The two Edward Abbeys

By Chrstian Probasco, 12-21-08

	Abbey's symbol: the monkeywrench

“I’m not going to bombard you with graphs and statistics, which don’t make much of an impression on intelligent people anyway.”
--Edward Abbey, One Life at a Time, Please, pp14

“In 1984 the Bureau of Land Management…confessed that 31 percent of the land it administered was in ‘good condition’ and 60 percent in ‘poor condition.’ And it reported that only 18 percent of the rangelands were improving, while 68 percent were ‘stable’ and 14 percent were getting worse.”
--Edward Abbey, One Life at a Time, Please, pp15

A father of five and a supposed anarchist who admired Thoreau’s dictum, “That government is best which governs not at all,” an implacable enemy of the “Anthill State” which was a “technocratic despotism…the enemy of personal liberty, family independence, and community sovereignty,” Abbey was also an advocate for state-imposed birth control.

The protagonist of his book Brave Cowboy, Jack Burns, was an archetypical old-fashioned, freedom-loving, authority-hating, barbed-wire loathing cowboy. Abbey grew up idolizing cowboys. For a brief time, he cowboyed. But he hated cowboys.  He hated the ranchers who employed them.  And he once quipped that if he had enough money, he’d run off and buy a ranch.

He also hated cows but loved steak. He personally didn’t like walking. He avoided it when possible. He tore up the desert and ran down closed roads in his famously decrepit pickup truck. But when it came to the approaches of the southwest desert’s natural wonders, he wanted everybody else to walk in.  He advised visitors to crawl.

He was a “hard-nosed empiricist” who believed in what he could “hear, see, smell, grab, bite into.” And he thought that the whole earth was a living being and that rocks had rights.

Abbey advocated extremism.  He advocated the middle way. He was a redneck.  He hated redneck values. 

Abbey wasn’t a naturalist. He wasn’t an environmentalist. He didn’t know, and didn’t care to know, the meaning of the word “ecology.” He wasn’t concerned with “nature as a living museum.” Yet his writing contributed greatly to the success of the modern environmental movement.

Prolific author Wendell Berry had this to say about Abbey:

“The problem, evidently, is that he will not stay in line. No sooner has a label been stuck to his back by a somewhat hesitant well-wisher than he runs beneath a low limb and scrapes it off.”

Abbey was a complex character.  He contained multitudes.  He was schizoid.  He was trying to speak to several audiences who had conflicting values and interests, with a heavy emphasis on two in particular: neo-Luddite environmentalists (some would say anarcho-primitivists/green anarchist) and “classical liberal” freedom-lovers. The two could only be joined together in his own soul and so his legacy heavily favors one and downplays the other.

Which vexes me, because I only seem to encounter references to Edward Abbey whenever some crusader wants to limit my access to what I’d once been told was my land. Wilderness advocates, for the most part, who have a very narrow definition of wilderness.

Take this passage of Ray Wheeler’s from the Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance (SUWA) website as an example:

“No one has better explained this highest value of the La Sals wilderness than Edward Abbey. If a piece of this region should ever become part of the National Wilderness Preservation System, it will be in some measure a tribute to his wisdom and passion and poetry, which so beautifully complements and completes the canyon country of southern Utah. For those who have read and loved Abbey’s books, some part of these mountains, this desert, will always be the Edward Abbey Wilderness.”

On another page, Illinois Senator Dick Durbin, of all people, confirms Abbey’s famous “Wilderness needs no defense, only more defenders” quote, adding, “We can’t allow our wild places to become nothing more than memories.”

And on a Sierra Club page about the “Colorado Plateau Ecoregion”:

“For many, the first name that comes to mind is Edward Abbey. With Desert Solitaire, the irascible iconoclast left such an indelible literary mark that many now refer to the region as “Abbey country."” (Sic)

That’s “Abbey’s Country,” dammit!  And what does the Sierra Club want to do with it?  Among other things:

• Confer federal wild-and-scenic protection on remaining free-flowing rivers.

• Shift the region’s economy away from resource exploitation to sustainable development.

• Reform the Mining Law of 1872 to prevent the proliferation of new mines and reclaim abandoned mines.

• Eliminate timber sales that threaten old-growth ponderosa pine stands; do away with subsidized timber sales in all national forests.

• Require federal and state agencies to evaluate the environmental impacts of all proposed development activities.

• Protect riparian areas from livestock by requiring herd rotations, fencing, and temporary range closures.

The Sierra Club and SUWA are to property rights, freedom of travel, grazing, logging, mining, four-wheeling, two-wheeling or any kind of wheeling what Ted Nugent is to animal rights, what Richard Nixon was to open government, what the Exxon Valdez was to Prince William Sound and what Dick Durbin is to the Second Amendment.  What I read in the above bulleted points is: federal control of the population through water ownership, cost-prohibitive or time-prohibitive permitting processes for mining, grazing and timber harvests, prohibition of vehicular travel beyond paved roads or outside designated recreation areas, and federal permits for rural property owners to clear brush, cut trees, build additions, sink wells or plant a garden.

Abbey had another use in mind for the wilderness: a refuge from civilization. “Every man needs a place where he can go to go crazy in peace,” he wrote, “Every Boy Scout troop deserves a forest to get lost, miserable and starving in.  Even the maddest murderer of the sweetest wife should get a chance to run to the sanctuary of the hills.”

This is the Abbey most folks would like to forget. And he goes even further:

“…there will inevitably be a tendency on the part of the authoritarian element—always present in our history—to suppress individual freedoms, to utilize the refined techniques of police surveillance…in order to preserve—not wilderness!—but the status quo, the privileged positions of those who now so largely control the economic and governmental institutions of the United States.

“If this fantasy should become reality…then some of us may need what little wilderness remains as a place of refuge, as a hideout, as a base from which to carry on guerilla warfare against the totalitarianism of my nightmares.”

If you wanted to preserve biodiversity or open space or scenic vistas, or if you wanted to ignore or cherry-stem the roads which run everywhere through supposed “wilderness” areas or ignore the substantial imprint of man on just about every acre in the lower 48, and preserve a region which is wilderness only in the legal sense, then it might make sense from your point-of-view to use the government to separate the land from its owners. But asking the state to create and enforce the borders of the sort of wilderness Abbey is contemplating would be nonsensical.  In effect, it’s asking an organization whose legitimacy you don’t recognize to limit its own authority on your behalf. 

The best a criminal, scofflaw or anarchist who anticipates an armed struggle with the state could hope for would be for the government to keep “wilderness” clear of officially recognized settlements. Incorporated towns, in other words. He wouldn’t have an objection to mining, grazing or logging as long as the land itself remained in common ownership.  Resource extraction can only support so many people, and once it becomes uneconomic to mine or drill, the mines and the derricks shut down and the workers leave.

An anarchist would want the wilderness and the backwoods and the tule under the authority of a weak government ruling from a distant capitol.  He wouldn’t want to keep off-road vehicles out, unless they were government vehicles.  He wouldn’t want to keep people out either, unless they were rangers or other law enforcement types.

Abbey would have been a perfect spokesman for the Minutemen monitoring the southern border. He was a certified gun nut and a member of the National Rifle Association; he might have had something good to say about that organization as well.  If he was more of a joiner, he might have joined a militia. Or started one. But I don’t see his name mentioned very often in defense of the Minutemen, the NRA or organized militias. I do, however, often see him quoted by environmental groups co-opted by representatives of the industrial interests he despised, whose dual purpose is rent-seeking for their donors and restricting vehicular access on public lands to nothing.

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