Environment pioneer David Brower energizes S.F. State students (San Francisco Examiner)greenspun.com : LUSENET : Sustainable Business & Living iForum : One Thread |
Environment pioneer Brower energizes S.F. State students
By Eric Brazil
OF THE EXAMINER STAFF)2000 San Francisco Examiner
Earth Day speech full of fiery rhetoric
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/examiner/hotnews/stories/28/brower.dtl
[Fair Use: For Educational/Research Purposes Only]
At age 87, David Brower has fought more environmental battles than most living Americans recall, but the old lion battles on, inciting -- yes, inciting -- young people to join him on the firing line.
"There's something you can do to keep this Earth from going straight to hell -- each of you can make a difference, and you'd damn well better!" Brower admonished an Earth Day student crowd Thursday at San Francisco State University.
Then he gave them the full-tilt Brower:
"We have to stop taking from Earth things we can't handle when we get them.
"We have to stop dumping things on Earth that it can't handle ..... plutonium, plastics. Earth can't handle what we can do with our stuff and our tricks.
"We've got to get rid of the idea that we can kill other species that cannot be replaced.
"We have to try equity for a change. ..... We're building inequity faster than it's ever been built before," he said.
"There are 500 billionaires in the world, 400 of them in America, and 300 million other people. That's not quite equitable, but that's not getting through," he said.
Brower, a world-class rock climber as a young man with first ascents of 70 Sierra Nevada peaks and the daunting Shiprock on the Navajo reservation to his credit, walks slowly these days, and his face is haggard. But his speech still conveys the passion that inspired and energized the modern American environmental movement at its birth almost half a century ago.
Humanity's feckless treatment of Earth is dynamic in a downward direction, and "we're losing species a thousand times faster than were lost by evolution," and -- who knows? -- a cure for AIDS may have been lost with one of them, Brower said.
"Billions of (unborn) people are coming, and they have some rights. We've got to make sure we leave behind a habitable planet, and we can't do it by our present technique of seeing how many people can get as rich as Bill Gates," he said.
Brower was largely responsible for putting the Sierra Club on the map as a national political player during two decades as its executive director, taking on high-profile campaigns such as keeping dams out of the Grand Canyon and the Green River and shepherding the publication of several spectacular coffee table books on the environment. He also founded Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute and, more recently, the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment.
It is the Alliance, a joint venture with the Steelworkers Union, that Brower believes exemplifies the kind of coalitions that promise to rationalize humanity's treatment of the Earth and inject a greater measure of equity into public policy.
Such coalitions will take on the World Trade Organization and other entities whose actions Brower regards as inimical to the general welfare -- with more success than protesters enjoyed while demonstrating recently at trade conferences in Seattle and Washington, D.C., he said.
Brower was to have opened the gates at Kings Canyon National Park, which he was instrumental in creating in 1940, on Friday. But a cold front blowing down from the High Sierra postponed that ceremony -- and also kept visitors away from the park. The weather at S.F. State was only a little better. Brower spoke under an umbrella held by a student to shield him from a drenching, rain-like fog.
)2000 San Francisco Examiner
-- Anonymous, April 29, 2000
...He also founded Friends of the Earth and Earth Island Institute and, more recently, the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment. ...Friends of the Earth
Friends of the Earth International (FoEI)
Friends of the Earth
England, Wales and Northern Ireland###
Earth Island Institute
(Love this site!)
http:// www.earthisland.org/home_body.cfm
Earth Island Journal
http:// www.earthisland.org/eijournal/journal.html
###
Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment
News from the Alliance for Sustainable Jobs and the Environment
Press Releases and Media Coverage
-- Anonymous, April 29, 2000