Global CPR
 by
David Brower
What I'm
working the hardest on now, if I can say hardest at my
age, is trying to establish a global CPR service: C for
conservation, P for preservation, and R for restoration.
You can sum it up in a ten-second sound bite: Conserve
the golden eggs carefully. Preserve the goose or there
will be no more golden eggs. And if you've already
damaged the goose, get going on restoration.
It comes
down to some fundamental requirements. Don't get rid of
anything you can't replace, for example, such as
species. Of course, we're getting rid of one species
about every twenty minutes, because we don't understand
the true value of nature. The forest service, for
example, thinks the value of wilderness is the number of
human footprints we put in it. That's like evaluating
the Mona Lisa by weighing its paint.
I like
to say that before we start criticizing capitalism, we
ought to try it. We don't factor the value of nature and
its services into the market equation. A wonderful,
eye-opening book edited by Gretchen C. Daily called
Nature's Services puts it in perspective. Every year we
use roughly $33 trillion worth of nature's services
throughout the worlds civilizations, and we
make little or no effort to pay any of that back. We
just use it. Look at the service a bee provides us, for
example. A bee doesn't charge hourly fees or anything
else. But if we lose the bees, we're not going to eat.
And the pollinators are disappearing. I just found that
out in my own backyard. Last year we had lots and lots
of flowers; this year, somehow, we have almost none. And
with no crop, we're in trouble.
Let's
not run our credit out on the earth. If we use $33
trillion worth of credit every year and don't pay
anything back, someone's going to say, "I'm sorry,
your credit line is exhausted." And when we lose
the wilderness -- if we lose it -- the world becomes a cage.
Even if
we know little about the wilderness outside, even if
we've never left the city, we can still revel at what's
going on in ourselves and where we came from. The
patient egg and the lucky sperm -- from these two entities
comes everything necessary for you and for me,
everything needed to be a person. You needed to be
nourished by your mother, kept warm and safe until you
emerged and nurtured. But everything you needed to know
comes from two cells, two seeds: How many eyelashes do
you need? How do you build a retinal? How do you build
windshield wipers to keep the eyes from getting too dry?
How do you build an immunity system? (At eighty-seven my
immune system has been developing for so long
I hardly have colds anymore. The grim reaper's not going
to get me with something little like a cold. He'll have
to get me some other way.)
All this
works by itself. It wasn't invented in the Industrial
Revolution. It wasn't the result of the Renaissance.
Man's appearance on this earth isn't responsible for
these systems. Everything now alive relates directly to
when life began, a direct outcome of failures and
successes along the way. Every one of us alive now is
the result of three and a half billion years of pure
success in the transmission of life's magic. And this
happened in wilderness, because that's all there was.
It's the ultimate encyclopedia, and we must stop
degrading it.
I would
like to see human beings honoring each other and the
intelligence with which we were born -- recognizing our
wonderful, delightful variation. No two people ever will
be or ever were alike. That difference is one of the
exciting things we can all celebrate.
When I
was about eleven, I read the entire Bible. I've
forgotten what I read, and I certainly didn't understand
it, but now I keep being reminded of some of my favorite
quotes. My current favorites are from Isaiah: "Thou
hast multiplied the nation, and not increased the
joy" (Isaiah 9:3) and "Woe unto them that join
house to house, that lay field to field, till there be
no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of
the earth" (Isaiah S:8). These verses point to two
things -- that God doesn't like sprawl, and that God does
like wilderness.
The
problem with the Ten Commandments, though, is that they
are all about how to take care of each other, which is
very important, but they don't have one suggestion about
how to take care of the earth -- not a word.
Maybe we
should take Father Thomas
Berry's advice: "Put the
Bible on the shelf for twenty years, and read the
earth." There is a vast amount of information out
there and it's pretty fascinating stuff. Once you get
even a little skilled at looking at it and trying to
understand it, you will never find life dull again. We
need to work with the earth, and do some global CPR:
conserve, preserve, and restore.
Readers'
Comments
 This
article was excerpted from the book Architects
of Peace: Visions of Hope in Words and Images, ? 2000, by Michael
Collopy. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, New World Library,
Novato, CA 94949. www.newworldlibrary.com
Info/Order this book.
This article was excerpted from:
"Architects of Peace"
by Michael Collopy.
Info/Order this book-?
About The
Author
Born
in Berkeley, California, in 1912, David Brower has been fighting
conservation battles since 1938. Mr. Brower joined the Sierra Club in
1933 and was its first executive director from 1952 to 1969. In one of
his famous campaigns, he prevented the Grand Canyon from being dammed.
Brower saw the club's membership grow from two thousand to seventy-seven
thousand before leaving on request in 1969, after which he founded
Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and Earth
Island Institute. As a climber and mountaineer, Brower made seventy
first ascents. He has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize three
times. Earth Island Institute, www.earthisland.org
(415) 788-3666. David Brower is the author of Let
the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run: A Call to Those Who Would Save
the Earth
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