Has Jesus Come and Gone?

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By Daniel Geery (about the author) Page 6 of 6 page(s)

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Brower: I try to get to the Sierras, because they're still my home away from home. I started going there when I was about six, and I don't want to quit. We have a few places we can get to, my wife and I, or one or two of the kids will come. We can experience the wilderness in a rather short weekend simply by going off-trail. When you get up high in the Sierras, it's easy to do that. The off-trail country is very beautiful.

Mariah: What are your long-range goals for Friends of the Earth?

Brower: I would hope to see it grow to at least 50,000 or 75,000. I would like to see another 15 countries or so involved in it, and to keep decentralizing it so it doesn't get too cumbersome. I would like to see us spend a little time getting back to basics, which we've been keeping away from because of the great demands of the anti-nuclear effort.

One of the things we're becoming concerned with is just holding onto agricultural lands; the developers would like to get at the land and split it up and make their millions. And we are badly fooled by what you can get out of an acre by force-feeding the land with chemicals. The energy-intensive procedures of agribusiness won't work in the long run.

An acceleration of the use of pesticides in agriculture is sure to lead to starvation, because we're building resistant pests. I think if there were a little more application of ecological principles in agriculture, and a bit less chemical company, we wouldn't be faced with the continuing loss of fertility of the land. That loss is what can bring about starvation.

Mariah: What's your view of humanity in evolutionary terms?

Brower: In evolutionary terms, man is a very recent addition to the planet's ecosystem. We should bear that in mind. If we compress the Earth's age into the six days of creation, the Earth begins Sunday at midnight, life begins Tuesday at noon, and man, in some very primitive, hardly recognizable form, appears somewhere about ten minutes before midnight on Friday. Neanderthal man appears eleven seconds before midnight, agriculture one and a half seconds. Christianity a quarter of a second, the Industrial Revolution a fortieth of a second, and the idea of exponential growth a five-hundredth of a second [the years since WWII, in Brower's calculation].

The most important thing I've learned recently about man's place is that it's good. It's a good place, and we've trained well for where we are, even though we took the human shape rather recently. From every one of us now alive back to the beginning of life on Earth, there's an unbroken chain for three and a half billion years; part of each one of us is three and a half billion years old. Most of that time, everything that made us durable, that gave us our immunities, our abilities to eat, to handle the chemistry of life, to learn the physics of motion, to think, to feel, to love, was shaped and perfected in wilderness. Up until at least half a second before midnight, that's all we had to work with. And that works for us.

We haven't had time to evolve really new capabilities-the veneer of civilization is very thin; we are essentially creatures of the wilderness. Although we've learned how to read and write, to put things on television and put people on the moon, we haven't learned any of the other essentials for keeping ourselves intact in this interrelated web of life on Earth, beyond what the wilderness and evolution have built into us. That, to me, is the most important part of it all: the fact that I own a rather latter-day understanding of wilderness.

I saw Dave Brower one more time, decades later, when in his eighties he gave a talk at the University of Utah, accompanied by his wife, Ann. I went up to him afterward and introduced myself as the one who had done this interview-it was several moments before this registered, but then again, I had changed in appearance from wholly mammoth to bald eagle-and when the lights went on, he smiled warmly and said three words, with all the firmness and surety of the rocky mountains he used to climb, "We WILL prevail!"

*Amory Lovins was at the time energy adviser to Friends of the Earth. His book,
Soft Energy Paths, became the master manual for environmentalists who advocate a swing toward small-scale applications of solar, wind, and biomass conversion as a means of decentralizing energy production. Dave said of one of Lovins' later books, Natural Capitalism, that it was "the most important book of the century"-I'm not sure which century he meant, but after reading the book several times, I'd say it could be the last century or this. Lovins went on to found Rocky Mountain Institute, which in its own words, and as proven through a mind-blowing track record, "finds better ways of meeting human needs that turn snowballing costs and problems into cascading savings and solutions" (See the RMI Website).

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Geery lived off the grid for 15 years in an earth-sheltered, solar heated home, while his kids learned in school that solar energy isn't feasible. NAPTA hosts a page on Geery's foibles in (more...)

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