Honored Elders
David Brower
From boyhood on, David Brower loved the rugged outdoors and was an avid hiker, fisherman and mountain climber. For more than sixty years, he led the important battles for conservation.
He joined the Sierra Club in 1933 and served as its first executive director from 1952 to 1969, overseeing the growth of the organization from 2,000 to 77,000 members. In 1969 he founded Friends of the Earth. He then created the League of Conservation Voters and fostered FOE organizations around the world.
David Brower helped create many of our favorite national parks and seashores, including Kings Canyon, the North Cascades, the Redwoods, Great Basin; Alaska, Cape Cod, Fire Island, Point Reyes; and the Olympic rainforest.
His activism addressed two critical questions: 1) what kind of growth must we have? and 2) what kind can we no longer afford? These questions led him to play a major role in keeping dams out of Dinosaur National Monument, the Yukon, and the Grand Canyon, and in establishing the National Wilderness Preservation System.
In 1982, to bring groups together to achieve environmental and social justice and promote peace on, and with, the earth, Brower founded Earth Island Institute, the Brower Fund, and the biennial Fate and Hope of the Earth Conference. In 1994, he co-founded the Ecological Council of the Americas as a network focusing on problems of the environment and economic integration.
David Brower edited, designed or secured co-publishers for more than fifty books for the Sierra Club and for Friends of the Earth. His 1993 book, In Wildness is the Preservation of the World, was judged one of the ten most beautiful books in the work.
In 1995, Brower warned of the global environmental crisis in his book (written with Steve Chapple) Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run. A revised edition of this book, which was printed on tree-free paper, was published for Earth Day 2000.
Brower’s autobiography is published in two volumes: For Earth’s Sake: The Life and Times of David Brower and Work In Progress. A video documentary of his life was produced in 1991 and a revised version aired on PBS in 1997.
In 1998, David Brower was awarded the Blue Planet Prize, the richest environmental prize in the world, by the Asahi Glass Foundation of Japan. He was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three times — in 1978, 1979 and 1998 (jointly with Professor Paul Ehrlich).
President Jimmy Carter said of David Brower: he has “been the path breaker, not given to easy answers or ruinous compromises…a man of great insight who caries deeply for his world.”
David Ross Brower died on November 5, 2002, at his home in Berkeley, CA, at age 88.