David Brower, Radical Environmentalist Icon, RIP

When Brower was born there was but a handful of national parks across the country. The national forests were in their infancy and had yet to be abused by logging. Nature had its Eastern champions in the form of Thoreau, Emerson, George Perkins Marsh and Gifford Pinchot. As Westerners respectively bred and born, Muir and Brower ranged themselves on a battlefield infinitely greater in scale. Until Muir no one had fought for an entire regional ecosystem as he did for the Sierras. With far more political agility than the flinty Muir, Brower fought for the entire West, then for the environmental stability of the planet.

Muir and Brower knew their mountain ranges firsthand. Muir would take a bag of oatmeal and a plaid and hike for weeks. Brower was a rock-climber. He made no fewer than 70 first ascents in the Sierra ranges. He was the first to climb Shiprock in New Mexico, later lamenting that he felt bad about treading on a Navajo sacred site. He was mountain-climbing in the Himalayas above 18,000 feet in his early 70s.

As a Sierra Club activist Brower spent the 1930s watching one vast federal scheme after another scar or drown the Western landscapes, from the mines abetted by the Bureau of Land Management to the Hoover Dam on the Colorado, to the opening of the national forests to corporate logging. In 1952 Brower became the first executive director of the Sierra Club, at that time a 2000-strong group of well-connected, mostly upper-crust Californians. Before long he was plunged into his own most traumatic struggle, as dire as Muir's over Hetch-Hetchy.

The battleground was Glen Canyon, on the Colorado River on the Arizona-Utah border. The history of the submerged Glen Canyon and its dam, how it came to be and its cultural and environmental legacy, has shaped the development of the modern West and, perhaps more than any other single issue, haunted the conscience of the American environmental movement. At the center of the story was Brower, whose trip down the canyon with Floyd Dominy, the dam-building head of the Bureau of Reclamation, was immortalized in John McPhee's book Encounters with the Archdruid.

It was Brower, the most creative and radical green of his generation, who signed off on the building of Glen Canyon Dam in 1956, as part of a deal to keep the Bureau of Reclamation from building the Echo Park Dam inside Dinosaur National Monument in northern Utah on the Green River. The decision shadowed him heavily from that day on. The first big dam to go up on the Colorado had been Hoover in 1935, designed to funnel water to ever-expanding Los Angeles and the fields and ranches of the Imperial Valley.

At the time, Hoover Dam was the biggest structure ever built?behind it was Lake Mead, the world's largest reservoir?holding back two years' worth of the Colorado's annual flow. Speaking at the dedication ceremony, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt extolled the project, touting it as the first move toward "altering the geography of the region."

FDR's words were prophetic, though, one suspects, hardly in the way he had hoped. The raising of that dam sanctified a certain mindset toward the arid lands, what the Western historian Donald Worster calls in his book Rivers of Empire "a world view of permanent subordination." Nature submerged is nature subordinated. The Hoover Dam project also inaugurated another grand tradition of Western water schemes: corporate profiting from the government pork barrel. The Bureau of Reclamation didn't actually build dams; it planned them, lobbied for them, fudged numbers to make them seem more efficient and fended off attacks against them from Congress and conservationists. Dam-building is big business, and those billions of dollars were predestined to end up in the coffers of corporations, not the bureaucracy. The lucrative contracts for Hoover Dam alone transformed three relatively obscure firms (Kaiser, Bechtel and Morrison-Knudsen) into corporate goliaths that have rampaged across the globe, causing ecological mayhem and human misery ever since. Bechtel would build Glen Canyon Dam and oversee the excavation of one of the world's biggest coal mines, Peabody Coal's Black Mesa mine on the adjacent Navajo reservation.

Hoover was California's deal. Now the Colorado's Upper Basin states?Utah, Colorado, Wyoming?wanted their shot. Their scheme was grandiose, including mega-dams at Flaming Gorge, Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument and Glen Canyon. It looked as though the water barons would get exactly what they wanted. They always had in the past. But then in 1952 along came Brower, the newly hired executive director of the Sierra Club. Over the next few years, Brower would come to know more about the region than nearly anyone, including Dominy and the ill-tempered Rep. Wayne Aspinall, the pro-dams Colorado Democrat who ruled the House Interior committee with an iron fist during the great fights over the fate of the river.

Brower was fond of saying that though he dropped out of Berkeley, he "graduated from the University of the Colorado River." He was outraged by the Bureau of Reclamation's plan to erect a dam on the Green River inside the stunning canyons of Dinosaur National Monument. The proposal reeked of the terrible defeat over Hetch-Hetchy in 1913. After that travesty, the Club made a pact: no more dams inside national parks or monuments.

Brower may not have known just how good he was. At hearings on the Upper Colorado Storage Act, the bill that was to authorize the Upper Basin dams, Brower ran circles around the Bureau of Reclamation and its congressional allies, pointing out distortions and outright fabrications in their testimony before the committee. "How can you trust an agency to build dams when they cannot add, subtract, multiply and divide?" he asked the dumbstruck committee. Brower was also a master organizer, generating one of the first great national campaigns in the history of the environmental movement.

But from the beginning Brower's focus was fixed on keeping a dam out of Dinosaur National Monument. At all costs he feared the precedent of Hetch-Hetchy. So Brower proposed a compromise: in exchange for keeping a dam out of Dinosaur, the Club wouldn't oppose a dam at Glen Canyon.

In hindsight, it seems clear that Brower might well have been able to beat back both dams. A few years after Glen Canyon was authorized, Brower and the Sierra Club crushed a proposal to build two more dams downstream in the Grand Canyon itself, a campaign that made public relations history with full-page ads in The New York Times under the banner, "Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel, so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?" The Grand Canyon dams were dead the moment those papers hit the street.

And so was the Club's tax-exempt status. Brower believed Steward Udall, then LBJ's secretary of the interior, pushed the IRS to take action against the Sierra Club in retaliation.

For two years the concrete poured nonstop into the towering pilings of the dam and the town of Page sprung up on the canyon's rim. It's now a city of just under 10,000 people, famously describe by Edward Abbey as "the shithead capital of Arizona." The floodgates on Glen Canyon Dam closed on March 23, 1963. From the observation deck outside Page, a quarter-mile downstream from the dam, the 710-foot-tall structure appears as a sleek blond colossus sunk into the bloodred Navajo sandstone.

As the dam began to be raised, David Brower and the photographer Eliot Porter took one last float down the river. They documented their trip in a book, archly titled The Place No One Knew. It was an elegaic testimony to what had been lost, fully capturing the haunted beauty of the canyon. But the book's title was also somewhat self-serving and deceptive. Many people knew and loved Glen Canyon, intimately and passionately, among them folksinger Katie Lee, river guides Ken Sleight and Kent Frost, Abbey, University of Utah historian Gregory Crampton and the thousands of people who had floated the Colorado and San Juan rivers. Glen Canyon was not a wilderness, per se. People had been living there for centuries, farming the bottomlands of the Colorado and San Juan. Those people were the Navajo and Ute tribes and before them the Anasazi.

As is so often the case, dams displace people, swallow whole communities. Despite its remoteness, Glen Canyon Dam was no exception. In fact, the dam site itself was on land owned by the Navajo tribe. The Navajo were given in exchange the so-called New Lands, a couple hundred miles to the south near Chambers. Nuclear lands would be a better description, since they ended up being contaminated by a big uranium spill into the Rio Puerco.

Another person who knew what would be lost with Glen Canyon Dam was the writer Wallace Stegner, a close friend of Brower who had floated through Glen Canyon twice. Indeed, before the deal was finalized Stegner told Brower that it was a mistake to trade Glen Canyon for Dinosaur National Monument. "Between us, Dave, Dinosaur doesn't hold a candle to it," Stegner said.

Looking back on it, Brower himself soon came to learn that Stegner was right. He called the deal his "greatest mistake, greatest sin." In one way or another, Brower the archdruid spent the past 40 years attempting to atone. Glen Canyon has become a testament to the perils of political dealmaking when it comes to the environment. "Never trade a place you know for one you don't," Brower again and again warned young environmentalists. Glen Canyon steeled Brower, making him not only more militant but more politically creative. He kept more dams out of the Grand Canyon. He engineered passage of the Wilderness Act, setting aside tens of millions of acres of public lands. If it had not been for Brower, Alaska would have become a back lot of the oil and timber corporations.

With the Sierra Club's tax-exempt status gone, Brower swiftly shed the sedate manners of genteel conservationism. The fiery stance of today's green militants owes everything to Brower, whose widening areas of concern began to vex his colleagues in the Sierra Club, as he he threw himself into battles against nuclear power and the big utilities, whose executives were tied into the same San Francisco establishment that had nourished the Club.

On May 3, 1969, in one of the most notorious evictions in American environmental history, the board of the Sierra Club threw out their leader. Brower didn't slow down. He founded Friends of the Earth, which globalized environmental issues and made arms control a green concern. Ultimately Brower's aversion to compromise proved too much for this organization, too, and he was driven out. Off went Brower to Earth Island, where his astounding creativity as an organizer fostered an umbrella for grassroots activists working on issues ranging from the threat of the Siberian forests to the plight of the dolphins and turtles.

Along with his drive and vision there was always an humanity to Brower markedly absent in many green crusaders. Earth Island became an advocate for environmental justice, bringing social issues?urban population, toxic dumping, the environmental degradation of poor communities?within the purview of green organizers.

In his mid-80s Brower didn't slow up. He was in New York, battling Mayor Rudy Giuliani's plan to sell off the city's communal gardens; then in Houston, where he helped cement an unusual alliance between steelworkers and Earthfirst!ers, both of whom have a common enemy in the form of Maxxam boss Charles Hurwitz. He launched a drive to be elected president of the Sierra Club's board. Brower set forth his vision in a letter to friends and supporters, in which he attacked the present board as "too comfortable with closed door sessions," not wanting "too much democracy to get in the way of the process." The Sierra Club's board, he wrote, "is seen as a bit smug, arrogant, with over-weening pride... We can do something about those perceptions. We would make a bigger difference. We'd reverse what we all have lately been doing?merely slowing the rate at which things get worse. The reversal is overdue."

To the Sierra Club's Old Guard, conservative and timid, the prospect of Browerian irruption was horrifying. There was open civil war between the business-as-usual Old Guard, mustered around executive director Carl Pope, and the thousands of militant grassroots club members in chapters across the country. Brower was beaten off. A few months later he resigned from the board, saying bitterly that it had connived at dozens of betrayals of the environment in the 1990s, when in his opinion Clinton and Gore had done more damage than Reagan or Bush.

Just under a year ago the 87-year-old Brower was in Seattle, ranged alongside demonstrators against the World Trade Organization two and three generations younger than himself and owing much of their inspiration to him. In the spring of this year Brower, battling cancer, returned to the Four Corners region to inaugurate a new campaign aimed at decommissioning Glen Canyon Dam, draining Lake Powell and restoring Glen Canyon. "It's time to correct one of the most egregious errors of the last century," Brower said. "The decommissioning of that dam will give the restoration era its big break and bring a lot of joy to the 1600 miles of Glen Canyon and its side canyons that are magnificent gestures of the Earth, in Ansel Adams' phrase, unmatched on Earth or anywhere else. They are waiting eagerly to be born again. I know, I asked them all."

Brower's wife Ann, who did more than anyone to put the steel in Brower's spine, to bring his soaring ego down to Earth and to teach him the organizing and fundraising possibilities of green journalism and photography, talks about a rock on Brower's desk. It's from the bottom of Glen Canyon and it sat there in front of him as a reminder of what had been lost and what can yet be won. Brower was always an optimist. How could a conservationist not be an optimist and fight through most of the 20th century? The rock is there to inspire the millions he led and taught.

This item was written with Jeffrey St. Clair.