During Expo '74, David Brower came to Spokane, Washington, to speak at an environmental symposium. This passage about the symposia is taken from The Fair and The Falls: Spokane's Expo '74, Transforming an American Environment. (Eastern Washington University Press, 1997)
"A Sort of Earth National Park"
Expo received a $50,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, which also mounted an educational exhibit. Harvard economist and Nobel laureate Wassily Leontief, who was on the advisory committee, declared that "the Expo symposia will provide a big step in establishing a much-needed relationship between scientific technicians and the people."(1)
During the fair, the symposia included three international conferences, six topical conferences -- on energy, population, agriculture, health, human settlements, and resource management -- and special meetings on recycling, municipal ecology, women and the environment, solid waste management, environmental law, and environmental education. In addition, days were set aside for "viewpoint statements" by the United Nations, Japan, Canada, the Soviet Union, the United States, and other nations.(2)
The theme for the three international symposia was "Learning to Live on a Small Planet." The first was devoted to "The Dilemma Facing Humanity." Participants included Senator Henry Jackson, environmentalist David Brower, futurist Robert Theobold, and scholars from Kenya National Parks, the United Nations, Moscow State University, and many American universities. Participants made statements on such topics as economic growth, limits to growth, the third world, and preservation. A Soviet speaker claimed that socialism had "distinct advantages" for solving environmental problems, and a Native American spokesman, not to be outdone, said that his people "took good care of the country for a long time."(3)
This symposium featured a spirited debate between industrialists and environmentalists. At one point Anthony J. Wiener of the Hudson Institute delivered a plea for economic development. "We're like mountain climbers," he said, "We don't know whether we can make it, but we know we can't go back." In his speech, David Brower, a seasoned climber, retorted, "This is one mountaineer who's here because I had enough sense -- more than once -- to turn around." He added, "I'm a doomsayer because there are so many doom-makers around."(4) In his speech, Brower underscored the need to take environmental problems seriously. He began by using a story he attributed to Maurice Strong, Executive Director of the U.N. Environment Program.
"An audience was about ready to watch a concert in a large auditorium when someone noticed flames around the bottom of the curtain. The audience started, with some anxiety, for the door. Sensing the emergency that was imminent, a musician strolled very nonchalantly over to the piano and, very deliberately, sat down and began to play. He played so beautifully that the audience came back to their seats -- and burned to death."(5) Brower continued, "The moral, of course, is beware of a calm piano player. I will not be that calm for you."
Brower also rejected the implications of the conference title, "The Dilemma Facing Humanity." "I believe that humanity is not facing a dilemma," he said. "It has but a single choice; to learn to live on a small planet. To choose otherwise is to eliminate humanity." "Second," he said, "I think that a preservationist is not a man apart. Everyone is a preservationist, though few admit it openly. We either preserve what makes life possible, or out we go."
Brower then reminded the symposium that our planet is the only one we have. "Some people," he said, "think that if we run out of this earth, there's a spare." To underscore the absurdity of that notion, Brower explained that if Neanderthal man had started traveling long ago at the speed of an Apollo rocket, he would still not have approached the nearest possible back-up planet. "This planet is all we have," Brower added, "We're stuck with it. We've got to handle it a little bit better than we are presently doing."
Brower next presented his trademark argument. He asked the audience to squeeze the history of the planet down to six days, explaining that in that time frame, Neanderthal man had not appeared until eleven seconds before midnight on the sixth day. The pyramids were built one second before midnight, and the industrial revolution began one fourteenth of a second before midnight. Brower continued:
We got to feeling extraordinarily clever. We became so extremely radical that we began using up capital at an unprecedented rate -- the capital of the environment; the capital of animate and inanimate resources. That all worked so well that we thought we had it all made. We liked what we had done so well that in the last five hundredth of a second, post World War II, we got into the GNP race. Russia started it, and we wouldn't take second place....
So it is midnight. Do we control technology or serve it? Or do we find a new oracle?
I like the planet so much that I'd like to preserve Earth as a conservation district within the universe, a sort of Earth National Park.
Brower concluded by urging the audience to "pause at the brink." In an image reminiscent of an old Boy Scout concept -- "Leave your campsite cleaner than you found it" -- Brower argued that human beings should live in such a way that the value of their planet would be "at least as high when we leave it as it was when we came."(6) Brower's speech -- so passionate and so convincing -- was the high-water mark of Expo rhetoric. Two decades after the fair it remains one of the finest statements ever made on behalf of ecological awareness.
Notes
(1) "Expo's Symposia Defined as Forum," Spokesman-Review, October 27, 1973, 6.
(2) "Symposia Schedule Set," Spokane Chronicle, May 3, 1974, 11.
(3) Neil Felgenhauer and Roger Hull, "Soviets Favor Talks," Spokane Chronicle, May 21, 1974, 5.
(4) "Industrialists, Preservationists Lock Horns in Environmental Talks," Kalispell Daily Inter Lake, May 20, 1974.
(5) Quoted in David Brower, "Preservationist Viewpoint," in "The Dilemma Facing Humanity," International Symposium I, eds. George M. Dalen and Clyde R. Tipton Jr. (Columbus, Ohio: Battelle Memorial Institute, 1974), 19.
(6) Brower, "Preservationist Viewpoint," 19-20, 23.