Encounters with Wild America by John McPhee. Library of America, 858 pages. 2026.

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.…