What are writing techniques that McPhee uses in describing New Jersey's Pine Barrens?

McPhee opens The Pine Barrens with
one of the descriptive techniques he use. He gives a detailed physical description. The
opening perspective for this description is from atop the Bear Swamp Hill fire tower in
Washington Township. He gives a panoramic eagle's-eye view of the vast expanse of Pine
Barren. He adds that the view is virtually the same from the neighboring fire tower at
Apple Pie Hill. He remarks on several distinguishing features that break up the scene of
pines and some oaks in the Barren. There are the Atlantic white cedars that extend above
the pines and grow along the twists of rivers within the Pine Barren. There is the dwarf
forest where a person "can stand among the trees and see for miles over their uppermost
branches." There is the view to the south where the "view is twice broken slightly--by a
lake and a cranberry bog--but otherwise ... to the horizon in
forest."

After the physical detail, McPhee switches to
describing the Barrens in terms of history; this includes present history and distant
history. He describes how developments presently encroach at the borders of the Barren
and create small inlets of city life in the edges of the quiet wilderness of the forest.
He describes how New Jersey had plans (now realized) for expanding its high-speed
roadway system and accompanying the New Jersey Turnpike with half a dozen other
north-south turnpikes. He further describes the Barrens in terms of recent history by
comparing population per square mile giving New Jersey's as at least 1,000 and the Pine
Barren's as about 15 people per square mile. The distant history reveals that it came by
its name when the original settlers judged the forests to be so dense and unfavorable to
farming that they left them intact and began to refer to that land as "barren," leading
to the Pine Barrens.

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Settlers ... found these soils unproductive for
farming , left the land uncleared, and began to refer to the region as the Pine
Barrens.

The mention the
people per square mile leads to another more complicated descriptive technique in which
he describes the Barrens in relation to the people who live there in what some call "a
suburb":

the
heart of the pine country is ... Hog Wallow. ... [with] twenty-five people ... [who]
describe it, without any apparent intention to be clever, as a suburb of Jenkins, a town
three miles away, [with] forty-five
people.

One of these people,
through whose eyes McPhee describes Pine Barrens, is Frederick Chambers Brown. He lives
up a dirt road "at the edge of a wide cranberry bog" and gave McPhee a drink of water
from his front yard pump and a tour of his home and his life in Pine Barrens. These are
some of the techniques McPhee uses to describe the Pine Barrens, which includes its 15
people per square mile.