David Brower

DAVID BROWER is a conservationist. Think about Walt Disney, birdwatching, and Peter Rabbit, and all the things that the word probably suggests, and then forget them; because when Brower starts talking about what we're doing to nature, he sometimes gets angry, the things he says aren't usually very pretty, and he has few kind words for Smokey the Bear.

"We've been expanding faster than we know how to handle it--and so we get smog and famines and ugliness. Growth for its own sake has somehow been confused with progress," Brower tells his audiences. And then, since the slogans are easy to ignore, he recites a list of some of the most outstanding mistakes planned in the name of progress--tapping the Yukon River for California, building an SST, or damming the Mekong in South Vietnam.

One of the few full-time environmentalists in the world, Brower is Executive Director of the 60,000-member Sierra Club. The group began with an interest mostly in mountaineering and California, but grew as it became more and more vocal in battles over remaining hunks of wilderness. Stubbornness and publicity now have given it the de facto leadership of the conservation movement. Full of brilliant pictures by photographers like Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter--plus redolent quotes from Thoreau or Robinson Jeffers--its "Exhibit Format" books and paperbacks are selling quickly. Brower has edited most of them. The Coop can't keep Sierra Club posters in stock. The Club counts a growing number of allies in Congress. And since a run-in with Internal Revenue over its tax-exempt status, its membership has been growing by almost 1000 a month, "probably." Brower says, "because anyone who gets in trouble with the tax men finds he has a lot of friends."

This may sound more like a crusader than a nature-lover, but that's not a bad description: he is a crusader, a new muckraker, in some ways typical of a changed tone in what conservation ought to mean. At 55, he is agile and athletic, still a skilled mountaineer, with a prophet's shock of white hair. His voice has a slight, unstudied Westernness that permits him to be lyrical occasionally. When he describes some of the tremendously complicated problems of dealing with the earth as a closed system, they reduce to a transparent simplicity. He projects himself to an audience as an honest layman who has only had to open his eyes to see the trouble.

This is a very effective, but deceptive, self-portrait. Brower is really balancing arguments on three levels--as visionary, public relations man, and social scientist. The juggling usually works.

BROWER has put the Sierra Club in its position of leadership because he knows how to advertise and has enlisted the support of professional advertising men. The Exhibit Format books and posters are designed to attract buyers and to leave a message. Sierra Club films are available to groups, and organized trips into the wilderness grow more popular every year. Now he is planning buttons and bumper stickers--on pollution ("Keep Our Air Visible") or population ("How Dense Can People Be?", "Good Breeding Can Be Overdone"), or just for irony: "Save the Pan Am Building." While other groups do the valuable work of interesting people, especially children, in the fascination of nature, Brower pitches his message at the intelligent city-dweller who hefts more immediate power and is more likely to use it.

Although he has to devote more time to public relations than to working out solutions to specific problems, the campaign is not just glitter and slogans. He is proposing a Council of Ecological Advisers on the Federal level to give the government basic information on the long-term consequences of what it does. A pet project is a Center for the Advanced Study of Ecosystems to provide scientific data on how the natural pieces fit together. And he looks toward establishing useful careers in environmental and population work.

This is a practical approach to a practical problem. At times, however, it sounds more as if he were proselvtizing a new religion than discussing a social problem. He told a Harvard audience last Friday, "The most important element of all, and something that makes natural beauty worth being concerned about, is life--the unbroken living chain that extends back to the origin of life on earth. From a long-ago beginning down to each of us here, it has never failed to reproduce itself well." The concept of "organic wholeness" is more than just an observation; it is an ethic, and Brower is calling for the cultivation of a conscience in the way we treat the earth.

THIS overriding, single vision of an order of nature being hacked to pieces is likely to make an outsider squirm. As an emotional reaction, there is something to it: people who feel a little awed at the top of a mountain, or even those who prickle when they hear a Simon and Garfunkel record, are likely to know what he means. But it's easy for talk like that to degenerate into guff, and Brower seems somewhat uncomfortable when he has to play the role of visionary.

That may be because the amorphous movement he is helping to lead is still just beginning to get people's attention. It is still hard to show that the science and the ethics of the environment are bound up with each other. Brower looks toward the possibility of making jobs for people who can comfortably practice both, but for now he has had to spend most of his time just telling people the right questions to ask.

"Obviously that's not an answer," Brower says, "only a method. But the answers have to come. With consumption doubling every decade, we've got to recognize that our generation cannot responsibly commit future ones to the kind of world they will have. That's what we're doing now. When it happens in an individual, we call it cancer."