I waited till Sunday to call him at his house high atop the Berkeley, Calif., hills. I figured if he was in the middle of one of his famous waffle brunches, my job would be made easier. I could ask him to put on San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, perhaps, or Randy Hayes, who started the Rainforest Action Network, or Alice Waters, the chef who helped create nouvelle California cuisine. Brower's "conviviality factor" has had a lot to do with his success. He knows everybody, and the waffles have played a big part in that.

"So, Dave, how's it going?"

"Not so good," he said, and I expected him to speak of infirmity, though he rarely talks about his own health. "I'm burning out on the Sierra Club. I'm running for president of the board again." Dave had been the first executive director of the Sierra Club in the '50s and '60s, helped to save the Grand Canyon, establish Point Reyes National Seashore and Olympic National Park, publish photographers Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, invent the exhibit-format coffee-table book, stuff like that. Then he'd been kicked out by his former friends Adams and Wallace Stegner, because of -- in Dave's view -- his unfashionably early opposition to nuclear power. In a decade or two, he was forgiven and duly made an honorary vice president. Later, in the '90s, after most of his friends on the old board were greening the earth most literally, he got himself reelected, along with a slate of puppy rabble-rousers like Dave Foreman of Earth First. In 1994, fretting that the average age of Sierra Club members was browning again, he sponsored the candidacy of 23-year-old Adam Werbach, a college organizer who has since gone on to host the rad TV enviro show "The Thin Green Line." ("Dave? Dave's younger than me," says Werbach.)

"I have many ideas on how to get the club back to what John Muir was after," Dave continued on the phone, "but the Sierra Club is more interested in process than in getting things done. [Executive Director] Carl Pope sent me a 30,000-word document saying what you can and cannot say, what the standing rules are, what chapters may do, how you may or may not raise money. Forty commandments. I said, 'The Bible got by with 10.' It'd be more fun committing suicide than reading this stuff!

"I've been anxious to get the club back into democracy, back to what the members are saying. A few years ago, the members had a petition to cut all cutting in national forests. The staff didn't want that. I am wary of any organization that gets lost in procedure-itis. The planet is burning, and all I hear is the violins. Whether I win or not, I'll stay on the Sierra board and keep bitching."

About now in normal conversation, the called is supposed to ask the caller how he is doing. I consider Dave a friend; we wrote a little book together -- "Let the Mountains Talk, Let the Rivers Run: A Call to Those Who Would Save the Earth" (title mine, the rest, resolutely Dave; first book printed on flowers, instead of trees), but once the train (Dave is not a friend of cars) is rolling down the track, Dave, though ever polite, is not easily derailed. He doesn't ask others about themselves much, never has. Yet, unlike some rock-and-critter zealots, he truly likes people, sees us humans as part of the soup.

"The conventional [environmental] organizations are losing their edge," he said. "They are too dependent on their funders. They are like the media, which is too afraid of offending advertisers. We are taking $30 trillion from the earth each year, and putting only $20 trillion back. We'll have to produce as much food in the next 40 years as we have in the last 8,000, to feed the population. We have 300 billionaires, who have as much money as the 3 billion people below them. Everybody wants to be Bill Gates, and the earth is suffering because of it. I have said Wall Street needs therapy. We should invest in things we need, not just in quick fixes. Of course, before we judge capitalism, I say we should try it. I mean, any company that so disregards their natural capital would be put out of business. It's Sunday. I do a count in the Sunday [New York] Times. There are about 10,000 places to invest, all ignoring the earth, and if you keep ignoring the earth" -- [pause on the fiber-optic; I knew Dave was smiling, warming up like William Jennings Bryan] -- "you'll hurt your profits, and kill your kids."

Strong thing to say. Dave has four kids of his own. But the earth is Dave's garden, his family. He's a megalomaniac, I suppose, and we need more good megalomaniacs around this planet. Dave once put the same phrase somewhat more elegantly, and it is chiseled in stone at the National Aquarium in Washington: "We do not inherit the earth from our fathers, we are borrowing it from our children."

Good line.

Dave is very good with the good line. That's another of the secrets to his success. He's a quick study who makes others see, instantly, what's happening. Another touchstone is that, though Brower may flounder and question himself, he never deviates from the mission. The sermon, though ever changing, is always wondrously the same. Saving the earth is what he cares about, and he rallies others to the cause. "Nothing I have heard from anybody else has affected my thinking so deeply as what I heard from David Brower," Charles Kuralt, of all people, once said, and there are dozens of strong environmental leaders around the country and the world who got the fire in the belly, and the purpose to their lives, from a Brower speech or, just as likely, from a tavern encounter with the arch-druid. Brower changes people.

"We can't afford the luxury of pessimism," said Dave, in Berkeley. "You wouldn't think that, after what I just said, but we should never say we can't fix it. We just need to work on it."

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