Page One

Berkeley’s Civic Arts Commissioners are being lobbied to make the Berkeley Marina home to “Spaceship Earth,” a 350,000-pound sculpture commemorating the late environmentalist David Brower. 

While San Francisco Arts Commissioners rejected the massive stone and bronze creation last year on the grounds that the work was aesthetically dubious and failed to honor either Brower or environmentalism, Berkeley Mayor Tom Bates has been actively pushing to install the work in his city. 

“The mayor’s very interested in seeing this installed,” said David Snippen, chair of the Berkeley Arts Commission. But he also acknowledged that the piece has its detractors. 

“There are strong opinions from both perspectives,” he said. “What I do not want to happen is a level of frustration develop to a point where an installation is mandated without public review.” 

Brower served as executive director of the Sierra Club until 1969, when he was fired. He promptly founded Friends of the Earth and the League of Conservation Voters that same year. 

Then, in 1982, he founded the Earth Island Institute. 

He was born in Berkeley on July 1, 1912, and died in his home here 88 years later, on Nov. 5, 2000, six months after he resigned in protest from the Sierra Club’s board of directors. 

The mass of the sculpture, designed by Finno-American sculptor Eino, is a 12-foot sphere composed of blue quartzite quarried in Brazil. The earth’s continents and islands are formed from 1,426 pieces of cast bronze, crowned by a life-size bronze representation of Brower. 

“The rock is beautiful,” said Mayor Bates. “It’s a gem,” saying that he’d be “very proud to have it here in the city of David Brower.” 

Bates added, “I don’t think people realize that David Brower personally approved this sculpture, and he personally approved of it being at the Marina. It’s a treasure.” 

The work was commissioned by Power Bar founders Brian and Jennifer Maxwell. They had intended the piece to be placed in San Francisco. Brian Maxwell died earlier this year in San Anselmo. 

The mayor, who had been a friend of both Brower and the Maxwells, chided critics who hadn’t even seen the sculpture, which remains in an unassembled state in a warehouse in the San Francisco Presidio. 

“We’re still trying to find out more about the sculpture,” Snippen said. “We’re still learning about this, and we’re still real, real short on the details. We had a meeting last week the attorney for the Maxwells. He told us one of Brower’s feet is standing on Berkeley.” 

A year-and-a-half earlier, similar pressure from the San Francisco County Board of Supervisors confronted the Visual Arts Committee of the San Francisco Arts Commission, which wound up rejecting Eino’s 175-ton creation, standing 15 feet tall including the figure of Brower atop the globe. 

A scathing one-page staff report by the San Francisco commission’s staff declared that “the monument is extremely grand and flamboyant. 

“The nature of the memorial is also in conflict with the message of the commemorated individual. David Brower was about the environment. The proposed memorial is large, heavy, and would create a significant environmental footprint with the footing that it would require. The committee considered the work to lack environmental sensitivity. 

“The aesthetic relationship of the figure to the globe is clumsy and poorly integrated. The depiction of the earth is the only reference to the environment and again does not suggest sensitivity to environmental issues.” 

The San Francisco Visual Arts Committee met to vote on the work on April 16, 2003. 

After staff member Debra Lehane told the panel that staffers considered the sculpture “ostentatious and aesthetically awkward,” arts commissioner Dugald Stermer, who had been a friend of Brower, declared that “the piece does not do honor to the environment nor to David Brower.” 

With one panel member abstaining, all of the remaining commissioners voted unanimously to reject the work. 

In Berkeley, Snippen and the Arts Commission are working with staff and members of the Waterfront Commission, some of who are expected to attend the first Berkeley Arts Commission’s Public Art Committee meeting from 11 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. today (Tuesday) in the first floor conference room of the city Permit Center Building, 2120 Milvia St. 

The discussion will continue Wednesday night when the full Civic Arts Commission meets at 6:30 at the North Berkeley Senior Center, 1901 Hearst Ave. 

Though nowhere mentioned in the hype surrounding the statue, the term “Spaceship Earth” was coined by R. Buckminster Fuller, architect, designer, prolific writer and a countercultural icon of the 1960s. 

Fuller coined “Spaceship Earth” to remind his readers that all humans are aboard a finite sphere, hurtling through the frigid vacuum of space with a finite amount of resources in a biosphere that needed to be cherished and nurtured. 

The term quickly spread, and became a favorite of Brower’s, often used in his speeches and writings. 

Snippen said he also wants the commission and waterfront commissioners to look at a proposal he is floating to look at sculpture already in the Marina and possible sites for additional works with the idea of creating a sculpture walk. 

“It’s a wonderful environment for appreciating sculpture, and there are some fine works there already,” Snippen said. 

?