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Book Review
| Your Land and Mine: Evolution of a Conservationist. By Edgar Wayburn and Allison Alsup. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2004. 319 pp. Illustrations, index. $35.00.
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| For four decades Ed Wayburn helped guide the Sierra Club, serving on its board of directors and as president for five years during the 1960s. This volume is not an autobiography but rather his memoirs of guiding the organization from a local outdoor club into one of the world's most powerful environmental organizations. Wayburn casts himself as a key player in this evolution, an early conservationist fighting for open lands in the San Francisco Bay area whose activism expanded into a global concern for environmental quality. |
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The book provides almost nothing on Wayburn's personal life other than his role as a physician and the importance of his wife, Peggy, in supporting his growing activism. He devotes, however, great detail to describing his early treks into Marin County and the Sierra Nevada Mountains, which as early as the 1940s spawned both a love of the land and a realization of the threat that urban growth posed. One of the first to advocate a conservation agenda in the Sierra Club, Wayburn led efforts to expand Mount Tamalpais State Park and to create both Point Reyes National Seashore and the Golden Gate National Recreation Area. It was critical, Wayburn insisted, that the Sierra Club define a "concise, marketable view of wilderness" (p. 73). It needed to stand for something, not just against proposals. The National Park Service was not always helpful, allowing "details to suffocate vision" (p. 57). |
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The Redwood National Park was the Sierra Club's "first large scale affirmative campaign" (p.146), the "toughest of my conservation career" (p. 170). Protecting Alaska's vast wilderness, however, soon became Wayburn's "obsession" (p. 227). As such, the book goes into every legislative detail of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act and, subsequently, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. Throughout, Wayburn provides new detail on the role of figures well known to environmental historians—Henry Jackson, Wayne Aspinall, Ronald Reagan, and others on both sides of the issue. |
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Most interesting, however, is Wayburn's description of the inner workings of the Sierra Club, specifically its well-publicized split with its prominent president David Brower. While Wayburn claims to admire Brower, his book defends the organization. Readers with a specific interest in one of the areas Wayburn covers will enjoy the work, while others may argue that it lacks context. Wayburn claims to embrace modern environmentalism and an ecological approach, but devotes little of the book to this stage in the Sierra Club's evolution. His focus remains narrow, apparently assuming that the reader already has an understanding of the broader environmental movement and the overall policies of the administrations covered. |
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"I hope that," Wayburn concludes, "these memoirs will show how one dedicated person can help save a little part of the planet" (p. 15). If this is his goal for the book, Wayburn succeeds. It may lack context, but it is hard to argue against his influence on both the Sierra Club and the modern wilderness movement. |
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J. Brooks Flippen is an associate professor of history and the author of Nixon and the Environment (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000). |
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