Authors: Mary Street Alinder
Brower was very fond of a certain Thoreau quote that spoke for Ansel’s sentiments as well, “In Wildness is the preservation of the World.”
2
Brower considered it the club’s mission to reach as many people as possible with that message, and to that end, he began an expanded publishing program. Through his efforts, the membership began to reflect a national constituency; its numbers exploded from ten thousand in 1956 to fifteen thousand in 1960 to over fifty-seven thousand in 1967. (With an astounding 2.4 million supporters in 2014, the Sierra Club is the country’s largest and most important environmental association.)
3
In 1954, the Park Service notified the club that the continued operation of the LeConte Memorial Lodge was no longer justified in Yosemite Valley; it was suggested that it be transformed into a geology museum since its namesake had been a famed geologist. Ansel firmly believed that the Sierra Club should keep the site open as a center for effective conservation education. He felt that if club members could explain the spiritual benefits of wilderness—beyond the obvious physical importance of pure water and clean air—the full impact of the need for preservation could be made clear.
4
Ansel’s idea found expression in
This Is the American Earth
, an exhibition of inspirational photographs accompanied by a lyrical free-verse text by Nancy. In 1950, Nancy had collaborated with Strand on the book
Time and New England
, pairing his photographs with a selection of texts, both historical and contemporary.
5
The photographs were not used to illustrate the text but instead maintained a separate identity. The combined effect was powerful and quite different from that of either the photographs or the words alone. Ansel’s term for this was “synaesthetic,” denoting two discrete creative forms brought together to create a third, and independent, expression.
6
The concept, begun with Nancy and Strand, grew to maturity in
This Is the American Earth.
More than a year of intensive work was required before the show’s 103 photographs were mounted, along with Nancy’s text, on panels built for touring. Most of the prints (fifty-four by Ansel and thirty-nine obtained from the usual cast of photographers, including Edward and Brett Weston, Eliot Porter, Minor White, William Garnett, and Margaret Bourke-White) had been made by Ansel to meet exacting size and tonal requirements.
7
That summer of 1955,
This Is the American Earth
opened at the LeConte Lodge, where enthralled crowds jammed the small space to slowly savor each magnificent image amplified by Nancy’s moving ballad. Ansel himself marveled at the power of her words.
This Is the American Earth
traveled to Stanford University and Boston’s Museum of Science before coming under the direction of the Smithsonian Institution, which then circulated it throughout the country. Ansel made four duplicate sets of the exhibit, to be sent around the world under the aegis of the United States Information Agency.
8
Ansel and Nancy worked with Brower to package
This Is the American Earth
into the ultimate traveling exhibition: a coffee-table book. After substantial changes (of the eighty-four photographs included, fewer than a third had appeared in the exhibition),
This Is the American Earth
was published in 1960 as the first of the Sierra Club’s large-format books. It became a long-lived bestseller, with seventy thousand copies sold before it went out of print over a decade later.
9
In the early 1980s, the club moved to reissue
This Is the American Earth
, but Ansel put a stop to the plan, suggesting that it was time for a new book by another generation of photographers and writers. In 1992, this classic of the environmental movement was brought back into print for some years, although it is not currently available. Some still say it is the finest conservation book ever.
This Is the American Earth
was not the only show of its kind that year. Also in 1955, Ansel and Nancy’s old nemesis, Edward Steichen, presided over the mother of all photography-as-entertainment exhibitions:
The Family of Man
broke all attendance totals at MoMA and traveled to thirty-seven countries, where it was viewed by nine million people.
10
The companion book is still in print. It has sold a phenomenal four million copies.
11
Although Nancy and Ansel were blind to the similarities, the two shows had much in common. Both were intended not just to educate or delight but to motivate the viewer: in the case of
This Is the American Earth
, to save the earth; in that of
The Family of Man
, to save mankind. Ansel and Nancy had long ago tried, convicted, and hung Steichen for his use of photography as emotional propaganda; it did not seem to occur to them that they might be guilty of the same charge.
The disrespect that Steichen showed for the aesthetic quality of a creative photograph removed any possibility that Ansel could truly “see” his show. He cringed when he went to
The Family of Man.
Steichen had insisted on having all the prints made to his specifications, right in New York, and had even asked Ansel to send his negative of
Mount Williamson from Manzanar
so that it could be turned into a gigantic mural. Ansel would never allow anyone else to make a print for exhibition from one of his negatives, and this particular negative bore his inadvertent fingerprint in its sky due to a mistake in processing. The bigger the enlargement, the more apparent was this flaw. When Steichen refused to let Ansel make the mural himself, Ansel sent him a copy negative to work from. He literally became ill when he viewed the results:
Mount Williamson
had been cropped (an absolute Ansel artistic no-no, a decision only he could make), and the fingerprint was so big it looked like the mark of a wrathful God.
12
For
This Is the American Earth
, Ansel had insisted on the very same conditions as Steichen, requiring that the participating photographers send him their negatives for printing. Perhaps with well-merited darkroom arrogance (he possessed one of the few darkrooms equipped to handle large murals), Ansel believed he could make better prints and murals than the images’ originators, and he was held in such high esteem as a printer that most of his fellow photographers agreed to his demands. Even Edward Weston relinquished his negatives, though his son Brett held firm and sent only finished prints, shocked that Ansel would make such a request.
13
Throughout this time, Ansel continued to serve as a member of the Sierra Club’s publication committee, though he was scrupulous to avoid even the hint of personal profiteering. (He and Nancy split just 5 percent royalties based on retail price; typical royalties are double that.)
14
This Is the American Earth
’s earnings helped to save the club at a time when it was nearly insolvent: although the fees accrued from the growing membership swelled the coffers, Brower’s multifarious projects proved fully capable of draining them again.
While the accomplishments on behalf of the environment were sweet, Ansel remembered the failures with great pain. In 1957, the National Park Service, acting under a directive dubbed “Mission 66” (whose stated purpose was to make the parks more accessible by 1966), announced that major improvements would be made to the Tioga Road, which connects the Owens Valley, via Yosemite, with the highly populated San Joaquin Valley. The construction would bring the middle section of twenty-one miles up to the same high-speed-highway quality of the roads on either end. But while a straight road marks the shortest distance between two points, as the young Ansel had observed in 1915, nature comes fully equipped with curves. The old Tioga Road traced a winding course that respectfully followed its majestic footings; the new route could be achieved only by dynamiting pristine granite domes along the shores of Tenaya Lake.
15
The idea of blasting a highway in such a place infuriated Ansel; it required immediate action. He demanded that the Sierra Club’s board take up the cause of protecting the Tenaya wilderness. Disheartened by the trustees’ timid response, he resigned from the board, believing he could carry Tenaya’s banner more effectively alone than with a waffling Sierra Club.
16
After the “improvement” began, he pleaded for the three most critical miles, along the glacier-polished shores of Tenaya Lake, to be spared. In 1958, work on the road stopped while Ansel was granted an on-site meeting with regional officers of the Park Service and Yosemite’s superintendent. An inspection by Conrad Wirth, director of the National Park Service, soon followed. Ansel left the discussion feeling confident that the most important stretch of domes would be spared. Returning to Yosemite from a trip some weeks later, he was appalled to discover the road had been completed with full devastation. In the meantime, the Sierra Club board had refused to accept his resignation, and he returned to its midst.
Ansel was determined never to let himself forget the Tenaya defeat, and instead used it to spur himself onward. As he assessed the damage, he recalled bittersweetly how it had all looked to him when he was twenty years old, a vast wilderness showing almost no evidence of man, save for a trail he could choose either to follow or to ignore. He soon had a rubber stamp made proclaiming “Remember Tenaya!!!” (Ansel was a major practitioner of exclamation points) and used it to brand his correspondence. Finally, he wrote an elegy, “Tenaya Tragedy,” that appeared in the 1958
Bulletin
, a lament to the irretrievable loss of magic.
17
The national parks are peppered with unprotected lands, some privately held and others administered by the Forest Service. Sequoia National Park contained one such Forest Service—managed property named Mineral King, a gorgeous fifteen-thousand-acre alpine bowl surrounded by Sierra peaks. When Sequoia was designated a national park, in 1890, Mineral King was not included because it was experiencing a brief silver rush, complete with cabins, mines, smelters, and mills.
18
The Forest Service put Mineral King out for development bids in 1965; the Walt Disney Company won with its bid to construct a Swiss village that would service up to fourteen thousand people a day, with overnight accommodations for three thousand visitors and a thousand employees. The lift capacity could support over eleven thousand skiers per hour.
19
For years there had been a tacit understanding between the Forest Service and the board of the Sierra Club that Mineral King would eventually be developed for skiing; many of the board members were ardent skiers and believed this was good use. But the times they were a-changin’. The Disney proposal was far larger than any of the Sierra Clubbers had anticipated, and the directors were deeply divided over what their course of action should be. Many of the older board members felt that they had given their word years before and that it would be setting a bad precedent for a new board to overturn an earlier decision. The younger members argued that times and conditions were different now, and it was imperative to adopt a new position against any development of Mineral King. It was a matter of principle to both sides.
20
Because Mineral King was almost literally an island, nearly surrounded by a national park, the access road for the thousands of skiers expected daily would have to cut directly through the park itself. Still smarting from the Tioga Road disaster, Ansel knew that the road and its hurtling traffic would change Sequoia forever. He had served on the board for thirty-one years and was definitely a constituent of the older group, many of whom had been his close friends for decades, but he now joined with the Young Turks, led by Martin Litton and Fred Eissler, and voted to oppose Disney and the Forest Service.
21
Not threatened by new ideas, Ansel continued to grow and change with his times.
The club brought legal suit to block the development of Mineral King, and although in the end it proved unsuccessful in the courts, Disney (now Walt-less) finally gave up, its resolve withered by the attrition of time. Mineral King was absorbed into Sequoia National Park in 1978.
22
It seems incredible now, but during the 1960s, the government tried to mess with the Grand Canyon. Both Phoenix and Tucson were growing at a phenomenal rate and more electricity was essential if the growth was to continue. The Bureau of Reclamation decided to build two more dams to control the flow of the Colorado River. Although the dams would be outside Grand Canyon National Park, their effects would reduce the river at its heart to two lakes connected by a trickle. The dam plan had powerful support, beginning with Arizona congressman Morris Udall and his brother, Stewart, the secretary of the interior, both of whom had reputations as liberal Democrats. In an interesting twist, Arizona senator and conservative Republican Barry Goldwater opposed the dams.
23
Glen Canyon, a spectacular though isolated region on the Colorado River in southern Utah, had been flooded in 1963. Brower believed himself and the club partly responsible, having done too little, too late, and he vowed to learn from that sad lesson by increasing the organization’s vigilance and activism. Protecting the Grand Canyon became his top priority.
24
Brower’s most significant initiative was the decision to run a series of full-page ads in the
New York Times
beginning on June 9, 1966, complete with coupons to be filled in and sent to the president, Secretary Udall, and the chair of the House Interior Committee. The Internal Revenue Service arrived at the club’s San Francisco offices the very next day and threatened to revoke its nonprofit status for engaging in legislative lobbying.
25
The club pounced on this bullying and turned it into news. Brower later said, “People who didn’t know whether or not they loved the Grand Canyon knew whether they loved the IRS.”
26
Membership doubled from thirty-nine thousand before the first ads to seventy-eight thousand within three years. However, the price was high: the club lost its tax-deductible status.