Robert Wyss: The Man Who Built the Sierra Club

David Brower (1912-2000) was a central figure in the modern environmental movement.   His leadership, vision, and elegant conception of the wilderness changed forever how we approach nature.

As a young man growing up in Berkeley, California, Brower proved himself a fearless climber of the Sierra Nevada's dangerous peaks. After serving in the Tenth Mountain Division during World War II, he became the first executive director of the Sierra Club.

Brower’s inception of publishing picture books of nature and his media savvy attracted millions to the conservation movement and the outdoors.  Through these ends, his outspokenness, and his actions with Congress and the courts, Brower stopped federally sponsored projects that would have dammed the Grand Canyon and destroyed hundreds of millions of acres of our nation's wilderness. He made the Sierra Club into a national force.

His achievements remain some of the most important triumphs of the conservation movement.  To admirers, he was tireless, passionate, visionary, and unyielding. To opponents and even some supporters, he was contentious and polarizing.

This uncompromising biography explores Brower's role as steward of the modern environmental movement. Yet what emerges from this unique portrait is a rich and robust profile of a leader who took up the work of John Muir and, along with Rachel Carson, made environmentalism the cause of our time.

Robert Wyss is a professor of journalism at the University of Connecticut where he has taught since 2002.  He is the author of The Man Who Built the Sierra Club,  Brimfield Rush –a nonfiction narrative set at the world-famous Brimfield Antique and Collectibles Show, and Covering the Environment, a journalism textbook about how journalists report on the environmental beat.

Wyss teaches environmental journalism to undergraduate students and communication skills to graduate science students.  Before teaching, Wyss was a reporter and editor for 28 years for the Providence Journal covering energy, environment and business.  He has also written for such publications as The New York Times, Christian Science Monitor, Audubon, Yankee, and the Huffington Post.

The Man that Built the Sierra Club book will be for sale at these events. The author will be signing books.

Robert Wyss will give two readings in June on the North Olympic Peninsula.  The Port Townsend Library and the Sierra Club North Olympic Group are cosponsoring the Thursday, June 15 reading in the upstairs of the Library.  Port Book and News and the Sierra Club North Olympic Group are cosponsoring the Friday, June 16 reading in the Port Angeles Library, Carver Room.  Both start at 7 PM.  These events are free.