Candids from the Sierra Club in the 1950s and portrait of David Brower (Sierra Club / Wikimedia Commons)

David Brower, first executive director of the Sierra Club and the founder of numerous conservationist organizations, was an indomitable advocate for the environment, and the magnetic subject of John McPhee’s 1971 nonfiction book Encounters with the Archdruid.

Below, ecological activist and writer Tom Turner reflects on his long collaboration with Brower, first at the Sierra Club and then at Friends of the Earth, as well as his memories of McPhee’s progress on his enduring profile of the environmental leader. It joins an earlier piece on Brower and McPhee from Library of America Honorary Trustee Edwin Matthews, marking publication of Encounters in Wild America, a new LOA edition of four of McPhee’s nonfiction masterpieces.

I went to work for David Brower at the Sierra Club in the spring of 1968, first to make a book from old journals and clippings by the Sierra mountaineer Norman Clyde, then as Brower’s administrative assistant. John McPhee had just started the three trips that would become the backbone of Encounters with the Archdruid. I knew this project was underway but not much more.

It was ironic, this timing, if that’s the right word. Brower had just led a ferocious campaign to stop the federal government from building two power dams in the Grand Canyon. He and many others had stopped a copper mine planned in the North Cascades and had begun an eventually successful effort to create a national park in the redwoods in Northern California. He had recently been on the cover of Life, and a short Sierra Club film on the redwoods had just won an Academy Award. Under his direction, the club had published a series of large (“Exhibit Format”) books that were wildly successful, intended to aid in various conservation campaigns.

Sierra Club “Exhibit Format” books: This Is the American Earth (1960) and In the Wilderness Is the Preservation of the World (1962)

Meanwhile, trouble was brewing. A substantial fraction of the fifteen-member Sierra Club board of directors worried that the publications program was getting out of hand and was losing money. They argued that Brower ignored their orders when he disagreed with their directives. Some were simply jealous of his fame.

David Brower (Wikimedia Commons)

There was an ugly battle in the club that spilled over into Bay Area newspapers that year, as McPhee was building his story. It all came to a head in the spring of 1969, when the members of the club voted for an anti-Brower slate of director candidates.

John McPhee (Wikimedia Commons)

Brower took the hint and resigned with a speech to the board and several hundred members. He said he would create a new organization to do what the Sierra Club didn’t want him to do.

I had lunch with McPhee the day Brower resigned, which is neither here nor there, but I’ll never forget it. I was fired from the Sierra Club the next day and went to work for Brower’s newly formed Friends of the Earth two months later. The first part of Encounters appeared in The New Yorker on March 13, 1971.

Tom Turner has worked at the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, and Earthjustice. He is the author of David Brower: The Making of the Environmental Movement; Wild by Law; Sierra Club: 100 Years of Protecting Nature; Justice on Earth; Roadless Rules; and hundreds of articles and op-eds on the environment.