Wild at heart - environmentalist Dave Foreman

Sierra, Jan-Feb, 1998 by B.J. Bergman

We're afloat, finally, easing into a delirious languor, still upstream from Navajo Bridge and barely 20 miles below the concrete monolith called Glen Canyon Dam. Hour One on the Colorado: immensity is general, all is a blur of rock and water, sun and sky and anticipation. There's no sign yet of the fabled rapids; we're just drifting, descending lazily past the bright Vermilion Cliffs on our way to the depths of the Grand Canyon. Creatures of wristwatches and leather shoes, we are nothing, reinventing ourselves, crossing over to river time. This is by definition a private process. Chatter seems vaguely profane.

It's Dave Foreman who spots the great blue heron on river left. We watch as it trolls the shorelines for fish, then launches itself abruptly and effortlessly, skimming the water's surface and gaining altitude, gliding along the contour of the sandstone wall until it vanishes from our view. Foreman keeps staring, as at an after-image. "They're so wonderfully prehistoric," he announces to no one in particular. "You look at a great blue heron and you just see how they're linked to dinosaurs."

I do see it, sort of Back in civilization in two weeks I'll see it more clearly, aided by picture-book photos of the Jurassic fossil Archaeopteryx, a feathered dinosaur thought to be the genetic bridge from reptiles to birds. For the moment, though, I'm more interested in the birder. This is, after all, the rowdy outlaw who in 1980 begat Earth First!, the radical band of monkeywrenchers for whom tree-spiking, 'dozer-disabling, and other forms of "ecological sabotage" were all in a night's work. Foreman and friends made their mark with a glorious forgery, an illusory crack in the dam that corralled the Colorado and turned Glen Canyon -- eulogized by David Brower as "the place no one knew" -- into Lake Powell, a splashy 160,000-acre playground for 3 million visitors a year. If Brower is the archdruid, Foreman throughout the 1980s was the archetypal eco-warrior: burly, bellicose, and, as Earth First!'s slogan had it, willing to brook "no compromise in defense of Mother Earth."

The cerebral, genial man in our rubber raft bears only a passing resemblance to the Dave Foreman of legend. At 50 he appears fit but surprisingly slight, pallid below and bald on top (he is usually pictured in hats), and today sports the kind of fish-pattern shirt favored by package-tour travelers to Key West. More substantively, Foreman long ago broke with Earth First!, has ceased his advocacy of monkeywrenching, and in 1995 won election to a three-year term as a Sierra Club director. Attacks from the left on his politics and character have become as reflexive as those from the right used to be. Alexander Cockburn, writing in The Nation, branded him "a tabby cat, lapping heartily from the boardroom saucers of the Sierra Club."

Even many mainstream conservationists, while less dyspeptic, find Foreman's conversion baffling. He spent over a decade sniping at the national green groups, claiming they'd been co-opted by their access to the powerful, their tidy "professionalism," their appetite for expansion. So why did this khaki-clad wilderness guerrilla come out of the mountains to dance with the Sierra Club, the very model of environmental respectability and good citizenship? had he finally outgrown the all-or-nothing idealism of a protacted and misspent youth? Has Foreman, like the mean and muddy Colorado, been tamed?

The water is up near 28,000 cubic feet per second today, high by post-dam standards but a trickle compared to the torrent Major John Wesley Powell and his men found in 1869. There are five of us in our boat. At the oars is Larry Stevens, a droll, unflappable research biologist and Grand Canyon authority who notched 220 trips down the gorge before he stopped counting. It's a bit of a shock to learn this is Foreman's maiden voyage: the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation scotched a planned expedition some 25 summers ago by shutting off the river to raise the level of the reservoir it named, perversely, after the one-armed explorer Powell. Lunch and a few modest rapids loosen our tongues, and soon the raft takes on the feel of a floating cracker barrel. Foreman and Stevens talk shop, schmoozing about dam-builders and bureaucrats, swapping insights on taxonomy and geology. A dragonfly buzzes the boat; Stevens tells us its kind has been around for 350 million years.

"As we go downstream, we're going back in time," he says. Then we're punching through House Rock rapid, leaving no doubt that there's life in the old Colorado yet.

As befits a Sierra Club outing, our first full day in the wild begins with a hike. We pause in the cozy North Canyon -- 21 Club members, including Foreman and his wife, Nancy Morton, plus six guides -- while Stevens holds forth on the local flora and fauna. A raven flies by overhead.

"Ed Abbey," someone jokes. In fact, it was the cantankerous author's stated wish to return as a turkey vulture, not a raven. But Foreman can tell from its behavior that this particular bird is not the reincarnation of Cactus Ed.