Stepping into a wardrobe and pushing past the mothballed fur coats you emerge into a pastoral and Wintered clearing who's main character is a wrought iron gas lamp post with multi-sided refracting glass panes. Serving as a spoke on a wheel each pane creates a warm beam of light that illuminates a part of the clearing. Each illumination being a study of a certain discipline that forms the superstructure of what may best be described as John McPhee's Grand Unifying Theory.
The only difference is that instead of a Faun greeting our arrival, you have a vast array of characters that over the course of what seem like infinite books and stories emerge as fantastical creatures who lead McPhee and the reader on a series of journeys.
Having never read nonfiction quite like Encounters With The Archdruid I was taken aback by two aspects. First was the easy narrative style the author utilizes to describe subjects that might best be termed sciency by the layman. Instead of inherent confusion he calmly speaks and records conversations that succinctly answer larger and more difficult questions, while giving room for the reader to ponder environmental impacts weighed against ecological conservation.
The second interesting aspect is the subject matter. Divided into three encounters, McPhee cobbles together opposing forces from opposite ends of the environmental spectrum and takes them on hikes into disputed landscapes. In every instance the protagonist is one time Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower, whom McPhee describes as the SC's, "leader, its principal strategist, its preeminent fang."
Books that speak about the impacts of opportunism and industry on the environment are outdated quickly. However like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Encounters With The Archdruid serves as a baseline to understand the motivations and the perceived need to sacrifice our wholesome Garden in the name of "progress." At the same time they become a guidebook for activism that may change the minds of next generations. As a culture we seem to be getting away from impounding water, mining haphazardly (Fracking a notable and disastrous exception), and destructive ecological development (somewhat.) Perhaps it is because of well written adventures like the ones described in these pages.
Like most books I have a read by John McPhee this book is highly rated and represents a major spoke on his wheel of stories that viewed from afar form a coherent mass of a greater truth.
Stepping into a wardrobe and pushing past the mothballed fur coats you emerge into a pastoral and Wintered clearing who's main character is a wrought iron gas lamp post with multi-sided refracting glass panes. Serving as a spoke on a wheel each pane creates a warm beam of light that illuminates a part of the clearing. Each illumination being a study of a certain discipline that forms the superstructure of what may best be described as John McPhee's Grand Unifying Theory.
The only difference is that instead of a Faun greeting our arrival, you have a vast array of characters that over the course of what seem like infinite books and stories emerge as fantastical creatures who lead McPhee and the reader on a series of journeys.
Having never read nonfiction quite like Encounters With The Archdruid I was taken aback by two aspects. First was the easy narrative style the author utilizes to describe subjects that might best be termed sciency by the layman. Instead of inherent confusion he calmly speaks and records conversations that succinctly answer larger and more difficult questions, while giving room for the reader to ponder environmental impacts weighed against ecological conservation.
The second interesting aspect is the subject matter. Divided into three encounters, McPhee cobbles together opposing forces from opposite ends of the environmental spectrum and takes them on hikes into disputed landscapes. In every instance the protagonist is one time Sierra Club Executive Director David Brower, whom McPhee describes as the SC's, "leader, its principal strategist, its preeminent fang."
Books that speak about the impacts of opportunism and industry on the environment are outdated quickly. However like Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, Encounters With The Archdruid serves as a baseline to understand the motivations and the perceived need to sacrifice our wholesome Garden in the name of "progress." At the same time they become a guidebook for activism that may change the minds of next generations. As a culture we seem to be getting away from impounding water, mining haphazardly (Fracking a notable and disastrous exception), and destructive ecological development (somewhat.) Perhaps it is because of well written adventures like the ones described in these pages.
Like most books I have a read by John McPhee this book is highly rated and represents a major spoke on his wheel of stories that viewed from afar form a coherent mass of a greater truth.