David Brower

David Brower was born July 1, 1912, in Berkeley, California, the third of four children. When he was eight his mother went blind from a brain tumor, and he began walking her through the hills so she could still picture what she could no longer see. Short on tuition money, he dropped out of UC Berkeley after two years and found the mountains instead, joining the Sierra Club in 1933 after meeting the climber Norman Clyde. Over the next decade he logged more than 70 first ascents, including Shiprock in 1939. World War II sent him to Italy with the Army's 10th Mountain Division, training soldiers to fight on skis, and he came home with a Bronze Star and an appetite for running something larger than a rope team.

Named the Sierra Club's first executive director in 1952, Brower turned a hiking society of 7,000 members into the country's leading conservation organization, seventy thousand strong by the time he left. He helped defeat the Echo Park Dam in the mid-1950s, helped push the Wilderness Act through Congress in 1964, and turned the club's large-format Exhibit Format books into a genuine lobbying tool. He also made the trade he later called his greatest regret, accepting the flooding of Glen Canyon to save Dinosaur National Monument, a swap that let Lake Powell drown a canyon he came to call more beautiful than the one he had fought for. Charges of unauthorized spending and a board revolt forced his resignation in 1969, and he started Friends of the Earth within weeks and Earth Island Institute in 1982.

Brower ran every organization he built the same way, pushing past whatever his own board had approved. The Sierra Club forced him out in 1969 on a ten-to-five board vote after years of unauthorized spending and end-runs around the directors, and a similar pattern followed him out of Friends of the Earth, which he also left under pressure, and at Earth Island he restructured around a loose network of autonomous projects rather than one board that could remove him again. Late in life the friction turned uglier: he grew fixated on immigration and population control as the root environmental threat, positions that put him at odds with much of the movement he had spent seventy years building, and he resigned from the Sierra Club's board for the last time, in protest, months before he died.

Brower died November 5, 2000, at eighty-eight, in Berkeley, days after casting an absentee ballot for Ralph Nader's Green Party campaign. He had already lived to see the movement he professionalized outgrow him — the Sierra Club he once ran from a few rented rooms had a staff in the hundreds and a budget in the tens of millions by the time he died. Historians and former colleagues now credit him with teaching American environmentalism to fight in Congress and in the press rather than only in court, while treating his late turn toward population politics as a cautionary footnote rather than a guide to the movement he helped invent.

David Brower's life against the full span of the corpus.

• Echo Park Dam campaign mission
  Blocked a dam proposed inside Dinosaur National Monument 1956
• Wilderness Act advocacy law
  Lobbied the Sierra Club's case for passage through Congress 1964
• Friends of the Earth company
  Founded weeks after leaving the Sierra Club 1969
• Earth Island Institute company
  An incubator model for smaller environmental projects 1982

• July 1, 1912 aged 0 Born in Berkeley, California
• 1933 aged ~21 Joins the Sierra Club after meeting climber Norman Clyde
• 1939 aged ~27 Makes the first ascent of Shiprock
• 1944 aged ~32 Serves in Italy with the Army's 10th Mountain Division Earned a Bronze Star.
• 1952 aged ~40 Named the Sierra Club's first executive director
• 1964 aged ~52 Helps push the Wilderness Act through Congress
• 1969 aged ~57 Forced out of the Sierra Club and founds Friends of the Earth
• November 5, 2000 aged 88 Dies in Berkeley, California

• John Muir 1838–1914
  Naturalist and organizer whose advocacy helped create national parks and the modern wilderness movement. succeeded the movement of
• Ansel Adams 1902–1984
  Landscape photographer whose Western images and zone system shaped American photographic practice. clashed with
• Rachel Carson 1907–1964
  Marine biologist whose book Silent Spring launched the modern environmental movement. contemporary of
• Gifford Pinchot 1865–1946
  First chief of the U.S. Forest Service and leading advocate of scientific conservation and managed public lands. opposed the philosophy of