Edward Abbey,...

[misanthrope]

...a heralded environmental novelist, wrote the following passage in his book "Desert Solitaire" back in 1968:


"Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people --- the following preparations would be essential:

1. Concentrate the populace in megalopolitan masses so they can be kept under close surveillance and where, in case of trouble, they can be bombed, burned, gassed or machine-gunned with a minimum of expense and waste.

2.Mechanize agriculture to the highest degree of refinement, thus forcing most of the scattered farm and ranching population into the cities. Such a policy is desirable because farmers, woodsmen, cowboys, Indians, fishermen and other relatively self-sufficient types are difficult to manage unless displaced from their environment.

3.Restrict the possession of firearms to the police and the regular military organizations.

4.Encourage or at least fail to discourage population growth. Large masses of people are more easily manipulated and dominated than scattered individuals.

5.Continue military conscription. Nothing excels military training for creating in young men an attitude of prompt, cheerful obedience to officially constituted authority.

6.Divert attention from deep conflicts within society by engaging in foreign wars; make support of these wars a test of loyalty, thereby exposing and isolating potential opposition to the new order.

7.Overlay the nation with a finely reticulated network of communications, airlines, and interstate autobahns.

8.Raze the wilderness. Dam the rivers, flood the canyons, drain the swamps, log the forests, strip-mine the hills, bulldoze the mountains, irrigate the deserts, and improve the national parks into national parking lots.

Idle speculations, feeble and hopeless protest. It was all forseen nearly half a century ago by the most cold-eyed and clear-eyed of our national poets, on California’s shore, at the end of the open road: 'Shine, perishing republic.'"

(Note: Robinson Jeffers is the poet he refers to, and author of "Shine, Perishing Republic")

[misanthrope]

1. Also,...

...Abbey is credited/blamed for kick-starting the eco-terrorist movement via his book "The Monkey Wrench Gang."

The guy's a damn good writer whose love of the land he inhabited easily shines through in his work.