McPhee's Best Work - Still Relevant Today

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	• Encounters with the Archdruid John McPhee Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977 - 256 pages average customer review:based on 34 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Encounters with the Archdruid

David Brower is a major conservationist who leads many environmental groups. In Encounters with the Archdruid, Brower travels to a mountain, an island, and a river, and has battles with various developers in each of the aareas. In the mountains, he encounters Charles Park, a geologist who is pick-happy. ON the island, he meets Charles Fraser, a developer who wants to build a resort on the island. He also goes fafting with Floyd Dominy, who is bent on building a dam to make a lake out of the end of the river. Brower winds some, and loses some, but for the sake of the enfironment, he never gives up.

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thought provoking

Interesting stories that force you to consider both sides of several important environmental issues. Solid writing. Even more interesting because the stories are true.

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identity and idealism

This is not a hagiography, and readers who think McPhee is portraying David Brower as a hero are not reading deeply enough. McPhee presents Brower as a human with faults. But this too is not his purpose. All ideals need champions, and Brower was the environmental champion of the 1970s. That he was a hypocrite to his own cause bears little relevance to his symbolic importance. McPhee carefully establishes Brower's identity such that the reflective reader can draw parallels to their own self-conception and ideas of perfection. Oh, and it's readable too.

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McPhee's Best Work - Still Relevant Today

I read this book for the first time 36 years after it was written, yet it seems like it was written today. The battles now have different names but the perspectives are still the same. My conclusion after reading it is that as a species human's have the capacity to view the same scenery and information and come to radically different conclusions; lets build on it or lets preserve it. The fundamental difference seems to be how an individual views the world around us; our surroundings exist to serve us or we an integral part of the world. This dichotomy in thinking may explain why some of us become engineers and real estate developers and others become artists and conservationists.

McPhee's genius in this book was to get the archetypes of those two positions to spend time together in a proposed open pit copper mine in the Cascades, a potential resort in Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia, and in and around dams along the Colorado River; recording the dialog while describing the landscape. This book is a paean to conservation and one of McPhee's best.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7

The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different relationships to their environment, and they encounter each other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, sometimes with reserve, sometimes with friendliness, sometimes fighting hard across a philosophical divide.

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