Edward Abbey and the American West

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Edward Abbey and the American West
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• Benedicto
• May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome,
  dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May
  your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
  May your rivers flow without end, meandering
  through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells,
  past temples and castles and poets' towers into a
  dark primeval forest where tigers belch and
  monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious
  swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue
  mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless
  stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient
  unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on
  profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white
  sand beaches, where storms come and go as
  lightning clangs upon the high crags, where
  something strange and more beautiful and more
  full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for
  you --- beyond that next turning of the canyon
  walls."?

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Edward Abbey 1927-1989

• American writer, essayist, park ranger,
  environmentalist
• Thoreau of West
• Militant conservationist, anarchist, polemicist

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Often compared to Thoreau, but not from elite
background or Emerson

• More like Muir.
• Grew up on farm in Indiana, Pennsylvania
• 1944, headed west, hitchhiked around west, fell
  in love with Four Corners Region
• Masters from UNM, later tried to attend Yale,
  quit after two weeks
• Self described redneck

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"I am a redneck myself, born and bred on a
submarginal farm in Appalachia, descended from an
endless line of dark-complected, lug-eared,
beetle-browed, insolent barbarian peasants, a
line reaching back to the dark forests of central
Europe and the alpine caves of my Neanderthal
primogenitors."-- from "In Defense of the
Redneck", Abbey's Road.
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Passionate defender of wilderness

• Hard to pigeonhole, and not at all stereotypical
  liberal environmentalist
• Loved to hunt and shoot, advocate of right to
  bear arms supporter of NRA
• Drink beer and red meat
• Argued important role for wilderness was as
  refuge from authoritarian government, place to
  hide out in times of tyranny and launch rebellion

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Hardly right-wing either

• Defended revolutionaries of Bolivia, Vietnam
• Opposed Vietnam war, conscription, foreign wars
  in general
• Railed against power of oil industry, road
  industry.Control of Washington DC by industry,
  generally.

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Keep America beautiful burn a billboard
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Like Thoreau, a passionate advocate of individual
liberty, bordering on anarchistAnd like
Thoreau, saw indissoluable link between
wilderness and liberty
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Like Thoreau, a poet
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Like Thoreau, a poet
I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which
the naked self emerges with a nonhuman world and
yet somehow survives still intact, individual,
separate. Paradox and bedrock.--Desert Solitaire
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The personification of the natural is exactly
the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to
eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade
for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of
the cultural apparatus, but also to confront,
immediately and directly if its possible, the
bare bones of existence, the elemental and
fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.
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I want to be able to look at and into a juniper
tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and
see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly
ascribed qualities, even the categories of
scientific description. To meet God or Medusa
face to face, even it it means risking everything
human in myself.
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I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which
the naked self merges with a nonhuman world ad
yet somehow survives still intact, individual,
separate. Paradox and Bedrock.Well, the sun
will be up in a few minutes and I havent even
begun to make coffee.--Desert Solitaire, The
First Morning
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Wrote 21 books

• Most famous, Desert Solitaire (1968)
• Meditation on beauty and solitude of nature,
  based mostly on experience as ranger in
  Canyonlands (15 years as with Park Service )
• Meditation on human folly, progress and
  culture
• Many aphorisms
• Reason has seldom failed because it has seldom
  been tried.
• Who will save the parks from the park service?

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The Monkey-wrench gang (1975)

• Novel about a group of misfits who become
  saboteurs, wrecking dams in American west to
  restore landscape
• Said to have been inspiration for Earth First!
• Direct action to protect wilderness against
  industrial tourism and other forms of
  development
• Monkeywrenching--to damage machinery or commit
  sabotage without hurting people (to throw a
  monkey wrench, or British to throw a spanner in
  works

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What does Abbey have to say in Desert Solitaire?
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I. Critique of Industrial Tourism

• What is industrial tourism?
• Why is it bad?
• Why does the park service foster it?

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Congress is always willing to appropriate money
for more and bigger paced roads, anywhere,
particularly if they form loops. Loop drives are
extremely popular with the petroleum industry
--they bring the mortorist right back to the same
gas station from which he started.
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Pinchot and U.S. Forest Service Reconciling
competing interests

• National Park Service a bit different
• Established in 1916 to provide for the enjoyment
  of the parks in such manner and by such means
  as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment
  of future generations.
• Provide for enjoyment v. unimpaired
• Are these goals compatible?

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Utilitarianism maximize good, greatest happiness
for greatest number

• What would Abbey think of this philosophy?

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Critique of Civilization What does Abbey think
of Civilization?(how does he characterize it?

• commerce, traffic and rubbish
• Clamor, filth and confusion

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II. What is the role of wilderness?

• Wilderness is a necessary part of civilization
  and it is the primary responsibility of the
  national park system to preserve intact and
  undiminished what little still remains.

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How should we understand the enjoyment part?

• Usufructuary
• The right to enjoy something belonging to
  another, so long as no damage is done

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How can we save the parks from damage?
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• Resistance. Esp. to automobiles.
• It is the responsibility of the Park Service, as
  well as that of everyone else concerns with
  preserving both wilderness and civilization, to
  begin a campaign of resistance. The auto-motive
  combine has almost succeeded in strangling our
  cities we need not let it destroy our national
  parks.

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Is this pie-in-the-sky? Why should it be?

• We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into
  cathedrals, concert halls, art museums,
  legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the
  other sanctums of our culture we should treat
  our national parks with the same deference, for
  they, too, are holy places.

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Prescription for national parks

• No more automobiles
• 2) No new roads.
• Existing roads only for bicycles or horses.
• Provide free bikes.
• Fraction of cost of road building and
  maintenance.

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3) Make rangers range

• What would happen if we did this?
• If we could learn to love space as deeply as we
  are now obsessed with time, we might discover a
  new meaning in the phrase to live like men.

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Civilization v. Culture

• I was accused of being against civilization,
  against science, against humanity
• Is he?

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Civilization v. culture

• Civilization is a semi-independent entity,
  precious and fragile, drawn through history by
  the finest threads of art and idea, a procfess or
  series of events wthout formal structure or clear
  location in time and space. It is the conscious
  forefront of evolution, the brotherhood of great
  souls, and the comradeship of intellectthe
  Invisible Republic open to all who wish to
  participate, a democratic aristocracy based not
  on power or institutions but on isolated men

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Who are these men?

• Lao-Tse Socrates Jesus Paine and Jefferson,
  Blake and Burns and Beethovern, John Brown and
  Henry Thoreau, Whitman, Tolstoy, Emerson, Mark
  Twain, .Nietzsche and Thomas Mann, Lucretius and
  Pope John XXIII, and ten thousand other poets,
  revolutionaries and independent spirits, both
  famous and forgotten, alive and dead, whose
  heroism gives to human life on earth its
  adventure, glory and significance.
• --Desert Solitaire, Episodes and Visions

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Culture in contrast

• means the way of life of any given human society
  considered as a whole.
• Examples?
• Industrial culture
• State socialism
• Monopoly capitalism
• Popular culture

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• Civilization is the vital force in human
  history, culture is that inert mass of
  institutions and organizations which accumulate
  around and tend to drag down the advance of life.
• Civilization is tolerance, detachment and humor,
  or passion, anger, revenge culture is the
  entrance examination, the gas chamber, the
  doctoral dissertation, and the electric chair.

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• Civilization is Jesus turning water into wine,
  culture is Christ walking on the waves.
• Civilization is the wild river culture, 592,000
  tons of cement.

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Inter-textualityWho is Abbey in conversation
with?Definitely Thoreau and Emerson
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Maybe T.S. Eliot

• British poet
• Wrote of emptiness of western culture.
• Turned to Christianity, had nervous breakdown,
  ultimately eastern religion

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The Wasteland (1922)Unreal cityUnder the
brown fog of a winter dawn,A crowd flowed over
London Bridge, so manyI had not thought death
had undone so many
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The Hollow Men (1925)We are the hollow menWe
are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpieces
filled with straw. Alas!Our dried voices,
whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and
meaninglessAs wind in dry grassOr rats feet
over broken glassin our dry cellar Shape
without form, shade without colour,Paralysed
force gesture without motionThose who have
crossed With direct eyes, to deaths other
KingdomRemember us--if at all--not as
lostViolent souls, but onlyAs the hollow
menThe stuffed men
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What is Abbeys goal in living alone in the
desert?
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Abbeys politics

• How would you describe them?
• Is Abbey the Thoreau of the west?

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Elitism Is Abbey elitist?

• A man could be a lover and defender of the
  wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving
  the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and
  right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether
  or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge
  even though we may never need to go there. I may
  never get to Alaska, for example, but I am
  grateful that its there. We need the possibility
  of escape without it the life of the cities
  would drive all men into crime or drugs or
  psychoanalysis.

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What does Abbey think of men in general?
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Does Abbey have a coherent philosophy of the
environment?
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Wilderness Ethics and Roadless Wilderness Debate