The Man Who Built the Sierra Club: A Life of David Brower

David Brower (1912–2000) was a central figure in the modern environmental movement. His leadership, vision, and elegant conception of the wilderness forever changed how we approach nature. In many ways he was a twentieth-century Thoreau. Brower transformed the Sierra Club into a national force that challenged and stopped federally sponsored projects that would have dammed the Grand Canyon and destroyed hundreds of millions of acres of our nation’s wilderness. To admirers, he was tireless, passionate, visionary, and unyielding. To opponents and even some supporters, he was contentious and polarizing. As a young man growing up in Berkeley, California, Brower proved himself a fearless climber of the Sierra Nevada’s dangerous peaks. After serving in the U.S. Army’s famed WWII Mountain Division, he joined the Sierra Club and quickly became its executive director. For nearly two decades, Brower led successful efforts to save crucial rivers in the West and millions of acres of wilderness, but in order to block two dams at the Dinosaur National Monument, he compromised on the building of Utah’s Glen Canyon Dam—a loss of wilderness that haunted him until his death. This uncompromising biography explores every facet of Brower’s time as leader of the Sierra Club and steward of the modern environmental movement. His style inspired many but bordered on reckless. His passionate advocacy destroyed lifelong friendships and at times threatened his goals. Married for fifty-six years, Brower jeopardized everything to engage in affairs with other men. Yet his achievements remain some of the most important triumphs of the conservation movement. What emerges from this unique portrait is a rich and robust profile of a leader who took up the work of John Muir and, along with Rachel Carson, made environmentalism the cause of our time.

About the Author :
Bob Wyss is associate professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut and a journalist who has written for the New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, the Boston Globe, Smithsonian, Yankee, and the Providence Journal. He is the author of Covering the Environment: How Journalists Work the Green Beat.

Review :
A riveting.... extensively researched, balanced account.... This absorbing portrait of a flawed yet fascinating figure, beloved and scorned, who defined America's national parks will engage all biography lovers.-- "Library Journal" A well-structured, clearly written account of an American lodestar, one whose nimble mind befuddled both allies and adversaries.... Wherever a reader stands on climate change and conservation in general, David Brower is as important to those current debates as John Adams or Thomas Jefferson are to tussles over modern political philosophy, and Wyss here gives him his balanced due.--Mike Freeman "Providence Journal" Brower remained a force in the environmental movement until the end of his long life, and this book makes fitting homage. Thorough and well written.... [The Man Who Built the Sierra Club] provides a highly useful view of how environmental battles are waged in the trenches.-- "Kirkus Reviews" David Brower--mountaineer, ardent conservationist, fierce advocate for wilderness--led a life that mattered then and still does. Like Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson, Brower stood up for the natural world when it had much to lose, and made a difference. Robert Wyss captures the man and that critical moment in this insightful, moving, and consequential book. The Man Who Built the Sierra Club adds an essential work to the canon of American environmental history.--William Souder, author of On a Farther Shore: The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson Wyss's assiduous research will lay to rest many lingering misconceptions about a man who exasperated and inspired by turns, and always spoke to our hearts' love for wild earth. A tremendously worthwhile and interesting chronicle of Brower's evolution into an uncompromising crusader.--Stephanie Mills, author of Epicurean Simplicity and In Service of the Wild: Restoring and Reinhabiting Damaged Land [The Man Who Built the Sierra Club] offers up a deeply researched... detailed portrait.--Jim Sterba "The Wall Street Journal" Wyss provides a penetrating and readable narrative of the highest-profile American environmentalist in the postwar decades and of the many battles he and the Sierra Club fought. He makes clear the multiple layers of Brower's personality: passion, commitment, aggressiveness, and, at times, recklessness. Readers will come away with a clear and compelling portrait of this cutting-edge environmental activist.--Mark Harvey, author of Wilderness Forever: Howard Zahniser and the Path to the Wilderness Act