For those who want to understand the issues of the environmental crisis, Encounters with the Archdruid is a superb book. McPhee reveals more nuances of the value revolution that dominates the new age of ecology than most writers could pack into a volume twice as long. I marvel at his capacity to listen intently and extract the essence of a man and his philosophy in the fewest possible words.

Nixon was a good president on the environment. Gerald Ford was good.

I plowed fields with horses and worked as a hired hand in high school for 50 cents a day.

We Americans are a funny people. We say that our favorite outdoor recreation is 'walking for pleasure' (or so it is reported in Outdoor Recreation Trends). Yet the average housewife will jump into the family car-or one of them-to go around the corner for a bottle of aspirin and a television guide. The businessman who walks four blocks to an appointment is the exception rather than the rule.

The most common trait of all primitive peoples is a reverence for the life-giving earth.

If you want inner peace, find it in solitude, not speed, and if you would find yourself, look to the land from which you came and to which you go.

Admittedly, we must move ahead with the development of our land resources. Likewise, our technology must be refined. But in the long run life will succeed only in a life-giving environment, and we can no longer afford unnecessary sacrifices of living space and natural landscape to 'progress.'