors, and now Brower, who retired as president and chief executive officer in 1979 but remains the unsalaried board chairman, is leading a drive to oust the nine-member majority and rescind its cost-cutting directives.

Brower’s critics say he is responsible for the debts. Brower counters that many of the decisions that caused the debts were made after he stepped down as executive director.

But to many, the underlying issue is Brower and what role, if any, the 73-year-old founder will have in shaping the organization’s policies as it struggles to address the environmental issues of the mid-1980s and beyond.

There are those on both sides who fear that Friends of the Earth may not survive the crisis. Friends of the Earth President Daniel B. Luten said that if Brower prevails, he will bankrupt the organization.

“All he will get is a bowl of ashes, financially,” Luten said.

“And I would counter,” Brower said, “that I think it would certainly lead to the destruction if they prevail.”

The battle is being watched closely across the country because it comes during an undeniable shifting of power in other conservation groups, including the Sierra Club and The Wilderness Society, to a second generation of environmental leaders whose style and tactics more closely resemble those of corporate managers than the firebrands of the past.

Many of Brower’s critics say that his time--and style of leadership--have passed. While the cause is unchanged, they say that tactics must adapt to new circumstances. Issues have become increasingly complex and do not easily lend themselves to sloganeering, his critics say.

What is needed, they say, is legislation to codify environmental goals, enforcement of those laws and litigation to keep guard against erosion of those gains.

“I think there’s been an enormous transition that has occurred, especially over the last decade,” Friends of the Earth Executive Director Karl F. Wendelowski said. “It’s a maturing process which renders the need for what I consider Dave to be--an ego star--much less significant and necessary.

“That doesn’t mean the problems have gone away. It means they’ve been identified, and the opportunities to glamorize them have diminished.”

Even so, Brower--who glamorized causes and imbued them with outrage and passion--is determined to prevail. And those who are equally determined to turn back his challenge admit that their task will not be easy.

It is difficult, they say, to take on a legend. The iconoclasts pause to genuflect.

This is the man who years earlier during an excursion to Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia was accompanied by a mineral engineer who remarked that he did not like Druids because they loved trees and hated people. Little did the engineer know, author John McPhee would recount later, that he was in the presence of the “archdruid.”

“Of course I love people,” Brower later told The Times. “I love people who love trees.”

‘On the Cutting Edge’

Brower was once described by former Interior Secretary Stewart L. Udall as being on “the cutting edge” of the environmental movement. Brower is credited with blocking the construction of dams in the Grand Canyon and was among those leading the battle for passage of the Wilderness Act of 1964, one of the environmental movement’s greatest triumphs. The act preserved millions of acres of wild and unspoiled land in its natural state.

During one of his fights against a proposed Grand Canyon dam, Brower said the dam would back up the Colorado River and fill portions of the canyon like a bathtub. He placed full-page newspaper ads that asked: “Should We Also Flood the Sistine Chapel So Tourists Can Get Near the Ceiling?”

Before starting Friends of the Earth, Brower was executive director of the Sierra Club, which he molded into a major environmental and political force.

It was Brower who early on conceived and edited the club’s large books with their dramatic Ansel Adams photographs of sweeping vistas and accompanying prose that ushered the environmental cause into the living rooms of America.

“I think he will almost certainly end up as the major figure in conservation in the mid-20th Century, maybe for the whole century,” said Luten, 77, who has known Brower 40 years and joined him in starting Friends of the Earth. “John Muir was dying when the 20th Century began. I don’t know of anyone who’s going to stand out as much as Brower will when it’s all over.

“But I don’t hear him saying anything new. I don’t hear him saying anything thoughtful.”

It is a sunny afternoon in San Francisco, and Brower, a tall man with a shock of snowy white hair and patrician manner, has walked down Sansome Street from the Friends of the Earth offices and headed resolutely up Broadway toward Enrico’s restaurant. He is greeted by Enrico Banducci with the deference due an archdruid. As if by unspoken command, a telephone is placed on Brower’s table.

Brower is fumbling through a fistful of messages and orders lunch.

He takes a sip of white wine.

“I suppose one of his problems,” Brower says of Luten after an instant’s reflection, “is he’s never been around to listen.”

To listen to Brower is to hear a fire sermon. He is earnest, entirely convincing, unquestionably rehearsed. His words have the texture of fine mahogany, the endurance of redwood. And to those who have known him, Brower’s words toll like a distant bell on old ears as he recites a familiar illustration of man’s relationship to the earth.

They have heard it before.

“It is just before midnight,” he says. A second is equal to 8,000 years. Creation began at Sunday midnight.

There is no life until noon on Tuesday. “It multiplies and becomes more stable, more diverse, more beautiful.”

By 4 p.m. Saturday the great reptiles appear. Five hours later, the redwoods grow, and the reptiles disappear. At three minutes before midnight, manlike creatures come on the scene. Christ is born a fourth of a second before midnight. At one-fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution begins.

“At 200th of a second we conclude that if we continue the attack on unrenewable resources at an exponential rate we will achieve the economic growth we need. Almost all the world’s leaders believe it will work. I do not think it is a sane conclusion.”

Brower pauses. The archdruid is satisfied.

“There’s hardly anybody questioning it,” he concludes. “We’re going quite beyond our environmental means globally and certainly in the U.S. . . . We’re losing species. We’re making deserts. We’re losing water. We’re losing air. It’s enough to discourage one.”

Brower’s opponents do not disagree with his goals.

“That’s not the issue. Everyone here subscribes to David Brower’s vision,” Friends of the Earth Director Edwin S. Matthews Jr. said in a telephone interview from New York.

“What’s at stake here is wheTher an organization will survive any one of us, and Friends of the Earth does not belong to any one of us,” Matthews, a lawyer, said. “It serves a higher cause. Regardless of David Brower’s contribution--and it’s substantial--FOE has a duty and a purpose and a role, and all of us must do what we can to support that.”

Noting that Brower recently had surgery to remove bladder cancer--an operation that Brower said was successful--Matthews said: “Does it make sense to turn over an organization to someone who is 73 and ill, no matter what his contributions in the past have been? It’s too bad. What he should be doing is supporting the organization instead of subverting it.”

Linked to Debt

Matthews and others have charged that Brower ran up an enormous debt before stepping down in 1979 as Friends of the Earth’s paid chief executive officer and president and that the organization has been hamstrung by that debt ever since.

But David Phillips, who for seven years was Friends of the Earth’s director of wildlife programs before losing his job in the staff cuts, dismissed the charges, as does Brower.

“I attribute that to an untrained and incompetent management rather than to any problem attributed to Dave Brower,” Phillips said. “They have only one choice to explain why things haven’t worked, and that’s to try Brower. He’s the most visible. He’s the easiest target.”

Whatever the reasons, there is little question that the organization is in trouble. In the last several years, membership has plummeted to 20,000 from a peak of 30,000. Membership campaigns to offset normal attrition have been hamstrung by budget constraints.

Friends of the Earth’s budget, which varies between $1.2 million and $1.5 million annually, is burdened by the $550,000 debt, most of it owed to members.

In addition, the group’s largest contributor, the separate Friends of the Earth Foundation that normally provides between $750,000 and $1 million a year, last December cut off Friends of the Earth without a cent until its management difficulties are resolved--and Brower’s interference stops, said Matthews, who is the foundation’s secretary. An anonymous benefactor who annually gives $80,000 may also withdraw support, Matthews said.

Faced with declining revenues, management took a series of controversial steps that precipitated the current conflict.

Executives Leave

Gone is Friends of the Earth’s longtime international director, soft-energy project director and wildlife director. The publication of the organization’s tabloid newspaper, Not Man Apart, has been scaled back to six issues a year from 10. Its veteran editor, Tom Turner, has been forced out. Friends of the Earth headquarters are being moved to Washington and consolidated with the legislative office, the official reason being an annual saving of $12,000. Others, however, see the move as a means to put a continent between Brower and the headquarters.

Wendelowski, 42, who holds a master’s degree from Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said Friends of the Earth must concentrate energies on activism rather than “long-term esoteric reporting work that was not producing results that were dynamic and visible enough for us to use to help the organization grow.”

More emphasis will be placed on such international environmental issues as the decline in tropical rain forests and spread of acid rain, using Friends of the Earth’s 30 overseas affiliates as a base.

At the same time, Wendelowski said, the organization’s three regional offices in the United States will be given more support in efforts to become local and regional environmental watchdogs.

But implementing the changes has not been easy. Matthews, Wendelowski and others have charged that Brower has repeatedly interfered and sought to undermine decisions of the board majority aimed at extricating the organization from its fiscal crisis.

‘So Hard to Control’

“He’s so hard to control. It’s so hard to get him to do what the board is trying to get him to do,” Luten said.

Recently, for example, Brower outraged the board majority when he obtained a copy of the organization’s mailing list and sent out letters at his own expense to 17,000 members warning that the future of Friends of the Earth was in jeopardy. He exhorted them to oust the majority in an April recall election and asked for donations, payable to the separate Brower-controlled Earth Island Institute, to finance the campaign. So far, he said, he has raised $24,400.

“Dave Brower has made his environmental reputation on being a guerrilla fighter,” Friends of the Earth Washington Director Geoff Webb said, “and some of the things that made him great as an environmental fighter are the tactics that he’s using against his own organization.”

The fight is joined. There is no possibility of reconciliation.

“I think they’ve gone too far,” Brower said. It is almost a whisper.

“You can’t sack the experienced people who had been doing the staff work in the organization and lose the members who had been supporting those people without sacking the organization,” Brower said.

“At the moment, I’m afraid (Friends of the Earth) is not distinguishing itself. . . . Right now there doesn’t seem to be anything very important on their docket, whereas I see lots of things on the docket if my side prevails and we can go ahead with it.”

He is thinking about the Grand Canyon and free-flowing stretches of the Colorado River.

‘Have to Win Every Time’

“I do get a certain satisfaction at looking at it and saying, ‘God-damn it, there’s no dams there!’ But, I hasten to explain that you can’t feel satisfied for long because none of these victories are permanent. The Colorado is still running. There’s a lot of hydroelectric potential in it. There’s more engineers than you can count who would just love to plug it and get the juice out--and they only need to win once. We have to win every time.”

The Colorado becomes a metaphor for Friends of the Earth. The opposition keeps throwing up obstacles in the group’s path. They want to manage and direct it. It should be allowed to flow free, producing programs. Money and membership will follow.

His mood is subdued. Contemplative.

“We need to get back to the population question, to attack growth and see how it can be handled, but particularly, since in 30 minutes the world as we know it could be destroyed, we need to find out what’s causing that. . . .

“We need laws that allow corporate management to be socially responsible . . . to show how corporations can lead in a way that leaves as beautiful an Earth to their succeeding corporations as they were operating.”

He pauses. A slight grin comes to his mouth.

“I just love the idea of surviving myself. At 73 1/2 I would like to see my Casio watch, which is very cheap, do its little switch at midnight Dec. 31, 1999. I would like to see it turn up ‘1-1-00.’ That would be quite exciting. I get excited by things like that.”