Encounters with the Archdruid

by John McPhee

  Sooner or later in every talk, Brower describes the creation of the world. He invites his listeners to consider the six days of Genesis as a figure of speech for what has in fact been four billion years. On this scale, a day equals something like six hundred and sixty-six million years, and thus “all day Monday and until Tuesday noon, creation was busy getting the earth going.” Life began Tuesday noon, and “the beautiful, organic wholeness of it” developed over the next four days. “At 4 P.M. Saturday, the big reptiles came on. Five hours later, when the redwoods appeared, there were no more big reptiles. At three minutes before midnight, man appeared. At one-fourth of a second before midnight, Christ arrived. At one-fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began. We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing for that one-fortieth of a second can go on indefinitely. They are considered normal, but they are stark, raving mad.”

  Brower holds up a photograph of the world—blue, green, and swirling white. “This is the sudden insight from Apollo,” he says. “There it is. That’s all there is. We see through the eyes of the astronauts how fragile our life is, how thin is the epithelium of the atmosphere.”

  Brower has computed that we are driving through the earth’s resources at a rate comparable to a man’s driving an automobile a hundred and twenty-eight miles per hour—and he says that we are accelerating. He reminds his audiences that buffalo were shot for their tongues alone, and he says that we still have a buffalo-tongue economy. “We’re hooked on growth. We’re addicted to it. In my lifetime, man has used more resources than in all previous history. Technology has just begun to happen. They are mining water under Arizona. Cotton is subsidized by all that water. Why grow cotton in Arizona? There is no point to this. People in Texas want to divert the Yukon and have it flow to Texas. We are going to fill San Francisco Bay so we can have another Los Angeles in a state that deserves only one. Why grow to the point of repugnance? Aren’t we repugnant enough already? In the new subdivisions, everybody can have a redwood of his own. Consolidated Edison has to quadruple by 1990. Then what else have you got besides kilowatts? The United States has six per cent of the world’s population and uses sixty per cent of the world’s resources, and one per cent of Americans use sixty per cent of that. When one country gets more than its share, it builds tensions. War is waged over resources. Expansion will destroy us. We need an economics of peaceful stability. Instead, we are fishing off Peru, where the grounds are so rich there’s enough protein to feed the undernourished of the world, and we bring the fish up here to fatten our cattle and chickens. We want to build a sea-level canal through Central America. The Pacific, which is colder than the Atlantic, is also higher. The Pacific would flow into the Atlantic and could change the climate of the Caribbean. A dam may be built in the Amazon basin that will flood an area the size of Italy. Aswan Dam, by blocking the flow of certain nutrients, has killed off the sardine fisheries of the eastern Mediterranean. There is a human population problem, but if we succeed in interrupting the cycle of photosynthesis we won’t have to worry about it. Good breeding can be overdone. How dense can people be?”

  More than one of Brower’s colleagues—in the Sierra Club, of which he was for seventeen years executive director, and, more recently, in his two new organizations, Friends of the Earth and the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies—has compared him to John Brown. Brower approaches sixty, but under his shock of white hair his grin is youthful and engaging. His tone of voice, soft and mournful, somehow concentrates the intensity of his words. He speaks calmly, almost ironically, of “the last scramble for the last breath of air,” as if that were something we had all been planning for. “There is DDT in the tissues of penguins in the Antarctic,” he says. “Who put the DDT in Antarctica? We did. We put it on fields, and it went into streams, and into fish, and into more fish, and into the penguins. There is pollution we know about and pollution we don’t know about. It took fifty-seven years for us to find out that radiation is harmful, twenty-five years to find out that DDT is harmful, twenty years for cyclamates. We’re getting somewhere. We have recently found out that polychlorinated biphenyls, a plastic by-product, have spread throughout the global ecosystem. At Hanford, Washington, radioactive atomic waste is stored in steel tanks that will have to be replaced every fifteen years for a thousand years. We haven’t done anything well for a thousand years, except multiply. An oil leak in Bristol Bay, Alaska, will put the red salmon out of action. Oil exploration off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland will lead to leaks that will someday wreck the fisheries there. We’re hooked. We’re addicted. We’re committing grand larceny against our children. Ours is a chainletter economy, in which we pick up early handsome dividends and our children find their mailboxes empty. We must shoot down the SST. Sonic booms are unsound. Why build the fourth New York jetport? What about the fifth, the sixth, the seventh jetport? We’ve got to kick this addiction. It won’t work on a finite planet. When rampant growth happens in an individual, we call it cancer.”

  To put it mildly, there is something evangelical about Brower. His approach is in some ways analogous to the Reverend Dr. Billy Graham’s exhortations to sinners to come forward and be saved now because if you go away without making a decision for Christ coronary thrombosis may level you before you reach the exit. Brower’s crusade, like Graham’s, began many years ago, and Brower’s may have been more effective. The clamorous concern now being expressed about conservation issues and environmental problems is an amplification—a delayed echo—of what Brower and others have been saying for decades. Brower is a visionary. He wants—literally—to save the world. He has been an emotionalist in an age of dangerous reason. He thinks that conservation should be “an ethic and conscience in everything we do, whatever our field of endeavor”—in a word, a religion. If religions arise to meet the most severe of human crises, now and then religions may come too late, and that may be the case with this one. In Brower’s fight to save air and canyons, to defend wilderness and control the growth of population, he is obviously desperate, an extreme and driven man. His field, being the relationship of everything to everything else and how it is not working, is so comprehensive that no one can comprehend it. Hence the need for a religion and for a visionary to lead it. Brower once said to me, “We are in a kind of religion, an ethic with regard to terrain, and this religion is closest to the Buddhist, I suppose.” I have often heard him speak of “drawing people into the religion,” and of being able to sense at once when people already have the religion; I also remember a time, on a trail in the Sierra Nevada, when he said, “We can take some cues from other religions. There is something else to do than bang your way forward.”

  Throughout the sermon, Brower quotes the gospel—the gospel according to John Muir (“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe”), the gospel according to Henry David Thoreau (“What is the good of a house if you don’t have a tolerable planet to put it on?”), the gospel according to Buckminster Fuller (“Technology must do more with less”), and the gospel according to Pogo (“We have met the enemy and he is us”). A great deal of the sermon is, in fact, a chain of one-liners from the thinking sector: “The only true dignity of man is his ability to fight against insurmountable odds” (Ignazio Silone), “Civilization is a thin veneer over what made us what we are” (Sigurd Olson), “Despair is a sin” (C. P. Snow), “Every cause is a lost cause unless we defuse the population bomb” (Paul Ehrlich), “The wilderness holds answers to questions man has not yet learned how to ask” (Nancy Newhall).

  Brower has ample ideas of his own about what might be done. He says, “Roughly ninety per cent of the earth has felt man’s hand already, sometimes brutally, sometimes gently. Now let’s say, ‘That’s the limit.’ We should go back over the ninety and not touch the remaining ten per cent. We should go back, and do better, with ingenuity. Recycle things. Loop the system.” When he sees an enormous hole in the ground in the middle of
New York City, he says, “That’s all right. That’s part of the ninety.” In non-wilderness areas, he is nowhere happier than in places where the ninety has been imaginatively gone over—for example, Ghirardelli Square in San Francisco, a complex of shops and restaurants in a kind of brick Xanadu that was once a chocolate factory. When someone asks him what one person can do, Brower begins by mentioning Rachel Carson. Then he tells about David Pesonen, a young man in California who stopped a nuclear-power station singlehanded. Then he sprays questions. “Are you willing to pay more for steak, if cattle graze on level ground and not on erodable hills? Are you willing to pay more for electricity, if the power plant doesn’t pollute air or water?” He taunts the assembled sinners. “You are villains not to share your apples with worms. Bite the worms. They won’t hurt nearly as much as the insecticide does. You are villains if you keep buying automobiles. Leave these monsters in the showroom.” Invariably, he includes what must be his favorite slogan: “Fight blight, burn a billboard tonight!”

  The cause is, in a sense, hopeless. “Conservationists have to win again and again and again,” he says. “The enemy only has to win once. We are not out for ourselves. We can’t win. We can only get a stay of execution. That is the best we can hope for. If the dam is not built, the damsite is still there. Blocking something is easiest. Getting a wilderness bill, a Redwoods Park bill, a Cascades Park bill, is toughest of all.”

  Brower is somewhat inconvenienced by the fact that he is a human being, fated, like everyone else, to use the resources of the earth, to help pollute its air, to jam its population. The sermon becomes confessional when he reveals, as he almost always does, that he has four children and lives in a redwood house. “We all make mistakes,” he explains. His own mistakes don’t really trouble him, though, for he has his eye on what he knows to be right. After he gave a lecture at Yale once, I asked him where he got the interesting skein of statistics that six per cent of the world’s population uses sixty per cent of the world’s resources and one per cent of the six per cent uses sixty per cent of the sixty per cent. What resources? Kleenex? The Mesabi Range?

  Brower said the figures had been worked out in the head of a friend of his from data assembled “to the best of his recollection.”

  “To the best of his recollection?”

  “Yes,” Brower said, and assured me that figures in themselves are merely indices. What matters is that they feel right. Brower feels things. He is suspicious of education and frankly distrustful of experts. He has no regard for training per se. His intuition seeks the nature of the man inside the knowledge. His sentiments are incredibly lofty. I once heard him say, “It’s pretty easy to revere life if you think of all the things it’s done while it was onstage.” He is not sombre, though. Reading a newspaper, he will come upon a piece by a conservation writer and say, “I like that. He’s neutral the right way.”

  Brower is a conservationist, but he is not a conservative. I have heard him ask someone, “Do you like the world so much that you want to keep it the way it is?”—an odd question to be coming from David Brower, but he was talking about the world of men. The world of nature is something else. Brower is against the George Washington Bridge. He is against the Golden Gate Bridge. He remembers San Francisco when the bridge was not there, and he says the entrance to the bay was a much more beautiful scene without it. He would like to cut back the population of the United States to a hundred million. He has said that from the point of view of land use the country has not looked right since 1830. There are conservationists (a few, anyway) who are even more vociferous than Brower, but none with his immense reputation, none with his record of battles fought and won—defeater of dams, defender of wilderness. He must be the most unrelenting fighter for conservation in the world. Russell Train, chairman of the President’s Council on Environmental Quality, once said, “Thank God for Dave Brower. He makes it so easy for the rest of us to be reasonable. Somebody has to be a little extreme. Dave is a little hairy at times, but you do need somebody riding out there in front.”

  The office of Charles Fraser, the developer, is in a small building about halfway between an undeveloped jungle and an alligator pond on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina. Alligators sometimes crawl along the sidewalk between the jungle and the pond. The alligators are natives and Fraser is not. Fraser was anxious lest the alligators be disturbed when, in 1957, he began building roads and golf courses and clearing homesites on some five thousand acres of the island, so he fed them great hunks of raw beef to lull them into acceptance of his bulldozers. The alligators swallowed it. They live now in water hazards and other artificial ponds throughout Fraser’s Sea Pines Plantation. On his office wall Fraser has a picture of himself, in a white suit and a panama hat, walking an alligator. Signs along the fairways say, “Please do not molest the alligators.” Fraser tried something similar with the bald eagles that were there, but the eagles would have none of it, and they flew away.

  Fraser is a short man, heavyset, prominent in the forehead, dark curly hair wisping out behind. The first time I saw him, he was standing on a floating dock at his Sea Pines marina, drinking Portuguese rose and wearing tennis shoes, white trousers, and a blue striped shirt. Those who know him would not instantly recognize such a snapshot, for although Fraser has built one of the creamiest resorts in America, he himself is not the resort type. He drinks little and plays less. Recreation is his business, and business seems to be his recreation. He almost always wears a plain dark suit. He tucks his chin in and sits straight when he is saying something important, and the more important it is, the straighter he sits. He talks about “marketing-acceptance factors” and about how “public money floats better than joint-venture money.” His conversation is predominantly about money—its flows, its freezes, its cataracts, its sources, its deltas. He speaks in a clear, authoritative voice, very slowly, as if he were writing a contract as he goes along.

  When Fraser first saw Hilton Head Island, rimmed with beaches and the ocean, it was a wilderness of palmettos, live oaks, Sabal palms, egret rookeries, and tupelo swamps shimmering with rattlesnakes and cottonmouths. What he saw there horrified him. Fraser is a visionary. He did not see the rattlesnakes. He saw Coney Island rising from the swamps. He saw what he calls “visual pollution.” He saw Myrtle Beach, Asbury Park, Seaside Heights, and Atlantic City. He saw the whole sorry coastline of the Atlantic states—two thousand miles of used flypaper. The flies had missed here and there—Blackboard Island, Cape Fear, Hilton Head—leaving pristine and visible some segments of one of the longest and most beautiful chains of barrier beaches in the world. Fraser, who was twenty-one, felt that development of some kind was inevitable at Hilton Head, and that it need not look like Myrtle Beach, and need not be done in dissonance with nature. He went to Yale Law School, and the course that most absorbed him was Myres McDougal’s Land Use Planning and Allocation by Private Agreement. The gist of what McDougal had to say was that the use of property ought to be planned, because when development is allowed to occur without control the result can be a form of destruction. Throughout his years in New Haven, Fraser was obsessed with a desire to create on Hilton Head Island a resort community over which he would retain absolute aesthetic control, and he was in a position to do so, since his family owned much of the island.

  Fraser’s father, Lieutenant General Joseph B. Fraser, was a lumber king in Hinesville, Georgia, whenever there was not a war. He and several partners had bought the island for its timber and its speculative potentialities. Charles Fraser worked in summer with the timbering teams and successfully urged that no cutting be done in oceanfront stands of virgin pine. He also drove up and down the coastline from Virginia Beach to Miami seeking out the original developers of beachfront properties wherever he could find them and asking, “If you had it to do over again, what would you do differently?” From haut monde to honky-tonk and back again, they told him what a shortsighted mistake it had been to line up a row of houses along a beach and then put a road just behind the
houses, creating a safety hazard and reducing the value of all the lots on the inland side of the road. They told him that large houses have a way of becoming boarding houses. They told him that control is quickly lost if it is not ironclad. Fraser regularly read almost all the journals of architecture. He went to the National Archives, in Washington, and looked up surveyors’ notebooks from the eighteen-sixties, because he wanted his development to be of a piece with history, and he tried to locate old cotton fields, wartime fortifications, and vanished Taras. In 1956, with no development experience and not much money, he returned permanently to Hilton Head, where he began to sketch in the air with his hands scenes that he alone could see. Locally, he was considered a major and absolute nut. To his mother he confided, “I may never make any money, but I want to create something beautiful.” She told him he was going to waste his time and his legal talent. She says now, “Of course, a person doesn’t often have a chance to take wilderness and make something of it. Charles has a sense of beauty and balance. He saw the possibilities there. I think he would have been a painter if he hadn’t chosen to do something else.”

  Sea Pines Plantation appears to be something painted by a single hand, in greens, grays, and browns. Its roads, meandering among the live oaks and Sabal palms, were bent wherever necessary to miss the big trees. All stop signs are green. Private roadside mailboxes are all green. Fireplugs are green. So far there are five hundred and fifty private houses, built by five hundred and fifty individual owners, yet most of the houses have cedar-shake roofs and bleached-cypress siding, the intention being that they should blend into their environment like spotted fawns. Some houses are set back in the woods along the fairways. (There are fifty-four fairways.) Other houses are on narrow drives that lead toward the beach from the principal roads, which are considerably inland. No one in the plantation lacks convenient access to the sea, because Fraser left dozens of fifty-foot public swaths between his arterial roads and the beach, and he has built walkways through the swaths. Neither the beach nor the line of primary dunes behind it has been built upon. Fraser spent fifty thousand dollars to save one live oak when he built a seawall for a harbor he dredged. Trees crowd the roads—dangerously in some places—but Fraser will not remove a tree until automobiles have crashed into it at least twice. He has one section of about a thousand acres that he calls the Main Wildlife Sanctuary and Woodland Recreation Area, and he has legally committed himself to leave twenty-five per cent of the plantation in its natural state. When prospective buyers used to ask about snakes, Fraser would say amelioratively, “Snakes? We’ll show you a couple this afternoon.” But the snakes eventually received the message, and now they do not show anymore. Alligators are packed up and sent to zoos when they become six feet long. Fraser has a private police force that spends most of its time protecting alligators and deer from poachers. The alligator hides are worth a hundred dollars apiece. Fraser’s live oaks were once Methuselan with moss, but after he discovered that rain-soaked Spanish moss can get so heavy it cracks limbs, crews of barbers were sent into the trees to create an overhead garden of Vandykes.