With the death last year of Edward Abbey, the environmental movement–and the American literary scene–lost an aggravating and outspoken scribe. Aggravating, because he constantly offended readers with remarks that were branded sexist, racist, and otherwise politically incorrect. Outspoken, because there was no sacred cow he wasn’t proud to attack. He was a polemicist who seemed scarcely able to be a bore, whose fulminations were always a pleasure to read. He ranted, but he ranted eloquently.
As soon as he was able, Abbey moved west–presaging the great postwar migration to the Sunbelt, which he would frequently decry in his writing. He supported himself in hand-to-mouth fashion, juggling a seasonal cycle of outdoor jobs–park ranger, game warden, fire lookout–with free-lance writing assignments. He labored in relative obscurity until 1968, when he published Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. The book is a memoir and collection of essays about a summer spent working as a park ranger at Arches National Park in the canyon lands of southeast Utah.
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Burning behind Abbey’s sensual descriptions of the canyon lands was anger at the way such areas are plundered by modern civilization. Between the time Abbey worked at Arches and the time he wrote the book, the park was “developed” with paved roads and more elaborate campgrounds, which served to attract more visitors. Abbey said the Winnebago-canned tourists who visit the “improved” park don’t grasp any of the essentials of the desert–such as silence, the sun at noon, the buzz of a rattlesnake. Worse, the facilities built to accommodate them ruin the experience for others–and for the real desert dwellers, such as the rattlers. The American cult of convenience, Abbey wrote, must be resisted, or all authentic experience wil be dulled by shields of plastic and metal separating people from the environment.
That sort of thing was dismissed by some as the demented fantasy of a barely employable radical who’d spent too much time in the hot desert sun. But however much Abbey’s thought ran counter to that of the mainstream, it was very much in the tradition of other great American thinkers, such as Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Henry David Thoreau.
Well, the sequel is called Hayduke Lives! More radical and with fewer social graces than ever, he’s back, tackling a big target–the Giant Earth Mover (GEM), a $37 million piece of equipment that is poised to tear up lovely, unspoiled Lost Eden Canyon to get at the uranium underneath. It is a formidable foe. But this time the monkey-wrench gang has allies: Earth First! is opposing plans to strip-mine the canyon.
But the Earth Firsters have a more hard-nosed and practical rationale than that. If the cost of dealing with monkey wrenching becomes great enough, then the companies developing wild lands will no longer make a profit from those operations. Logging operations in large areas of the national forests are lucrative only because they are subsidized by the U.S. Forest Service; ranching–and the resulting overgrazing and erosion damage–is profitable on many federal lands only because ranchers pay dirt-cheap fees for use of the land. “The ecology warrior hurts no living thing, absolutely never, and he avoids capture, passing all costs on to them, the Enemy,” says Doc Sarvis, one of the gang. “The point of his work is to increase their costs, nudge them toward net loss, bankruptcy, forcing them to withdraw and retreat from their invasion of our public lands, our wilderness, our native and primordial home.”
If you haven’t read any Abbey, Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang are better books. Hayduke Lives! is less a novel and more mythology: the archetypal hero fights the monster that is threatening the peaceable kingdom. The struggle results in real deaths, but the characters who die are caricatures, as expendable as the average dope smuggler on Miami Vice.
