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

In John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid, David Brower is the central figure, whose passionate advocacy and unwavering commitment to environmental conservation causes McPhee to dub him the Archdruid of the conservation movement. McPhee lands on this title after a conversation with Charles Fraser, in which the developer calls conservationists who oppose his projects on Cumberland Island “druids,” signifying what Fraser sees as their outdated, spiritualist, and sentimental approach to nature. Brower at first defies this stereotype: When he visits Fraser on Cumberland Island, he appears to Fraser as an unchallenging figure—and idea that McPhee sends up in elevated, grandiose language attesting to Brower’s actual potency:

Fraser, ebullient, was finding Brower so docile that he wouldn’t even call him a druid, and in a sense Fraser was right, for the rote behavior of an ordinary member of the priesthood should be simple to predict. This, however, was—as Fraser apparently did not grasp—no ordinary member of the priesthood. This was the inscrutable lord of the forest, the sacramentarian of ecologia americana, the Archdruid himself Fraser's difficulties with druids were anything but over (138).

As McPhee suggests, Brower is closer to a modern-day druid than other members of the conservation movement due to his profound spiritual connection to nature, his prophetic vision for the environment, and his role as a moral and ethical leader in the fight against ecological destruction.