Happy Birthday Edward Abbey

[NightWatcher]

When Edward Abbey died in 1989 at the age of sixty-two, the American West lost one of its most eloquent and passionate advocates. Through his novels, essays, letters and speeches, Edward Abbey consistently voiced the belief that the West was in danger of being developed to death, and that the only solution lay in the preservation of wilderness. Abbey authored twenty-one books in his lifetime, including Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Brave Cowboy, and The Fool's Progress. His comic novel The Monkey Wrench Gang helped inspire a whole generation of environmental activism. A writer in the mold of Twain and Thoreau, Abbey was a larger-than-life figure as big as the West itself."

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"The most common form of terrorism in the U.S.A. is that carried on by bulldozers and chainsaws. It is not enough to understand the natural world; the point is to defend and preserve it. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul."

Edward Abbey left his family home in Home, Pennsylvania at age 17 and headed west across America, on a journey of hitchhiking through the desert from which his heart and mind never recovered. Before long, he had moved to the Southwest, where he earned several degrees from the University of New Mexico. (His Masters thesis discussed “Anarchism and the Morality of Violence.”)

Through the 1950s and 1960s Abbey worked as a seasonal park ranger and fire lookout, and wrote three novels that attracted minor attention. Desert Solitaire (1968), his fourth book, made Abbey’s reputation as someone who, as Robert Redford later wrote, “positively influenced many to not only treasure our natural heritage but to fight for its preservation as well.” This non-fiction account of life as a backcountry ranger in Utah, subtitled “A Season in the Wilderness,” is a masterpiece of nature writing and philosophy.

Publishers like the Sierra Club and Time-Life Books were eager for more of Abbey’s work, and (along with a fourth novel) he next wrote three non-fiction coffee table books (Appalachian Wilderness, 1970; Slickrock, 1971; Cactus Country, 1973), filled with beautiful photography. His fifth novel, however, soon distanced him from the establishment.

The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), the most famous of Abbey’s 20+ books, tells the story of four ecological saboteurs whose dream is to blow up Arizona’s Glen Canyon Dam. The author called his book a satire; others saw it as a how-to guide for destroying property. The novel inspired the formation of the militant group Earth First!, and such sabotage in defense of the environment became known as ‘monkey-wrenching.’

Abbey, uncomfortable with his image as a counterculture environmentalist, often angered his antagonists with statements like “Society is like a stew. If you don’t keep it stirred up, you get a lot of scum on top,” “Freedom begins between the ears,” and “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.” Refusing to be linked with either the left or the right, he enjoyed fighting what he considered the good fight.

“Better a cruel truth,” he said, “than a comfortable delusion.”
http://www.americanswhotellthetruth.org/pgs/portraits/Edward_Abbey.html

[uppityperson]

1. k&r for Edward Abbey. He was only 62? Good grief, I am getting old.

[NightWatcher]

3. he did more living in his 62 than most people would get out of ten lifetimes

[villager]

2. K&R here, too. And to quote Hayduke:

"Sweet holy Motherfuck!" ;-)

[InvisibleTouch]

4. Read "Desert Solitaire" years ago.

Oddly enough, the only parts that stick in my mind are the bit about the tourist who was "lucky" enough to have died in the great outdoors with a hell of a view (I can't argue too much with that), and when Abbey cut off a rattlesnake's head (which upset me to no end, since the rest of the book was so respectful to nature and wilderness).

[xchrom]

5. recommend