I started running around in the mountains at a very early age because my family liked to camp, and we went into the Sierra. Yosemite. My first trip there was 1918. The I-80 at that point was a one-lane, dirt road. It's changed a bit (chuckles) since then. But that meant there was a chance to take a long trip. Took four days to get to Tahoe. Seventy-four hours. We camped out, and just that experience… and finding out [the very next year] what the loggers were doing, way back even then, spoiling something that I'd just discovered… I mean, I started off with a bias that I have never escaped. (laughs) Never trust a logger. But then I worked for the Berkeley Echo Camp for three summers and took people up mountain peaks, easy peaks, and learned that the real high stuff is in the High Sierra. Took backpack trips: one in ‘33, a seven-week trip; in ‘34, a ten-week trip, trying to climb everything I hadn't climbed yet.
Didn't get into rivers until I guess about 1950. I was on the Sierra Club board, and we heard a description of what to do about the Grand Canyon. At that point we were persuaded that the Sierra Club should vote in favor of the Grand Canyon Dam, and Glen Canyon. And I went along with it. I asked the one advocate we had on our board, Bestor Robinson, I knew, who liked development. Had he checked this out with Frederick Law Olmstead? Yes, he had, and he was a good follower of Olmstead's father…
Anyhow, Frederick Law Olmstead thought nothing damaging would be done to the Grand Canyon by these dams: that the canyons would still be rising very high above the reservoir level… and we got over that idea. We voted for those dams, and I was one of the people who did. That was back in 1949. In 1950 I began to hear about Dinosaur, and that got me quite excited. I didn't think that we should allow dams in a national monument. One of our directors said, “Well, there's nothing there but sagebrush.” But I'd heard some other stories. Had no good photographs. Then in 1952, Harold Bradley—one of the oldest presidents of the Sierra Club—he was a son of a charter member of the club… took his family down through Dinosaur and made a 16mm movie. When I saw that, I said, “This place has got to be saved.” It took photography to wake me up. And then I got into the battle and started in ‘52, and it's been going on since then. 1952 to 1997. When does it end?!

David Brower has been an environmental activist for almost half a century. At 85, he still may be the best known, most recognized figure in the game… as well he should be. Along the way he was executive director of the Sierra Club for 17 years. He founded the League of Conservation Voters, Friends of the Earth, and Earth Island Institute. He participated in battles that stopped dams in the Grand Canyon and Dinosaur National Monument; and successfully set aside areas such as Point Reyes National Seashore, Fire Island, Cape Cod, Redwood National Park, and North Cascades, to name just a few. In a broader sense, he has been a beacon of conscience and hope, where nature is concerned, for practically an entire planet. Last fall he, the Sierra Club, and an organization called the Glen Canyon Institute made headlines once again by calling for the draining of Lake Powell and the restoration of Glen Canyon.
In late January, Brad Dimock and Jeri Ledbetter made a pilgrimage to California and interviewed Brower at his home. This spring, Lew Steiger was lucky enough to catch him in Flagstaff as well. The following is a compilation of both conversations, with occasional interjections from his multitudinous writings…

When did you become the executive director of the Sierra Club?

In 1952. So I was given a new platform, really, a place to operate from, and a budget. It was in the following year, 1953, that we persuaded Bus Hatch to take a bunch of us through the canyons. We had three trips of about 65 people each, so that we got 200 or 300 people through Dinosaur in that year, down through Echo Park, out through Split Mountain Gorge, and they got to experience a six-day trip. And that was the major beginning for Sierra Club river trips. It was the first use that I know of, of the big baloney boats. Then… we had the capability, [suddenly], of taking a lot of people down rivers. And I'm certainly glad that tradition got going full bore. The experience of a river trip, I remember, was just…. I was just in a kind of ecstasy… here you are down by the river, washing pots. Go wash everything out into the river and clean things up, come back, get good and wet, get dry. (chuckles) Find campsites along good spots. And you could get into places that nobody else could get to.
It wasn't until Glen that I began to get the side canyon experience (and we got more of that later in Grand). I'd tell people, “What side canyons have you seen?” That goes for Grand or anything else. But in Glen, the side canyons were the thing. I've just got to see those start to recover…

You really seem to take Glen Canyon personally…

The first thing I thought of when we got into the congressional hearings, was a compromise indeed—the biggest compromise of all, that in order to save Echo Park and Split Mountain from being dammed, we put all that water in a bigger Glen Canyon Dam. And I was the guy who advocated that Glen Canyon Dam be built higher. River runners in Salt Lake got after me on that one and said, “What the hell are you up to?! You haven't seen it, have you? And you don't know what you're talking about.” And that was right. But beyond that, the Bureau of Reclamation's commissioner said, “We would have difficulty protecting Rainbow Bridge if it were higher. And considering we have serious doubts about the foundation of Glen Canyon itself, [we] don't want to make it any higher.” That quote needs to come out again. They were concerned then about it—they should be concerned more now.
But then the battle came on. And as the battle went on and on, I saw that there were other things wrong with the whole project [the Colorado River Storage Project]. It was a bum project, it was too expensive, taxpayer expense—all the bad things. And we had plenty of people with us on that. We knew that it was bad engineering. I knew that from Walter Huber who was the dam expert for President Eisenhower. And we knew from Luna Leopold, one of our best hydrologists, of the U.S. Geological Survey, that they were not thinking right about sedimentation and aggradation. And I got going on those subjects, and got really excited about it. We had a very bad project. It was going to waste water [through evaporation and bank-storage loss]—I had no idea how much then—and it was a bad idea altogether. And we had enough people ready to oppose that right at that point, a block of 200 votes from the House of Representatives to shoot it down, and they would have enough trade votes to kill it.
At that point, when it was, I think, on the ropes, and the whole Reclamation program on the ropes with it, I got a wire when I was lobbying back in Washington from the executive committee of the Sierra Club saying, “If Echo Park and Split Mountain Dams are taken out of the project, the Sierra Club will withdraw its opposition to the entire project.” They didn't really know much about the whole project, because they hadn't been thinking about that—they'd just been thinking about the national monument precedent. When they did that, the people who were trying, along with us, to block the dam, realized that with the Sierra Club out of this—it was the keystone of the opposition—the opposition would fade, and the project would go through, which it did.
But the thing that bothers me still, is that when that decision came by wire from San Francisco to Washington, instead of grabbing the next plane home and getting the board to meet and squaring them out, giving them the story about this, “Look, this project is wrong on all these bases. And besides, it violates the Sierra Club's own policy: ‘there should be no major scenic resource lost for a power project.'” But I didn't get off my duff; I didn't move. And I don't know yet, to this day, exactly why I didn't.
That was the difference. I could have made the difference at that point. I was the one person who could have. I had all these pieces to work with, and they didn't, and I didn't make that trip. It was an excuse for me later that, well, I hadn't seen it yet, or I'd have been as excited about that as I was about Dinosaur—I hadn't seen it, indeed. But whatever the reason, I was in a position to keep the Sierra Club intact, to keep the opposition intact, and Senator Paul Douglas asked, “Why did you quit?” and Senator Clinton Anderson, a great reclamationist, said, “If it hadn't gone through [then], it would never have gone through.”

So then the CRSP went through without Echo Park, but with a provision to save Rainbow Bridge?

Yes. And the provision to save Rainbow Bridge was interesting because we'd fought for that, and Howard Zahniser got those words in, “It is the intention of Congress that no dams or reservoirs be in national parks or monuments, and protection of Rainbow Bridge…”. And then we got into court on that later. But meanwhile, what happened in Congress is what happens often—that you can get a lot of public attention on a major issue, but when you get the appropriation, there's very little chance for public participation. And I was at the hearings on the appropriation bill, where there was no chance for me to talk, and Wayne Aspinall was asked, “Well, wasn't there some provision that Rainbow Bridge should be protected?” “No.” He just out-and-out lied. And there was nothing we could do about it. I was there.
They didn't protect it. We had this later trip when Stewart Udall took a lot of people by helicopter, including Connie Wirth of the Park Service and all kinds of people—I was there—to the site they were supposed to have protected, Rainbow Bridge—to build the coffer dam that would keep any flow from Glen Canyon Reservoir from getting to Rainbow Bridge. And Floyd Dominy was there, among others, and I said, “This is the place you've got to build it—that's the one place where you can handle what has to be handled. And yes, you're going to have to have something that'll take the flow out of Aztec Creek and Bridge Creek, and put it up into the reservoir. It's going to take a pumping station.” And Floyd Dominy just did a couple of kicks at some of the soil around there, and said, “You can't build a dam here.” That was the attention given it.

When did the Grand Canyon bill begin?

Well, I think it began once they had the assurance of the silt trap in Glen Canyon, then they could go right ahead with Marble and Bridge. Because without Glen's control of sediment, and without some control to be built on the Little Colorado, which is a big sediment carrier—Bridge, of course, was the one vulnerable there—Marble would not last long if it had to carry the sediment that Glen was getting. And Bridge wouldn't last long if it had to carry both. So there was no point in thinking about either of those dams until Glen was assured, and the Coconino Project was well reassured. It'd be a hard job stopping, protecting the Little Colorado drainage. I suppose we could do it, but… That's a great big bunch of silt comes down there.
In any event, once Glen was assured, then the Bureau began to get ready for the Southwest Water Plan—everything else they could do to hurry up with the Grand Canyon, with Bridge and Marble. Now they've wrecked one, they want to wreck the rest of it.

Martin Litton says that when the Grand Canyon dams first came up, that Bestor Robinson was the president of the Sierra Club and was not opposing the dams—that he merely wanted adequate recreational facilities—elevators for the fishermen— as part of the dam. How did that get changed?

Bestor came on with a very persuasive statement. He was a good lawyer, and he knew how to swing a jury. But he could not overcome what Martin did, who made the speech following Bestor's. That was when we had more members listening in on board meetings than we do now. There was quite a bunch listening. And they listened to Bestor and there was silence. Then Martin poured it on, on what a ridiculous thing this would be to do. And the audience applauded. And Bestor subsided, and we voted “no.”

Had Martin been primed for this speech?

Martin doesn't have to prime for a speech. (laughter) He's ready. He's very eloquent.

And then the fight began.

So the fight was ready to continue.
The Pennington film [of the inundation of Glen Canyon] was extremely helpful. Then a whole series of things began to be extremely helpful, including the numbers that we got out of the three principal assistants I had—one a nuclear engineer, Larry Moss. Another, our mathematician, Jeff Ingram. And then Alan Carlin, who was of the Rand Corporation, an economist, began to feed numbers into the system that were devastating. The principle argument that Larry Moss was coming up with was we could go to nuclear instead. I was trapped in that briefly, but got out of that trap. But Jeff pointed out to the then Office of Management and Budget, then called the Bureau of the Budget, his analysis of the figures the Bureau was using. They were counting on using the revenue from Grand Canyon to finance further Reclamation work, to sequester that from what was required under the act that it go to the general account, the Treasury. And the Bureau of the Budget didn't like that. This was kind of shocking that the Bureau would try to do that, and the Corps of Engineers, when they got wind of what was up—that this was a long-range plot for the Bureau to get into the water of the Columbia—and when the Army engineers heard that, then we had all kinds of help—and help from Pacific Northwest members of Congress. That was some of the quiet help we got on the Grand Canyon. We got some pretty important people saying, “No way.” That included the guy who was the Speaker of the House, didn't stay there, Mr. Foley. He was very helpful in the Grand. And Senator Jackson was very helpful.

What brought about the ad campaign?

I'd started the ads after I'd been given the example in Dinosaur. There was a meeting of the Colorado River Board about Echo Park and Denver coming up. This man who was heading this took up a full-page ad in the Denver Post that arrived in the daily meeting. And that ad included “if there are any secret hopes continued by you people for the Echo Park Dam, we will block the entire project.” (laughs) So I saw the power of the full-page ad at that point, and began using them for the Redwoods.
The one that's most famous of all was the one with my story about what was wrong—I'd given a whole story of the history of the earth and everything else, when things were built and so on, and when Grand Canyon started—and also about words that had come to us in a letter from a Sierra Club member who lived in New Jersey and used the line, “Should we flood the Sistine Chapel because it gets us nearer the ceiling?” So that was put in the ad, and that has been one of the most famous ads of all time, and people still love it.
It was a very effective ad. Then the other ads were effective. We put out, I guess, five all together, on the Grand Canyon. And three books, two films. All that stuff—the ads, the films, the books—those helped as tools. And getting around to the meetings, the hearings, the arguments, the interviews.
The first ad we took out, “Should we flood the Grand Canyon for profit?”—that was an ad with a bunch of coupons, saying “write your congressman” and so on. That's where Mo Udall had drinks with Sheldon Cohen at the old Congressional Hotel, and said, “How can the Sierra Club get away with this?” And so that day the IRS clouded our tax deductible status. I got into the bad graces of Stewart Udall briefly because I thought that I didn't know that Udall had done it, but I thought something had happened here. And Mo never admitted it in public, but he told me privately in his office that was the worst mistake he made. But the IRS action was extremely helpful.
I tell that story that a lot of people didn't know the threat to the Grand Canyon, or much about it, but they did know they hated the IRS. And here's a little organization out in California trying to save the Grand Canyon for the world, and the IRS penalizes them. What the hell is the matter with the IRS?! And this was extremely helpful. So we got news coverage across the country, editorial coverage in many papers—all friendly.
And it is strange that although Stewart [Udall] was key to the success of [the CRSP] in the House, that he was also key to the reversal on saving the Grand Canyon—because he did his switch. And he gave me credit for causing the switch in his attitude. And I gave credit to a woman, Sharon Francis, who was working for the Wilderness Society—then she went to work in the White House for Ladybird [Johnson] for the Office of Beautification. And she worked on Ladybird constantly. And finally we got the statement of Lyndon Johnson, over whom I guess Ladybird had some influence, that, “if this legislation includes dams in the Grand Canyon, I will veto it.”
But I saw her at a timber hearing in New Hampshire about three years ago, gave her credit for saving the Grand Canyon—said, “You got Ladybird to put the pressure on.” She said, “Well, there are a hell of a lot of letters that helped. And the ads were extremely helpful.”

And that was it? After Johnson said that, it was struck from the bill?

Uh-huh.

Both dams?

Yeah.

* * *

But still, in spite of being largely responsible for the victories at Echo Park, Marble and Bridge, it seems the loss of Glen Canyon is the big thing to you, that you feel personally responsible for that…

Yes, and I've had this hanging over my head ever since… until last November—forty years plus after that disastrous move by the Sierra Club board—the board voted unanimously to drain Lake Powell, to let the river run through it.
So this is where we are now, and we have the chance… and among all the other reasons we know now, things that we didn't know then, what is imminent at Glen Canyon is an economic catastrophe beyond belief for Arizona, California, and Nevada, because that dam is not in good shape, and it's going to be in worse shape. We damned near lost it in 1983. We've got enough water to lose it again [in 1997] if they don't play it right. And it's weaker than it was, and besides that, we're losing a lot of water we didn't know we were losing—a lot by evaporation, and a lot because we have this huge reservoir with a lot of thirsty deserts on all sides, and as a result right now, we're losing something like one million acre-feet of water a year because of the great Lake Powell mistake. We don't need to, and that's what we've got to stop. We've got to let the water go through, let the sedimentation go through to Lake Mead. When Lake Mead is finished, maybe a century or two from now, that would be time to rethink Glen, if anybody at that point wants to make that kind of mistake again. I don't think they will, but we'll leave that option. That's the compromise.
The sedimentation was not considered, they don't know what they're doing, and as that fills up more and more, then the lake spreads out more and more. There's more to be lost by bank storage and evaporation. So now is as good as it's ever going to be—it's going to get worse. And this river can't afford that kind of waste. It's a matter of: “Let's have better water, more of it, and stop putting a great scenic resource out of action because we want to make hydroelectric power.” These days, that is old fashioned.

“Great scenic resource” meaning Glen Canyon?

Glen Canyon itself was one of the greatest scenic resources on earth, and when we restore that, people are going to have a chance to learn that, and they'll never let it happen again—in my judgement. But meanwhile, there are lots of alternatives, and we're concentrating on those, the other things that can make the people who think they're unhappy, happy about this project, which they should be.

But how on earth are we going to turn the clock back? I mean, seriously.

I say this isn't a matter of turning the clock back. It's keeping the clock running. And our institutions don't have that idea yet. That means the corporations, the government, the universities, the investors. We haven't got the message yet, it hasn't caught true. We don't get it.
Just one number, it comes from Paul Hawken, who wrote the book The Ecology of Commerce. It's not in that book, but I think it'll be in his next one. If things go on as they're going on, we're going to have to produce as much food around the world in the next 40 years, as has been produced in the last 8,000 years. Now, you might not want to believe that, but you'd better not disbelieve it ‘til you've proved that it's wrong. We've gotten into this exponential curve of growth and demand on resources. We've grown right up the wall. We're getting along reasonably well here, but we're going right up the wall, and the wall isn't going to take it forever. We cannot produce that 8,000 years' supply of food. It's out of the question. But we don't have any of our institutions, no presidents, no vice-presidents—taking the option—no university president is thinking about this. It's time to rethink what we do with water, what we do with energy, and what we do with growth. And we've got to do it, we don't have much time to do it. So I'm worried about taking too long to get this started.
If we make Glen Canyon an example, we let the river run through it, I have no doubt—though I have nothing to prove it with—that 150 years from now, when we really need something like it as a substitute for Lake Mead… no one will permit it. But if we try to take the dam down now, we've got the huge budget of taking it apart. That's huge. Right now, for example, there's been general agreement that a dam should be taken down up near Olympic National Park, the Elwha River Dam. But it's been dropped by a mere $150 million problem: they think it's going to cost that much to take the sediment out. So nothing has happened, and the Department of the Interior wants to do it, the people want to get it done, but they're stuck in a budget, because we get stuck on budgets.
We're incapable right now of thinking what it's going to cost the earth and the future if we don't do some of these things. All we think about, “What's it going to cost us if we do it now?” And to hell with the future, to hell with the earth. But we've trashed the earth for a good 250 years since the Industrial Revolution. We've been fairly good at it, and nobody's been better than we in the United States.
We can do something else, we don't have to trash it anymore. We can run a society that doesn't require that the earth be trashed. We're bright enough to do that, I have full confidence in that, and that's what we gotta get going on.
So I'm willing to let the dam stand as an example. “That was a silly act! Why the hell did they ever put that up in the first place?!” Let that be the tourist attraction, the horrible example. And once people really understand what Glen Canyon was, as it begins to restore—and it'll begin immediately, once you get the water out of it—they will never let that happen again. They would never let Hetch Hetchy happen again in Yosemite. It's a new world coming up, a new bunch of thinking on dams. It was a great idea, it's time has passed, and it's time for us to realize that.

Why do you suppose they keep that lake so full, even on a wet year like this?
We keep it full because we're a little chintzy. The higher the head, the more hydroelectric power can be produced, and the more income to pick up the tab on all these little goodies that were part of the Colorado River participating projects, including the Central Utah Project, and including no small part of the Central Arizona Project, and these other little projects along with the other little dams. There's a lot that came out of that Christmas tree at Glen Canyon, because nobody in the marketplace or anybody else was ready to calculate the costs. Cheap money. They took a place without paying anything for it—one of the most beautiful places on earth. They created the possibility of a catastrophe. They created monstrous growth. They did all kinds of things without quite thinking them through. Now, I don't expect to think anything through in my eighty-four-plus years, but at least you make a try at it. And our minds are good enough to make a try at this.
I was in intelligence in World War II in the mountain troops in Italy. And in intelligence you're told, “gather information, evaluate it, interpret it, then do something about it.” And one of the things you're supposed to do in the course of all this is to consider what the enemy capabilities are.
Well, I wouldn't call, in here, the enemy Nature, but Nature is the one. And the other enemies are the people who are sick and tired of the United States using up most of the world's resources. The number I have is that in the last fifty years, the United States has used up more resources than all the rest of the world in all previous history. Extremely hard to believe. I'm not sure I believe it myself. But I certainly believe this seems to be our direction, that we're determined to do this.
And I like René Dubois' remark: “Trend”—and this is a trend—”is not destiny.” We're not committed to this stupidity. We're brighter than that. We're a hell of a lot brighter than that. And I just would like us to catch on how brilliant we are (chuckles) and stop turning our heads away from problems, from opportunities we can handle. That's deep dish philosophy here. As you get older, you get into it deeper and deeper. I guess this happens, because I followed the example of Ansel Adams. He said, “If you're going to get old, get as old as you can get.” And that's what I'm up to. (laughter)

Well, you don't seem to lack for optimism either.

No. This is the great point of Paul Hawken, that we do have to redesign everything. And here's some examples of this. One is they redesigned the 3M Company. They redid every project they had so they would cut their contribution to the waste stream. Over a fifteen-year period, they cut it in half, and they made half a billion dollars more profit by doing it right. Now, this is the example that needs to go through with the corporate world. Have you any plans for doing it right? Try it; it might be fun, you might make even more money, if that's what you're into. The earth could certainly feel relieved.
And I like to tell people in my audiences, “There's nobody in the audience who between now and sack time couldn't think of at least three things that need to be redesigned.” And I give a couple of examples, just simple-minded ones.
The low-flush toilet. How many do they have in Arizona? We finally got one at our house. We've been in that house for fifty years. We've got two, as a matter of fact, instead of the others. And I've done a rough calculation: if we'd got those fifty years ago, we'd have saved $3,000 in water bills. That would have been worth trying. But anyhow, that's just a number. But there are more things than that.
The beer can. Remember when you pull off the tab and toss it away somewhere, and that was environmentally unsound? So somebody said, “Well, we'll fix it so you don't take it off, you just loosen it, and then you recycle the can.” Simple redesign. And people… just start redesigning, start rethinking, because the earth is just crying for this effort on our part, since we seem so determined, unlike any other species, to trash it…
This is rethinking dams, but it's rethinking [everything]. And along with this [draining Lake Powell], I want a rehabilitation of the entire Colorado River drainage. Why does it flow so muddy? Because we've done such damage, some stupid things upstream. Well, let's cut it out. We've got lots of people who need work, let's put those people to work the way they did back in FDR's day and fix it. There are plenty of people that could, there's plenty to be fixed, why let it continue to be eroded unnecessarily? And so on.
Martin Litton [during an earlier conversation] hit the key idea: that is, underlying [our most pressing problems] is this strange addiction to growth. And where we got it, I don't know. But you can't find anybody who'll say anything but “you gotta have more growth.” I started questioning that about, oh, thirty or forty years ago. And we can't have more growth much longer. But we're still trying. We're selecting as if we could grow and grow and grow. Yes, the population of the earth has upped a factor of 3 in my lifetime of eighty-plus years. But then, if you start looking into things that have happened just in my eighty years, you realize we can't do it again.
Simple example: In California in the great valley of California, where we produce—and I'm a Californian bragging—one quarter of the food America eats. We had 6,000 miles of salmon streams—we're down to fewer than 200, and the farmers don't like that. You can't do that again. We had something like 75 percent of the original redwoods—we're down to 4 percent. You can't do that again. We had a sardine fishery—we don't have it. You can't do that again. And these are the things that you can't do again, and nobody wants to think about that. “There'll always be more. High tech and science will fix this.” High tech and science are adding about two problems, at least, to every one they solve—maybe more. I would rather think of ten, 10 to 1. But it's happening.
Another problem we haven't solved is how to get the marketplace to give us some numbers that we can think with. The marketplace is, I would say, out and out stupid. My simple example: what's the value of a tree? The marketplace will say what it's good for, for pulp or two-by-fours. That's it. Nothing about what it does for carbon monoxide balance. That's rather important: we don't like global warming. Nothing about what it does for oxygen, and I rather like oxygen myself. I use it myself. Nothing about what that tree does for keeping the soil in place. Clear cutting is a very sophisticated device for getting soil downstream to the nearest reservoir as fast as possible. The marketplace doesn't say a thing about habitat, and the forest is the habitat for millions of species, most of which haven't been discovered yet. And it doesn't say anything about the quality and quantity of water. Trees are great sponges, and they have this release system, sustained release. Marketplace doesn't mention it. And they're beautiful! None of that stuff, all critical, is worth a fig—not even a fig—to the marketplace. And that isn't right!
I don't know how long they can continue not being at least bright enough to realize that these things exist, they are valuable, they are subsidizing everything we think we're doing that's so smart. Nature is paying our way, and we're kicking it in the teeth, and I don't think that works.
Our biggest problem [is this idea that] the only thing to do is have more growth, so we'll have more money to pay off the old debt, or something—some strange quirk, so that we can go on growing and growing and growing. I remember in San Jose, which is now our third-largest city in Southern California… it's Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, then San Francisco. When I was born in Berkeley, San Jose was smaller than Berkeley. All right, so I was asking a bunch of planners who were coming up with what they're doing about transportation and all that. And they had some good ideas, but I said, “Have you thought of when you would like to see San Jose stop growing?” They didn't want to hear it.

Didn't want it to stop growing?

They didn't want to hear it, they didn't want to discuss that. They were just never—it didn't cross their threshold. And pardon me if I sound excited about this, but this damned-well has got to cross our thresholds. We cannot continue being that stupid. And we aren't destined to be that stupid. We've got extraordinary minds. There are incredible things we can do. (pause)
Maybe it's just television. (chuckles) As I was just telling a panel at Stanford once, chaired by Ted Koppel, “Television is causing cerebral gridlock across America.” He didn't like that statement very much, so we had a discussion. But it is, somehow. We cannot be that bright, if we're gonna just sit here and have the screen give us stuff all day, day in and day out, and change channels. Because what happens when you don't do your own thinking?
When I was in the Army, I taught. That's one of the things an officer is supposed to do, is teach. And you give a good demonstration, you give a good explanation, then it's supposed to be practical work and there's a test. So in television we get explanation, we get some demonstration, but it's pretty well biased. But there's no practical work you have to do. All you have to do is go out and buy. And then beyond that, there is no test. “Is this working? What has this done to you? What have you learned from this that's going to help you, your family, the earth, or whatever you think is important these days?” Like quality—what's it doing? Pretty close to zip.

It's just, these people in Page…

They want to shoot me. You didn't see that article in the latest Economist?

No.

“These environmentalists all ought to be lined up and shot, every one of them.” (chuckles) So I was thinking twice about, “Well, do I want to go to Page right now, considering all the crazies we've got around, including Page?”
But Page has got great opportunities… they can be the takeoff point for trips down the Grand Canyon; the takeoff point for trips up Glen Canyon. They can be the supplier for whatever happens at the revised Wahweap. Or, yes, they've got their hotel and so on, and they're not going to have all those boats, but they can have something else, something else besides flatwater recreation. There's a lot of nonflatwater recreation in this country, and it's a big business. Get into it!
And go on from there, figure out how we're going to get some water up from Glen for the 30,000 acre-feet you need for the Navajo Generating Station, keep that on for a while, and try to get it polluting less. But there are all kinds of things they can do if they use their imagination. And so far as the people who want their houseboats, I'd say (chuckles), “Well, if Glen Canyon Dam goes, one way or the other, their house boats will all be in Lake Mead anyway.” But rethink what to do with flatwater recreation at Lake Mead, and rethink what could be done with the exquisite terrain and scenery—if you just want to call it scenery, it's so cheap—but this extraordinary example of geography. Well, I call it geography. Think of what could be done once we say, “Let's use this, and use it in ways that maximize the effect of this place on its visitors, and minimize the effect on it by them.
These are things that can be thought through. All you have to do is start thinking about it, and coming up with the imagination, the ideas. Page doesn't have to disappear at all. And if we keep Glen Canyon Dam around as just a tourist attraction for a while, you can run up and down it and you can see how much water leaked in it and through it. (chuckles) You can watch it leaking… But all these things could happen at Page. And I guess if anybody wants to hear me say it, I'll tell ‘em up there. I got a few notes.

* * *
It's possible to look superficially at Brower these days and see an old man driven crazy by a perceived mistake he made thirty years ago. His passionate call for bypassing Glen Canyon Dam seems a bit whimsical, certainly impractical to many of us. But read his and Steve Chapple's recent book “Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run” and the picture opens up considerably. It's not just Glen Canyon that Brower's thinking about these days, it's the whole damn planet. He's 85 years old and in his time we've eaten up a hundred times more good stuff than we ever saved; and the truth is, it ALL pains him.
But he still has hope, he's still in there pitching. In addition to draining Lake Powell he'd like to see across this continent (and the world) a network of linked havens: large wilderness areas with connecting corridors that are left alone not for the benefit of man, but for biodiversity itself- for all the other living things that are still here, so they can move around when they need to. He'd like to see a revised version of the old Depression-era CCC: instead of welfare, sign up people for the “CPR Corps.” Have an outfit dedicated to Conserving, Protecting, and Restoring the earth on a global scale. As for practicality, he says in that book:
“Whatever and whoever has brought humanity to the edge of this chasm probably thought they were just being practical. Practical people, as has been pointed out, are those who have made all their decisions, lost the ability to listen, and are determined to perpetuate the errors of their ancestors. They have all the foresight implicit in this advice: ‘When you reach the fork in the road, take it.' More people need to understand that milk does not come from a plastic container, or water from a valve, or gasoline from a throttle. The sources of human wealth have been provided for by nature on the only planet most of us are ever likely to reside upon comfortably. The Earth's ecological capital has been sorely overdrawn. We are running out of the things that fuel economic growth.”
Glen Canyon? Well of course it's symbolic, just like Grand Canyon. The point now, in Brower's mind, seems to be that holding a little ground here and there (as we've been wont to do lately) won't be near enough for the next millennium. We've got to actually turn around and head the other way…

* * *
But you run into all those logistical questions. I mean, when you try to literally think it through, step by step, how are we gonna do this thing? It's pretty amazing that people are actually standing up and saying “do it” out loud. I was quite surprised.

Well, I'm surprised, and surprised at the number of people who buy it, and say, “Hey, that's cool!” (laughter) But then all I have to do is remember my own family's experience when we were taking the few trips we took before Lake Powell filled. We watched the filling begin. Before any of it had happened, we went up a good many of the side canyons. That was one of the greatest experiences our family had in our lives.
I know when I was going through there with John McPhee and Floyd Dominy some years ago, for the book Encounters with the Archdruid… We reached a point where we were in Cathedral Canyon, and John McPhee said he was watching Dave, but he wasn't watching very closely, or he would have seen that I was crying, because I remembered what it was like for my kids, going through, exploring this place, just loving every minute of it, going from pool to pool, and being helped up the slippery stuff, on up to the rather common stuff that gets up higher. But those beautiful things that happened in those side canyons are incredible. And I want to see them again.
I've had some big ideas in my life. I've made some things happen. But the idea I believe I will be checking out on is restoration. I want to help save a taste of paradise for our children. Give us back Hetch Hetchy and Glen Canyon, and I'll go quietly.

Lew Steiger