Encounter with the Archdruid summary PDF

Title Encounter with the Archdruid summary
Course StuDocu Summary Library EN
Institution StuDocu University
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Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee Author Bio: John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey on March 8 1931. Later he earned his degree at Princeton University. After college McPhee became a writer for time magazine and then New Yorker where he became a staff writer in 1965. This same year he published his first book A Sense of Where You Are followed by many other books. McPhee received a reward in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977 and the Pulitzer Prize in 1999.

Issues: The issue includes three different sections. Section 1 is on a mountain range where the issue is mining and the damage the mining does vs. the idea that mining helps us and places need to be mined to keep the economy going well. In this section Charles Park argues that we need our metals while David Brower says that it is ruining the land and our country. Section 2 is a island where David Brower meets Charles Fraser a resort developer. Brower’s goal was to stop Fraser from developing the island because it will ruin it while Fraser says that we need to develop and continue taking land. In the last section its about the Colorado River and Floyd Dominy a builder of gigantic dams. Brower wants to stop dams because he does not think the water is worth the flooding and what is lost while Dominy grew up in a dry area and knows the importance of water to those people.

Characters: 1.Charles Park- A mineral engineer, looking for copper in Glacier Peak Wilderness in the Cascades. Park believes that, "Minerals are where you find them. The quantities are finite." So you go & get them wherever they are located. 2.Charles Fraser- Developer of Hilton Head Island's Sea Pines Plantation, who has obtained 3000 acres on undeveloped Cumberland Island. Fraser considers all environmentalists to be "druids" who will sacrifice people to save trees. 3.Floyd Dominy- United States Commissioner of Reclamation and devoted dam builder. He considers the water that people need is more important then the environment and the river itself. 4. David Brower- He is the militant conversationalist that is meeting with the men above to argue with the reasons that there ideas of development, mining, and dams are wrong and harmful. He is the Druid in the book that is for the environment.

Highlights 1. The Glacier peak in the cascades located in central Washington. This is where the first highlight happened. This is were some mines are located and some are probably going to be located in the future. Brower argues that mines ruin the land and the wilderness is dead if a environmental group loses the battle while if the win they only temporarily have a victory. This is important because it showed the rest of the argument about building mines in the wonderful environment. 2. The second highlight was when he met Charles Fraser. This man wanted to countinue developing new land into urbanized cities, parks, and other people places. This was a large part of the story because this started the second argument about people moving into places we should not be and how that harms the habitat in the area. 3. The final highlight was David Browers Encounter with Floyd Dominy. This is the one I could relate with the best because it is about building dams. This one especially talks about the Colorado River and how dams are asking the river to do more then it can. This is because dams are flooding areas and harming the environment.

Outcome In each section the outcome is all the same with nothing except the argument between Brower and the person he is with ending. Neither one of them actually win the argument because the author wanted the reader to decide which side he or she was on. The main charecter was affected by that persons opininon but it did not change his mind about how he felt toward nature. Society was not affected because there was only the people arguing that were really there as a reader you could side one way or another and it lets you see the point of view for both sides. I liked the end because it was not biased and as a reader I got to see what the other point of view is other then just the environmental side. I would have kept the ending the same because you can't have a winner because then there is a unfair advantage to one of the sides that the reader would probably end up agreeing with....


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