Nearly 60 years ago, John McPhee rafted the Colorado River with a longtime Sierra Club reader and his nemesis, taking notes as the men argued over the fate of the land, the future of Lake Powell. Today, McPhee is 95 years old and widely acknowledged as a singuler chronicler of place, people, and time. As David Schurman Wallace notes, he also has “a good chance of outlasting the lake.” In a stimulating review of Encounters with Wild America, a four-book collection by McPhee, Wallace sets a master’s time-intensive and famously lengthy projects against the contemporary attention economy and the media industry. Longform writing didn’t spring from a hashtag; it was a natural outcome of applying narrative frames to complex subjects, including nature itself. Now, writes Wallace, “this work of dedicated attention, so essential to thinking about, say, the environment, is at risk of becoming a relic.”

[McPhee’s] work is an artifact, one that aids reflection, but demands you stop first and take things slowly. It’s no accident that the books that Library of America have chosen to canonize first are about nature and the people who inhabit it. To appreciate, or even just think about an expanse—a nearly deserted forest, a glacier, a stretch of tundra—is difficult. You can look at an image, but you can just as quickly turn away or scroll past. His writing is a tool that helps us feel distance. You have to spend time on the page getting to know it, trying to imagine things you will most likely never experience yourself.