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- It's been three decades, but he's making
one last charge.
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- Thirty years ago this spring David Brower,
the man later dubbed "the Arch-Druid" stood at what seemed the
apex of his vocation as America's most effective green crusader. Under
his leadership the Sierra Club had turned from an elite hiking club of
some 2,000 members into a vibrant movement of 77,000. When Brower's Sierra
Club stood up for a river, a canyon, a mountain range or a forest, or against
nuclear power plants, politicians had to listen.
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- Brower kept dams out of the Grand Canyon.
He engineered passage of the Wilderness Act, setting aside tens of millions
of acres of public lands. If it had not been for Brower, Alaska would have
become a back lot of the oil and timber corporations.
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- Brower made some deals he learned to
regret: he traded Glen Canyon, upriver from the Grand Canyon, to keep a
dam out of Dinosaur National Monument. But unlike many of his environmental
progeny, he acknowledged the blunder, remarking famously, "Never trade
a place you've seen for one you haven't." Ultimately his audacity
proved too much for the club he'd built from almost nothing. On May 3,
1969, in one of the most notorious evictions in American environmental
history, the board of the Sierra Club threw out their leader.
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- Brower didn't slow down. He founded Friends
of the Earth, which globalized environmental issues and made arms control
a green concern. Ultimately Brower's aversion to compromise proved too
much for this organization too, and he was driven out. Off went Brower
to Earth Island Institute where his astounding creativity as an organizer
fostered an umbrella for grassroots activists working on issues ranging
from the threat to Siberian forests to the plight of the dolphins and turtles.
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- Along with his drive and vision there's
always been a humanity to Brower markedly absent in many green crusaders.
Earth Island became an advocate for environmental justice, bringing social
issues--urban population, toxic dumping, the environmental degradation
of poor communities--within the purview of green organizers.
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- Brower is eighty-six years old now. He's
not slowed up. The last few weeks have seen him in New York, battling Mayor
Rudy Giuliani, who wants to sell off the city's communal gardens; then
in Houston where he's helping to cement an unusual alliance between steelworkers
and Earth First!ers, both of whom have a common enemy in the form of Maxxam
boss, Charles Hurwitz. Above all, he's in the last moments of a drive to
be elected president of the Sierra Club's board.
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- Since Brower was fired thirty years ago,
the Sierra Club has all too often stumbled, victim to one unrewarding bout
of political expediency after another. There's been open civil war between
the business-as-usual Old Guard, mustered around executive director Carl
Pope, and the thousands of militant grassroots club members in chapters
across the country.
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- To the Sierra Club's Old Guard, conservative
and timid, the prospect of Browerian irruption is horrifying. The vote,
by the Club's board, is scheduled for Saturday, May 22. The pro-Brower
forces were jubilant earlier in the month when the reform faction, known
as the John Muir Sierrans, captured some crucial slots, but the old Guard
is exerting tremendous pressure on these new board members to turn back
Brower and re-elect the incumbent, Chuck McGrady, a pliant status-quo type
from North Carolina. [Update: Brower lost his race to become president
of the Sierra Club in a 10-3 vote. The election was a triumph for the Old
Guard faction of the Club, with Anne Ehrlich, the anti-immigrant zealot,
being elected treasurer.]
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- Watching the struggle with considerable
trepidation is Al Gore, whose prime political card in his stumbling bid
for the Democratic nomination is his claim to the green vote. Brower is
the man who originally led the Sierra Club into direct political endorsements.
Brower is also the man who remarked on the eve of the 1996 presidential
election that Clinton/Gore had done less for the environment than Reagan
or Bush.
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- Sierra Old Guard's Panic
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- When we reported in last week's AVA (Anderson
Valley Advertiser) on Brower's efforts to capture the Sierra Club's presidency,
the article went like a rocket through Sierra Club fax machines and e-mail
accounts. Within hours of the AVA hitting the streets, we were besieged
with e-mails from excited or furious Sierra Clubbers. The Arch-Druid himself
got a message from Sierra Club president Chuck McGrady. This Christian
from North Carolina gave vent to un-Christian boasting, including his claim
that he has an invincible bloc of nine votes in his pocket. He also pleaded
with Brower to repudiate our AVA article. Laura Hoehn, another Sierra Club
big-wig and former John Muir Sierran, told Brower he should withdraw because
of our piece. Nowhere else in the United States has there been a single
word printed about this noble last campaign by America's greatest enviro-warrior.
Following is Brower's response:
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- TO: Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St.
Clair cc: Sierra Club Board of Directors and Directors-Elect; Laura Hoehn
FROM: Dave Brower
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- Chuck McGrady has asked me to repudiate
your "Whither the Sierra Club?" article, but, with no knowledge
of your sources, I have no basis for correcting any of its data. I think
the objecting members of the Board can repudiate these on their own, if
they wish. Chuck has also drafted a letter that I will soon sign that calls
for renewed civility within the Club. I stand by this call for disagreement
without disrespect and would hope to see this idea spread beyond the Club
as well. You will not, however, soon find me challenging the right of members
of the press to express their opinions, simply because they are inflammatory
and controversial. I will confirm that you quoted me accurately and I only
regret that your kindness fell heavily on me and not at all on some others.
You know that I did not ask for your article or contribute to it, though
I too have been unsettled by some recent (and some not-so-recent) developments
in the Sierra Club. I guess that I am able to forgive more easily than
some, including my wife Anne, who has yet to forgive the Gang of '69 who
fired me as Executive Director.
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- While I am not comfortable with many
of your allegations against past, present, and future members of the Board,
we all know (or should) that such politicking and backstabbing is not without
precedent on the Board of Directors, especially in recent years. In last
year's officer elections, I thought I would win, but lost by two votes.
I learned from a member of the Board that in that vote, Carl Pope lobbied
against me, saying that my election would make him nervous. It shouldn't
have; as I said, I am able to forgive when given the opportunity.
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- You correctly pointed out that this year's
election brought me more support only in theory. Now, because of an article
I did not write, Laura said I should withdraw my candidacy entirely. Even
this is a step up from Phil Berry, who never wanted me to run in the first
place. I have come to expect this from Phil, who has spent the last thirty
years ridiculing most of the things I wanted to do, most recently on sparing
the National Forests. As usual, his wife is with him on this and when Michele
was President, she and Carl Pope juggled the ballot statement for endorsing
the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Protection Act so that supporters of it
had to vote No to endorse. The measure narrowly lost in the member voting.
The following year, unfettered by such hooliganism, the measure to call
for an end to commercial logging on public lands passed two to one. But
Phil also ridiculed my being nominated (three times) for the Nobel Peace
Prize, and then I got the Blue Planet Prize (from Japan; $400K), so I won't
fuss too much more.
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- Which brings us to the state of my presidential
campaign today. Chuck says he "has" nine or ten votes, which
doesn't leave many for me. I'm not greedy, all I ask is for as many as
it takes (eight) to give the Sierra Club one last shot before I close the
book on my sixty-five years of service. Whatever the election results,
the Club is in dramatic need of a spiritual and structural overhaul that
allows our Board to be leaders in helping direct the substance, not merely
the procedures of the Sierra Club. I have seen enough of the Club fiddling
while the Earth burns to last several lifetimes. Several hundred lifetimes
before my own, the prophet Isaiah made a statement that the country's largest
environmental group would do well to address: "Thou hast multiplied
the nation, but not increased the joy."
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- We have indeed multiplied the membership
and the budget, but where is the vision, the passion, the joy? Let's quit
our bitching and get on to creating some joy on the planet."
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- --Jeffrey St. Clair and Alexander Cockburn
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