John McPhee and David Brower set against backdrop of Glacier Peak Wilderness in Washington (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Even before the revered nonfiction writer John McPhee gave him the enduring appellation of “archdruid,” David Brower occupied a sanctified place in the American environmental movement. The first executive director of the Sierra Club and the founder of numerous conservationist organizations, among them Friends of the Earth (FOE) and Earth Island Institute, Brower served as a tireless advocate for nature against human rapaciousness and despoliation.
Edwin Matthews (courtesy of the author)
Below, Library of America Honorary Trustee Edwin Matthews reflects on his rewarding, sometimes vexing relationship with Brower, whom he first teamed up with in the early 1960s to save a section of New York City’s Central Park. His touching personal reminiscence accompanies publication of Encounters in Wild America, the new LOA edition of McPhee’s lauded nonfiction that includes, along with Encounters with the Archdruid, his celebrated works The Pine Barrens, The Survival of the Bark Canoe, and Coming into the Country.
A routine day in 1963 began with me rushing across Midtown Manhattan to meet David Brower, then the executive director of the Sierra Club. I was a young associate in a large international law firm who’d had the idea to ask the Club to join a suit against the City of New York to prevent filling in the heritage lake in Central Park on 59th Street with a bar and restaurant. At the time, I had no idea David Brower would change my life.
In his fight to save the Grand Canyon from power dams, Brower had argued, “Should we flood the Sistine Chapel for tourists to see the ceiling?” How about saving Central Park, I asked him? Without a moment’s hesitation, Brower agreed.
David Brower (Earth Island Institute)
The Sierra Club would go on to bring hundreds of lawsuits to protect the earth and founded a legal defense fund which became Earthjustice, today the leading pro bono law firm for the environmental movement.
Brower described his mission this way: “We seek a renewed stirring of love for the earth; we urge that what man is capable of doing to the earth is not always what he ought to do; and we plead that all people, here, now, determine that a wide, spacious untrammeled freedom shall remain as living testimony that this generation, our own, had love for the next.”
With this message, who would not follow David Brower anywhere? His musical poetry, his unashamed love of the beauty of the earth, and his political activism inspired millions around the world engaged in the environmental movement. He shed light on countless human-made disasters and helped preserve millions of acres of wilderness.
Encounters with the Archdruid by John McPhee (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980)
This complex conservationist was deeply and critically portrayed by John McPhee in his book Encounters with the Archdruid, subtitled “Narratives about a conservationist and three of his natural enemies.”
In McPhee’s understanding, archdruids such as Brower do not easily compromise with the real world of human affairs. After seventeen years at the head of the Sierra Club, in 1969 Brower was fired for his opposition to nuclear power and his refusal to follow board direction. He then spent forty days alone in the Sierra, and out of that experience founded Friends of the Earth (FOE). I helped FOE start sister groups all over Europe, and it is now active in seventy-six countries.
In the 1970s, Brower was to retire from FOE. He imposed on me to leave my law practice, then based in Paris, and move my family to San Francisco, where I was to succeed him as president. But David suffered from founder’s syndrome. He could never retire, and soon after I was elected, he got me fired. I retreated to New York but remained a supporter, and was soon called upon to save the organization. For this, I had to get Brower fired from the group he founded. Of course, ever undaunted, Brower went on to start yet another organization, this one called Earth Island, and continued his life mission to save the planet. Our paths diverged.
John McPhee: Encounters in Wild America (March 2026)
On October 17, 1971, at the Frankfurt Book Fair, Brower had handed me a copy McPhee’s enthralling narrative, he inscribed: “To Edwin, who was sacrificed, from the Archdruid. David Brower”.
From the hospital, before he died, David called me after years of silence. We said nothing about our encounters. There was then too much for us to talk about, and for him no time remaining. I am left gifted with the earth he fought to preserve and John McPhee’s enduring portrait. He showed this lawyer from the north Idaho woods how to help save the nature he grew up loving.
—Edwin Matthews, Honorary Trustee, Library of America
November 26, 2025
