Dave Brower: Tireless Environmental Champion

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PLOWBOY: How many groups usually join forces for one of these environmental-action coalitions?

BROWER: That depends. Sometimes we get three out of five and, on the next issue, we'll come up with eight out of five.

PLOWBOY: Is each organization expected to contribute a certain amount of personnel or money or time or whatever to every coalition it enters into?

BROWER: No, we all just do the best we can. Friends of the Earth was actually kind of an "also ran, me too" in the pipeline suit. The Wilderness Society and Environmental Defense Fund picked up the legal costs on that one and we've tried to help out in other ways.

PLOWBOY: Such as?

BROWER: Well one thing we did was publish a big book called Earth and the Great Weather: The Brooks Range. It has a lot to say both about the mechanics of how much oil is used by whom and about what the hell we're doing to the oldest culture by far—Eskimo—that we have on the North American Continent.

PLOWBOY: Are these alliances just chummy gatherings of ecology groups, or do you welcome the help of "outsiders" when you're getting ready to do battle against a despoiler of the environment?

BROWER: There are no outsiders in these fights and we always welcome all the help we can get . . . although I'll admit that we sometimes do a better than usual job of bringing additional strength into the fold. It depends a lot on who's in charge.

George Alderson, for instance, is the legislative director in our Washington office and he's a very good man. He knows how to just kind of play things cool—instead of coming on like gangbusters the way I sometimes do—and he can really bring people around to believing in what he's doing. For the SST fight, George put together a coalition of 30 organizations that included laborers, businessmen, economists . . . people with widely divergent backgrounds.

PLOWBOY: How did you get the economists?

BROWER: People sometimes come in by strange routes. We were joined by Paul Samuelson and, I think, 16 other economists because of Barbara Heller . . . the daughter-in-law of President Kennedy's economic advisor . . . and, collectively, they just riddled the economic arguments for the SST that the administration was putting forward. They didn't leave the administration an economic leg to stand on.

PLOWBOY: OK. Your economists, businessmen, other environmental groups—all the divergent organizations and power blocs that joined Friends of the Earth—added up to a lot of muscle in the fight against the SST. Are the environmental battles always fought and either won or lost on that lofty plane? Has the ecology movement become big business-like almost everything else—and forgotten the little man?

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