‘The Greatest Generation’ of Conservationists Passes On

CAPS Advisory Board Member and Legendary River Conservationist Martin Litton Dies at 97

News anchor and author Tom Brokaw famously wrote of The Greatest Generation: those stalwart American men and women who survived the harrowing deprivation of the Great Depression in the 1930s only to face the bloodiest conflict in the long and bloody history of humanity in the 1940s.

The Greatest Generation fought and won World War II – conquering the existential threat that Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan posed not just to our nation but to all civilized and humane values.

The founders of the modern environmental movement were products of that Greatest Generation. They included the likes of David Brower, iconic executive director of the Sierra Club, and Senator Gaylord Nelson, father of Earth Day. Brower served as a lieutenant with the 10^th Mountain Division of the U.S. Army, earning a Bronze Star for action in Italy, while Nelson saw action with the Army in the Okinawa Campaign in the Pacific Theatre.

Martin Litton, who passed away on November 30 at the age of 97 in Portola Valley, California, was also a member of the Greatest Generation. Litton was a CAPS Advisory Board Member and a former director of the Sierra Club. He once received the Club’s coveted John Muir Award and was also a former Senior Editor of Sunset magazine.

But Litton was revered and will most be remembered for his decisive roles in two of the greatest conservation battles of the 20^th century – over proposals to build dams in remote Dinosaur National Monument near the Utah and Colorado border and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon itself.

Litton was fearless, unflinching and uncompromising, qualities which served him and our side (the good guys) well in World War II and afterwards in America’s pitched conservation battles. During the war, he piloted gliders carrying supplies and soldiers, crash-landing behind enemy lines in Occupied Europe. As Outdoor magazine writer Kevin Fedarko told NPR’s Melissa Block:

…after having gone through that experience, and endured that ordeal, standing toe to toe and battling with the engineers of the Bureau of Reclamation or logging companies in Northern California paled in comparison. I don’t think that there’s anything that Martin confronted later in his life, including running Class V rapids at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, that ever really seemed quite as bad as crash-landing a glider behind enemy lines in Europe.

In an obituary in The New York Times, Litton was called the “Jeremiah” of the environmental movement:

…the crier in the wilderness who spotted the threats, condemned the desecraters and rallied the leadership to the defining preservation conflicts of the early 1950s through the ‘80s.

The one-and-only David Brower (also once a CAPS advisory board member) referred to Litton as “our conscience.”

Following the route blazed by 19^th century explorer John Wesley Powell, Litton first descended the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon of Arizona in 1955. He then founded Grand Canyon Dories and led many excursions on the river. He set the record more than once as the oldest person to row the entire Grand Canyon, most recently in 2004 at the age of 87.

Martin Litton, like almost all authentic, old-guard conservationists, was deeply concerned about human overpopulation. In the bitter internecine struggle for the soul of the Sierra Club in 1998, which this time the good guys lost, he became an endorser of the ballot proposition spearheaded by Sierrans for U.S. Population Stabilization (SUSPS), calling upon the Club to support comprehensive efforts, including reduced immigration levels, to stop U.S. population growth.

In a January 1998 piece, “There They Go Again: The Sierra Club Board Rigs Another Election,” which is still available at the SUSPS website, Litton wrote:

Overpopulation is the Sierra Club’s business. At the same time we’re hoping to do something about it worldwide, we can do something here at home. The Board’s argument is full of irrelevancies and generalizations. Let’s advocate what should be done by passing Position A.

Unfortunately, the Sierra Club Board of Directors got away then with its dirty tricks and shenanigans, establishing a disastrous precedent in America’s leading activist environmental organization. And the Club has only gone from bad to worse on the immigration issue, recently endorsing amnesty and “comprehensive immigration reform” that will lock environmentally damaging, rapid population growth in for the rest of the century. It represents an utter dereliction of duty that disgusted former soldier and war hero Martin Litton.

In a 2012 interview, when asked by The Eddy what the most important issue facing us today is, Litton answered:

The obvious, most important issue is numbers of people. The earth is already terribly overcrowded and overcrowding causes people to move around. In our case it causes people to move from Mexico to California, and [chuckles] we’re overcrowded. It’s the most important issue on the earth – movements of people, and growing numbers of people.

Spoken like a true population activist and CAPS supporter!

As a fellow member of the CAPS advisory board, I am grateful to Martin Litton for having lent his name and considerable prestige to our worthy if quixotic quest to stabilize California’s and America’s populations.

Our deepest condolences to his wife of 72 years, the former Esther Clewette, and their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.