The Man Who Built the Sierra Club by Robert Wyss

Author:Robert Wyss
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO030000, Biography & Autobiography/Environmentalists & Naturalists, NAT011000, Nature/Environmental Conservation and Protection
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2016-06-06T16:00:00+00:00

14. Diablo and Galápagos

Taking risks has been my trouble in the environmental movement. Because I am a climber, I am aware that there’s a certain amount of danger in getting off level ground. When you get up to where the holds are very thin and there’s a great deal of air under your feet, you know that it’s not a good time to slip because you might not survive it. Perhaps that is why I have always liked this quotation: “A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships were built for.” I like to get out of port, I think we were built to explore.

DAVID BROWER, LET THE MOUNTAINS TALK, LET THE RIVERS RUN

California’s coastal Diablo Canyon and the Galápagos Islands west of South America are separated by more than 3,000 miles of Pacific Ocean, and they appear to have little in common. And yet for David Brower in the mid-1960s they created similar opportunities to further the conservation cause at the expense of increased disruptions within the Sierra Club.

Diablo was the site of a proposed nuclear electricity-generating station, and some Sierra Club members were instrumental—surprisingly and ironically—in helping the developer, Pacific Gas & Electric (PG&E), find it. Brower was not involved in those efforts, and he became increasingly outraged because the project was going to be built on one of the last scenic and undeveloped canyons on the California coast.

The issue with the Galápagos was more subtle but in some ways nearly as threatening to Brower. His decision to work secretly toward producing a book about the islands made famous by Charles Darwin for their unusual species angered many Sierra Club leaders.

Without the Diablo controversy, Brower probably could have calmed tempers about his handling of the Galápagos book. But the Diablo issue instead exacerbated the friction and the growing factionalization, pitting Brower and his supporters against a coalition of what had been his best friends, including Dick Leonard and Ansel Adams. It precipitated the greatest rupture in the history of the club, greater even than the split caused by John Muir’s fight for Hetch Hetchy at the dawn of the twentieth century. Further, Diablo was only the preliminary round, a preview of what was ahead for Brower and his one-time allies.

Later, when the questionable safety of nuclear energy became a rallying cry for environmentalists, Brower was one of the movement’s leaders. In 1978, he helped rally more than three thousand protesters at Avila Beach near the Diablo site in an action organized by the Abalone Alliance, an antinuclear organization. Later that day, 487 of the protesters were arrested. A year later, before a crowd estimated at up to forty thousand, he praised the Abalone Alliance and protesters for their efforts to stop Diablo.1 But in 1966 when Brower raised his first objections about Diablo, they had nothing to do with safety. “We were split over not whether there should be reactors,” said Brower, “but simply where. I wanted the reactors in a place that was already developed, instead of taking a relatively unspoiled piece of coast.

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