How to honor an activist -- one more fight

THE SAN FRANCISCO Bay Area has what is perhaps the world’s most diverse and extensive urban greenbelt, a complex of national, state and local parks that runs almost continuously from Point Reyes in the north to Big Basin in the south. Millions of people benefit from it, and thousands worked to build it, from national legislators to local citizens. But nobody did more for it than the late professional conservationist, David Brower.

Point Reyes National Seashore might not exist today, for instance, if a landowner hadn’t barred Brower and his family from a Marin County beach one day in the 1950s. In response, Brower spearheaded the campaign for that national park, and the example of its success has continued to inspire conservationists across the country.

It is sad and ironic, then, that an attempt to commemorate Brower, a lifelong Berkeley resident, with a park memorial has become a Bay Area laughingstock. Commissioned by a wealthy friend after Brower’s death in 2000, the memorial has been repeatedly rejected by park commissions and other public agencies on both sides of the bay, in part as a result of objections from environmentalists.

The sculpture -- a massive blue stone globe to which a bronze likeness of Brower (a celebrated mountain climber in his youth) was to have clung -- does have artistic and logistic problems. Aside from its conceptual triteness, the piece weighs 17.5 tons, and one reason for its rejection at sites such as the Berkeley marina was the possibility that it might sink into the soft bay landfill.

Yet the derisive reaction to the proposed memorial goes deeper than its unwieldiness. Another objection, for example, was that it supposedly commemorated imperialism by showing a dead white man climbing the planet. (Officialdom accordingly banished Brower’s likeness from the stone globe, first consigning it to a seat on a nearby park bench -- admiring rather than climbing the planet -- then planning to exclude it entirely from the memorial, should it ever be installed.)

This objection fits with a view held by some ideologues that parks themselves are bad because the land was taken from indigenous people (as though the land under the houses and offices of these ideologues weren’t also taken). It further reflects an ideological disdain for parks as a “Disney version of environmentalism” (to borrow a phrase from Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn) imposed by elites either to exclude the masses from wild lands or to co-opt them with cheap vacations.

Such attitudes may be impeccably progressive, but they have something in common with the dogmas of reactionaries -- a contempt for things as they are, and a firm belief that ideology (i.e., their ideology) is the only way to correct the situation. Of course, things as they are can be pretty bad, but history shows that ideology-driven changes often make them worse.

It is ironic that Brower has become a focus of ideologues’ derision, because his later career reflected environmentalism’s drift from the practical to the ideological. After he lost his influential position as executive director of the Sierra Club in 1969, he increasingly embraced radical groups such as Earth First! and perhaps spent more time advocating the destruction of dams than the creation of parks.

In 1989, I tried to get his input on an article about enlarging the national park system. But he took umbrage when I described parks as a form of wealth and argued that, in that sense, the United States is poorer than Third World countries such as Costa Rica, where a larger percentage of the land is given over to parks.

Brower didn’t explain why this annoyed him -- maybe it seemed reactionary. In the end, I wrote the article without much help or input from him.

But I still thank him when I go to Point Reyes, or to Redwood National Park, Big Sur, the California desert or any number of other places he helped to protect.