| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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interview Interview with an Uncompromising Environmentalist
California Wild: When considering the next 20 years in California, what comes to mind for you? David Brower: My major thought, which I've expressed again and again, is that we've got to wake people up. You cannot have a civilization that pretends it's capitalist but ignores the principal source of its capital, Earth's services. Gretchen Daily's book, Nature's Services, gives some startling numbers: Every year we use something like 33 trillion dollars worth of services from the Earth. That produces a good general GNP around the world (it's about 20 trillion) but we have no obligation in our thinking to pay any of that back. So we're running out of nature's services and we're going to get a bad credit rating. We're already getting it for what we're doing to marine resources, to our forests, to our air, to other forms of life. CW: Perhaps the question is, how patient is our creditor? DB: Yes. She's been extraordinarily patient so far. But there just won't be anything to use. So the whole business is what my wife, Anne, calls "greedlock." It seems to have just taken over for most of this century. Right now the U.S. is doing pretty well, but we're also using most of the world's resources, so though we feel pretty good about it, I don't think most other people in the world feel that good. Raymond Dasmann, one of the world's best ecologists, once said, "We're already fighting World War III, and I'm sorry to say that we're winning." It's the war against the Earth. And we cannot afford the luxury of being pessimists. We're bright enough to know that we can do something about it, but not by just hanging on to the bad habits we got into in this century. What we have discovered is how little we know and how much there is to know. The original deep ecologist, so far as I know, was Robinson Jeffers, and in his poem called "The Answer" he described how beautiful a thing a hand is. But a severed hand, he said, is an ugly thing. "...the greatest beauty is organic wholeness...the divine beauty of the universe. Love that, not man apart from that." That for me is one of the most telling quotes from Jeffers, and it helped inform me. Somehow we need to awaken people to beauty, what's happening to it, and what they can do about it. That's what I was doing with the publication of the Sierra Club exhibit-format books. We were getting people to fall in love with the Earth, and various parts of it. And we were pointing out what the hazards were, what we might lose, and then what we might do about it. And we need to concentrate on that once again whether it's on e-mail, on the web, on the media, wherever we can get it. And certainly in California Wild. CW: What would California look like in 20 years if we went into the future carefully, with our priorities intact? DB: Two lines from Isaiah come to mind: "Thou hast multiplied the nation and not increased the joy." That's pretty powerful. And we're doing just that. We have lots and lots of people in our California nation, but if you think it's joyful, try gridlock. The other quote is: "Woe to them that join house to house and lay field to field till there be no place where they may be placed alone in the midst of the Earth." Isaiah was worried about sprawl and the loss of wilderness, they just hadn't come up with those names yet. But that's how we need to think of it. We need to listen to Isaiah and not take anything that gets in the way of either of those warnings. And we could do that. We have to learn to say "enough." If we don't learn how to say that, the game is over and lost. We can't possibly win. But we can say enough. It's an old line from Garrett Hardin: "Inevitable? Not if you say no." And we have to learn to say no. It's unpopular, but I think that if we could get the corporate world to understand this and consumers to understand this, it would make a big difference. You can still make a living doing something besides trashing the Earth. For instance, we can spend a lot of effort restoring the Earth and restoring cities so that they are so beautiful, so well managed, so nice to live in that we don't have to go off and trample through the roses for relief. CW: For decades it seemed like people in government and industry were saying, ‘We'd love to protect wilderness and the environment, but we really can't afford to. If we allocated the resources we'd need, the economy would erode, etc.' Now it seems that there is a superabundance of capital in the government and in parts of the private sector, and yet I don't see my contemporaries focusing on saving the Earth. Instead they seem to be spending their wealth on bigger houses and larger cars with larger engines. DB: Right. Why wasn't Bill Gates happy enough with 37 billion dollars? Why must he have a hundred billion? Right now we have something like 300 billionaires in the world, most in the U.S. Their aggregate wealth exceeds that of the poorest 3 billion on Earth. I lived through what led to the Great Depression. I lived through what's happening now on Wall Street once before. One of the questions my friends asked each other when I was about 16 was, ‘Where is all this money coming from?' Then people were suddenly dropping out of buildings, committing suicide. It wasn't real money. It was just an assumption. This is what we are doing right this minute. And the worst part of it is that we actually are spending capital, but we're spending the Earth's ecosystem capital without giving a thought about what we're doing to it. The big question that needs to be repeated and repeated to the economists, including Alan Greenspan, who has not given this a thought, is ‘What does it cost the Earth? And what does it cost the future?' And what we're costing the Earth right now, and what we're costing the future, is unforgivable. Suddenly with the Industrial Revolution we could do things by digging into the Earth in a way that it had never been dug before and finding alternate sources of energy so that we have a hundred times the energy available that a human being used to, and with that we have learned to take things apart. And we've become very good at it. But we're not good at putting things back together, of repaying some of our loans from the Earth. CW: Is there a kind of collective denial because of the tremendous fear, guilt, and anxiety about what we've done to the Earth? If so, how can the conservation movement overcome such psychological resistance? DB: Good question. It's the numbing factor, the denial. If you start fussing about anything, you get an almost instant denial through the media. CW: What about population? It's become a kind of politically incorrect subject, hasn't it? It doesn't seem like the conservation movement has forgotten population, it seems to have been thrown overboard. DB: It's much easier for Carl Pope [Sierra Club executive director] to talk about standing rules and chapter management than about managing the Earth, or managing it less. They have big funders, and they don't want to offend the big funders. That's the bind all of the big conservation organizations are in. But in reality, it all relates to population and the overuse of the Earth. We're going into a fibrillative state (I have a pacemaker-I was fibrillating and I've got mechanical control now). The Dow going up and up and up is fooling so many people. They think they're getting rich and everything else. But you don't get rich on gold. CW: It sounds like you're prescribing some pretty radical cultural transformations. DB: For one thing, religions had better update their thinking. When they were invented, if I can be that cynical... CW: Well, they may have been invented by God, right? DB: No, if God invented them, what the hell was He doing for the first three-and-a-half billion years? How'd He get along without them? So we invented them, and we made God in our own image because that's the only image we like the looks of. When Christ was born, the population of the world was estimated to be 200 million. Now it's six billion and it's a different ball game. And the religions have not adapted to it. There's some great stuff in the Bible, but so much of it is just about a different world than ours. Jesus considered the lilies of the field, for instance: "They toil not and neither do they spin. Yet Solomon in all his Glory was not arraigned like one of these." Well, I'll buy that. It's just a wonderful... I practically cry just thinking about it. I wish He'd done a little more nature writing. Gordy Slack is a Contributing Editor for California Wild. |
