"Polite conservationists leave no mark
save the scars upon the Earth
that could have been prevented
had they stood their ground."
–David Brower
David Ross Brower was born in Berkeley, California on July 1, 1912. He founded Earth Island Institute and was president of Earth Island Action Group. Brower was a life-long wilderness enthusiast and engaged in conservation battles starting in 1938 and ending in 2000 with his death at the age of 88.
Mr. Brower joined the Sierra Club in 1933, became a member of its board of directors in 1941, and was its first executive director from 1952 to 1969. He saw the club's membership grow from 2,000 to 77,000, and successfully urged the formation of the Sierra Club Foundation (in 1960) before leaving the club staff on request in 1969. He was re-elected to the Sierra Club board again in 1983, 1986, 1995, and 1998. In 1969 he founded Friends of the Earth, along with the League of Conservation Voters, and initiated the founding of independent FOE organizations in other countries. FOE is now multi-national and operating in sixty-eight countries.
Through the years, David Brower had a profound impact on the state of America's wild lands by helping to create national parks and seashores in Kings Canyon, the North Cascades, the Redwoods, Great Basin, Alaska, Cape Cod, Fire Island, the Golden Gate, and Point Reyes; and in protecting primeval forests in the Olympic National Park, and wilderness on San Gorgonio. He played a major role in keeping dams out of Dinosaur National Monument, the Yukon, and the Grand Canyon, in establishing the National Wilderness Preservation System, the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission (which resulted in the Land and Water Conservation Fund), and in raising the twin questions:
"What kinds of growth must we have?"
"What kinds can we no longer afford?"
Earth Island Institute, Brower Fund, and biennial Fate and Hope of the Earth Conferences, all of which Mr. Brower founded in 1982, will continue to work to bring peace, environmental, social justice, and other groups together to achieve peace on and with the Earth. Mr. Brower recently founded the Global Conservation, Preservation, and Restoration (CPR) Service to help catalyze the restoration of natural and human systems. In 1988 and 1990-92, he led delegations to Lake Baikal in Siberia at Soviet request to aid its protection and restoration. In the fall of 1994, he co-founded the Ecological Council of Americas as a network of organizations in the Americas focused on problems of environment and economic integration. Mr. Brower developed plans for the creation of a National Biosphere Reserve System, as well as for a National Land Service to replace the current Bureau of Land Management and to have a new mission of protecting and restoring both public and private lands in the United States.
In civilian climbing and ski mountaineering, Mr. Brower made 70 first ascents, summer and winter, in Yosemite and the Western United States, participated in a historic attempt on Mount Waddington (Canada), led the first ascent of New Mexico's Shiprock (1939), and trekked to 18,000 feet in the Himalaya below Mount Everest (1976) and to Thyangboche (1984). He received the First Class Skier award in 1942, and, from 1939 to 1956, in the Sierra Club Wilderness Outings Program, he initiated the knapsack, river, and wilderness threshold trips and led some 4,000 people into remote wilderness.
David Brower was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times (in 1978, 1979, and 1998 -- jointly with professor Paul Ehrlich).
In October 1998, Brower received the Blue Planet Prize for his environmental accomplishments. The Blue Planet Prize is awarded annually by the Asahi Glass Foundation of Japan and is the richest environmental prize in the world.
Comments about Brower's efforts have ranged widely. John McPhee's Encounters With the Archdruid is about Mr. Brower and three of his natural enemies -- and is in its twenty-seventh printing. Mr. Brower especially liked what Russell Train said when he was chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality in the Nixon administration: "Thank God for Dave Brower; he makes it so easy for the rest of us to be reasonable."
