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1 Mich. J. Envtl. & Admin. L. 1 (2012)

handle is hein.journals/michjo1 and id is 1 raw text is: ESSAY

THE QUEST FOR A SUSTAINABLE
FUTURE AND THE DAWN OF A NEW
JOURNAL AT MICHIGAN LAW
David M. Uhlmann*
When I joined the faculty of the University of Michigan Law School in
2007, the first assignment I gave students in my Environmental Law and
Policy class was John McPhee's Encounters with the Archdruid.' It must have
seemed like a curious choice to them, particularly coming from a professor
who just three months earlier had been the Chief of the Environmental
Crimes Section at the U.S. Department of Justice. The book was not a
dramatic tale of courtroom battles. In fact, the book was not even about the
law, and the clash of environmental values it depicted pre-dated the envi-
ronmental statutes that were the focus of the course.
Encounters with the Archdruid chronicles outings McPhee organized dur-
ing the 1960s with David Brower, the first Executive Director of the Sierra
Club and one of the most influential environmental activists of his genera-
tion.2 Brower was an unapologetic advocate for conservation at a time when
we still believed that anything was possible in the United States and that
America had an endless bounty of natural resources to support economic
growth. McPhee paired Brower with three antagonists who had very differ-
ent ideas about our relationship with the environment: Charles Park, the
former Dean of Stanford University's School of Earth Sciences and a pro-
ponent of mining in the Cascade mountains;, Charles Fraser, the developer
Jeffrey F. Liss Professor from Practice and the Director of the Environmental
Law and Policy Program at the University of Michigan Law School. I would like to com-
mend the founding board members of the Michigan Journal of Environmental & Administrative
Law and the journal staff for a superb inaugural issue of the journal. I also would like to
thank Johanna Dennehy for providing outstanding research assistance for this introductory
Essay.
1.   JOHN MCPHEE, ENCOUNTERS WITH THE ARCHDRUID (1971).
2.   E.g., Richard Severo, David Brower, an Aggressive Champion of US. Environmental-
ism, Is Dead at 88, N.Y. TIMES, Nov. 7, 2000, at C22 (describing Brower's influence on the
American environmental movement in the latter half of the twentieth century). Brower was
also the founder of Friends of the Earth, the League of Conservation Voters, and the Earth
Island Institute. David Brower, DAVID BROWER CTR., http://www.browercenter.org/node/
179 (last visited Oct. 22, 2011).
3.   MCPHEE, supra note 1, pt. 1.

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