Storming the Gates of Paradise (34 page)

Brower himself came out of publishing and publicity, and he naturally gravitated toward books—and later, newspaper ads and films—as a means of educating the public and advocating for conservation issues. A brilliant mountain climber and mercurial personality, he more than anyone changed the club from a small regional outdoors society that did a little lobbying to the preeminent environmental organization of the 1960s. His book projects sometimes made money for the Sierra Club; more reliably, they brought in members and raised awareness. The club had 7,000 members in 1952; 16,500 in 1961; 24,000 by 1964; and 55,000 by 1967 (in mid-2000, membership stood at 636,302). But by the mid-1960s, the publications program had begun to lose money, not raise it. As Stephen Fox recounted in his history of the American environmental movement,

The conspicuous success of
Wildness
concealed the more typical commercial failure of other books in the series. Brower, believing the books a triumph in conservation, if not financial, terms, disregarded the warnings of his directors and plowed more money into the program. Once he asked the Publications Committee . . . for permission to go ahead with an Exhibit Format book. Turned down, he imperturbably replied: “But I’ve already spent $10,000 on it.” Such collisions delayed the execution of contracts and the payment of royalties, poisoning relations between Brower and some of his most prominent authors, including Porter, Krutch, and Loren Eiseley. . . . From1964 onward, the books program lost an average of $60,000 a year.

Brower and the Sierra Club published Porter’s
Summer Island: Penobscot Country
, a portrait of his family’s island in Maine, in 1966;
Baja California and the Geography of Hope
, with an extended essay by Joseph Wood Krutch, in 1967; and
Galapagos: The Flow of Wildness
in 1968. Though the books were not always
related to immediate conservation objectives, they were often orchestrated to complement the campaigns Brower was working on. In his history of the Sierra Club, Michael P. Cohen points out that
The Place Nobody Knew
is a corollary to the “Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so they can get closer to the ceiling?” ad, just as the Galapagos book was linked to Brower’s infamous advertisement proposing the whole planet as “Earth National Park.” The Galapagos book also helped to feed the turbulent controversies swirling around Brower by the late 1960s, when Porter was a member of the board of directors.

Porter had been elected to the board in 1965 and served two terms during the great years of transition in the Sierra Club. In the 1950s, the club had been fairly active in organizing outings and expeditions, less so in fighting environmental battles, and little involved in such battles outside California. Then, the club took no stand on development and technology as such, only on their implementation in particularly beautiful or ecologically sensitive places. The Sierra Club essentially told the U.S. government that even though it opposed a dam in Dinosaur, it would not oppose one in Glen Canyon—and then the club found out too late what beauty the latter canyon of the Colorado held. Glen Canyon was not described as ecologically important but as aesthetically irreplaceable. In the 1960s, the club began to oppose many kinds of pesticide and herbicide use; and by the 1970s, nuclear power and other major technologies were called into question: it had moved from preserving isolated places to protecting pervasive systems.

Porter was an outsider in the club, whose directors were then mostly Californians, longtime members of the organization, and, more often than not, participants in its outings; he brought with him an independence from the club’s traditional ties and limitations. Several board members of the 1960s had been great mountaineers in the days when the Sierra Club was a major force in American mountaineering, and many had ties not only within the club but within more powerful institutions in California—there were engineers, chemists, physicists, and executives involved with enterprises the club would later target. “The idea of playing hardball with big corporations—Standard Oil or PG&E and what have you—was a jarring thing to them,” remembered board member Phil Berry.

With Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, the drama of Dinosaur and Glen
Canyon was repeated. The builder was Pacific Gas & Electric, the same company that benefits from hydropower from Hetch Hetchy Dam inside Yosemite National Park, the early twentieth-century dam that John Muir strove so hard to prevent and that first made the club into a forceful political organization (and first threatened to split it, as members became divided over the relative merits of development and preservation). In 1963, members of the club discovered that PG&E was planning to build a plant at Nipomo Dunes on the central California coast, a site that had often been recommended for park status. After the club’s executive committee voted to try to preserve the dunes, board president Will Siri privately negotiated to have the plant moved to Diablo Canyon. Once again, too late, Sierra Club activists discovered that Diablo Canyon was too important to trade off. Many board members, including Adams, argued that if the club had agreed to support the Diablo siting, then they had an obligation to stick by the agreement. Porter thought differently. As Berry puts it, the uncompromising stand advocated by board member Martin Litton “was most eloquently stated, really, by Eliot Porter. Eliot said at that infamous September ’68 board meeting, that the Sierra Club should never be a party to a convention that lessens wilderness. That’s the truth. We shouldn’t be. I think we gained strength from the mess of Diablo.”

Porter himself said in a letter published in the
Sierra Club Bulletin
, “Every acre that is lost diminishes our stake in the future. That is why a compromise is always a losing game. The wildness that we have set as our task to protect is finite, but the appetite of the developers is infinite.” Litton managed to get a bare majority to vote to withdraw support and begin fighting against Diablo Canyon. Porter’s stand on this action was his most high-profile act during his six years on the board. To Porter, Diablo was biologically important as well as scenic, just as his Galapagos book was about evolution, Darwin, and imperiled biodiversity as well as exotic fauna and scenery. (The club lost the Diablo fight, and by the 1980s, the antinuclear movement had taken over the job of protesting the nuclear power plant there, which was built with many cost overruns, huge errors, and unanswered questions about safety.)

At least since the battle over Hetch Hetchy, early in the twentieth century, the Sierra Club had experienced a lot of internal dissent about tactics and mission,
but the battles during the sixties were far more heated than their predecessors. Like the controversy over Diablo Canyon, the controversy over the publications program threatened to tear the club apart in the late 1960s. Board conservative Alex Hildebrand later accused Porter of a conflict of interest for voting to support the lavish publications program, a charge Porter vehemently denied. Brower, Porter, and some of the others on the board saw the publications as having far-reaching, if indirect, effects, in promoting environmental awareness and raising the club’s profile. Others saw the program—particularly the picture books—as a drain of time and money and believed that publications should be far more closely tied to specific campaigns and specifically endangered American places. Adams—who had mixed feelings about color photography anyway—was opposed to the lavishness and political indirectness of the publications program and to David Brower’s direction in those years.

Porter’s Galapagos book, which he had been thinking about since the early 1960s, joined Diablo as one of the conflicts that came to a head in 1968. “There was a great deal of opposition to the proposal within the board of directors,” recalled Porter of the Galapagos project, “on the grounds that the islands were outside the continental United States, which, it was felt, put them outside the legitimate conservation concerns of the club; so the idea was rejected.” Then-president Edgar Wayburn argued that “other projects have higher conservation priority; for example a Mount McKinley book could make or break a great national park.”

Porter shared Brower’s sense that the club and the American conservation movement should expand to begin working globally, and he was passionate about the threats to the unique species and ecosystem of the Galapagos. Brower reintroduced the project more successfully later. “The publications committee of the Sierra Club had at last agreed to finance an expedition to the Galapagos Islands,” Porter wrote. However, he added, “before it left, our party reached an almost unimaginable size.” Porter’s son and daughter-in-law and Brower and his son Kenneth had joined it, along with various other individuals playing roles of varying necessity. Eventually growing impatient with continual delays in publication, Porter in 1966 approached Harper and Row about publishing the book, but it
remained with the Sierra Club and grew into an unwieldy two-volume set whose publication costs, like the expense of the expedition, became enormous.

By 1968, as Cohen recounted, “Adams argued that Brower would not accept a position subordinate to the Club and demonstrated his thesis by detailing what he called the ‘Galapagos Book venture,’ wherein Brower flagrantly disregarded decisions of the Publications and Executive committees.” Brower’s waywardness pleased no one. As Porter recalled, “During a board meeting at the Sierra Club camp in 1968, Brower proudly presented me with the first copy off the press of
Galapagos: The Flow of Wildness
. . . . My initial delight was soon dampened, however, by the discovery that my name appeared nowhere on either volume other than as photographer. . . . When I asked Brower why my name was not on either volume, he said it was because there were so many contributors that no one could be named. I was so shaken and speechless I left the meeting.” Despite this, reviewers and readers recognized it as Porter’s book.

Porter would vote to keep Brower on the board of directors anyway, but the vote was ten to five against, and Brower left the job—but not the club—in 1969. He founded Friends of the Earth and continued working to protect wilderness, nationally and globally. Porter served out his second term and, to his relief and chagrin, was not nominated to a third. He continued to support the club’s objectives, served on the New Mexico Nature Conservancy board and on the Chairman’s Council of the Natural Resources Defense Council, gave images as donations and for reproduction to environmental organizations (and Planned Parenthood), and continued to donate money to a wide variety of causes. And his books continued to be published, primarily by E. P. Dutton, which in 1972 finally put out the bird book that had inspired him to take up color photography more than thirty years before.

Porter himself roamed farther afield, completing books on Antarctica, Iceland, Egypt, Greece, Africa (with Peter Matthiessen), and China, as well as continuing to photograph North American places and phenomena. Many of the images made abroad incorporated evidence of human culture and portrayed human beings, as the American work generally did not. Perhaps it is that people were integrated into their landscapes in those places in a way they seldom are in the restless, rootless
United States (though that process of integration has created some of the world’s oldest environmental degradation in overgrazed Greece and topsoil-exhausted China). The African and Antarctic books were particularly concerned with environmental issues, though questions of extinction and habitat were present in most. From a modest initial definition of nature as birds and details of the New England landscape, Porter’s photography grew into a global picture of natural systems and human participation—often benign—in those systems. His work seemed to evolve as the environmental movement did, from protecting specific species and places to rethinking the human place in the world, a world reimagined as a system of interconnected systems rather than a collection of discrete objects.

Porter remained a scientist as well as an environmentalist. When James Gleick’s book
Chaos: Making a New Science
came out in 1987, Porter read it with excitement and, with the help of his assistant Janet Russek, organized his own book around its themes,
Nature’s Chaos
, for which Gleick wrote an introduction. Porter was struck by the way the new scientific ideas seemed to describe nature as he had been attempting to describe it with his camera—for chaos theory might better be called complexity theory: it describes the intricate patternings, interpenetrations, and repercussions of natural processes. For this last book—which would be published posthumously in 1990—Porter collected existing images that suggested patterning, conjunctions of forces that overlapped and affected each other. In some ways, these had always been his themes.

Perhaps the central question about Porter’s work is about the relationship between science, aesthetics, and environmental politics. His brother, the painter and critic Fairfield Porter, wrote in a 1960 review of the color photographs: “There is no subject and background, every corner is alive,” and this suggests what an ecological aesthetic might look like. The statement resembles Barry Commoner’s 1971 declaration of the first principle of ecology, “Everything is connected to everything else,” which ecofeminist Carolyn Merchant revised in 1981
as “All parts of a system have equal value.” Merchant expanded, “Ecology assigns equal importance to all organic and inorganic components in the structure of an ecosystem. Healthy air, water, and soil—the abiotic components of the system—are as essential as the entire diverse range of biotic parts—plants, animals, and bacteria and fungi. Without each element in the structure, the system as a whole cannot function properly.” A century before, John Muir had stated this with less science: “When we try to pick out anything in the universe, we find it connected to everything else.” Porter’s most distinctive compositions are the close-ups in which the frame is filled with life and with stuff. Rather than portraits that isolate a single phenomenon, they function something like samples from the web of interrelated phenomena.