Authors: Mary Street Alinder
The most famous Sierra Club ad, which appeared later that summer, asked,
should we also flood the sistine chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?
Although the Bureau of Reclamation had never intended to fill the Grand Canyon with water, the ad proved potent. Ansel, though he never got credit, inspired the copy: in a July 2 letter to Brower and board president George Marshall, Ansel wondered, if the Grand Canyon could be flooded, what was to stop someone from filling the Sistine Chapel two-thirds full with water so that tourists could better view Michelangelo’s murals?
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With an alarmed American public barraging Washington with letters and phone calls, President Lyndon Johnson made it known that he would veto any bill put before him to dam the Grand Canyon. The next year, Congress passed legislation protecting the canyon from future exploitation. Victory!
In 1962, the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) announced plans to build a nuclear power plant on the Nipomo sand dunes overlooking the Pacific Ocean north of Santa Barbara. Sand dunes comprise a delicate ecosystem, and such oceanside dunes are rare in California. With Ansel spearheading the Sierra Club’s protest, PG&E agreed to move the reactor to a less fragile site. He continued to assert his long-held belief that cooperation was
not
compromise: the best way lay in working
with
business and government to solve problems together, rather than in obstinately assuming an adversarial position.
The majority of the Sierra Club board felt it had won on the Nipomo issue, but Brower led the minority in protesting the building of
any
nuclear power plant. He believed it was impossible to work with PG&E without becoming corrupted; in his view, they were all crooks.
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Ansel’s good friend Doris Leonard, wife of his fellow Sierra Club director Dick Leonard, served on PG&E’s board and worked as a liaison between the club and the company. A lifelong environmentalist who had directed the club’s biennial wilderness conference for many years, she felt it was imperative not only to save the dunes but to move the reactor away from the populous Nipomo area.
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The site PG&E finally chose was an empty stretch of privately held property seven miles from Nipomo and directly on the ocean, which was essential to provide the enormous amounts of water needed to cool the reactors. Brower publicly attacked Leonard, accusing her of having been bought.
30
He burned his bridges with old friends and longtime congressional allies as well as with those who would have been against him anyway. Everything and everybody was either right or wrong; there was no in-between. He treated fellow environmental groups as enemies, unwilling to share any of the glory even though it had been won, at least in part, by others.
Brower insisted that the question be put to the entire membership of the Sierra Club. The result was a resounding vote of support for Ansel’s compromise position, rather than Brower’s extreme stand. PG&E proceeded to build the plant at Diablo Canyon, an installation now infamous for its construction very near a seismic fault.
Although in his view this had been a fight to protect lands, not to discourage or promote nuclear energy, it might seem contradictory that Ansel, the great environmentalist, championed nuclear power. But he believed that nuclear-generated energy was preferable to the burning of fossil fuels, with its subsequent pollution of air, forest, rain, and water. In the year before his death, he was to twice visit the Lawrence Livermore Laboratories to photograph its facilities for magnetic fusion, which he believed represented the future solution to the provision of clean, self-generated power.
Even after the club’s membership voted to support the board’s Diablo Canyon/Nipomo dunes position, Brower refused to give up the fight.
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He had become completely impatient with having to answer to a board of directors, and his ego and desire for power grew apace with his enthusiasm for his cause, reaching manic proportions. He announced that he would run for the board and assembled a group of four other candidates to stand in the coming April 1969 elections. His slate dubbed itself the ABC, which stood at first for “Aggressive Brower-style Conservationists,” then for the less ego-driven “Active, Bold, Constructive” Sierra Club. Others suggested that “Aggressive Berserk Conservationists” or “Ave Brower Caesar” might be closer to the mark.
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To the outrage of many of the old-time board members, Brower also initiated a petition to bring the matter of Diablo Canyon before the entire membership yet again. The Sierra Club was in a mess.
Ansel was up for reelection, as were five of the fifteen board members each year. For the first time since 1934, the nominating committee, now composed of Brower backers, did not nominate him. Ansel formed an independent, opposing slate of five candidates that called itself the CMC, “Concerned Members for Conservation,” translated by the ABC as “Conservatives for Minimum Conservation.”
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Convinced that the end justified the means, Brower made numerous unilateral decisions. When the Publications Committee rejected a book on the Galapagos Islands, Brower ignored its recommendation and committed to two volumes. He engaged the services of a printer in England, obtained a gift of seventy-eight thousand dollars from a British donor, deposited the money in a London bank, set up Sierra Club offices in that city, and published the Galapagos books, all without the knowledge or permission of his board.
When his twenty-thousand-dollar discretionary fund was placed under the control of the board president, Brower wrote into the next book contract a 10 percent royalty for himself. When his action was discovered, he charged that the board had driven him to it, claiming he had intended only to replace his sequestered expense account.
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Ansel pleaded with him to reassess the situation and allow the elected board to assume its rightful duties.
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Disregarding all such advice, Brower continued on his chosen course.
Things went even further downhill from there. Ansel and two fellow directors, Dick Leonard and Richard Sill, made charges against Brower at the October 19, 1968, board meeting. Each presented an individual indictment, ranging from unlawful use of funds to blatant disregard of board and committee decisions. The board president, Edgar Wayburn, authorized an investigation.
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Brower had dug his own grave, and dug it deep. On January 14, 1969, a one-and-a-half-page ad appeared in the
New York Times
, totally of Brower’s own doing and, as was now his pattern, without the knowledge of the board. The text, which proposed the establishment of an
earth national park
, dumbfounded the board members, to whom this idea was just as new as it was to the rest of the
Times
’s readership. This proved to be the last straw. First, Brower was stripped of his power to make financial commitments on behalf of the club; then, at the February meeting of the board, he was asked to take a leave of absence until after the elections.
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The results were humiliating to Brower’s ABC group. Each of the five CMC candidates collected more votes than did Brower himself, and on the Diablo Canyon issue, the membership once again overwhelmingly sided with Ansel’s faction, by an even larger majority than in 1967.
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On May 3, 1969, the new board took office. Hundreds of members attended the meeting, which was held in the Empire Room of San Francisco’s Sir Francis Drake Hotel. As they waited for what was inevitably to come—the dismissal of Brower—many became mesmerized by that morning’s edition of the
San Francisco Chronicle.
The famous drive-through giant sequoia in the southern part of Yosemite had fallen. It was front-page news, illustrated by a photograph made by Ansel thirty-odd years before, showing the tree with a Pierce Arrow automobile parked in its middle and a couple of people posing for scale. The caption read “A Fallen Giant.” One of the models in the picture was David Brower.
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After decades of sound sleep following numerous battles, Ansel was immensely distressed by the conflict with his old friend Brower and the years of strife over Diablo Canyon, even though he had “won.” He could no longer enjoy the Sierra Club; everything seemed spoiled. Marj Bridge Farquhar, another club leader, had come to the same conclusion, later remarking, “It was too bad, and it really split the thing up. It finished the Sierra Club as it had been. It has never been the same.”
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Ansel submitted his resignation on September 13, 1971, one year shy of the end of his term. The
Sierra Club Bulletin
published photographer Philip Hyde’s moving commemoration of his years of service:
It has been said that nature photography, and many photographers, have worked in Ansel Adams’ shadow. Nonsense! The man radiates light—he doesn’t cast a shadow. And that radiation has warmed and prospered the Sierra Club’s efforts in many directions through Ansel’s nearly four decades of service on its Board of Directors . . . He brought to the Board a balance. His voice, expressing the importance of emotional and intangible values, has provided the kind of influence and counsel so badly needed in a world hastening toward greater technology and the dominance of so-called practical values. Ansel has been our artist-in-residence on the Board so long it is hard to imagine a balanced Board without him. Surely, his footprints on the Sierra Club trail will be hard to fill.
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After Ansel’s death, the club created the Ansel Adams Award, given “for superlative use of still photography to further the conservation cause.”
While most souls would have been undone by such wrenching turmoil, Brower remained strong and committed, never wavering from his convictions, founding Friends of the Earth, the John Muir Institute, and was reelected to the Sierra Club board to serve for a time. Unlike Ansel, whose edges were softened by age, Brower maintained a sharp hardness. He survived to the age of eighty-eight to be recognized as the grand old man of the environmental movement, outliving and outtalking his critics, devoting his potent energies to the future of man and earth. Brower never lagged behind or dwelled on the issues of the past, but neither did he forget the failures, seeing them instead as errors that may be corrected. One of his last great campaigns was to pull the plug on the Hetch Hetchy reservoir by removing the dam and allowing the waters of the Tuolumne to flow free once more.
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David Brower thought of just such incredible possibilities, and every once in a while he pulled them off, making his transgressions seem paltry in comparison. David Brower died on November 5, 2000, sixteen years after Ansel.
Like Brower’s, Ansel’s environmental energies never flagged, continuing to be expressed through venues other than the Sierra Club, but mostly in his role as a private citizen, with all the rights and privileges thereof. A lifelong Democrat, Ansel nonetheless tolerated his Republican friends with good humor, believing they were just slightly dense. From 1960 onward, Ansel’s counsel was sought by every president save for Nixon. Even Ronald Reagan asked to meet with him.
In 1965, the huge success of
This Is the American Earth
captured the imagination of President Lyndon Johnson, and he invited Ansel and Nancy to prepare a volume of photographs and excerpts from his environmental speeches to emphasize his commitment to the American natural scene. The privately published
A More Beautiful America
is a remarkable testament to President Johnson’s great love for America, long overshadowed by the tragic events of the Vietnam War. In this book, the president wrote, “Above all, we must maintain the chance for contact with beauty. When that chance dies, a light dies in all of us.”
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This reads like vintage Ansel Adams, and in fact the president did enjoy two long and conversation-filled meetings with him.
When President Carter requested that Ansel make his official presidential portrait—the first time a photographer, not a painter, was selected—Ansel felt greatly honored. He recalled, “The painters, of course, were very mad. It was a break in nearly two hundred years of tradition.”
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It seems difficult to believe, but Ansel Adams was nervous that something would go wrong—the exposure would be incorrect, the focus blurred, on and on. Din Land put his worries to rest by loaning him one of Polaroid’s twenty-by-twenty-four-inch cameras so that Ansel could see instantly if the picture was good. No little machine, the camera required a crew of two full-time technicians and was moved about the country in a special truck.
President Carter had his own concerns, confessing to Ansel that his smile did not come off in most portraits. With a grin, Ansel told him not to worry, just to relax.
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During the “shoot,” the two men became friends. In the 1970s, Ansel had joined the Wilderness Society’s campaign to safeguard portions of Alaska, and scarcely a week now passed without letters between him and the president, Ansel’s full of his distress over a vanishing wild Alaska. Soon a White House wall was adorned with Ansel’s greatest Alaskan photograph,
Mount McKinley and Wonder Lake, Denali National Park.
Just before leaving office in December 1980, President Carter signed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act, protecting over 104.3 million acres, the largest land-preservation act in history.
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