The Ecocentrists: A History of Radical Environmentalism

Because radical and mainstream environmentalism have the same intellectual roots, they have a common history. Both grew in part out of twentieth-century conservation and its commitment to moderating industrial society’s effects on natural resources and amenities. At the center of the conservation movement was the Sierra Club, at various points the most recognized and most politically influential conservation organization. The Club was also in many ways the most democratically structured conservation group, so its point of view shifted with its membership rolls.¹ The Club’s evolution over the course of the twentieth century tracked the development of key ideas about conservation and environmentalism that would structure the environmental movement and its relationship to the social politics of the 1960s and 1970s. Spurred by its executive director, David Brower, the Club focused increasingly on ecological ideas that described an interconnected world without human beings at its center and in which nonhuman nature might be worth protecting for its own sake. Those changes and ideas set the terms under which some environmentalists in the 1970s walked away from the movement’s mainstream and toward more radical thought and action.

The same amateur standing that would become synonymous with grassroots activism by the late twentieth century meant nearly the opposite during the Progressive Era. To be an amateur was to have money. At a time when leisure was a privilege of the wealthy, the same was true of politics as avocation. Even among career conservationists like Pinchot, concentrated wealth was important; among amateurs, it was essential. “Conservation and business are natural enemies,” Fox writes.3 But despite the larger truth of that claim, early Club leaders were overwhelmingly professionals and businessmen—“the prime movers,” according to Michael Cohen, “in what one might call the philanthropic tradition of conservation, where business provided the individuals, progressivism provided the ideology, and American industrial growth provided the economic power.”⁴ There were other conservation organizations that represented even higher social strata, like the Save The Redwoods League, but few that reached lower. By mid-century this began to change as conservation groups relied more heavily on lobbying backed by popular support. As late as the 1960s, though, the Club’s work still took place in private rooms at San Francisco steak houses, the banquet hall at the Sir Francis Drake Hotel, and meetings at the Bohemian or Pacific Union clubs.⁵

In the early days of the Sierra Club, private wealth shaped not only public lands but also particular views of democracy. The Club may have had somewhat democratic goals—in its first few decades it was dedicated to opening the Sierras to the public in a way it was not later—but early twentieth-century conservationists generally had mixed views of popular support. On the one hand, they rallied the public to their causes; on the other, conservationists like Rosalie Edge in the 1930s and Paul Sears in the 1960s insisted that independent wealth with fewer strings attached was the most effective means of protecting natural resources.⁶ Early conservationists often worked behind the scenes rather than in the public eye. This could produce a heroic sense of the exceptional point of view. In the 1950s, Harold Anderson of the Wilderness Society predicted that conservationists would always make up “a very small minority” but also thought “there is no good reason why our influence should not be out of all proportion to our numbers.”⁷ Initially, the wilderness movement championed this argument from the margins. “One of the dominant strains of early wilderness thought,” writes historian James Morton Turner, “was the role of wilderness in forging American independence and respecting the rights of the minority.”⁸ The intellectual commitment to a perspective shared by a relative few could lead to an affinity for business conducted by a select group rather than for a broad base, done with a handshake instead of through a mass appeal. “The amateur pioneers of the movement hated politics and doubted the people could appreciate what they were doing,” Fox writes of Muir’s battles with “consummate politician” Pinchot.⁹ When the Sierra Club expanded purposefully beyond California’s borders in the mid-century, director Marjory Farquhar resigned from the board. Fellow director Richard Leonard believed it was because the Club had sacrificed intimacy and close-knit control for breadth and a larger membership. “Her Club is lost,” Leonard said. “It is now a powerful, impersonal political force.”¹⁰

The shift from one Club to the other—from a group of relative intimates and fellow enthusiasts to an organization national in scope—followed nearly a half century during which the Club engaged in only one major political slugfest on the national stage, over the damming of the Tuolumne River in the Hetch Hetchy Valley. That fight spanned the first dozen years of the century and involved several mayors, the national press, Congress, and three presidential administrations. By 1913, the Club was defeated: the O’Shaugnessy Dam held back the Tuolumne River, and the Hetch Hetchy Valley disappeared under a reservoir that provided municipal water to San Francisco. A year later the Club lost Muir himself to pneumonia. For several decades after, the Sierra Club limited itself to little-publicized political efforts and much-publicized trips into the Sierra Nevada Range. Limited in both its goals and its constituency, it defined itself as a regional organization dedicated to the protection and appreciation of the Sierras.

There was no place more closely associated with the Sierra Club than the Yosemite Valley region on the western slope of the Sierra Nevada Range. Born of fire and ice, its walls originating as magma deep underground and sculpted by glaciers over several million years, it was John Muir’s favorite. He called it “the incomparable Yosemite.” Protecting Yosemite National Park may have been the main impetus behind the Sierra Club’s founding in 1892; much of the Club’s energies in its first two decades went toward park management, up to and including the battle over Hetch Hetchy. That initial sense of purpose informed the Club for much of the twentieth century. Its mission was shaped by the twin beliefs that scenic places should be protected as parks and that people rallied around the parks they most enjoyed. Muir spent many years popularizing the Yosemite area, extolling its beauty under the assumption that greater public appreciation would provide a defense against industrial development.

Muir’s assumption was reasonable during the Progressive Era but became less and less so in the decades after. During the interwar years, outdoor recreation spread at the speed of a Model T as more and more Americans owned automobiles and used them to find pretty locales. Private businesses aided this trend by creating a commercial infrastructure of shops, motels, and advertising, all part of a celebration of consumption and middle-class American life. The federal government promoted car camping too, primarily as the nation’s largest road-builder. Quickly, the most immediate threat to the quiet and contemplative parks of Muir’s heart was no longer loggers or ranchers but the very Americans that Muir had been calling to the parks for decades. Popular outdoor recreation, and the roads that facilitated it, compromised the sanctity of the remote outdoors more than did private industry.11

The mass consumption of the outdoors by the 1940s did not alarm most Sierra Club leaders, many of whom viewed recreational infrastructure and conservation as aligned. Their membership agreed. Most Sierra Clubbers “were not refugees from civilization,” Susan Schrepfer writes, and “rarely challenged the nation’s economic interests.”¹² Others, including the younger generation of Club directors led by David Brower, Richard Leonard, and Ansel Adams, felt differently, and this difference of opinion emerged during two fights in the 1940s: one over the possibility of building a ski resort on the San Bernardino National Forest’s Mount San Gorgonio, just east of Southern California’s Inland Empire, and the second over plans to develop the road that crested Yosemite’s Tioga Pass.

The Club’s board divided over San Gorgonio both in its meetings and in the Sierra Club Bulletin, which published articles for and against. Brower laid out the opposition to a ski resort, and Bestor Robinson, at the time the Club’s new president (and later remembered by Brower as “the developer”) wrote anonymously in favor of it. Robinson considered skiing every bit as legitimate an outdoor activity as hiking and camping and stressed the sport’s growing popularity.13 He made a democratic appeal: parks had roads, after all, to allow more people to enjoy them. “Our club purposes,” he noted, “include ‘rendering accessible.’ Any other policy would confine the use of the wilderness to the aristocracy of the physically super-fit.”¹⁴ Brower argued for the “absolute” value of wilderness even against the adventuring of tourists, vacationers, and thrill-seekers. He ducked accusations of elitism by referring to a “relatively small number” of skiers, and claiming in a sidebar that “wilderness for all should take precedence over its development for any special group.”¹⁵

Two years earlier Brower had even more directly challenged Robinson’s populist sentiments. Still stationed in Italy, where he fought with the Tenth Mountain Division in the last months of World War II, he wrote an article for the Sierra Club Bulletin called “How to Kill a Wilderness,” with Europeans’ misuse of their remote mountain valleys and peaks in mind. There were two basic steps to killing a wilderness, Brower explained: “Improve and exploit it,” and “Rely always on the apparently democratic argument that you must produce the greatest good for the greatest number.” Here Brower took issue with straightforward utilitarianism and also with democracy being understood as whatever most people wanted. He asked whether anyone could reasonably think of dividing Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel frescoes into bits so that more people could see them. Satisfying the immediate whims of many, he suggested, risked destroying the world’s irreplaceable treasures, and attending to contemporaries risked ignoring posterity. Brower may have been arguing that majoritarian democracy was not the only kind, or that democracy should take into account future generations, or that democracy of whatever variety might lead to regrettable choices.16 He was certainly wrestling with what historian Paul Sutter has called “an increasing confusion and conflation of democratic politics and consumer choice” in the mid-twentieth century, as a culture of mass consumption traveled out of cities on newly paved roads and arrived at the forest’s edge.¹⁷

Paving the roads was the first step in bringing people to the mountains. For many decades, getting city people outdoors had been part of the Sierra Club’s mission. Brower later complained that the long-held view of the Club’s older generation was “that roads were just peachy, that we must get more roads into the Sierra to get more people there.” The road over Tioga Pass tested this view.¹⁸ The Tioga Road in 1915 was a steep, rugged, privately owned route that ran from the eastern to the western slope of the Sierras and bisected Yosemite. Stephen Mather, the energetic new assistant secretary of the interior and a Sierra Club member, bought the road with donations from wealthy friends, some of his own fortune, and funds from the Club itself. He donated the road to the federal government and for several decades the new National Park Service maintained and gradually improved it.

Until the late 1940s, the Sierra Club supported the Park Service’s plans to upgrade the road from a narrow and windy drive to a wider and more direct thoroughfare. Then some of the newer directors and one veteran of the old guard, Harold Bradley, began to question the need for high-speed travel through the park. Particularly at issue were plans to blast through slabs of Sierra granite and skirt the edges of Tuolumne Meadows and Tenaya Lake. Brower, Bradley, Adams, and Leonard opposed the improvements from different ethical standpoints but shared an opposition to road development for the sake of faster travel times. If the circuitous Tioga Road forced visitors to slow down and take their time crossing the park, so much the better. If it limited the number of visitors to higher elevation lakes and valleys, it served its purpose. Improving and exploiting the park’s wilderness and swelling its motorized crowds threatened to kill it, as Brower had warned several years earlier. In order to grant more people a view, the Park Service was dividing the chapel’s ceiling into bits.¹⁹

Much of the Sierra Club’s leadership remained either unmoved by Tioga Road development or else more concerned with preserving the Club’s working relationship with the Park Service. In the early and mid-twentieth century, such relationships constituted the Club’s main currency. Years later, when the Club had garnered a mass membership that it could rally to its causes, it began loudly opposing the Park Service and Forest Service. Before it gained the leverage of nationwide public support, though, it relied on collegiality between its own leaders and federal land managers. Forest and Park Service administrators regularly consulted the Club when making major decisions about scenic places.

In the case of the Tioga Road, maintaining friendly relations won out. The Park Service expanded the road with convenience and speed in mind. Brower and the other directors who stood against the development plan lost both the fight and, it seemed to them, a place they had been charged with protecting. “I haven’t gotten over that yet,” Brower remarked a half century later.20 Ansel Adams grew so disheartened in the immediate aftermath of the Park Service’s improvements to the road that he resigned from the Club’s board of directors and sent furious telegrams to the Park Service, the Department of the Interior, the Bureau of Public Roads, and the Army Corps of Engineers. Despite Adams’s breach of protocol, the Club did not want to lose one of its best-known directors to an internecine battle and refused the resignation. After venting his anger, Adams stayed on.²¹

Having lost the fight over Tioga Road, however, Brower, Adams, and the others gained a sense of conviction that would gradually reshape the Club. As the Park Service moved philosophically and administratively toward Mission 66, its decade-long effort in the late 1950s and early 1960s to expand visitor services and road access to national parks, the Sierra Club moved haltingly in the opposite direction.²² It began to see-saw between protecting parks for people and protecting parks from people, a balance the Club struggled with for many years—as did the environmental movement more broadly. The new Tioga Road changed Yosemite’s high valleys forever, and it changed the Club as well. In 1951, the board proposed and the membership approved amending the Club’s statement of purpose from “explore, enjoy, and render accessible the mountain regions of the Pacific Coast” to “explore, enjoy, and preserve the Sierra Nevada and other scenic resources of the United States.”²³ The Club had grown wary of the overcrowded mountains encouraged by its founding documents, as it was becoming even warier of the actual multitudes inhabiting the planet.

Dinosaur National Monument in northwestern Colorado was one of those distant lands that even most Sierra Club leaders had never visited. Richard Leonard was an exception. In 1950, Leonard served as secretary of the Sierra Club and as a councilmember of the Wilderness Society when he attended the Society’s annual meeting at Twin Springs, Colorado, and took a tour of nearby Dinosaur. The monument was then under the shadow of a giant: a Bureau of Reclamation proposal for ten dams on the Colorado River and its tributaries that would capture nearly fifty million acre-feet of water for irrigation and hydropower throughout the Southwest. Despite its anodyne name, the Colorado River Storage Project (CRSP) was, as the writer Marc Reisner later wrote, “as big as the universe itself.”24 The plan included a reservoir at the confluence of the Green and Yampa rivers just above Echo Park, where the Bureau hoped to build one of two dams within Dinosaur. The CRSP pitted two wings of the Department of the Interior—the National Park Service and the Bureau of Reclamation—against each other, one opposed to any dams within national monuments and the other eager to build several of them. Secretary of the Interior Oscar Chapman sided with the Bureau and in 1950 forced the resignation of Park Service director Newton Drury.²⁵

Dinosaur left the Wilderness Society council awed at the monument’s surprising beauty and shocked by the possibility of the first dam since Hetch Hetchy to be built on Park Service land. Leonard took that shock and awe with him to the Sierra Club, which elected him president in 1952. As he discussed Dinosaur with his board of directors, he also decided that the Club’s growing commitments required a more businesslike approach. Leonard proposed that the Club hire an executive director, and he recommended Brower.²⁶ This would be the first paid staff position in what had been an all-volunteer organization, a pivot away from the amateur tradition and toward professionalization. Although the Club took on paid staff later than most conservation groups, it made up for lost time with its first hire. The two independent decisions that Leonard encouraged—to defend Dinosaur and to make Brower executive director—remade the Club in ways that he could never have predicted. Director Edgar Wayburn later called the combination of Dinosaur and Brower “the turn of the hinge.”²⁷ Brower accepted the position of executive director in 1953, and soon began to hire more paid staff members. “The Sierra Club,” Stephen Fox writes, “moved irrevocably into the big time.”²⁸

The proposed dam at Echo Park amounted to just one small piece of the CRSP, but fighting even one piece of such a monumental project was far beyond what the Club had taken on before. Nevertheless, Leonard and Brower made Dinosaur the Club’s top priority, leading an effort that allied the Club with the Wilderness Society, National Audubon Society, National Parks Association, and several other groups. This quickly assembled coalition caught its government adversaries by surprise. Brower famously embarrassed the Department of the Interior during a Congressional hearing in 1954 when he used a chalkboard to demonstrate that the Bureau had miscalculated evaporation rates and that raising the height of the proposed Glen Canyon Dam—outside of Dinosaur—would save more water than constructing an entire dam at Echo Park.

But it was publicity and constituent pressure, much more than closed-door hearings, that won the battle. Brower worked obsessively to raise the ire of voters and their representatives with every means he could think of. He made a short film, Two Yosemites, that compared the proposed dam at Echo Park to the actual dam at Hetch Hetchy; he published a book of essays and photographs called This Is Dinosaur: Echo Park Country and its Magic Rivers with an introduction by Wallace Stegner and a conclusion by Alfred Knopf; and he took out a full-page advertisement in the Denver Post. Brower waged a public-relations battle with the United States Congress and with Congressman Wayne Aspinall of Colorado in particular, and the longer the battle went on, the more public opinion began to swing in favor of the conservationists. Brower, the Club, and their allies mobilized broad public support in a way that conservationists had not tried to do since Hetch Hetchy, and with far greater success. Aspinall and the Bureau of Reclamation finally relented, and in 1956 they scratched plans for a dam at Echo Park.

It was, from Brower’s point of view months later, a Pyrrhic victory. Several of the organizations that opposed dams in Dinosaur, in particular the Wilderness Society and National Parks Association, did so to keep major projects out of Park Service lands. The Sierra Club went along with this basic reasoning and agreed to allow a series of dams that would not violate national parks or monuments. Brower’s own testimony suggested that saving Echo Park meant building a bigger dam at Glen Canyon. And so, a few months after the defeat of the dam at Echo Park, the Bureau of Reclamation began construction on Glen Canyon Dam. Even as Brower and his friends celebrated their victory, the photographer Eliot Porter sent Brower photos from a float trip through Glen Canyon. The beauty of Porter’s photos shocked Brower and he decided to visit Glen Canyon himself. After taking three separate trips down the Colorado through a canyon now consigned to flooding, he sunk into depression. At a time when conservation decisions could come down to purely aesthetic questions, Glen Canyon’s beauty alone led Brower to reevaluate what many considered the Club’s greatest success (see figure 1.1).

Richard Leonard and other Club leaders praised their new executive director’s restrained tone and reasoned approach to the Dinosaur fight. Brower would never again be accused of either. After losing Glen Canyon, he resolved never to surrender anything worth saving, especially for the sake of compromise. Even his allies came to refer to the feistier, post-Dinosaur Brower as “a shin kicker.” Brower got his chance to make up for Glen Canyon ten years later when the Bureau of Reclamation proposed another set of dams that threatened another national park, in order to complete another massive irrigation and power scheme for the Southwest. The plan was called the Central Arizona Project, and the dams would not be in the park itself but at Marble Gorge and Bridge Canyon on either end of Grand Canyon National Park. The upper dam would calm the rapids of the Colorado through the park, and the lower dam would back the river up several dozen miles, flooding parts of the canyon.

Brower went to work with two San Francisco advertisers, Jerry Mander and Howard Gossage, and together they created what became known as the Club’s “Grand Canyon battle ads.” Much of the work to defeat the Grand Canyon dams took place in Washington, D.C., where the Sierra Club had grown more influential than it had been during the Dinosaur fight. Public opposition again played a crucial role, and Brower, Mander, and Gossage rallied it with some of the most effective pieces of persuasion in conservation history. Most famous was the ad that responded to the Bureau’s claim that a partially flooded Colorado would give tourists a better view of the Grand Canyon’s walls from motorboats. Echoing Brower’s wilderness and development analogy from twenty years earlier, the ad asked, “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?” Congressional mail turned overwhelmingly against the dams. Reader’s Digest and Life published anti-dam articles. Representative Morris Udall condemned the ads from the floor of Congress while his brother, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall, fought Brower behind the scenes. But the opinions of voters swung against any threat to the Grand Canyon, and the Department of the Interior retooled the Central Arizona Project to work without the Marble Gorge and Bridge Canyon dams. Brower and the Club had again cultivated and then appealed to broad sentiment, portraying the Department of the Interior’s plans as not just misguided but a betrayal of the public trust.29

In one sense, the middle decades of the century were a time of renewed leadership and resolve for the Club. “A quiet regional group of mountaineers in 1945,” Fox writes, “two decades later the Sierra Club had become the focal point of modern American conservation under the leadership of a man who seemed to be Muir reincarnate.”30 In another sense, it was a period when the Club, and Brower in particular, confronted the limits of conservation work and the inevitable losses that accompanied every victory. Glen Canyon was the most obvious example and would remain a symbol for conservationists decades later. But there were others. Defeating the Grand Canyon dams prevented development in one of the nation’s iconic parks but may have contributed to air pollution in the Four Corners region and to the strip-mining of Black Mesa on northern Arizona’s Navajo Reservation. In order to complete the Central Arizona Project, the Department of the Interior substituted the power that would have come from the Grand Canyon dams with electricity generated by the coal-fired Navajo Generating Station.³¹ Sierra Club policy at the time was to never sacrifice scenic places for the sake of energy production because one was rare and the other plentiful. Club leaders had not yet come to understand that the two issues could not be separated.

During the various park battles of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, the Sierra Club acted selectively, not systemically. Conservationists had long recognized the broad forces behind specific threats such as consumer culture or the spread of roads and automobiles. Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and its call for a “land ethic” was a sacred text for conservationists, if not yet for a wider public.32 But more often than not the Club and its allies focused their efforts on easily bounded places, patrolling borders instead of confronting root problems. That began to change. In 1963, Brower, who ran the Club’s publication program, used Eliot Porter’s photographs of Glen Canyon in a book called The Place No One Knew: Glen Canyon on the Colorado. It was both a lament for a lost place and a regret for a too narrow definition of conservation. Brower’s foreword began, “Glen Canyon died in 1963 and I was partly responsible for its needless death. So were you.” He had appealed to public sentiment in the defense of Dinosaur, but several years later he blamed that same public’s own myopia in the drowning of Glen Canyon. He warned of other treasured places threatened by other development plans, and he pointed his finger not at the Bureau of Reclamation or the agricultural lobby but at an entire way of thinking. “The rest will go the way of Glen Canyon,” he predicted, “unless enough people begin to feel uneasy about the current interpretation of what progress consists of—unless they are willing to ask if progress has really served good purpose if it wipes out so many things that make life worthwhile.”³³

Soon even that sweeping condemnation was overly timid. “The alternatives that could have saved Glen Canyon are still unused. Fossil fuels, for one,” Brower argued in The Place No One Knew. Nuclear and solar power, he continued, would “make the destruction of Glen Canyon appear to have been the most naïve of choices in the search for electricity.”³⁴ By the mid-1970s Brower had reconsidered this position. “The alternative I talk about now,” he told an interviewer, “as I’m always looking for alternatives, is to have a new look at growth. We don’t want atomic power, we don’t want more hydroelectric power, we don’t want a lot of strip mining, we don’t want to use up the fossil fuels which are, as someone has described it, the earth’s life savings of energy.”³⁵ In a few years the idea of “alternatives” evolved from different sources of power to different ways of thinking. In the 1960s, Brower questioned whether economic growth demanded invading the nation’s most scenic resources. In the 1970s, he questioned economic growth itself. As would be the case for many thinkers in the emerging environmental movement, the tradeoffs involved in any source of energy or economic expansion forced Brower to consider increasingly fundamental premises.

Among those premises was the assumption that people knew what was best for themselves and for others. Brower described the “moral” of the Glen Canyon story as “Progress need not deny to the people their inalienable right to be informed and to choose. In Glen Canyon the people never knew what the choices were.”36 Confident that “the people” would have chosen his own position, Brower put his faith in democratic procedures. Instead of arguing that conservationists articulated a crucial minority view, Brower liked to assume that they spoke for the masses. In 1957, he talked about Echo Park on a conservation panel for the Democratic National Conference. “The conservationist force, I submit, is not a pressure group,” he said. “It merely demonstrates the pressure of man’s conscience, of his innate knowledge that there are certain things he may not ethically do to the only world he will ever have….”³⁷ In 1959, he spoke to the North American Wildlife Conference, declaring, “Support for the Wilderness Bill comes from no hastily organized battalion of rugged hikers, no ‘wilderness lobby’; it reflects broad public concern about direction.”³⁸ In 1960, he addressed the Sixty-Sixth National Conference on Government in Phoenix and defined “conservation” as “humanity fighting for the future.” He argued against undue restrictions on political advocacy by conservation groups because such work was done by “citizens” representing “a corporation which is duly, naturally, and quite effectively taking care of its own self-interest. I don’t say ‘selfish interest’ because that is merely to use a label as a substitute for thought.”³⁹ Conservation, in this view, was simply the commonsense work of people protecting common interests. Brower would always hold on to this idea, but like other conservationists he would also begin to ask whether people acting on their own behalf might sometimes cause more harm than good. A decade and some years after Glen Canyon, he said, “My own thinking has evolved a long way away from finding the handy geographical alternative to something; the alternative is inside our own heads: Stop demanding so much for ourselves now, at the cost of all the other people who are ever going to show up and all the other living things.”⁴⁰ Self-interest and selfish interest had become synonymous.

The year 1969 was transformative for the Sierra Club and for the conservation movement it often led. The change most likely on the minds of the Club’s directors was the resignation of David Brower. A majority of the board had come to believe that Brower, despite his preternatural skills as a publicist and political strategist, held little respect for the board’s own views and too often acted on his own without consulting any of his staff or his superiors. When Brower spent over $10,000 on a page-and-a-half advertisement in the New York Times calling for an “Earth National Park,” many had had enough, including Brower’s onetime fellow upstarts Richard Leonard and Ansel Adams. Club president Ed Wayburn suspended Brower’s financial authority. The next board election pitted a Brower slate against an anti-Brower slate, and when the latter won, the board pressured Brower to resign.

Brower’s resignation was only a change in personnel, even if it involved the most influential person in the Club. More significant was a change in the direction of the Club, and even of the conservation movement as a whole, in response to what would soon be called “the environmental movement.” Although the two movements overlapped considerably, environmentalism distinguished itself from traditional conservation in its concern with nature close at hand in suburbs and cities rather than in faraway parks and forests, and with the pollution of living spaces more than with the extraction of natural resources.41 Those ideas emerged gradually in the early and mid-twentieth century and then grabbed the nation’s attention with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962. Carson’s warnings about the invisible threat of pesticides like DDT, as they wandered from bugs to birds and from produce to people, took conservationists’ dim view of unthinking “progress” and rendered it in human terms. Instead of worrying about what industrial development and technological change might mean for wildlife and wild places, Carson asked what they might mean for families and neighborhoods.

In September 1969, the Club’s new executive director, Michael McCloskey, spoke to his board amid what the Conservation Foundation’s Rice Odell called “the Big Bang of the Environmental Revolution,” a year that began with a major oil spill off of the Santa Barbara coast and ended with the enactment of the National Environmental Policy Act.42 McCloskey asked the assembled directors whether the Club should consider taking on new priorities, including “environmental survival,” a catch-all category centered on overpopulation and pollution. New priorities would mean a broadening of Sierra Club interests beyond traditional conservation and into the realm of environmentalism, a not uncontroversial decision for the Club’s directors. Eliot Porter argued for the new priorities, as “shotgun attacks” to protect particular places would be meaningless in the long run if population and pollution ran rampant, whereas Martin Litton and Edgar Wayburn opposed stretching the Club too thin and taking on too many issues. No group more effectively protected remaining wilderness, Litton said, and “saws can destroy redwoods faster than environmental pollution.” The board finally decided that the Club should reach beyond its traditional responsibilities and take on new concerns.⁴³ In truth the Club had sporadically and unofficially involved itself in such issues for years, often against the judgment of most directors. But what had once been haphazard was now policy. The Sierra Club would no longer limit itself to conservation in the most conservative sense.

Eight months later, just weeks after the first Earth Day brought tens of millions of Americans into parks, onto streets, and alongside rivers and lakes to celebrate the planet and protest industrial pollution and waste, McCloskey reported to his board again. “Congress has never been more receptive,” he said. “And public understanding has never been greater.” The sudden surge of attention that buoyed Earth Day also lifted the profile of traditional groups like the Sierra Club that were quickly becoming environmental as much as conservation organizations. Along with the unprecedented attention and leverage, however, came criticism. McCloskey reported “skepticism…from a variety of sources.” Most of those sources supported the Club’s philosophy while objecting to its strategy. But there was also doubt “from those who believe established institutions are beyond reform and must be made to tumble entirely, whether through paralysis or revolution; and these people are often allied with those who believe the environmental movement is merely a diversion of public attention from other more pressing social issues.”⁴⁴ That position—that environmentalism amounted to little more than a distraction from real problems—was not an isolated one. It characterized much of the New Left for most of the 1960s and persisted well into the 1970s and after. In its most sophisticated forms, it offered a substantive and vital critique of environmentalism from a humanistic perspective. For several decades, environmental thought would be shaped in part as a response to that critique. New Left groups and ideas were both distinct from and a vital influence for the environmental movement.

It was easy enough to assume by 1970 that environmentalism and the New Left went together, and that years of popular protest would combine with growing awareness of environmental harm to produce a more socially just and ecologically sound society, or at least produce a dedicated effort in that direction. Yale law professor Charles Reich predicted “a renewed relationship of man to himself, to other men, to society, to nature, and to the land,” in his best-selling The Greening of America.45 Reich believed this relationship would come about through a shift from a collective “consciousness” tied to materialism and technology to one based in equality and community. The green and the just were intertwined. “If he thinks wilderness areas should be ‘developed’ he is quite likely to favor punitive treatment for campus disruptions,” Reich wrote of a hypothetical American stuck in the old consciousness. Opinions about society and opinions about the environment reflected each other.⁴⁶

The opposite was more often the case. In the 1960s, the politics of social justice and the politics of conservation and environmentalism had little resemblance. The New Left—that amorphous movement that often emanated from university campuses and was most concerned with civil rights, economic inequality, opposition to the Vietnam War, and eventually feminism—came to environmentalism late, and only with misgivings. Because the New Left comprised several movements and many organizations, it was ideologically indeterminate; historians have argued about what the New Left was and what exactly it represented.⁴⁷ Motley as it appeared, though, it prioritized some issues and principles over others, and for most of the 1960s environmentalism and conservation were not among them. A fundamentally humanistic movement, the New Left tended to regard an emerging interest in the nonhuman environment with skepticism or even hostility.

Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), the most voluble and politically plastic New Left organization, was never synonymous with the New Left as a whole but its views and actions carried weight far out of proportion to its numbers, and whether SDS followed the larger movement or the larger movement followed SDS, its pronouncements, manifestoes, and strategic decisions tended to approximate the views of a broad swath of protesters, especially those based on campuses. SDS was a weathervane of sorts; because the group organized itself not around a particular cause but around questioning the social and economic conditions that many Americans took for granted, it remained open to new issues and concerns. “Thus,” onetime SDS president Todd Gitlin wrote in 1967, “we offer alternatives to a wide variety of people and foment movements of different sorts, each of which…attunes us to new outlooks.”⁴⁸

The group rose to national prominence in 1965 when it took the lead in staging an April demonstration in Washington, D.C. against the Vietnam War. Although Vietnam was only one issue among many for SDS, the demonstration turned into the largest antiwar protest in U.S. history, prompting many months of organizational hand-wringing, soul-searching, and position paper after position paper as SDS debated what to do with its newfound prominence. Paul Booth, who helped create the vibrant Swarthmore chapter of SDS and was twice elected vice-president of the national office, wrote in 1966 of SDS’s organizing efforts, “there is little clarity as to the content of the radical program in behalf of which the organization is carried out.”49

Even amid that uncertainty, the group held strong political commitments. SDS first articulated its key issues and core values in 1962 at a national conference in Port Huron, Michigan. SDS was only two years old and the conference attracted just a few dozen attendees, but the document the conference produced, the Port Huron Statement, became a key expression of New Left thought in the early 1960s, and a point of reference for years after. The Statement highlighted a raft of problems needing attention, including labor relations, colonialism, higher education, the military-industrial complex, and especially the American South’s racial segregation and the Cold War’s potential for nuclear annihilation. There is the sense, in the several dozen pages of the Statement, that its authors could have gone on listing more and more causes for concern. Still, tying them all together were the organization’s—and, the document implies, the generation’s—basic values: “human beings, human relationships, and social systems.” Tom Hayden, the principle author of the Statement, and his co-writers explained SDS’s guiding principle as a faith in people. “Men,” they wrote, several years before women in the New Left would point out the movement’s inherent sexism, “have unrealized potential for self-cultivation, self-direction, self-understanding, and creativity.”⁵⁰

To a large degree SDS owed its faith in the innate dignity and promise of individuals to the influence of the Civil Rights Movement, the greatest and most immediate source of inspiration for the New Left. The taproot of the Civil Rights Movement was a humanistic defense of fundamental freedoms, a principle voiced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and demonstrated by black Southerners standing up to violent repression. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the movement fought for the very same liberal values—equal rights, civil liberties—that were at the heart of American political discourse, and that many white Americans believed had already been achieved. Early New Left leaders learned the importance and the tenuousness of those values not only by witnessing the Civil Rights Movement but also by participating in it; many activists in groups like SDS and campaigns like the Free Speech Movement began their political lives by spending several weeks or months in the South working with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The South’s aggressive defense of segregation shocked the conscience of white student volunteers from the North and the West. They assumed the wrongs of segregation were obvious. In supporting the Civil Rights Movement, the future New Left relied less on a new set of ideals than on a reaffirmation of the liberalism that theoretically grounded modern American democracy. Tom Hayden, reporting on attempts to suppress SNCC’s 1961 voter registration efforts in McComb, Mississippi, felt no need to explain what was at stake; in an account that relied almost exclusively on straight description and that assumed the common values of its readers, Hayden wrote, “This report is intended to make facts real and evoke not reader interest but productive commitments. The method need not be demagoguery however. Just read the facts. And read them again. And again.”51

Less than a decade later, SDS and the New Left embraced a radicalism that rejected the middle-class order of mainstream liberalism. But that rejection came gradually, and never completely. A few months after he reported from the South, Hayden used the Port Huron Statement to articulate SDS’s particular interpretation of the common values he had taken for granted in Mississippi. As a group that fundamentally believed in democratic participation, SDS had to also believe in human wisdom, and so the Port Huron Statement emphasized “human independence,” “love of man,” and the search for the “personally authentic.” These vague descriptions differed little from the basic commitments of mainstream liberal thinkers in the 1960s, the thinkers behind many of the policies SDS came to oppose. The primacy of the individual, and the importance of individual freedoms in a democratic society, bound together student protesters and establishment political figures. “Every liberal, of course,” Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. wrote in 1967, after the New Left had begun to attack the liberalism he represented, “will define liberalism in his own way. But liberalism has always seemed to me in essence a recognition that the world is forever changing and a belief that the application of reason to human and social problems can enlarge the dignity and freedom of man.”52 On this, even if on little else, Schlesinger and SDS agreed. The New Left were humanists just like the mainstream liberals they came to criticize. Schlesinger’s definition unwittingly echoed the Port Huron Statement, which stated, five years earlier and with emphasis on the object of its admiration, “We regard men as infinitely precious and possessed of unfulfilled capacities for reason, freedom, and love.” Schlesinger put his faith in the Democratic Party, and SDS invested itself in grassroots activism; Schlesinger held that politics was the art of compromise, and SDS gave no quarter; but liberals like Schlesinger and New Leftists like SDS believed, fundamentally, that maximizing individual freedom would produce social good, and that given enough freedom people had the competence to create conditions favorable to all.

Ecological conditions did not figure prominently in this perspective. SDS paid almost no attention to the state of the natural world and natural resources or even to pollution in cities and suburbs. In the Port Huron Statement, the absence is notable. In dozens of pages of criticism and analysis is a single sentence registering concern with environmental decline, noting the threat of overpopulation and the “sapping of the earth’s physical resources.” A year later SDS refined its critique of American society in America and the New Era.⁵³ Again the group focused its attention on the Cold War, civil rights, and economic inequality, and ignored environmental concerns. In the year between the Port Huron Statement and America and the New Era, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring became a bestseller. But Carson’s warnings about the unintended consequences of modern technology did not resonate with early New Left activists. Although SDS leaders expressed grave concern about nuclear technology and “the Bomb” in 1962 and 1963, they drew no connections between nuclear fallout and the subtler sorts of technological threats to which Carson alerted the nation.

SDS held this non-stance toward ecology for the rest of the decade. The SDS newsletter, New Left Notes, one of the most widely read journals of the student movement, published practically no articles about environmental issues before 1970. Throughout the 1960s, New Left Notes reported on race relations, urban poverty, and the war in Vietnam; late in the decade, it addressed the Black Power movement, the counterculture, U.S. imperialism, and radical feminism. But New Left Notes paid scant attention to environmental issues or to the emerging environmental movement until the first Earth Day in April 1970. SDS conventions demonstrated the same set of concerns. At the 1967 national convention in Ann Arbor, Michigan, attendees discussed draft resistance, whether to march on Washington to protest the war, and supporting SNCC.54 The convention agenda included workshops on first-time topics such as “cultural revolution” (in recognition of the growing importance of the hippie counterculture) and “liberation of women” (an issue several women in SDS had been pushing for years), but delegates to Ann Arbor did not discuss environmental matters, and nor did delegates to Clearlake, Iowa, in 1966 or to East Lansing, Michigan, in 1968.

The New Left assigned itself the daunting tasks of reducing poverty, helping to end segregation, and ending the Vietnam War. Next to these formidable responsibilities, cleaning up lakes and rivers and protecting forests seemed beside the point. More important, the New Left valued the liberatory potential of social movements and the idea that regular people held the knowledge necessary to address social ills and achieve social harmony. “Man is the end and man is the measure,” declared an anonymous 1966 essay in New Left Notes as SDS debated the direction it should take in the second half of the decade. “The rock bottom foundation of radical ideology is a view of man—human nature and human possibility.”⁵⁵ Social justice, for the New Left, meant delivering power from an entrenched elite to a democratic mass, and believing that doing so would quickly lead to a better world. Putting restrictions on people and suggesting that individual freedom could lead to social harm—as environmentalism seemed to imply—remained anathema to the New Left’s general faith in liberation.

By the time the “ecology movement”—soon to be renamed “environmentalism”—arrived in 1969, the New Left had climbed aboard what Todd Gitlin later called the “express train of antiauthority.”56 Escalation of the Vietnam War played a large role, as growing frustration with American foreign policy fueled a split between liberal antiwar groups and New Left activists, the former anticommunist and the latter often sympathetic to North Vietnam. Street fighting between police and protesters outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, which led to hundreds of hospitalizations and one death, radicalized both participants and observers⁵⁷ Looking back, Carl Oglesby marked the shift as early as 1965, the year he was elected president of SDS and “the black and white sectors of the movement explicitly abandoned reformism and took up that long march whose destination…is a theory and practice of revolution for the United States.”⁵⁸ In the space of just a few years, SDS and much of the New Left gave up on not just institutional liberalism but on modern American society, as the group accepted the need for fundamental, sweeping change.

A more radical and more antiestablishment New Left found even more fault with the ecology movement. Where once SDS simply disregarded environmental issues, now the New Left actively disparaged them. Still fundamentally committed to social justice and a humanistic philosophy, many activists worried that pointing to environmental harm did little to cut to the core of what was wrong with the nation. The politics of ecology, some activists felt, blunted the movement’s radicalism. Claiming that industrial production harmed everyone smudged the differences in race, class, and gender that had become central to the New Left’s criticisms of the modern state. The New Left’s humanism was rooted in inequities of power between different social groups, and the notion that American society unwittingly poisoned itself ignored an unequal distribution of political influence and material resources as it promoted a “we’re-all-in-this-together” attitude. The ecology movement’s holism diverted attention from exactly the sorts of differences that most concerned the New Left.

Radicals skeptical of ecology made their doubts clear in the pages of the vast and raucous underground press. The Fifth Estate, Detroit’s best-known alternative newspaper, declared, “Ecology sucks! It sucks the life out of social reform. It sucks the energy out of campus movements. It sucks the irritants out of capitalism. It sucks change out of politics. It sucks reason out of thought.” According to The Fifth Estate the ecology movement siphoned money away from crucial social programs, shifted blame from industrial polluters to society as a whole, and distracted from more urgent issues. “Limpid water in our lakes and rivers will not help the worker who doesn’t have a job….”59 The week before Earth Day, the Berkeley Tribe reminded its readers that “there will be no peace between man and nature until there is peace amongst men and women.” Radicals questioned any framing of environmental concern that did not indict American society as a whole. “Pollution control,” the Tribe argued, “at this point is merely another means of social control: to prevent America’s children from realizing that the crisis in the environment represents nothing less than a crisis in America itself.”⁶⁰ In a more sanguine piece about ecology in New York’s Rat, “Pocahontas” nevertheless warned that supposedly radical ecology groups were in fact firmly in the mainstream: “They don’t make the connection between violence on the environment and the society that perpetrates that violence.”⁶¹

The conventional media unwittingly confirmed the underground press’s suspicions about ecology’s antiradicalism, covering the story of ecology on campus as the issue to overshadow Vietnam and using words like “responsible,” “conservative,” and “unpolitical.”⁶² Earth Day, created by a United States senator, was for many on the Left the clearest sign yet of ecology’s potential for co-opting the radical movement. According to the editors of Ramparts, Earth Day organizers were attempting to “banish everything but environment to the back pages of our minds.”⁶³ That same month, New Left Notes called overpopulation worries “racist hysteria,” and argued, “The problem of non-white people…is super-exploitation and racist oppression, not ‘overpopulation.’ ”⁶⁴ Criticism spilled over into friendly publications, too. An “angry reader” of Bellingham, Washington’s Northwest Passage, an alternative newspaper that dedicated itself to environmental issues, called ecology “the white liberal’s cop-out,” and complained, “People figure that if they stick with a subject which is controversial as Apple Pie…then they won’t get hasseled [sic] by those in power.”⁶⁵

The Sierra Club’s attempts to reach out to a younger generation furthered the New Left’s disdain. Hoping to take advantage of student activism, the Club made an early appeal to younger Americans through a campus outreach program. In September 1969, the Club hired Connie Flateboe as its first campus coordinator. Flateboe started organizing activities immediately, contacting and collaborating with local environmental groups in the Bay Area, publishing handbooks for students about environmental activism, and organizing a conference in Santa Cruz, California, with the new Environmental Protection Agency’s Youth Advisory Board. The outreach program also acted as the Club’s primary campus presence on Earth Day, and ambassador to a younger generation. “Conservation is an old word,” Flateboe explained to the board. “Environment, or Ecology is with it today.”66 And the program talked tough. “The fad is over and it’s time for the hand wringing and bitching to stop,” staffer Ron Eber wrote to his campus contacts late in 1971. “To save the California coast will take action and not rhetoric.”⁶⁷ Eber did not ask students to take to the streets, though, but rather to support AB 1471 in the state assembly, which would set up a statewide coastal commission. While the Sierra Club campus program encouraged student groups to chart their own courses, often the Club used the network as little more than an extension of its own political activities. These students were not firebrands. Flateboe described them as “pragmatic,” “concerned,” and “working within the system and making it work.”⁶⁸

The Club’s praise for a new generation of activists usually betrayed its own skepticism as much as its excitement. While the Sierra Club Bulletin noted the importance of “ecological revolutionaries,” it described the revolutionaries’ groups as “ill equipped to pursue conservation goals through the courts or to conduct a protracted battle to stop pollution.” And while the younger groups enjoyed “enthusiasm and dedication,” they were short “the political muscle of a national organization with thousands of members.”⁶⁹ Even the Club’s attempts at outright pandering rang hollow. Paul Brooks, a member of the Club’s board in 1969, wrote knowingly that the conservation movement, “though it operates within the law, is in principle revolutionary.” Many Americans mistook the movement’s revolutionary potential for traditional values. “The younger generation understands this,” Brooks explained, before going on to discuss the need to marshal facts in debates with experts, to gain recognition in courts, and to otherwise pursue decidedly non-revolutionary tactics.⁷⁰

In 1972, two campus coordinators warned the Club’s board of directors, writing, “At this point in time you must realize that students are very doubtful that the system is capable of bringing about meaningful change.” It was the job of the Sierra Club, they went on, to show that “the system” could work, as “we cannot abandon our effort to inform and involve this country’s students.”71 Soon after, the board dissolved the campus program due to budget constraints. The mixed messages of the Club’s student outreach, which used the language of environmental revolution but advocated more conventional reform, underscored the environmental movement’s conflicted relationship with radical politics and student activism in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even an established organization like the Sierra Club experimented with the idea of environmentalism as an inherently radical movement, but soon the Club and other leading groups pushed forward their programs of reform along the well-worn paths of the established political process.

Whatever success the Club had in reaching the New Left and a broader youth culture was mostly unintentional, and much of it began with the 1969 wilderness conference in San Francisco. The conference showcased some of the ideas that had been percolating at the Club for years and even decades. A growing sense of ecological relationships and an embrace of Darwinism gave shape to a more ecocentric perspective, which in turn nudged human beings from the moral center of some Club leaders’ cosmologies. The 1969 conference was one vector through which these ideas traveled outward, onto the pages of newspapers and into conversations between activists across the Bay.

The concept of the wilderness conferences started with Norman Livermore, a livestock wrangler, economist, timber executive, Sierra Club director, and California’s secretary for resources under Governor Ronald Reagan.⁷² After an extended debate, the Club went ahead with Livermore’s idea and held the first biennial wilderness conference in 1949, across the Bay from San Francisco in Berkeley. Livermore initially proposed gathering land managers, recreationists, and conservationists to consider a management plan for the Sierras, but soon the conferences became a much more wide-ranging discussion of wilderness. The Wilderness Society enthusiastically participated in the conferences but its director, Howard Zahniser, let the Sierra Club take the lead.⁷³

“I attended two and they were the dullest things I’ve ever been to in my life,” Ansel Adams remembered.74 This was an uncommon view. Michael Cohen makes clear the importance of the wilderness conferences, where issues and positions would emerge for discussion years before the Club rendered final judgment. The conferences served as a sort of incubator for ideas that grew into organizational and sometimes national policy, including the Wilderness Act itself.⁷⁵ Brower, an early enthusiast of the conferences, began publishing their proceedings in the late 1950s, effectively putting the Club’s seal on informal talks not yet vetted by the board. At the 1959 conference, speakers raised the issue of overpopulation years before the Club took a formal stance on human numbers.⁷⁶

Even more consequentially, the 1959 conference was, according to Cohen, “filled with speakers who presented an ecological view of nature.”⁷⁷ Soon an ecological perspective on wilderness became less notable at the conferences, only because it was by then a given. The more traditional aesthetic and romantic justifications for wilderness never disappeared, but they made room for scientific explanations of why wilderness mattered as a baseline for measuring change, as habitat for particular species, and as preserves of biodiversity. “By the 1960s environmental militants in the club had come to have a dynamic perception of a wilderness park,” Susan Schrepfer writes, using the word “militant” somewhat loosely. “Rather than a preserve frozen in time, to them a wilderness park was a living organism within which disease, fire, and all natural processes must play a continuous and creative role.”⁷⁸ Earlier conservationists assumed they knew exactly how to manage and protect wild places. A more ecological approach was one that presumed human ignorance and protected natural systems, which were likely doing more work and offering greater benefits than managers could fully comprehend. Even John Muir could get it wrong. Although he thought in ecological terms decades before most conservationists, Muir opposed any and all forest fires, while many Native Americans—including Yosemite’s Miwok Indians—and a handful of forest commissioners recognized the role of fires in forest health. Brower later dismissed Muir’s “unecological attitude toward fire in the forests,” noting that it was the view of the Forest Service’s mascot, Smokey Bear. “He didn’t know a damn thing about forest ecology,” Brower said of Smokey, “and all he tried to do was make people practice conservation through feeling guilt.”⁷⁹

Brower wanted conservation to spring from “higher motives” than guilt, but in fact conservationists like Brower were moving away from any sense of hierarchy at all, whether of motives or of species. Schrepfer stresses the shift in thought among Club leaders in the 1960s from the ordered world of Muir, filled with intimations of divine intention, to the random sense of evolutionary history captured in the popular writing of anthropologist Loren Eiseley.80 Brower, an Eiseley enthusiast, convinced him to contribute to several Sierra Club books. The lean toward Eiseley was also a nod at the modern evolutionary synthesis, which reasserted Darwin’s theory of natural selection after several decades during which scientists considered more directed theories of evolution. The renewed influence of Darwin in the mid-twentieth century, popularized through writers like Eiseley, pointed to a world without divine order and in which Homo sapiens was a chance occurrence rather than an inevitable end product. If modern, industrial society was happenstance rather than inexorable, it deserved greater scrutiny and doubt.

An emphasis on ecology and a darker view of the human place in evolution contributed to what Schrepfer calls “an ontological equality—that is, men are not better than trees.”⁸¹ That idea would become an increasingly important and vexing one in environmental thought and activism. Few held it in the extreme before the 1970s. Most Club members and leaders thought that men were, in fact, better than trees, or at least more valuable. But many conservationists began to edge slowly toward the trees. James Morton Turner describes how wilderness activists by the late 1960s and early 1970s used more technical and scientific arguments for protection of wild places. As those arguments gained favor, “what began to dwindle were sweeping claims on behalf of the public interest, appeals to patriotism, and an emphasis on the historic value of wilderness…”⁸² In conservation work, people were less and less central to conceptions of the natural world and to arguments for its protection, and that de-centering had inevitable moral implications.

An ecological emphasis and a pessimistic view of modern human societies were fully in evidence at the Club’s eleventh wilderness conference at the San Francisco Hilton in March 1969. The conference foregrounded wilderness and wildlife in Alaska, but looming in the background was the threat that people posed to the planet. The media covered both. The Associated Press reported on the howling timber wolf that played over speakers during a talk on Canadian wildlife; the Los Angeles Times and St. Paul Dispatch told readers about the important role of Alaska in wilderness politics, as did, predictably, the Nome Nugget, Alaska Empire, and Kodiak Mirror. Other papers focused on the more controversial topics addressed by the conference’s opening and closing speakers, Paul Ehrlich and Garrett Hardin. The San Diego Union and Los Angeles Times relayed Ehrlich’s gloomy prediction that more and more people would inevitably degrade not just wilderness but food, air, and water. The Philadelphia Inquirer and the San Francisco Examiner described Hardin’s recommendation that wilderness be restricted to only those physically capable of strenuous hikes.83 Hardin had recently published “The Tragedy of the Commons,” the essay that would make him both famous and infamous. In that piece, Hardin considered how to conserve a resource when unrestrained individual gain could lead to collective loss. Now he asked the same question of wilderness, a resource that could easily be enjoyed to oblivion. Hardin concluded that while other systems of selection might be more fair and democratic, one based on “merit” would best match those most appreciative of wilderness with places worth appreciating.⁸⁴ Hardin argued unapologetically for exactly the position that Bestor Robinson had called unconscionable during the San Gorgonio debate more than twenty years earlier: a policy that would, in Robinson’s words, “confine the use of the wilderness to the aristocracy of the physically super-fit.”⁸⁵ Not everyone in the Club approved of Hardin’s view and his talk received a mixed response. But conference chairman Dan Luten, fishing for bold statements, had invited Hardin in order to leave the audience with “a persisting uneasiness.”⁸⁶ In 1947, that unease had been acute for many Club leaders. By 1969, it was part of the program.

Saving wilderness, Hardin told his audience, was “a problem of human choice” as population increased and wilderness acreage did not.87 The idea of human choice and its profound consequences echoed through the conference. John Milton of the Conservation Foundation lamented a culture “dominated by an assumption that our economy must always continue to expand,” and advised, “There may still be time to choose a better vision, but with each new dawn our options narrow.” Geographer George Macinko warned, “In man’s headlong flight to conquer nature, he tends to behave as though he were not subject to any ecological laws.” Brower suggested that only by combining human self-interest with the interests of wildlife would humanity survive.⁸⁸ Beginning with Ehrlich’s pessimistic view of population growth and ending with Hardin’s cold calculations for limiting human freedom, the Club’s eleventh wilderness conference left little doubt that people and their modern comforts lay at the root of environmental problems.

What was there to do? Conference attendees knew that few Americans shared their particular interests and concerns, or at least their sense of urgency. As the Providence Journal joked of the roughly one thousand people participating in San Francisco, “The hedonistic delights of that most wonderful of all convention cities in North America will mean little to them.”⁸⁹ Some speakers walked gingerly up to the line separating conventional reform from radical acts, disapproval of modern society from outright resistance, but none crossed it. Chairing the first day’s afternoon session, Richard Cooley asked the Club’s Northwest representative, Brock Evans, whether environmentalists should be revolutionaries. “I have a split feeling whether we should or not,” Evans answered. “Some decisions we cannot accept,” he said, tempering that declaration by expressing hope for judicial action to protect Oregon’s Cascade Range.⁹⁰ When Ray Sherwin told George Macinko that he had voiced “profoundly radical and subversive” ideas and asked whether conservationists should use “civil rights tactics,” Macinko demurred. To plan for the long-term future, he said, was “prudent, not subversive.”⁹¹ The Club’s leaders and friends had started to question economic growth, democratic principles, and human primacy in the world, but they held firm to traditional methods of reform and suggested that their arguments were little more than common sense.

Snyder had convinced his friend Keith Lampe, a fixture in the Bay Area’s hip community, to join him at the conference. Lampe had been a Beat poet in the early 1960s and a Yippie later in the decade, one of the organizers of the 1967 effort to exorcize the Pentagon of evil spirits. He had never been especially interested in conservation or ecology until the Sierra Club’s conference changed his political and moral point of view. “People in the Movement and subculture will have to take to the streets with disruptive Save-Our-Species-Week demonstrations in order to give the liberals of the Sierra Club any lobbying leverage with the U.S. regime,” he wrote the following week in the Berkeley Barb, at once measuring the ideological distance between radicals and liberals and recognizing the possibility of aligned interests. Where the New Left had generally disparaged the ecology movement as narrow and reformist, Lampe acknowledged both its limits and its possibilities. The conference was “middle-classy,” with few young people in attendance and even fewer nonwhite audience members. Ecology had the potential, though, to bring together old and new leftists. “All of us now hung up with the industrial revolution,” Lampe told his readers, “have got to move from the disastrous notion of man-versus-nature into a peaceful coexistence with nature.”⁹⁴ After the Sierra Club conference, Lampe dedicated himself to proselytizing for that cause. He started a newsletter called Earth Read-Out that turned into a syndicated column in the underground press, and he appointed himself the voice of the environment among hippies and New Left radicals.

Lampe tapped into what was already a swirl of issues and activists in the Bay Area. Several years before Earth Day, the New Left, the traditional conservation movement, and an emerging environmentalism intersected in and around San Francisco.95 Before 1969 this confluence was difficult to see, visible only to those in the back reaches of the Bay Area political scene where the various streams of thought met. They ran together most often in Berkeley, where in 1967 a University of California student named Cliff Humphrey met Chuck Herrick, who was just back from serving in Vietnam. Cliff Humphrey and his wife, Mary Humphrey, took an interest in ecology not only as a way of understanding the natural world but also as a way of framing political decisions. Herrick, who had studied zoology, shared their point of view. The Humphreys and Herrick chose the new Peace and Freedom Party as a vehicle for their ideas. In late 1967 and early 1968 they distributed essays and articles about ecology and politics to Peace and Freedom Party members. Humphrey wrote one piece, “A Unifying Theme,” with help from forestry doctoral student Fred Bunnell and professor of geography Dan Luten, a member of the Sierra Club’s board of directors and later chair of the 1969 wilderness conference. “A Unifying Theme” tried to connect war, overpopulation, racial hierarchy, and economic inequality through the overarching theme of ecology. “Radical movements in the United States are responses to inequities that constitute ecological blasphemy,” the authors declared.⁹⁶

The Humphreys and Herrick formed a group called Ecology Action, recognized as an official caucus of the Peace and Freedom Party even as Ecology Action shifted away from formal politics and toward education. Ecology Action tried to convince the New Left of ecology’s critical role in radical politics. “The relationship between current campus unrest and a blindly expanding human population is not yet recognized,” Humphrey wrote in 1968 after transferring to San Francisco State University. “Ecology offers the beginnings of an alternative to the present value structure that many have rejected,” he said in a radio broadcast on KPFA in June. Humphrey lamented students’ lack of an ecological perspective, a shortcoming compounded by a missing sense of urgency about environmental decline.⁹⁷ Eugene Anderson, founder of the Southern California chapter of Ecology Action, described conservation (the term “environmentalism” was not yet coined) as “universally approved and universally unsupported,” an issue that inspired none of the attention it deserved. Conservatives subordinated environmental concerns to those of business, Anderson felt, and liberals were generally pro-growth and pro-development. New Left radicals, the group Anderson expected the most support from, felt that “somehow other issues are ‘more important.’ ” A “narrow interpretation of Marx’ attack on Malthus,” Anderson complained, “has led some radical friends of mine to opposition of all conservation on principle.”⁹⁸

But many New Left radicals opposed conservation on much more than principle. Even as Ecology Action tried to combine the urgent concerns of the New Left with the emerging issues of environmentalism, it often unwittingly set them against each other by privileging one over the other. “The magnitude of these problems reduces the Vietnam War to an absurdity,” Humphrey and Bunnell wrote of environmental concerns in 1967.99 “Ethnic studies and campus autonomy are backlog issues, needed certainly, but a settlement of these issues alone will not automatically move us toward the search for behavior that is not self-destructive,” Humphrey insisted in 1968.¹⁰⁰ Campus activists had little sympathy for Ecology Action’s holism, its tendency to look only at the big picture and to insist on the primacy of an environmental perspective.

Ecology Action thought of its holism as synthetic rather than hierarchical, an overarching politics rooted in ecological principles and a step beyond the traditional conservation movement of Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, which Anderson derided as “The prototypic statement of the pretty-pretty, Wilderness-values, nice-weekend-farm school attitude.”¹⁰¹ Uninterested in pastoral nature, Ecology Action carried money sacks weighed down with Bay fill to financial institutions supporting the Bay’s development and issued a statement of ecological relationships called “The Declaration of Interdependence” at a press conference in front of the Berkeley dump. The group insisted that environmental issues touched on all others, implying that environmental issues were therefore always central.

The most influential project Ecology Action created was not initially a political act. In May 1968, Chuck Herrick died in a car accident driving to a Peace and Freedom Party conference in Ann Arbor. In response Ecology Action took an abandoned lot on the corner of Dwight and Telegraph, several blocks from the University of California campus, and designated it Herrick Peace and Freedom Park. Ecology Action and its sympathizers planted a garden in the lot and put up petitions on the fence which read, in part, “CITOYENS: IF YOU WISH TO KEEP THIS AS A PARK, YOU MUST ACT. THIS WILL BE A PEOPLE’S PARK. RATHER THAN ANOTHER STRETCH OF ASPHALT TO SERVE THE AUTOMOBILE…THE SIMPLEST WAY TO EXERT PRESSURE ON THE CITY OF BERKELEY, WHICH OWNS THIS LAND, IS TO CALL A CITY OFFICIAL.”102 The city removed the flowers and trees soon after, but Cliff Humphrey began to work with Berkeley’s parks commission and city council to find a site for a permanent park honoring Herrick.

The saga of Herrick Peace and Freedom Park remained in the collective memory of the Telegraph Avenue community a year later when an avenue merchant named Mike Delacour tried to find a performance space for a local band. He picked an open area just off of Telegraph Avenue and bordered by Haste Street, Bowditch Street, and Dwight Way, less than half a block from the original site of Herrick Peace and Freedom Park. Lot 1875–2 belonged to the University of California, which had torn down several buildings and let the three acres collect mud and garbage. Through the Berkeley Barb, Delacour invited community members to help transform the lot. Dozens showed up on April 20 to lay sod and plant shrubs in the lot’s northeast corner. Landscaping continued for the next three weeks, sometimes with a handful of workers and sometimes with several hundred, all cleaning and planting by day and celebrating at night. By the middle of May much of the lot sprouted grass, flowers, and vegetables, and locals began calling it the People’s Park (see figure 1.2).¹⁰³

State and University officials, unwilling to cede the land but wary of confrontation, spent several weeks debating the best course of action. Chancellor Roger Heyns met with a group of park supporters in early May to search for a compromise. Professor of architecture Sim Van der Ryn suggested a park maintained by the Telegraph Avenue community under the university’s sponsorship. Heyns considered and then abandoned the idea, citing pressure from the Board of Regents. Finally, he declared that the university would erect a fence in order to prevent further unauthorized use of university land.

People’s Park has long been understood as a violent clash between radical activists and established institutions at a time when those two sides were most determinedly opposed. Robert Scheer, a reporter for Ramparts, described it in these terms just months after the fighting: “The park confrontation was a battle in a war between the mainstream of society, as represented by the University of California’s administration, and the counter-community of revolt which thrives in the South Campus-Telegraph Avenue area, with the People’s Park site at its heart.”104 Winthrop Griffith of the New York Times explained the clash over the park as “part of the accelerating conflict between the tightly structured and self-proclaimed ‘rational’ institutions of society and the unordered and yearning youth of the nation.”¹⁰⁵ The Black Panther described the Park as “socialism in practice” and the fight over it as an extension of “The Fascist State.”¹⁰⁶ Ronald Reagan said the conflict centered on a group of local activists “challenging the right of private ownership of land in this country.”¹⁰⁷ New Left Notes agreed with Reagan’s analysis, if not with his position; both sides, the newspaper explained, “understand that the question of OWNERSHIP AND CONTROL OF PROPERTY is the basis of the current struggle.”¹⁰⁸

For much of the New Left, Berkeley was the likely epicenter of a nationwide uprising, and People’s Park was simply a potential catalyst to growing militancy, little different from the Democratic National Convention in Chicago the previous year. Dazzled by direct action, they remembered People’s Park for the street fighting that followed it rather than for the planting and growing that preceded it. Months after the confrontation over the park, New Left leaders Tom Hayden and Frank Bardacke called Berkeley “an example of rebellion to others” and “a kind of ‘front’ in the worldwide battle against American capitalism.” In the Berkeley Tribe Hayden and Bardacke took stock of what the movement had learned about revolution and about itself in the East Bay “stronghold.” They discussed police tactics, divisions within the radical community, proletarianization, and internationalization, but not ecology or the environment. Hayden and Bardacke’s wide-ranging evaluation of what Berkeley had taught American radicals showed no interest in the ecology movement nor in growing concern with land use and resource destruction. People’s Park was a moment when “we ripped off the Man’s land” rather than a sign of new goals and concerns.¹⁰⁹ Its significance was quantitative, signaling escalating confrontation, rather than qualitative, signaling a new set of ideas.

Local activists had a different take. Keith Lampe published an open letter to Hayden and Bardacke explaining how “astounded” he was that “you guys could type out so many pages of words without once relating to what we’ve learned in recent months about the fragility of the earth’s life-support system.” That absence, he went on, “renders your material naïve and dated.”110 People’s Park, for Lampe and other Berkeley activists, infused the movement with a green ethos and with a new concern for the natural world. Here, finally, was the convergence of ecological concerns with New Left radicalism. “We will never forget that if they win this simple struggle, the planet will soon become a slag-heap of radioactive rubble,” one activist wrote of the state and university, “but if we, in our own way, overcome the official agents of uniform death, the earth will become a park.” Another predicted, “We will fight with strange new weapons. With dirt and water. With flowers and trees…. Can you legislate against the earth? We will be the earth.”¹¹¹

A year later, and a month before Earth Day thrust environmentalism into the national spotlight, the Berkeley Tribe reported, “People’s Park was the beginning of the Revolutionary Ecology Movement. It is the model of the struggle we are going to have to wage in the future if life is going to survive at all on this planet.” The new struggle, according to the editors of the Tribe, combined the social politics of the New Left with a growing ecological sensibility, a fusion first seen at People’s Park. “What we did with one city block last spring is going to have to be done more and more on a larger and larger scale,” the editors of the Tribe explained.¹¹² While another People’s Park never materialized, in the year or so following the original event the radical community in Berkeley grabbed hold of ecology as a paramount concern. Just days after the National Guard pulled out of Berkeley, over two thousand people gathered on campus for an “Ecology and Politics in America” teach-in sponsored by two American Federation of Teachers locals. “The questions raised by this issue,” the event’s flyers read, “reach into two worlds at once: the world of power, politics and the institutional shape of American society on the one hand, and world of ecology, conservation and the biological shape of our environment on the other.” Ecology and politics, the flyer explained, “are no longer separate or separable issues.” Ecology Action held an ecology workshop and an “extinction fair” over the summer; the Eco-Liberation Front temporarily hijacked a meeting of the Bay Area Pollution Control District in early 1970; and a coalition of eco-minded groups launched a months-long campaign to grow trees on unused Bay Area Rapid Transit land.¹¹³

By late 1969, the seed of radical interest in the environment planted at People’s Park took root as Left thinkers and writers began to think and write about the natural world more than they ever had. In response to an interviewer’s question about the place of poetry within the movement, Allen Ginsberg began talking about how contemporary activism was “a little wavelet on a larger awareness that’s growing in people, which is a biological awareness rather than a political awareness.”114 Unprompted by any question at all, another interviewer recorded, the Hog Farm commune’s Hugh Romney said, “What I’m really into is the Whole Earth trip, because that’s something that everyone can agree on. Everyone can see that the planet is in bad trouble and we’ve all gotta get together and melt our flags and hang a rainbow on a pole and share all the food.”¹¹⁵ And Todd Gitlin, by 1969 a veteran of the New Left and increasingly skeptical of ever-newer movements, offered grudging admiration for Gary Snyder’s Earth House Hold. “Snyder can help us do one thing we’ve scanted,” Gitlin wrote, translating Snyder into his own terms, “which is to understand how American capitalism rips up everything of value.”¹¹⁶

While People’s Park helped trigger a blossoming of radical interest in ecology, that interest was sustained by an emerging view that ecology played a role in an overall, radical analysis. The environment, New Left activists came to argue, was not an isolated issue but rather an essential element in a larger critique of American society. Lampe had been making this point for months. By late 1969, he decided it was time to “begin to define a more specifically radical (‘root’) approach to the emergency.” The coming mistakes in addressing ecological issues, he predicted, would be programs based on competition, faith in technology, the profit motive, and centralized authority. Lampe associated such approaches with “the OLD TIME, i.e., the industrial-revolution phase of history.” Nations themselves, he argued, must be phased out and replaced with “tribal and regional co-operative post-monetary steady-state post-technocratic heliocentric economic models, eco-models.” Lampe recognized earlier than many others that, spun out to its extreme, the logic of ecological activism could call into question the foundations of modern industrial society, including property, economic growth, and centralized government.¹¹⁷

Few committed themselves to a radical ecotopia as Lampe did, but many other activists began to consider what Ecology Action had long argued: that the environment was an issue tailor-made for opposing the establishment. Because concern for human survival was so basic, environmentalism—as it was beginning to be called—could point to fundamental and even suicidal flaws in modern American society. Holism, the tendency to group all people together and reduce complicated issues to single causes like overpopulation, was rhetorically both environmentalism’s worst characteristic and its greatest strength. “The environment” could connect disparate issues like racism and sexism and war, and offer an overarching symptom (or cause—it worked both ways). “The notion of man’s ability/need to completely control his environment is ancient,” the Austin Rag suggested. “This idea should be critically analyzed by radicals. This analysis should be prompt, for the consequences of a new understanding of man in nature are far-reaching.”118 New York’s Rat agreed. “An exploration of ecological trends demonstrates that the present ecological crises cannot be separated from the social crisis,” a writer called “Pantagruel” explained. “An attack against environmental destruction is an attack on the structures of control and the mechanisms of power within a society.”¹¹⁹

For Ecology Action, the news was old but the sudden interest welcome. “well, we finally hit the big time, sort of,” Eugene Anderson wrote from Riverside with his typical disdain for capital letters. “i think it is a good idea on the whole that Ecology Action’s part in people’s parks hasn’t been publicized. still, it gives me a feeling of great satisfaction that we, in our quiet peaceable way, have been responsible for a genuine revolution!!”¹²⁰ Ecology Action tried to capitalize on People’s Park by helping to write and distribute a special issue of Philip MacDougal’s magazine Despite Everything, explaining how a green flag had flown at People’s Park “beside socialist red and anarchist black,” a flag that signaled “new indelible connections in the mind which will re-color popular protest in every country in the world, from this time on.” The environment, MacDougal claimed, held the potential to unite the Left and even garner mainstream support because it touched everybody.¹²¹

It was one thing to enthuse about environmentalism’s all-encompassing meaning, but another to establish it. On the one hand, Eldridge Cleaver, writing from exile in late 1968 after his parole was revoked but still the Black Panther’s minister of information, seemed to have a sense of what MacDougal meant. Cleaver compared the Black Panther’s Breakfast for Children program with People’s Park as, respectively, a black and a white response to the failures of “the system.” One addressed vital needs and the other addressed what might be perceived as leisure, but “they both pose precisely the same question” about the distribution of goods and amenities. “I find myself very enthusiastic about these developments,” Cleaver said.122 On the other hand, MacDougal imagined Panther Bobby Seale, shovel in hand, telling reporters that the park was a crucial issue for black Americans, and then lamented that this scenario was “a mere dream.”¹²³

People’s Park triggered a growing interest in integrating New Left radicalism with ecology—working at the roots, both figuratively and literally—but the analytical framework for such a combination remained unclear at best. “The underground culture is beginning to groove on conservation and ecology, but a comprehensive radical viewpoint needs to be developed,” Pantagruel noted. “Lewis Herber, in his breakthrough essay ‘Ecology and Revolutionary Thought,’ provides a starting point.”¹²⁴ In fact, Lewis Herber provided much more than a starting point. “Lewis Herber” was a pseudonym for Murray Bookchin, an Old Left anarchist who became a New Left guru by creating a school of political thought called “social ecology.” In 1969, abridged versions of Bookchin’s essay “Ecology and Revolutionary Thought” appeared regularly in the alternative press. Bookchin followed the New Left closely, occasionally writing to their publications and offering advice based on his many years of radicalism. After a long and underappreciated career as a radical thinker, Bookchin enjoyed belated recognition within the New Left exactly because he offered an analysis that tied together social and environmental politics.¹²⁵

Bookchin, in other words, provided a pre-assembled philosophy for integrating the “new” issue of environmentalism into the Left’s overall radical analysis. Social ecology argued, essentially, that people’s abuse of the natural world resulted directly from social inequality, that control and exploitation among human beings of each other led to control and exploitation by human beings of nature. “The truth of the matter,” Bookchin wrote, “is that man has created these imbalances in nature as a direct outgrowth of the imbalances he has created in his own society.” As an anarchist, Bookchin placed the blame for the modern world’s predicament squarely on the shoulders of social hierarchy and the suppression of the individual. “The mass society, with its statistical beehive approach,” he wrote, “tends to triumph over free expression, personal uniqueness and cultural complexity. This creates a crisis not only in natural ecology but in social ecology.”126

Such an analysis resonated with the New Left, opposed as it was to the impersonal, bureaucratic “establishment,” and supportive as it was of free expression and cultural pluralism. And so, many radical thinkers adopted environmental concerns into a Bookchin-like framework. “Environment destruction is merely another manifestation of the fundamentally fucked-up system,” a contributor called “Panurge” wrote in the Rat. Such destruction “is the more subtle effect of a social system no longer in the hands of the people.”¹²⁷ The Old Mole of Cambridge, Massachusetts agreed: “The problem we face cannot be solved if we think about it in terms of pollution, which is a result of the crisis and not a cause,” wrote Roxanne O’Connell. “It has to do with the way we operate and the way people and nature are viewed—as something to be used and exploited.”¹²⁸ After People’s Park, the environment became a canary in a coalmine for some on the Left, a chief indicator of just how oppressive and self-destructive modern establishment society had become.

“The Environmental Movement is coming to be more than a re-labeled Conservation Movement,” Michael McCloskey told the Sierra Club’s membership several months after Earth Day. The boundaries of the environmental movement stretched to embrace the consumer movement, population stabilization, pacifism and participatory democracy, an action-oriented youth movement, and “a diffuse movement in search of a new focus for politics,” McCloskey said. “The varied groups are still learning to understand each other.” McCloskey found this fragmentation and diversification jarring. It remained unclear whether the coalition could hold. It might be possible, he speculated, “to try, eclectically, to combine many of these perspectives.” It was equally possible, though, that the Club was “entering into a period of competing strategies.”¹²⁹