Encounters with the Archdruid: Narratives About a Conservationist and Three of His Natural Enemies

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Description

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 and every other on mountain trails, in forests and rapids, occasionally with reserve, occasionally with friendliness, occasionally fighting hard across a philosophical divide.

Born in 1915, the mountaineer and outdoorsman David Brower has arguably been the single most influential American environmentalist in the last half of the 20th century; even his erstwhile foes at the Department of the Interior grudgingly credit him with having nearly single-handedly halted the construction of a dam in the heart of the Grand Canyon, and he has converted thousands, even millions, of his compatriots to the preservationist cause through his work with the Sierra Club, Friends of the Earth, and other organizations.

Brower used to be in the thick of battle when John McPhee profiled him for the New Yorker in a piece that would evolve into Encounters with the Archdruid. McPhee follows Brower into unusually close combat as Brower faces down a geologist who is, it kind of feels, convinced that there’s no sight moderately so elevating as that of a completely operational mine; a developer who (successfully, it turned out) sought to convert an isolated stretch of the Carolina coast into a resort for the moneyed few–and who provided the title for McPhee’s book, wryly opining that conservationists are at heart druids who “sacrifice people and worship trees”; and, most formidable of all, former Interior Secretary Floyd Dominy, who oversaw the construction of a structure that for Brower stands as one of the crucial hated creations of our time, Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River. McPhee offers up an engaging portrait of Brower, a man unafraid of a good fight in the service of the earth, making Encounters crucial contribution to the history of the brand new environmental movement. –Gregory McNamee

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