Tucson Weekly: Jolly Green Giant (October 22

Environmental Legend David Brower Visits Tucson To Muse About The State Of The Earth.
By Tim Vanderpool
MOST OF US hope to make an imprint on the world. But some of us leave tracks as large as canyons, as powerful as raging rivers, as vast and remarkable as the earth itself.
That's the territory inhabited by people like David Brower. He's left his indelible footprint on our landscape, from his unforgettable fight against the Glen Canyon Dam, to his long tenure with the Sierra Club and his founding of Friends of the Earth. Brower has also helped create national parks in beautifully remote places from Alaska to Fire Island, and this year was a nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was recent winner of the $400,000 Blue Planet Prize, the world's richest environmental award offered annually by the Asahi Glass Foundation of Japan.
On Saturday, the environmental giant will address the Natural Choices Expo in the Tucson Convention Center.
Currents Besides such recognition, at 86 Brower also has the satisfaction of seeing some of his defeats--with Glen Canyon topping the list--slowly but indisputably shifting course. There's now growing talk of the dam's demise. For Brower, that marks a profound ideological reversal for the West. It's also a discourse he obviously relishes, with tainted waves reaching all the way to Tucson via the CAP.
He says water trapped behind the dam in Lake Powell is polluted by jet skis and other motorized recreation. That results in the toxic equivalent of one Valdez oil spill every three years pouring into the Colorado River--and subsequently the CAP. It's also just another mark against an edifice he says suffers from "bad hydrology and bad engineering, as well as the bad scenic damage. We should put a hole in it, rather than wait for it to fall over.
"It is very seriously on the table," he says, "and I predict it is going to happen. At the age of 86, I just want it to happen sooner rather than later. I went through the Grand Canyon before it was messed up, and it was one of the most beautiful places on earth.
"And it's very good," he adds with a chuckle, "that we had a suggestion on how to drain it from the very guy who built it, Floyd Dominy."
For Brower, that must be a sweet irony indeed. As Interior Department chief under Dwight Eisenhower, Dominy reveled in the dam's construction. Writer John McPhee captured the men's mutual antipathy in Encounters With the Archdruid, recounting a canoe journey they shared down the Colorado nearly 30 years ago.
At one point, Brower predicted that the waterway would resurge triumphant: "The river has its hands tied," he said, "but it's still running."
Dominy replied that it never died in the first place. "I didn't turn it off, God damn it, I turned it on," he told Brower as canyon walls streamed past. "Ten months of the year, there wasn't enough water in here to boil an egg. My dam put this river in business."
Recently, Brower was embroiled in a far different business when the Sierra Club debated its neutral position on immigration. The feud later spilled into the public arena with a national referendum, and rank-and-file members ultimately voted to retain neutrality. But the bitter scuffle took its toll, with many like Brower rubbing their wounds.
"My position remains that overpopulation is a major problem," he says, "and over-migration is an important part of it. We can ignore neither. We have to address both. As for me, I'm just looking forward to when Mexico takes California back."
It's a joke, but only slightly; Brower calls for rexamining the issue at its roots. Those tendrils lead straight to American agri-business (an "ecologically unsustainable" industry, he says), which plows under small Mexican farmers, even while drawing them north for work.
"We cause it," Brower says, "and then we bitch about it."
That point flows seamlessly into overall invasion of the West. "I've been challenging the concept of growth for about 30 years now," he says, "and I haven't given up. I don't know where we got the idea that everything must grow to prosper. But if it keeps growing, it kills itself, and that's what's happening now. California has proved that. I was born there, and there are 16 times as many people there now as then."
He calls it a "corporate scorched-earth policy," adding: "We figure we can just somehow keep piling people on, and wiping out the services nature gives us at no charge--wiping out that bounty and thinking we can get away with it.
"We're not succeeding. We're going into the form of fibrillation I suffered when I got my pacemaker."
David Brower speaks from 1:30 to 4 p.m. Saturday, October 24, at the Natural Choices Expo, in the TCC Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave. Cost is $28. For information, call 749-7790.

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