4 ideas
In the 1950s Brower agreed not to oppose Glen Canyon Dam so that a proposed dam at Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument would be dropped. He had never properly explored Glen Canyon. When he later saw what the reservoir drowned, he came to regard the deal as his worst failure, and it hardened him against negotiated compromise.
Brower argued that a protected wilderness can always be threatened again, while a mined, dammed, or paved landscape cannot be restored. Because each compromise gives away ground that can never be won back, a series of reasonable concessions adds up to total loss. The only coherent stance is to refuse to split the difference.
Seen this way, preservation serves an elite that can reach untouched places, and engineering that alters a landscape opens it to the public. The dispute is really about who wilderness is for.
McPhee reports each conflict by placing Brower and an opponent together in the landscape they are fighting over. With Charles Park, a mineral engineer, he hikes Glacier Peak, where Park wants to permit a copper mine. With Dominy he rafts the Colorado through the Grand Canyon. Shared physical hardship and direct contact with the terrain push each side's abstract position into concrete, candid argument, and show where the principles actually conflict.