Edward Abbey And Desert Solitaire

I recently finished Edward Abbey's legendary memoir Desert Solitaire. It's an amazing book but one that left me with mixed feelings about the author.

The memoir covers a period in the 1950s when Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger at then Arches National Monument, now a national park. His descriptions of the desert, its landscape, vegetation and wildlife are vivid and atmospheric. He wrote with a dry sense of humor, tinged with sarcasm and more than a bit of misanthropy.

Abbey included tales of side adventures in the Grand Canyon and other wild areas of the desert southwest. These are fascinating glimpses into a world few see, and a world that has been transformed by increasing population and visitation. Edward Abbey could see this transformation happening before his eyes, and he didn't like it.

You could read long excerpts from the book and conclude Abbey was an environmentalist who loved nature, and he was, but the problem comes with some of his behavior. He wrote at length about issues of conservation and pollution, destruction of habitat, water use, and other problems caused in wild places by human activity. But he also related stories where he seemed to be as much of a problem as the tourists he despised.

Edward started a destructive wildfire on a river trip through irresponsible behavior. He also tells a tale of rolling a tire into the Grand Canyon through a mule train with some friends. He killed a rabbit with a stone inside the national monument, for no reason other than a moral experiment (if the story is even true). He committed an act of vandalism that would now be considered ecoterrorism, following after a survey crew and systematically undoing all of their work demarcating a new road.

I was not surprised to find out later that he was friends with people in the Earth First movement. Earth First supports "direct action" on behalf of the environment, including violent acts of destruction¹. Abbey has been dead a long time now but these acts continue. Recently in Flagstaff there was an incident of construction equipment being damaged where a road is being extended for a new golf course and housing. The more things change, the more they stay the same.

You get the impression that Edward Abbey was very pleased with himself. He seems to have went through life thinking he was "dunking on" everybody, to use a twenty-first century phrase. Abbey loved the wild lands, but believed he alone should have access to them, nobody else. It was a childish and selfish world view, an extreme form of locals only.

Still, the book is an amazing time capsule and many of the issues he discussed continue to be relevant: habitat destruction, population growth, crowding of parks, killing of wild predators. Even though I came away with some contempt for Edward Abbey the man, I still think the book is an amazing read for anyone with an interest in the wild areas of the Desert Southwest and the issues we have today.

Footnotes

1 The FBI considers Earth First and some splinter groups to be a terrorist organization, or a domestic extremist group. I was briefly an environmental science major in college and brushed up against some of these people. They were knuckleheads. They possessed very little knowledge but a lot of moral certainty.