Prior to The Man Who Built the Sierra Club: A Life of David Brower by Robert Wyss published by Columbia University Press in 2016, my most thorough introduction to environmentalist David Brower came from John McPhee’s classic Encounters with the Arch Druid (1971). While it has been a long time since I read McPhee’s account of dialogue between arch-nemesis’ Brower and Bureau of Reclamation Director Floyd Dominy during a rafting trip, Brower came across to me in that work as amiable and casual. That is definitely not that the characterization given by Wyss who, in contrast, depicts Brower as manic, domineering, and demanding. While he may have been charming to meet, he was also a stern taskmaster and troublesome subordinate who followed his own moral compass to the great consternation of his employers who found him difficult to keep focused. As I read through Brower’s life, I kept noting some striking similarities to William Temple Hornaday. Hornaday is not mentioned at all in the index, and I would not be surprised if Brower had never even heard of him in anything more than a passing reference.
Hornaday focused almost all his conservation efforts exclusively on wildlife while Brower devoted himself primarily to protecting natural landscapes. Like Brower, Hornaday caused his employers at the Bronx Zoo constant headaches. Both Madison Grant and Henry Fairfield Osborn were exasperated with Hornaday’s endless fights with everyone over everything. Anything from a seemingly simple exchange of specimens with the American Museum to complex negotiations with the city of New York turned into a brawl. Hornaday’s employers did not appreciate either the stinging barbs that Hornaday, in his zeal for the cause for wildlife protection, directed at his fellow conservations (including someone like George Bird Grinnell who was a close personal friend to Grant) or the fact that battled his adversaries as if it was a no-holds barred street fight. Hornaday publicly shamed and humiliated his adversaries and refused to play by the Queensbury rules when it came to his dealings with the gentleman sportsman. Like Brower’s employers at the Sierra Club, Hornaday’s at the New York Zoological Society eventually decided he was too hot to handle. After a prolonged battle with Department of Agriculture, the Bureau of Biological Survey, and John B. Burnham, among others, Hornaday was to some extent forced to retire.
Like Brower who went on to found Friends of the Earth, Hornaday would not be silenced by the New York Zoological Society. Long before his retirement, he formed the Wildlife Protection Fund, an endowment of $100,000 raised from wealthy contributors, that allowed him the freedom to campaign for his own causes in his own way outside of the auspices and control of the New York Zoological Society. Like Brower’s Friends of the Earth, Hornaday’s organization allowed him to take a much more radical, passionate stance.
Like Brower, Hornaday was a pioneer in the use of media and advertising. When he was with the Sierra Clun Brower produced stunning photography-books and ran full-page ads in major newspapers supporting his causes. Fifty years prior to Brower’s use of these techniques, Hornaday had done similar things. He was the first person to write a book devoted exclusively to wildlife protection, Our Vanishing Wildlife (1913). He also pioneered in the use of photographs in his publications, which was then an expensive and new technology. When Hornaday’s publishers balked at the expense, his wealthy friend and patron Andrew Carnegie financed the projects. Hornaday also used the new medium of film in the cause, such as when he and T. Gilbert Pearson of the Audubon Society showed a clip of egrets being killed and skinned in their lobbying campaign to persuade Congress in 1913 to support a ban on plumage imports as part of Woodrow Wilson’s tariff revision. They were ultimately successful in accomplishing this historic and long-sought objective of wildlife protectionists.
Both men were uncompromising and came to that position after learning some lessons the hard way. For Brower it was acceding to the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam to protect Dinosaur National Monument. For Hornaday, it was working with sportsmen and even gun manufacturers. In both instances, Brower and Hornaday felt betrayed and became unyielding in their pursuit of what they considered the pure and just cause.
Both men were workaholics. Brower to the extent, according to Wyss, that he damaged his marriage and even relationship to his children. While Hornaday’s marriage and relation with his daughter remained solid as bedrock, he worked long days as director of the Bronx Zoo followed by long nights and weekends writing. He wrote, as he mentioned in several letters over the years, until he could no longer keep his eyes open.
Both men were builders. Brower took a small California mountaineering club and turned it into an influential national environmental organization. Hornaday built the largest zoo in the world from scratch and made it the international standard in animal conservation and education.
The last similarity that I wish to bring up is that both Brower and Hornaday relentlessly battled federal governmental agencies. For Brower, it was the Bureau of Reclamation. For Hornaday, it was the Bureau of Biological Survey, forerunner to the Fish and Wildlife Service. Both were scathing in denouncing these agencies, their motives, their use of science, and their unhealthy connections to business interests.
I am not sure what all this means. Perhaps, the most that can be teased out of this is that agents of change can be prickly, principled, and unyielding characters unwilling to accept things as they are when they see things as they should be.
No comments:
Post a Comment