This biography of David Brower is best read by starting on the very last page, where the reader learns that one of the most famous environmentalists of the twentieth century “was an amateur among the professionals” (297). An amateur environmentalist is someone who seeks to raise moral issues about humankind's relationship with the natural world, someone reluctant to compromise, who abhors a so-called win–win solution which is little more than a sorry capitulation to those keen to dominate nature. That was David Brower – a total amateur.

Brower was born in 1912 in Berkeley, California. A college dropout, Brower, who quipped that he was graduated from the University of the Colorado River, would eventually take up mountain climbing, a sport in which he excelled, indeed, fabulously so, conquering thirty-three peaks in the Sierra Nevada.

While Brower was off scaling mountains, the federal government launched what may be one of the most massive efforts in human history to transform a continent's river systems. Between 1928 and 1956 the US Bureau of Reclamation erected some seventy-seven dams while the US Army Corps of Engineers put up hundreds more. One of those dams, a seven-hundred-foot piece of concrete constructed along the Colorado river in northern Arizona between 1956 and 1963, would turn Brower into the thorough amateur he seemed destined to become. That dam was Glen Canyon. In a deal worked out in 1956, Brower had managed to get the dam builders to agree to spare Dinosaur National Monument in exchange for building a higher dam at Glen Canyon. At one level, the deal was an achievement. The federal government has yet to build a dam in a national park in the decades since. But to Brower, the deal was mistake, a failure of will on his part, a botched compromise that suggested moral weakness.

Brower's second-guessing and willingness to admit his mistake made him more human as well as more combative as he moved forward. He went on to advocate, along with Howard Zahniser, for the passage of the Wilderness Act, signed into law in 1964, a piece of legislation that deemed humankind a mere visitor in these undeveloped places. Over the next half-century, the legislation resulted in the preservation of over 109 million acres of land, an area equivalent to roughly the size of the state of California. In addition, Brower worked to keep the Grand Canyon free of dams by drumming up public support, through savvy advertising, for untamed rivers. He went toe-to-toe with the Bureau of Reclamation. And by the latter part of the 1960s Brower had transformed the Sierra Club from a genteel hiking group into a modern political force to be reckoned with. Then, because of his personal failings – his paranoia, indiscretions, defiance toward others, and reckless financial management – he was driven from power.

Brower did not give up. He moved on and founded Friends of the Earth in the year before the very first Earth Day. The emphasis on the earth suggested Brower's interest in taking environmentalism in a new direction, beyond the nation-state, to consider the health and future of the planet at large. The global vision that Brower promoted helped to inspire campaigns beyond the traditional ones against dams, roads, and the trade in furs to include nuclear weapons, herbicides, and armaments such as the B-1 bomber. But again Brower's no-holds-barred approach to environmentalism created tensions in the organization that resulted in his being fired. Again he was charged with financial mismanagement and insubordination as if he were acting out some Freudian repetition compulsion.

Brower was now in his seventies. But rather than retire he founded yet another environmental organization, the Earth Island Institute, which would come to embrace environmental justice and human rights. Meanwhile, from his position on the Sierra Club board, to which he was elected in the early 1980s, Brower criticized the group for being spineless and too compromising. The fire in his belly stuck with him to the end, even after he developed cancer. Instead of getting his illness treated Brower was off protesting automobile traffic in Yosemite National Park and followed that up by sticking a finger in the eye of Al Gore, the presumptive environmentalist nominee for President, and backing Ralph Nader who took a far less compromising approach to corporations and their environmental exploits.

Wyss's fine biography offers an empathic portrait of one of the greatest environmentalists ever to live. It's the perfect book in these triangulating times.