Note that if you purchase something via one of our links, including Amazon, we may earn a small commission.
Sixty years ago, a writer took a pioneering environmentalist camping with three of “his natural enemies.” The resulting classic sheds light on the conservation movement to this day.
In 1971, the United States was just waking up to what a mess we had made of our country. The first Earth Day had just happened, the nation’s bedrock environmental laws were being enacted, and the idea that we could actually do something was novel and exciting.
Also in 1971, author John McPhee published his timely yet timeless Encounters With the Archdruid (on Amazon).
The ostensible subject of the nonfiction book is David Brower, the prominent mountaineer and former Sierra Club executive director, and the “archdruid” of the title. “Ancient druids used to sacrifice human beings under oak trees,” notes one of Brower’s antagonists. “Modern druids worship trees and sacrifice human beings to those trees. They want to save things they like, all for themselves.” The real subject of the book, however, is not Brower himself, but the environment and humanity’s place in it: what we should take, and what nature should get to keep.
McPhee, in a stroke of genius and courage, enlisted three adversaries for Brower, and took them each separately on a trip into nature with Brower. Brower debated with a mining expert while backpacking in the Cascade wilderness, with a real estate developer at a Cumberland Island campsite, and with the federal government’s chief dam builder while rafting down the Colorado River.
It would have been easy for McPhee to line up bad guys for a heroic Brower to dismantle, but the beauty of the book is that there are no bad guys. And Brower is a tragic hero, whose zealotry and inflexibility got him fired from the Sierra Club that he had almost single-handedly built into the organization we know today.
McPhee’s choices of contrasts for Brower were inspired. First, there was Charles Park, a wilderness-loving explorer who roamed the wilds of the world to find valuable minerals, and whose knowledge of the natural world was encyclopedic. Then, Charles Fraser, a real-estate developer so concerned with keeping his projects in harmony with nature that he rerouted roads around trees and spent $50,000 (almost $500,000 today) to spare a single oak. And finally, there was Floyd Dominy, the powerful director of the Bureau of Reclamation, the federal agency responsible for dams, who reveled in the fact that Lake Powell, created by the Glen Canyon Dam, allows millions of people to get out and enjoy the rugged beauty of the American West.
It would have been easy for McPhee to line up bad guys for a heroic Brower to dismantle, but the genius of the book is that there are no bad guys. And Brower is a tragic hero, whose zealotry and inflexibility got him fired from the Sierra Club.
In the book, Brower is presented as both a gentle soul and a bare-knuckle brawler unafraid to bend the truth to make a point. But surprisingly, the encounters in the book are always respectful and often friendly. One struggles to imagine similarly nuanced arguments published today.
Early on, as McPhee, Brower, and Charles Park hike the Cascades, they reach Cloudy Pass for a view of the Glacier Peak wilderness. “What we saw made us all stop,” McPhee wrote. “I said slowly, the words just involuntarily falling out, ‘My God, look at that.’ Across a deep gulf of air, and nearly a mile higher than the land on which we stood, eleven miles away by line of sight, was Glacier Peak — palpable, immediate, immense. In the direction we were looking, we could see perhaps two hundred square miles of land.”
He described the valleys and glaciers, and then the bickering between Brower and Park:
Brower said, without emphasis, “This is what is known in my trade as a scenic climax.”
… In the central foreground of the view that we were looking at from Cloudy Pass was the lode of copper Kennecott would mine, and to do so the company would make an open pit at least two thousand four hundred feet from rim to rim.
Park said, “A hole in the ground will not materially hurt this scenery.”
Brower stood up. “None of the experts on scenic resources will agree with you,” he said. “This is one of the few remaining great wildernesses in the lower forty-eight. Copper is not a transcendent value here.”
“Without copper. We’d be in a pretty sorry situation.”
“If that deposit didn’t exist, we’d get by without it.”
“I would prefer the mountain as it is, but the copper is there.”
“If we’re down to where we have to take copper from places this beautiful, we’re down pretty low.”
In each of the book’s three parts, Brower squares off with someone who loves the natural world almost as much as he does, but who sees the need for people to use what nature has to offer. It’s a conundrum that has roiled the environmental movement since the beginning: the tension between meeting the needs of people and the conservation of nature for nature’s sake, and for ours.
Similar balances churn the environmental movement today: We need data centers to advance science and stay connected, we need to mine metals for batteries to fight global warming, we need solar and wind farms for green energy. But where and how?
Beyond debating the copper mine in the wilderness (which never was dug), Brower discusses a housing development on an untouched coastal island (it became a National Seashore instead) and the Glen Canyon dam (Brower had failed to defeat it in the early 1960s, and today it powers about 350,000 homes with low-carbon energy). In some cases, Brower’s foes seem more reasonable than he does, since we need copper, homes, water, and renewable electricity. Brower’s insistence that humans need to learn to live with less is an unattractive position that to this day has failed to win over the vast majority of Americans.
McPhee subtly suggests balance through these debates. We need copper, but maybe not from an unimaginably beautiful wilderness; we need houses, but maybe not on a pristine island; we need water, electricity, and outdoor recreation, but we flooded an awesome landscape to get them. Similar balances churn the environmental movement today: We need data centers to advance science and stay connected, we need to mine metals for batteries to fight global warming, we need solar and wind farms for green energy. But where and how?
If anything in this book written almost 60 years ago feels dated, it’s the idea that a greener, cleaner world is going to require people to live with less. Brower’s pleas for sacrifice have not only fallen on deaf ears, but have proven largely unneeded: In the last half-century, America has become vastly richer, but also much, much cleaner in most ways. The lessons of the archdruid and “his natural enemies” give us a framework that can help us debate the hard environmental challenges that remain today.
