Encounters with the Archdruid [Paperback]

Join McPhee as he struggles over copper-bearing mountains with Brower and geologist Charles Park. Park "would move the White House if there was copper under it." To Park, mineral extraction is mandated by the need of Americans to maintain the lifestyle they've achieved in the 20th Century. Brower argues that lifestyle growth must slow its pace to retain the remaining natural resources. Park counters Brower's desire to protect the wilderness with assertions that "managed mining" will achieve both aims. Park argues that mining need not destroy wilderness and that Glacier Peak's hiking trails will not be lost because copper is removed from its innards. Does this sound familiar?

The Archdruid's second encounter is with the rather more flamboyant Charles Fraser. Fraser has a winning track record in development, particularly golf courses. He wants to "open" an island off the Carolina coast. The island, "a third larger than Manhattan, has a population of eleven people." Fraser sees that condition as disproportionate. When Brower disagrees, Fraser dubs him the Archdruid - contending that 'conservationists' are 'preservationists.' "Modern druids worship trees and sacrifice human beings to those trees," Fraser contends. The humans being sacrificed are golfers and others who can afford to visit the offshore island Fraser wants to "develop." Fraser, like Park, understands the need of Americans to return to a remembered uncongested frontier condition, if only temporarily.

The western frontier becomes the site of McPhee's concluding essay. In the West, more than anywhere else in North America, water is life's blood. Whether water is better used in a free flowing or captive condition is the subject of Brower's dispute with Floyd E. Dominy, dam builder. McPhee follows the pair over reservoirs, deep into dams, along river courses, in his account of the "water wars." McPhee describes Dominy as "a child of the hundredth meridian," that boundary between wet and dry Mid-America. Dominy spent years capturing water for ranchers and farmers, later adding cities, casinos and boaters to his clientele. Along the Colorado River, deep in the Grand Canyon, McPhee records Brower and Dominy debating the impact of damming western rivers.

We have lost David Brower. If there's a finer memorial than McPhee's account, point it out. The issues related here aren't resolved today, giving this book an unexpected endurance. John McPhee has performed an incomparable feat in aligning the attitudes and expressions of the "developer" and the "environmentalist." Clear choices are made apparent, but as McPhee reminds us, neither Brower nor his contenders are the ones who will make the decisions - it is you, the reader.

McPhee's excellent, almost transparent style allows the personality and arguments of each of the central characters to emerge naturally, without ideological distortion or evident bias. What came across most powerfully to this reader was the complexity of the issues involved. The temptation to simplify that complexity for public consumption tempts all conservationists who, like Dave Brower, see the danger of a threatened resource disappearing because its defenders were too scrupulous in their choice of methods.

Who will say that events in the thirty years since have not proven 'naïve' Brower correct and his Sierra Club critics rational and well-intentioned but wrong?