Five years ago, I found a book called “Encounters with the Archdruid.” It told the story of a legendary conservationist and “three of his natural enemies” — a mining engineer, a dam builder and a resort developer.
The legend was David Brower. I was delighted to read that he grew up in Berkeley, a few blocks from where I had lived. He was a young expert on butterflies who graduated high school at age 16. Then, he dropped out of college at age 19 and spent the next decade scaling the Sierra Nevadas and other peaks. Oh, and he joined a local hiking society called the Sierra Club.
World War II intervened. Brower joined the Army and served as a captain in the 10th Mountain Division. He trained thousands of soldiers to climb and cross the rugged terrain they would face in Europe. As a combat-intelligence officer, he was part of the Allied advance through the Apennines in Italy. For this, he was awarded the Bronze Star.
He came back to America, welcomed by a wife and young child.
The world was changing rapidly. Many people confused rapid changes with progress. Nobel Prizes were awarded for discovering the uses of DDT and the frontal lobotomy. In 1952, the year Brower took charge of the Sierra Club, America detonated the H-bomb — the “super,” as scientists naively dubbed it. We were swiftly engineering the path to our own destruction.

The natural world was no less threatened. Miners, dam builders and developers were leaving no mountain unturned, no river unwrecked and no island untouched.
As Brower would later say, “I am not blindly opposed to progress. I am opposed to blind progress.”
John McPhee, the author of the book, remarked that here was a man “who wanted — literally — to save the world.”
With this ethic, he led the Sierra Club for 17 years, turning it from a local hiking club into a national force of 77,000. But Brower didn’t just lead people. He led causes. Causes beyond most people’s imaginations. Like National Parks to protect the California Redwoods or the North Cascades. Or a Wilderness Act that now preserves 105 million acres as forever wild.
With the Sierra Club, he made us see how wasteful and destructive dams could be. He stopped several, including one that would have flooded the Grand Canyon. With Earth Island Institute, which he founded, he became an advocate for environmental justice, bringing social issues such as toxic dumping and environmental degradation in poor communities into the green consciousness.
His maverick personality and radical stances eventually forced him out of the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth. In other words, he told people what they preferred not to hear.
“You are villains not to share your apples with worms,” he’d say. “Bite the worms. They won’t hurt nearly as much as the insecticide does.”
He simply shaped the way we look at the natural world because he allowed the natural world to shape his way of looking.
As a youthful lepidopterist, he once tried to aid butterflies in their transformation. He widened the split in their chrysalis. He had interrupted the flow of fluid from the abdomen to the wings. So the butterflies emerged with extended abdomens, and wings stayed clenched and shriveled. They ran around until they died.
“I have never gotten over that,” he said to McPhee. “That kind of information is all over the country, but it’s not in town.”
So he preached the principles of conservation, preservation and restoration. He spread his message at the University’s famed Public Interest Environmental Law Conference for 18 years. He never made it to the 19th — my first. Land Air Water, the environmental law student society, honored him with last year’s conference theme, “Global CPR.” And every year, the group presents the David Brower Award to an outstanding local environmentalist.
Bite the worms. And save the world.