Dave Brower: Tireless Environmental Champion

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PLOWBOY: The democratic process is still alive and well in this country.

BROWER: It's still alive and, if we'll only take the time to learn how to use it, we can make it work for us. Politicians like to get elected and re-elected. Talk to them in language they can understand and they'll listen.

PLOWBOY: OK. After fighting environmental battles for over 20 years—only to come face to face with burgeoning stocks of atomic waste, artificially created demands for energy, agribiz that mines the soil, human overpopulation and God knows how many other potentially planet-killing forces—you're still optimistic. You still believe that we can trust the average citizen to mend his wicked ways before it's too late . . . and you're confident that all us little folks can still win the big skirmishes in the political arena.

BROWER: Yes.

PLOWBOY: All right. What's your Master Plan for turning mankind around? How can we bail out of the spiraling merry-go-round we've built and get ourselves back in touch with Mother Earth? How can we rediscover—if we ever knew—our true rights and responsibilities?

BROWER: Well, as the Welshman Allen Reese puts it, "At the edge of the abyss the only progressive move you can make is to step back." The mountaineers say the same thing in a different way: "When you're lost, retrace your steps to the last known landmark."

We are at the edge of an abyss and we're close to being irrevocably lost. We've got to search back to our last known safe landmark. I can't say exactly where it is, but I think it's back there about a century when, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, we began applying energy in vast amounts to tools with which we began tearing the environment apart.

Perhaps, once we've gone back—at least in our thinking—and we've found our bearings again, we'll take a look at what's been happening to the earth's biological resources while we've been preoccupied with all these mechanical things. And if we look very carefully, maybe we'll see that there is nothing more important on this planet than life. While we've been so busy measuring this distance and that diameter and the forces over here and those light years out there . . . we've forgotten that none of these little, nonsensical things matter if there's no life to perceive it.

And then we might peer into the future at the generations yet unborn and ask ourselves if we're really trustworthy custodians of their heritage. Do we have the right to tell them that they can never see a whale, for example, because we would rather hunt down and kill the last of these greatest of all mammals for our lubricants and cosmetics? Or do we want to say that we're going to do everything in our power to give those who follow, the gift of whales?

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