Dave Brower: Tireless Environmental Champion

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PLOWBOY: Mr. Brower, thanks to your seemingly tireless work over the past 20 or so years with the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth and other environmental organizations, you've become a rather legendary figure in the conservation and ecology movement. If you'll allow me to, however, I'd now like to strip away some of your larger-than-life image and introduce all of MOTHER's readers to the flesh and blood human being underneath. Please, if you will, give us a brief rundown of David Brower's existence to this point.

BROWER: I was born in Berkeley, California 60 years ago and I dropped out of college in my sophomore year. The rest of my education came a little more slowly. I went in the back door and was an editor of the University of California Press for eleven years, with time out for World War II.

PLOWBOY: How did you serve during the war?

BROWER: As a battalion intelligence officer in the ski troops—mountain troops—in Italy . . . and I had one experience there that still impresses me.

PLOWBOY: What was that?

BROWER: Well, I don't want to bore you . . . but I can vividly recall a day when I had gotten up on a little observation point to see if the enemy was in an area that we were moving toward. As usual, I didn't spot much because the Germans were very good at keeping themselves unseen. That was one of their tricks. We were always bustling all over and they were out of sight. Maybe I've got that backward: Maybe we were the ones who were out of sight, really out of sight.

Anyway, I sat down at the top of that hill in a slit trench or something that would protect me from rifle fire and, for some reason, I was looking back instead of forward . . . when there was a click against the branch right over my head and I knew it was a shell.

Now I must explain that, at the time, we were losing a hell of a lot of troops because the Germans were very good at getting tree bursts. They didn't have, as we did, radar-activated or proximity-fused shells that would explode at a certain distance above the ground—so the resulting shrapnel could kill or wound soldiers over a wider area—but they got the same effect by aiming their 70mm shells at the trees above us.

And this particular shell just ticked a branch right over me but, luckily, the limb didn't touch the projectile's fuse. And the shell went on and—because I was looking back—I saw this dark circle get smaller and smaller and smaller until it hit a hill on the other side of a ravine and BANG! I figure from that point on, my life has been a gift. About this much variation (Brower measures a fraction of an inch between thumb and forefinger) in the path of that shell and I wouldn't be sitting here boring you tonight.

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