The Man Who Built the Sierra Club

May 1, 2016
A sturdy life of David Brower (1912-2000), the legendarily tough and tough-minded pioneering environmentalist who shaped the Sierra Club into a national political force.By the reckoning of a fellow activist, Brower was "the last of the great amateur environmentalists"--meaning, as Wyss (Journalism/Univ. of Connecticut; Covering the Environment: How Journalists Work the Green Beat, 2007, etc.) elaborates, that he did not come to the job equipped with the tools of a CEO or development officer in the way of a modern nonprofit leader. Instead, Brower wielded the ice ax of a mountaineer and the blue pencil of an editor, and he knew his way around a podium as well as a goat path. As Wyss notes, the board of the Sierra Club, which Brower led for years, had to confine him to the office by contract to keep him from running off into the field. The author writes under the long shadow of John McPhee, whose Encounters with the Archdruid (1971) cast Brower as a quixotic hero. Wisely, Wyss elects not to compete with McPhee but instead to round out his account with details of the daily work of advocating for conservation. That work involved hated office routines and lots of politicking, to be sure, but also afforded Brower the opportunity to do some interesting things, such as publish a line of books featuring such writers as Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey and photographers such as Galen Rowell and Ansel Adams, the last of whom would prove a testy friend and uneasy ally. So it was, too, with Stewart Udall, the interior secretary on whom Brower pinned much hope but who regularly crossed him. Often reprimanded and sometimes fired, Brower remained a force in the environmental movement until the end of his long life, and this book makes fitting homage. Thorough and well written, if sometimes dry. The book lacks Brower's soaring idealism, but it provides a highly useful view of how environmental battles are waged in the trenches.

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May 1, 2016

For David Brower (1912-2000), the mountains offered a lifeline. After a cash-strapped childhood in Berkeley, CA, defined by his mother's illness and caring for his younger brother, the socially awkward college dropout discovered a love of hiking and climbing. Wyss (journalism, Univ. of Connecticut) writes a riveting biography of a complicated man who embraced the wilderness while serving in World War II. In the 1950s, Brower transformed the Sierra Club, founded by John Muir in 1892, into a conservation organization. Mining archives and interviewing family and colleagues, Wyss presents an extensively researched, balanced account of a magnetic leader who couldn't balance time or money and continued projects despite opposition, including lengthy battles with the U.S. Park Service. Critics claimed Brower went too far; supporters argued he didn't go far enough. Brower's prevention of dams in the Grand Canyon came at a price: coal plants near Navajo lands. He regretted not being able to prevent Arizona's Glen Canyon Dam. While Brower frequently traveled to Washington to testify before Congress, his wife, Anne, devotedly raised their children in Berkeley, amid rumors of her husband's infidelity. The book culminates with Brower's removal from power in 1969. VERDICT This absorbing portrait of a flawed yet fascinating figure, beloved and scorned, who defined America's national parks will engage all biography lovers.--Stephanie Sendaula, Library Journal

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