Encounters with the Archdruid #1

Today in 2011 we are struggling to see how we can live in better harmony with the earth.

John McPhee

Back in 1972, when John McPhee published his seventh book, Encounters with the Archdruid, we were already struggling with the question, and the book explores the topic by pitting three knowledgeable experts who favored economic development, rather than wilderness preservation, against one whose priorities were exactly the opposite.

The expert who wanted to save more of nature's unspoiled beauty from economic exploitation was David Brower, a.k.a. the "Archdruid." Brower had been named the first executive director of the Sierra Club in 1952. In 1969 he'd resigned from that position and founded Friends of the Earth. McPhee made him the focus of a series of articles in The New Yorker which were later collected as Encounters with the Archdruid.

Glacier Peak

The first of the articles (Part One of the book) features the confrontation of Brower with a legendary geologist and mining engineer, Charles Park. McPhee, Brower, and Park trek, with two other men, through the Glacier Peak Wilderness area toward an exquisitely lovely area where there's a lode of mineable copper underneath their feet. Park wants to extract it for human use. Brower wants to leave it untouched.

Park's view corresponds to what most of us intuitively feel, even today: if there are mineral deposits or potential oil wells, we ought to dig for them or drill into them.

Brower says to McPhee at one point, early on, "I’m trying to save some forests, some wilderness. I’m trying to do anything I can to get man back into balance with the environment. He’s way out—way out of balance. The land won’t last, and we won’t."

Park says:

“My idea of conservation is maximum use. I think preserving wilderness as wilderness is a terrible mistake. This area is one of the few places in the country where copper exists now in commercial quantities, and we just have to have copper. The way things are set up, we can’t do without it. To lock this place up as wilderness could imperil the whole park system, because in ten years or so, when copper becomes really short, people will start yelling and revisions will have to be made. Any act of Congress can be repealed.”

He's talking about the very wilderness area they are walking through, which had recently been set aside and protected from development by an act of Congress — except that the law allowed mining interests to dig for ore under certain pre-existing circumstances. Apparently, those circumstances did not permit a copper-mining claim such as that which Park thought desirable in the Glacier Peak Wilderness area.

Park goes on:

“I’m in favor of multiple use of land ... With proper housekeeping, you can have a mine and a sawmill and a primitive area all close together.”

Soon comes this extended exchange, as McPhee introduces and records it:

Near the southern base of Plummer Mountain and in the deep valley between Plummer Mountain and Glacier Peak — that is, in the central foreground of the view that we were looking at from Cloudy Pass — was the lode of copper that 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 far.”

“Minerals are where you find them. The quantities are finite. It’s criminal to waste minerals when the standard of living of your people depends upon them. A mine cannot move. It is fixed by nature. So it has to take precedence over any other use. If there were a copper deposit in Yellowstone Park, I’d recommend mining it. Proper use of minerals is essential. You have to go get them where they are. Our standard of living is based on this.”

“For a fifty-year cycle, yes. But for the long term, no. We have to drop our standard of living, so that people a thousand years from now can have any standard of living at all.”

Someone brought up the abandoned Holden mine, which the party of trekkers had encountered earlier in their trip. It is a place where, says McPhee:

The Howe Sound Mining Company [had] established an underground copper mine there in 1938, [building] a village and [calling] it Holden. The Holden mine was abandoned in 1957. We had hiked past its remains on our way to the wilderness area. Against a backdrop of snowy peaks, two flat-topped hills of earth detritus broke the landscape. One was the dump where all the rock had been put that was removed before the miners reached the ore body. The other consisted of tailings — crushed rock that had been through the Holden mill and had yielded copper. What remained of the mill itself was a macabre skeleton of bent, twisted, rusted beams. Wooden buildings and sheds were rotting and gradually collapsing. The area was bestrewn with huge flakes of corrugated iron, rusted rails, rusted ore carts, old barrels. Although there was no way for an automobile to get to Holden except by barge up Lake Chelan and then on a dirt road to the village, we saw there a high pile of gutted and rusted automobiles, which themselves had originally been rock in the earth and, in the end, in Holden, were crumbling slowly back into the ground.

Park believed such desecration could be eliminated if mining outfits used proper "housekeeping":

“Holden is the sort of place that gave mining a bad name. This has been happening in the West for the past hundred years, but it doesn’t have to happen. Poor housekeeping is poor housekeeping wherever you find it. I don’t care if it’s a mine or a kitchen. Traditionally, when mining companies finished in a place they just walked off. Responsible groups are not going to do that anymore. They’re not going to leave trash; they’re not going to deface the countryside. Think of that junk! If I had enough money, I’d come up here and clean it up.”

My thought as I read this is that it may not be economically feasible or even possible to guarantee proper housekeeping and cleanup. We know from recent history that oil wells, pipelines, and petroleum transport ships are apt to explode or leak or run aground, despite our best efforts. Coal mines in Appalachia leave huge scars when they are created by blowing the tops off mountains, and although it's possible to force mining companies to clean up after themselves, the result is never a pretty one. The ecological damage remains immense.

Yet that's a side issue, in a way, because the value of what's extracted is so high. Our whole standard of living depends on things like copper, oil, and coal. When Brower says, "We have to drop our standard of living," he hits an important nail on the head. Will "people a thousand years from now ... have any standard of living at all," unless we cut back in a big way today?

Global warming and climate change activists say we'll lose our standard of living a lot sooner than a thousand years from today, if we don't stop pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere now. When John McPhee wrote Encounters with the Archdruid, global warming wasn't even on the radar screen. Now it is. And I don't think our politicians are taking it seriously enough. Why not? Because they instinctively know that we need to lower our standard of living ... and they don't have the guts to say so.