The Man Who Built the Sierra Club: A Life of David Brower

by Robert Wyss

Overview

David Brower (1912–2000) was a central figure in the modern environmental movement. His leadership, vision, and elegant conception of the wilderness forever changed how we approach nature. In many ways, he was a twentieth-century Thoreau. Brower transformed the Sierra Club into a national force that challenged and stopped federally sponsored projects that would have dammed the Grand Canyon and destroyed hundreds of millions of acres of our nation's wilderness. To admirers, he was tireless, passionate, visionary, and unyielding. To opponents and even some supporters, he was contentious and polarizing.

As a young man growing up in Berkeley, California, Brower proved himself a fearless climber of the Sierra Nevada's dangerous peaks. After serving in the Tenth Mountain Division during World War II, he became executive director of the Sierra Club. This uncompromising biography explores Brower's role as steward of the modern environmental movement. His passionate advocacy destroyed lifelong friendships and, at times, threatened his goals. Yet his achievements remain some of the most important triumphs of the conservation movement. What emerges from this unique portrait is a rich and robust profile of a leader who took up the work of John Muir and, along with Rachel Carson, made environmentalism the cause of our time.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231164467
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	06/07/2016
Pages:	400
Sales rank:	783,179
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.40(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Robert Wyss is associate professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut and a journalist who has written for the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Yankee, and the Providence Journal. He is the author of Covering the Environment: How Journalists Work the Green Beat (2007).

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations
Chronology
Introduction
1. First Fight
2. Mountains
3. The Club
4. The Lesson
5. Wilderness
6. Forest
7. Parks
8. Glen Canyon
9. Progress
10. Books
11. Escalating the Risks
12. Grand Canyon
13. Losing While Winning
14. Diablo and Galápagos
15. Conflict
16. Campaign
17. Echoes
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
Index

Editorial Reviews

Wyss provides a penetrating and readable narrative of the highest-profile American environmentalist in the postwar decades and of the many battles he and the Sierra Club fought. He makes clear the multiple layers of Brower's personality: passion, commitment, aggressiveness, and, at times, recklessness. Readers will come away with a clear and compelling portrait of this cutting-edge environmental activist.

Mark Harvey

Wyss's assiduous research will lay to rest many lingering misconceptions about a man who exasperated and inspired by turns, and always spoke to our hearts' love for wild earth. A tremendously worthwhile and interesting chronicle of Brower's evolution into an uncompromising crusader.

Stephanie Mills

[The Man Who Built the Sierra Club] offers up a deeply researched... detailed portrait.

The Wall Street Journal - Jim Sterba

Wyss has crafted a detailed and thorough account of Brower's life, employing archival collections at the Bancroft Library, oral histories, and...extensive interviews.

Journal of American History

David Brower—mountaineer, ardent conservationist, fierce advocate for wilderness—led a life that mattered then and still does. Like Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, Brower stood up for the natural world when it had much to lose, and made a difference. Robert Wyss captures the man and that critical moment in this insightful, moving, and consequential book. The Man Who Built the Sierra Club adds an essential work to the canon of American environmental history.

William Souder

A well-structured, clearly written account of an American lodestar, one whose nimble mind befuddled both allies and adversaries.... Wherever a reader stands on climate change and conservation in general, David Brower is as important to those current debates as John Adams or Thomas Jefferson are to tussles over modern political philosophy, and Wyss here gives him his balanced due.

Providence Journal - Mike Freeman

05/01/2016
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

Library Journal

2016-04-07
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.

Kirkus Reviews