By the time I met David Brower, in 1969, he was more indoors than out. He was only 12
years younger than the 20th century, and he had spent a large part of his life escaping
interior scenes by getting himself up into the Sierra Nevada and away from confinements of
both the natural and the figurative kind. He was shy, and that spurred him, too, to get
away. He came to know the mountain country in such detail that it was said he would know
exactly where he was if, magically, a hand were to set him down anywhere at all from
Sequoia National Forest to the Feather River. He took up technical climbing and achieved
the first ascents of 33 Sierra peaks. By his account, he would have liked to choose one
and stay there.
When incursions in various forms threatened his Sierra, though, Brower had to come down
and fight. He fought in theaters, halls, and chambers, and in a way that Homer would best
understand. His voyages through the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth and Earth Island
Institute and other loci for defenders of his faith were punctuated with mutiny,
fratricide, and triumph. He was feisty, heaven knew. And arrogant, possibly. And
relentless, certainly. And above all, effective-for he began his mission when ecology
connoted the root and shoot relationships of communal plants, and he, as much or more than
anyone in the midcentury, expanded its reach and inherent power until it became the
environmental movement. Others in time would learn more than he knew and advance the
argument in a stabilizing way, but they would always be following him.
I spent a year with him going from halls to chambers and from city to city, East and
West. Blessedly, it was a year of rivers and redwoods and mountains, too. Among scenes and
anecdotes that are now reassembling and crowding the mind, one minor and peripheral moment
somehow lingers at the center. We were crossing the Mojave Desert. Not on foot. And after
an hour or two of the Mojave, Dave Brower remarked that in the give and take of
environmental politics-in the long wrestle with opposing forces lined up on countless
vectors-he would be willing, if necessary, in the name of diplomacy and compromise, to
surrender the Mojave.
I asked him if he would enumerate terrains of his choosing that might be put in the
same category. Sitting beside him, his wife-his gyroscope Anne-seemed to smile. His son
Ken, hitherto somnolent in the backseat, sat up and said, "It's going to be a short
list!"
It was something shorter than that, for Brower looked around a little more at the
Mojave, and changed his mind.
John McPhee, a staff writer for the New Yorker, has produced a bookshelf
full of environmental classics, including Encounters With the Archdruid, a
profile of David Brower and three of his natural enemies: a developer, a dambuilder, and a
mining advocate.
