HEADED UPSTREAM Interviews With Iconoclasts<i> by Jack Loeffler (Harbinger House: $10.95, illustrated)</i>

The writers, film makers and social activists in these brief profiles are not randomly chosen free thinkers but people with unconventional approaches to ecological issues and questions of Native American rights, particularly the dispute over the development of the Black Mesa region of New Mexico. Their opinions range from rather conventional liberalism to fuzzy-minded romanticism. Dave Foreman offers the untenable assertion that the existence of primitive hunter-gatherers was “the best life people ever lived.” (To paraphrase Tom Lehrer, “By the time the average hunter-gatherer reached Foreman’s age, he was already dead.”) In contrast, historian Alvin Josephy and former Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall offer more thoughtful reflections on the issue of nuclear power and the conflict between traditional Amerindian beliefs and Western culture. “Headed Upstream” raises many interesting questions; unfortunately, most of the answers it offers are simplistic and superficial.