Three men are out rafting on the Colorado River together: an activist, a government servant, and a journalist. This is not a setup for a joke. The year is 1969, and they have been brought together for the purposes of an article to be published in The New Yorker. Two are foes: David Brower, the longtime former executive director of the Sierra Club, and Floyd Dominy, the commissioner of the Bureau of Reclamation, in charge of building the nation’s dams, against which Brower has waged a bitter war for years. The writer is John McPhee, who has put together this piece of stunt journalism; he is there to observe and record. Sitting in an inflatable boat in Arizona, south of the massive Glen Canyon Dam and Lake Powell, the jewel in Dominy’s crown and the defeat of Brower’s life, the discussion turns into one of scale, time, and an existential threat:
The Colorado, Brower reminded us, used to be known as Old Red. This was because the river was full of red mud. It would never have been possible for Dominy to dip his cup in it in order to get water to go with his bourbon unless he wished to drink mud as well. On arriving at a campsite, rivermen used to fill their boats with water, so that the mud would settle to the bottom of the boats and they would have water for drinking and cooking. . . . “Emotionally, people are able to look only two generations back and two generations forward,” Brower said. “We need to see farther than that. It is absolutely inevitable, for example, that Lake Powell and Lake Mead will someday be completely filled with silt.”Nature writing, in the hands of McPhee, is like the interaction of river and silt. In calm, patient prose, McPhee observes, and facts accrue and settle until there is a formation that had not existed before. He is patient. He is slow, though not without a wry sense of humor (“They catch the beer and drink it, and they put the aluminum tongues inside the cans. I threw a tongue in the river and was booed by everyone.”). He is the chronicler of things that happen so gradually that we cannot see them unless someone takes the time to document them in their entirety. Brower and Dominy’s verbal duel would become the third and final part of Encounters with the Archdruid, one of McPhee’s best-known books and a landmark in environmental writing. In a new Library of America collection titled Encounters in Wild America, four of McPhee’s books, including Encounters, are canonized.
“Nonsense, nonsense, complete nonsense. First of all, we will build silt-detention dams in the tributaries—in the Paria, in the Little Colorado. And, if necessary, we will build more.”
“Someday the reservoirs have to fill up, Floyd.”
“I wouldn’t admit that. I wouldn’t admit one inch!”
“Someday.”
“Someday! Yes, in geologic time, maybe . . .”
The questions Dominy and Brower raise about what will persist apply to the practice of writing nonfiction today. To Brower’s point, the long view, either backwards or forwards, is hard to make out. Little lasts long in our conditions of tweet and retweet. Nature writing requires slowness, because the value of nature itself is not inherently obvious. Rushing through our lives in a screen-mediated frenzy, we are farther than ever from what it takes to know it. In his interview, many years later, with The Paris Review, McPhee describes his own process in terms that are strikingly similar to the debate on the river:
It’s like the difference between geological time and human time. On a certain scale, it does look like I do a lot. But that’s my day, all day long, sitting there wondering when I’m going to be able to get started. And the routine of doing this six days a week puts a little drop in a bucket each day, and that’s the key. Because if you put a drop in a bucket every day, after three hundred and sixty-five days, the bucket’s going to have some water in it.Today, writing in the spirit of geological time—to observe nature, but also for any kind of long-form journalism, really—is a vanished privilege. Meanwhile, Lake Powell really is filling up with silt—over “thirty thousand dump truck loads” per day—causing a long-term existential crisis, not to mention the man-made reservoirs of the Colorado River emptying out after years of sustained drought. With a good chance of outlasting the lake, McPhee is the modern archetype of the writer as practitioner of a gradual craft, working away at exquisitely detailed depictions of people and places. This work of dedicated attention, so essential to thinking about, say, the environment, is at risk of becoming a relic.
The span of McPhee’s writing in the Library of America collection covers work published in The New Yorker from 1967 to 1977—the critical years in the development of the environmental movement. The phrase “global warming” had only recently emerged, and there was still disagreement about humanity’s ability to create long-term change in the climate. The New Yorker was no stranger to the subject, publishing in 1962 a version of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which was still seeping its way through American consciousness. Between the bookends of Carson and Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature in 1989, McPhee was the presiding figure of The New Yorker in a time when it could lead the public conversation about environmentalism—long form could persuade through deft storytelling that integrated and presented the factual evidence.
In today’s swirl of information noise, it’s hard to imagine a similar piece ever breaking into public consciousness again. If Carson made an impassioned, if highly literary, plea (somewhat against the grain of the average New Yorker article) in a time when environmental issues were less politicized, McPhee’s work was more classically detached on a subject that was becoming a fierce battleground. Eschewing advocacy, McPhee is a patient aggregator in a sense foreign to today’s meaning of the term. Weaving between journalism and a more descriptive kind of nature writing, McPhee was given room to sprawl in a piece that was not only a portrait of Brower but also a work of landscape, broadening out from his human subject to display the ecosystem his subject sought to protect. A work like Encounters with the Archdruid would appear in three parts in the magazine over the course of a month in 1971, stretching to a total of over sixty thousand words.
I’m not aware of anyone who gets to write a sixty-thousand-word magazine piece these days. Size isn’t everything, but this is an obvious reflection of the current economics of journalism, as well as everyone’s perception of time. The print ad revenue that for decades sustained magazines like The New Yorker dried up, sucked into Meta and Google’s ad labyrinths. The reader’s patience, willingness, or capacity to read at all has been drained too, as writing in general competes with video algorithms. Everyone knows this. Good, long, serious articles still get written. But to observe the current against them is not simply nostalgia or sour grapes. The way we access information, the way we think, is still changing.
The purpose of reading a long article is no longer the acquisition of information, if it ever was primarily that. If there is new information, it will quickly be screenshotted and uploaded to social media platforms to be digested in bite-size pieces, or even rewritten by AI for efficiency fetishists. Or maybe readers would like an experience—what we used to call a story, perhaps—and there is no shortage of quicker, stickier content to flood the zone of the synapses. Information is oversaturated and undervalued, and journalistic narrative, at least for now, has been defeated. Say a decade ago, the idea of long-form journalism—the kind of in-depth article you might send to a friend to read on a lunch break (even if you hadn’t read it yourself)—still held prestige. Today, I’m not so sure. Is this writing still enjoyable? Is it necessary? Do you think you will make it to the end of this book review?
McPhee is one of The New Yorker’s signature staff writers—he has been a contributor since 1963, and remains a staff writer today. Across this seven-decade and thirty-plus-book career, he has long been considered one of the founders of both “creative nonfiction” and long-form journalism as we know it today. The course he taught for years on nonfiction writing at Princeton, where he came from and has lived almost his whole life, has been highly influential, with many of its students going on to publish their own books. (Including, notably, David Remnick, who edited this edition and edits The New Yorker.) He is known for the eclecticism of his subjects: truckers, roadkill, oranges, rocks. I can’t say if he invented this archaeology of the little thing you’ve never thought about before, but because of him it is now a whole subgenre of literary journalism, spawning pieces about hand sanitizer or paper jams. There is often no pressing reason for McPhee’s work (no news “peg,” as journalists like to call it)—his curiosity is considered reason enough, a permission that is a luxury for writers today. McPhee was a unique artist that slipped seamlessly into a commercial publishing world that today is well on its way out. Long form has died, long live short form.
His work is an artifact, one that aids reflection, but demands you stop first and take things slowly. It’s no accident that the books that Library of America have chosen to canonize first are about nature and the people who inhabit it. To appreciate, or even just think about an expanse—a nearly deserted forest, a glacier, a stretch of tundra—is difficult. You can look at an image, but you can just as quickly turn away or scroll past. His writing is a tool that helps us feel distance. You have to spend time on the page getting to know it, trying to imagine things you will most likely never experience yourself.
McPhee’s project is born from a tension that is common but often taken for granted. He is a classical journalist, a supposedly neutral, mostly invisible eye working to uncover and represent the facts. But he’s a storyteller first—rarely will you see the “inverted pyramid,” the paradigm of placing the most relevant information at the beginning of a (usually newspaper) story. When McPhee began his career in journalism, emerging from Princeton into the unsigned back pages of Time magazine, the stock-in-trade was profiles, and the profile is usually the vehicle for McPhee’s artistry, spread out and absorbed slowly. He meticulously plans the shape of his pieces, complete with outlines and diagrams, into extended book-length works, in which myriad details and digressions are as important as the core idea of the story (“A thousand details add up to one impression” is one of his mantras). There is something fundamentally painterly here: the portrait artist moving out to the edges, the frame widening, until the painting is not a portrait at all but instead a landscape.
by David Schurman Wallace, The Baffler | Read more:
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[ed. I've read at least a half dozen John McPhee books, none more impactful than Coming Into the Country. Made me first thing (!) buy a shotgun and start looking for bears around every corner.]
