Making Parks with Books

An Impact on Publishing

I posed these questions to Ken Brower, a Bay Area writer and conservationist who grew up with the Exhibit Format series. His father was David Brower, the Sierra Club’s charismatic executive director from 1952 to 1969, who was largely responsible for conceiving the series.  

Ken recalls being present, at age twelve, in sessions in which his father worked with Ansel Adams and the writer Nancy Newhall to put together the first title, This Is the American Earth, published in 1960. When he was a sophomore at the University of California, Berkeley, he was hired to edit the Jeffers folio, Not Man Apart, which became one of the most popular Exhibit Format titles, and he went on to edit or write more than half the series.

“I think Stegner was referring to the atmosphere as the books started coming out,” Brower said when we spoke recently in Berkeley. “As I watched them making This Is the American Earth, they were excited; it was electric. It was like they were working under ‘intense light.’ And I think it was more than ‘something of a revolution in publishing.’” He observed that it changed bookmaking itself in three main ways.

“First, it changed the way books were marketed,” he said. “My father would take the books around to stores, and they’d look at them and say, ‘We can’t sell these; they won’t fit on our shelves.’ Big-format photographic books were done in limited and costly editions, not as trade books, until then. But they found that they could sell them: people would see them displayed in the shop windows and go in and buy them.” He noted that This Is the American Earth sold over a million copies in its various editions, while the Ballantine paperbacks sold even more.

“Second, I think the series revolutionized the way people looked at nature through books,” Brower said. “Ansel Adams first noticed this. When you ‘read’ pictures in the Exhibit Format, your eye doesn’t just rest on a single image as it does in smaller formats. It has to move around, the way it does when you’re outside in a landscape. So people walking down city streets and seeing the books in shop windows could suddenly feel as though they were in the wilderness. People have said that the books changed their lives.” For instance, membership in the Sierra Club climbed as the books were being released.

“Third, and I think most important from my father’s viewpoint, it had an unprecedented impact on the environmental controversies that, as Stegner wrote, many of the books address,” he said. “Exhibit Format books contributed significantly to stopping dams in Grand Canyon National Park and to establishing Redwood and North Cascades national parks. One of the first titles, Island in Time, had a lot to do with establishing the Bay Area’s own national park. And that book still has a lot to do with that park.” 

Books as Nature’s Advocates

Island in Time was another of the books that inspired me fifty years ago. With photographs by Philip Hyde and text by Harold Gilliam, a San Francisco environmental writer, it describes the Point Reyes Peninsula north of the California city. Divided from the mainland by tectonic movements that are rafting it northwestward along the San Andreas fault, the peninsula is one of the few undeveloped stretches on the state’s coast. Cattle ranches and dairy farms occupied it until the 1950s. Then, impending suburbanization sparked a conservation movement that encouraged the Kennedy administration, favoring new parks, to establish the Point Reyes National Seashore in 1962. It is now the only major national park unit an hour’s drive from a megalopolis.  

Published earlier in the same year the park was created, Island in Time celebrates the peninsula’s uniqueness, which involves geological and botanical differences from the mainland as well as historical remoteness. The book informed me about the park, and, as I continued to explore it, Hyde’s photographs became a benchmark of a “rewilding” process that was underway. His landscapes are beautiful, but cattle are the only animals, and there are no people. A two-page spread at the beginning underlines this, showing an expansive seascape in the background and a barbed wire fence in the foreground. But, over time, the fences dwindled, while bare gullies and grazed hillsides grew up to riparian woodland, pine savanna, and coastal prairie. Charismatic wildlife like bobcats and river otters increased, and the shore was alive with sea lions, seals, and gray whales—and with sunbathers and swimmers.  

In the northern third of the federally owned park, however, cattle ranches and dairy farms persisted. Since farming was declining, it had been expected that those areas would revert to the park in a few decades, so they remained under nominal leases, rents, and grazing fees. They came to be taken for granted as a “pastoral zone,” evoking scenes of rustic tranquility. In a 2015 David Brower biography, Tom Turner, a prominent environmentalist, writes: “Do cows belong in a national park? In this one they do.” Yet cows weren’t mandated in the 1962 park bill, and industrial dairy farming is not scenic. Muddy holding pens and manure piles surround sheet metal barns and milking sheds. As time passed, conflicts between park and farms increased.

Raising Visibility

The major event of the park’s rewilding was the return of tule elk, once abundant on the peninsula. A subspecies endemic to California, the elk narrowly escaped extinction in the 1800s; their survival depends on the scarce remaining habitat. In 1978, ten were reintroduced to a fenced refuge on Tomales Point at the peninsula’s north end. They had increased to over 400 by 1999, when twenty-eight were moved to the wilderness area south of the ranches. Both herds became stellar attractions to the park, which was receiving heavy visitation and international tourism by the 2000s. Packed parking lots and eroded hiking trails called for more public access and facilities.  

During the droughts from 2012 to 2015, about half the elk in the refuge died, mainly of starvation; the spectacle of rotting carcasses inside the fence alarmed the public. Meanwhile, ranchers who received Park Service waivers for stream pollution and greenhouse gas emissions called for the “culling” of free-roaming elk to reduce conflict with cattle. They also wanted to increase restrictions on public access to the “pastoral zone” and to intensify their operations—raising sheep, chickens, pigs, and row crops, as well as cattle.  

The conflicts boiled over in a 2022 “Elk Rally” at the park’s Bear Valley visitor center, where a number of speakers advocated an end to agribusiness in the park. Among them was Ken Brower, who grew up with Point Reyes National Seashore even more than with the Exhibit Format books. He’d been present in 1955 when a builder refused his family access to Limantour Beach, now the park’s most popular beach. This was a mistake for developers because David Brower brought the Sierra Club’s influence into the park movement, advocating for it “as publicly as possible” with things like Island in Time. The publisher’s note in the book’s front matter recounts the Brower family’s exclusion from Limantour Beach. 

Ken remembers working (unpaid) on the park campaign at age fourteen, reviewing the Island in Time manuscript for his father. He later got further involved in activism, symmetrically, when a rancher ordered him off park land. In his Elk Rally speech, he mentioned that and forcefully outlined the downsides of park-subsidized agribusiness: it was illegally polluting air and water; it was harming native wildlife and vegetation; it was excluding the public from public property; and it set a bad precedent, one that park founders, President John F. Kennedy, Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, and Congressman Clem Miller, had not intended. He emphasized the last point by describing a photo of Kennedy signing the park bill. Standing beside him is Miller, who holds a copy of Island in Time; Udall, on Kennedy’s other side, also holds a copy. In his David Brower biography, Tom Turner writes that Island in Time was “acknowledged” as a key element in “the successful campaign to preserve Point Reyes.” Yet, Brower said, the book contains no reference to a “pastoral zone” where ranching is to continue.

When I looked through my copy, I found no mention of it either. Secretary Udall’s foreword thanks ranchers for maintaining Point Reyes’s “uncluttered dimensions” in the past, but stresses the “challenges of the recreational needs of a future public.” Author Gilliam calls for protecting as much wild land as possible and hopes that the “millions of future residents of this region will cherish this island in time and … resist all encroachments.” 

There is much talk now of digital communication replacing books; a 2015 Sierra Club press release gave that as the reason for ending its books program. But this can’t replace the historical role of books like Island in Time, which are “islands of memory” rising above a flood of online material that can threaten to engulf human and natural history. The book’s reminder of the park’s intended role seems to be working. Ken Brower told me that in 2024 ranchers’ requests to further exclude the public, cull elk, and intensify their operations were in abeyance and that negotiations were underway that could end agribusiness in the park and let rewilding continue.