Dave Brower: Tireless Environmental Champion

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

It's just imperative that each one of us solemnly swears to buy half as much overpackaged, disposable, obsolescent merchandise as we have been and to stop reading ads until the advertisers begin spending money to tell us how to waste less . . . or eat half as many calories . . . or drink only half as much.

PLOWBOY: I doubt that we'll ever do it. I mean, do you really think that the general public will give up anything for some nebulous concept called "ecology"? Unless, of course, we just run head-on into catastrophe and have no other choice?

BROWER: I think they will. I believe that the average guy in the street will give up a great deal, if he really understands the cost of not giving it up. And remember, I'm talking about lowering the standard of use rather than lowering the standard of living. In fact, we may find that, while we're drastically cutting our energy consumption, we're actually raising our standard of living.

Trees, you know, are such good air conditioners and are so pleasant to have around that it seems a shame to knock them down, build a house and then cool it with an impersonal, energy-hungry box stuck in the wall. Perhaps we should tell all architects and planners that they may not build another thing or even plan another thing until, as Garrett Hardin says, they've spent a year in Venice to learn what a city is like when it's built to human scale. Or we might tell those designers to go and stay in the warmer countries of southern Europe until they understand how their counterparts of centuries ago used the natural wind patterns and circulation to make a building comfortable without the kind of air conditioning that comes in a box.

PLOWBOY: I agree with you, of course, but I still think that it's going to be a tremendously difficult job to get the message across. In time, anyway.

BROWER: Oh yes. It'll be difficult, and we don't have very long to accomplish the job . . . but it can be done. Look at the SST.

PLOWBOY: Yes, tell me about the SST. Friends of the Earth is still a relatively young and small organization . . . and yet it seems that your group defeated the multi-billion-dollar politi cal, labor and corporate force behind the SST almost single-handed.

BROWER: Well it's nice of you to say that, but it wasn't that way at all. Although Friends of the Earth did more or less spearhead the drive, the work that defeated the SST was done by a coalition of several environmental groups. We were just sort of nominated as leader of that particular joining of forces, in the same way that The Wilderness Society has coordinated the actions of ecology organizations that have brought suit against the Alaskan pipeline. It's sort of like musical chairs.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print