North Meets South: FoEI 1971–2002

Abstract

FoE was the idea of one man — David Brower, who founded FoE in the United States in 1969. He had been actively involved with the Sierra Club, the US preservationist organization, since 1933 and became its first Executive Director in 1952, helping to expand its membership and playing a leading role in campaigns against dams in the American West. Brower came under criticism within the Sierra Club for failing to act to curtail the financial losses that it was making in the late 1960s. He was also opposed to its acceptance of a new nuclear power plant at Diablo Canyon in California. By 1969 anti-Brower candidates had been elected to the Sierra Club’s Board and Brower’s position had become untenable (Bosso 2005: 42, 51). He resigned and announced that we would form a new organization, which, on the suggestion of his wife, was called Friends of the Earth. Like the Sierra Club, FoE was based in San Francisco, and it drew on the preservationist tradition of defending wilderness but combined this with new environmentalist issues such as critiques of overconsumption and population growth, and a more general call for a new relationship between humanity and the earth.