Meet Our Keynote Speaker - Ken Brower

Ken Brower is a writer who specializes in environmental issues and natural history. He is the author of many books and has written for the Atlantic, Smithsonian, National Geographic, and many other magazines.  He is the oldest son of David Brower, the first executive director of the Sierra Club.  As a child and young man, Ken observed the eight-year campaign for passage of the Wilderness Bill.  He watched the close collaboration between his father and Howard Zahniser of the Wilderness Society, the bill's author.  He was witness to the hard work that went into this epochal law.   

The fieldwork for Ken's writing on wilderness has taken him to the Arctic and Antarctic, the rainforests of Amazonia, Central America, West Africa, Borneo, and New Guinea, the open ocean, the coral reef, and the mountains and deserts of the American West.  In 1967, at 22, to research his book on the Brooks Range, he walked for five weeks across those northernmost of Alaska's mountains and out to the Beaufort Sea.  He has written on the wilderness of Wrangell-St. Elias.  His book The Starship and the Canoe was set, in part, in the wilderness of the outer coast of Glacier Bay.

^{Top photo by Michael Murkhardt. Bottom photo of Punchbowl Falls by Tula Top.}