DAVID BROWER : From Dams to the Green Cross

For a while, David Brower, the man who defeated the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ plan to turn the Grand Canyon into a lake, was himself a dam builder of sorts.

Brower was 6 when he first sloshed into the clear waters of Strawberry Creek, in the Berkeley hills, and temporarily arrested its flow with twigs and leaves.

The stream carved a deep impression through his young consciousness. Already, though, development was eating away at the open spaces of the UC Berkeley campus and surrounding hills.

One day, mud from the construction of a new stadium clotted Strawberry Creek.

Watching his childhood landscape destroyed “made a bloody conservationist out of me,” says Brower, 77.

When Brower was 8, his mother, a devout outdoorswoman, lost her sight. Brower developed his powers of observation by describing the natural world for his mother on their trips to the high Sierra.

Later, as a young man climbing in those mountains, he observed that the natural world was increasingly threatened. He decided to fight the forces that were destroying the landscape.

By the first Earth Day, in 1970, he had been in the trenches of environmentalism for the better part of four decades.

This Earth Day, Brower--who has fought many battles to preserve the Grand Canyon, including the notable “Sistine Chapel” campaign in the mid-’60s--will speak on the Capitol Mall in Washington.

He striving to make the traditionally white, middle-class environmental movement more multicultural and international.

Soon, he will take his campaign to Japan.

At the same time, he has begun crusading for an idea introduced by Mikhail S. Gorbachev at a recent global conference: an “international Green Cross,” to heal the Earth’s environmental wounds.

“When I speak now, I ask audiences how many of them would be willing to commit a year to an International Green Cross?” Brower says. “Half the hands go up.”

For these Green troops to win the war to save the world will take radical new battle strategies, Brower believes.

But then, “conventional wisdom hasn’t created anything. Dreams do. Let’s follow our dreams.” The environmental movement, he says, needs “fewer economists and more poets.”

NOTABLE

Helped to create national parks in Kings Canyon, North Cascades, the Redwoods, Cape Cod, Fire Island and Point Reyes and to preserve wilderness on San Gorgonio and other mountains. He has just written his autobiography, and received the Carey-Thomas Award for creative publishing.

NAME: DAVID BROWER

TITLES: Chairman, founder, Earth Island Institute; founder, Friends of the Earth; first executive director, Sierra Club; founder, Trustees for Conservation and the North Cascades Conservation Council; chairman, Natural Resources Council; co-founder, John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies; editor, Sierra Club Books.

QUOTE: “At this point in my life, I think any development is overdevelopment.”