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Has Jesus Come and Gone?
By Daniel Geery (about the author) Page 2 of 6 page(s)
Within a few months of his departure, Brower's new organization, Friends of the Earth, was off and running. The scope of this organization is hinted at by a glance at its newsletter, Not Man Apart. The name is taken from the lines by Robinson Jeffers: "...the greatest beauty is / Organic wholeness, the wholeness of earth and things, the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man / Apart from that..." Articles cover such topics as the Canyonlands, bowhead whales, desertification, black people and energy, and the Panama Canal. A dedicated FOE staff of about 30 people receive an average salary of $7,700 a year-a lean remuneration perhaps supplemented by the shared hope that healthy changes can be achieved through the democratic system. Brower claims that one of his major contributions to this staff is "to add about five years to the average age of the group." He also travels extensively to present speeches, around the world and throughout the United States; over the last six years, he says, he has spent two-thirds of his time away from his home in Berkeley Hills.
David Brower is a humanist, a man deeply concerned with the survival of the human species on this planet-a soft-spoken, mild-mannered, and extremely gentle person. He has a sharpness of mind and spirit that seems untouched by physical age. Indeed, his recent decision to retire at 128 instead of at 66, seems well within his potential.
Brower described to me a recent eye examination: the doctor had aimed a beam of light into his eye, and he could see every single vein on its surface-on the surface of his own eye. How amazing it was, he said, that humans are able to see through this maze of veins and arteries without ever knowing that they exist! Now, Brower said, he was gong to spend a good deal of time, standing in front of a mirror with a flashlight, studying this phenomenon. This depth of fascination with the natural world is itself a phenomenon, as acknowledged in the citation, written by Garret Hardin, which Brower received from the Starr King School for the Ministry:
David R. Brower: Charismatic leader of crusades for the liberation of the temple of nature from its oppressors, archbishop of the church of the wilderness; archdeacon of the cathedral of the environment; archenemy of all who would sell our heritage in nature for a mess of pottage; and, by universal and unchallenged acclaim, the first, the greatest, and indeed the only archdruid.
Mariah: How can you maintain your optimism when you seem to be so acutely aware of everything our society, and the world, are doing to harm the environment?
Brower: My optimism is a guarded optimism, and it comes, primarily, from my being fortunate enough to lecture a bit around the country. Most of my audiences are student audiences, and even though they aren't as big as they were back around the original Earth Day, they are still high-quality audiences. When you watch the young faces catch on and like what they hear, and when these people come around afterward to talk and wonder how they can get involved, you get optimistic. You realize that the torch, if that is what it is, is being passed on.
If enough people understand that you can't get away with our present exponential rate of growth, sustained, that you're going to have to stop it some time, then we can stop it while we're still sane-or at least while we still think we're sane. I think we're going to get smart just in time. But we have such a habit of liking photo finishes; that's what worries me. We shape up only at the last dying moment.
Mariah: What is your greatest source of dismay at what we are doing to this planet?
Brower: Proliferating nuclear technology in the attempt to harness the atom for peace. As Indira Gandhi proved, atoms for peace are very easily changed to atoms for war. I refer here to the fact that Canada and the United States provided the nuclear technology that enabled India to fashion and detonate its first atomic bomb. What India did, any country with any reasonably intelligent people can do, without any help other than what is in the public domain, in the libraries.
The burden of my argument is that the atom in the fist and the atom in the glove are the same atom; the only thing that makes them different is whatever human determination there is to maintain a barrier between the two. To keep that barrier intact requires an infallibility that does not exist. It requires a stability of government that has never existed. The way to avoid proliferation is to stop it where it starts, and that is with the peaceful atom. Once we do this [the United States], other countries will see that we are serious, that we are not just trying to stop their export of reactors so that we can get the business. We want to stop the whole thing, so that nobody gets the terminal business the atom promises.
Mariah: You were pro-nuclear for about two decades. What changed your thinking?
Brower: I became pro-nuclear at the end of World War II, when the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki made it unnecessary for me to move from the battlefields of Italy to the shores of Japan. I was grateful for that, not quite realizing the consequences-which I've come to realize since then. In the mid '50s, I was still very pro-nuclear. In the mid '60s, I was beginning to be a little bit dubious, but still thought the question was where you put reactors, not whether. In mid-1969 I was attending a conference in Chicago. I found out that what had been promised for 14 years for disposing of nuclear waste still wasn't being done. Now, nine years later, it still isn't being done.
Mariah: What did you mean when you said that if we don't fight nuclear proliferation and win, all the rest is academic?
Brower: If the United States doesn't lead the world back from the nuclear brink to which it led it in the first place, then nuclear war will be inevitable. A nuclear war would reduce civilization to a few fragments of whatever capable cultures there were that were not dependent on high technology. All our interest in wildlife, parks, forests, and wilderness will have to be transferred to radioactive forms of wildlife, parks, forest, and wilderness.
Now I don't want us to give up working for wilderness, parks, forests, wildlife, and wild rivers-assuming, which we must, that we will end nuclear proliferation, we have to have other things ready to go. But if we don't defuse the nuclear threat to humanity, everything else is academic.
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