Book Review Coyote in the Maze Tracking Edward Abbey in a World of Words Peter Quigley

Edward Abbey is now remembered equally a militant environmentalist, an environmental writer, even a nature writer, but that is most certainly not how he saw himself. In his listen he was only a writer. His sister Nancy, quoted past James Bishop, Jr., thought of Abbey as, "just a very fine writer who cared most the surround." He cared most a neat many other things, however, and wrote about them as well. Soon before his decease in 1989, Abbey said of himself, "I never wanted to be anything but a writer, period. An author. A creator of fictions and essays. I accept all of life, all of society, for my proper realm of discourse, as whatever honest reader can discover."

But the environment was extremely important to Abbey, not simply equally a writer just also as a homo. A human being. He continually rediscovered himself in nature, in the wilderness of the desert Southwest, and recoiled at the vision of exploitative actions that were depriving him and the rest of civilisation from the freedom to experience that nature — purely homo nature in a pristine wilderness. He was securely inspired by Aldo Leopold's state ethic, and did what he could as a writer to promote the "integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic customs."

Edward Abbey was also a instructor and a philosopher. He taught environmental ethics and humanistic philosophy through his writings. He as well taught writing courses at the Academy of Arizona in Tucson. His touch on every bit a instructor should not be ignored.

Merely, by my definition, Abbey was only partially an environmentalist. In the preface to my book, The Environmentalist, I describe an environmentalist this mode:

The preservationist sees natural wonders and wants to hold them unblemished for all time. The conservationist sees natural resources and wants to ensure their viability for time to come generations. The ecologist sees the relationships between species and the world they inhabit, and wants to maintain a salubrious ecosystem. The environmentalist sees all of these as one and the same.

Edward Abbey expressed oft and with vigor the deeply held convictions of a preservationist. He was openly hostile to conservation science as applied past the U.S. Forest Service and its constituents. He feigned ignorance of ecology, an ironic stance that served him well as an avowed preservationist. In sum, Abbey was not a complete environmentalist. He was, however, a dandy and adamant defender of wilderness. "Why wilderness?" he wrote in Slickrock. "Because we similar the taste of freedom. Because nosotros similar the smell of danger." For Abbey there is no freedom without wilderness, therefore we must preserve what precious little wilderness remains. Our foes are the industrial powers of growth and their allies, the state. We must fight the skillful fight — the enemy is ourselves.

He has been called an environmental militant past some, just they must not have read his books. His reputation comes largely from the actions of others who have patterned their activities subsequently Abbey's books, particularly The Monkey Wrench Gang. Earth First! was founded in 1979, 4 years after the publication of MWG, by Dave Foreman, an admirer of Abbey'due south work. Globe First! is unhesitatingly militant in its ecology actions. On a page of the World Wide Web posted past the Honey Canal wing of Earth First!, one may read this description:

World Offset! takes a decidedly unlike tack towards environmental bug. We believe in using all the tools in the tool box, ranging from grassroots organizing and interest in the legal procedure to ceremonious disobedience and monkeywrenching.

Earth First! is different from other environmental groups. Hither are some things to continue in listen about Earth First! and some suggestions for being an active and constructive Globe First!er : First of all, World First! is not an organization, but a move. There are no "members" of Globe Get-go!, only Earth First!ers. It is a belief in biocentrism, that life (the Earth) comes starting time, and a exercise of putting our beliefs into activity.

While there is wide diversity within Earth First! (from animal rights vegans to wilderness hunting guides, from monkeywrenchers to careful followers of Gandhi, from whiskey-drinking backwoods riffraff to thoughtful philosophers, from misanthropes to humanists) in that location is agreement on i affair, the demand for action!

Globe Showtime! publishes its own Earth First! Journal, calling information technology "The Radical Environmental Journal." At the time of this writing, the electric current event posted on the Spider web (August/September 1999) has articles most contempo and ongoing ecology actions. Articles similar:

• "In Defence force of Mishanthropy" [sic] in which the author calls for a reduction in human population for the proficient of the environment;


• "BBB Pies Barry Clausen: EF! Nemesis Sees Cream" the report of a pie in the face action against an EF! informant; and


• "Confrontation in Colorado" in which a series of typical monkeywrenching actions were taken against expansion of the Vail ski resort most Vail, Colorado.

In the latter article, reported by Emily Wolf and Stephanie Tidwell: "A coalition of woods defenders converged on Vail to stymie Vail Associate's greed-motivated plans of wanton devastation in pursuit of the omnipotent dollar." As one EF!er hung from a thirty-foot tripod, blocking access to the structure zone, several others locked themselves to equipment brought in by the Forest Service to remove the homo obstacle. While these actions were carried out another EF!er prepare a roadblock to the surface area by overturning a van and locking himself to it. Typical monkeywrenching. Constructive in slowing the progress of progress. And nobody got hurt.

Globe Start! cries "No compromise in defense of Female parent Earth," with the very large exception that people must non be harmed in the grade of environmental actions. The movement might be described as militant pacifism in defense of the environs. And it certainly has a sense of humor. Much similar its mentor.

Abbey described his own role in environmental militancy this way: "I lead the assail and and so once contact is fabricated with the enemy I rapidly retreat, and let more moderate people starting time compromising, explaining, and maneuvering while I become off and do something else." He fights for the underdog, convinced the other dogs have enough to fight for them already: "I say these things because too few others will, because far also many say the contrary."

Yet his influence every bit a writer advocating militant environmentalism cannot exist overlooked. Even his widow, Clarke Cartwright Abbey, has carried on the piece of work. She, with three friends, organized a group called the Wild animals Impairment Review, devoted to reporting atrocities committed past a trivial-known group within the U.South. Section of Agriculture called Animal Impairment Control or ADC. The ADC utilizes traps, firearms, aircraft, and other devices to impale thousands upon thousands of black bears, coyotes, mountain lions, blackbirds, skunks, badgers, and raccoons each year for cattlegrowers whose herds graze on public lands. The cattlegrowers claim they cannot enhance beef without federally subsidized predator control. The Wildlife Damage Review considers the slaughter to be unjust, cruel, and a waste of taxpayers' money.

Abbey's writings accept also influenced recent actions taken past 1 of his erstwhile employers, the National Park Service. As he foretold in "Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks," our National Parks have go overburdened with automotive traffic. The 1000 Canyon National Park Foundation, an organisation devoted to fundraising in back up of the Grand Canyon National Park, has summed up the problem in this description posted on the National Park Service Website:

The nearly pressing issue in the park today is the impact created past the annual crush of well-nigh 5 million visitors and their private cars on the few developed areas forth the canyon rims. The roads and facilities in adult areas of the park were never designed to handle this volume of use. The issue has been the gradual degradation of the company experience and unacceptable impacts on the park'southward natural and cultural resource. No comprehensive management program is in place that provides direction for the park when dealing with full general visitor utilize or that guides appropriate development in the park.

That in that location is no comprehensive management plan in place is in no fashion the error of Edward Abbey. He offered up a plan some thirty years agone. Nonetheless, Park Service is proposing a solution known as the "The Greenway." It is described by the Thousand Coulee National Park Foundation on its webpage:

The Greenway will offer a combination of not-motorized routes of travel; multi-employ trails designed to adjust those who wish to feel the canyon. A system of high quality inter-connected trails and overlooks will permit visitors to access the canyon rim on pes, by bicycle, in a wheelchair, or (some areas simply) on horseback. The trails volition be specially designed and surfaced to brand admission and use easy and user-friendly for all levels of power. Options will greet each individual, group, or family. They will range from a curt walk to the canyon rim to a daylong outing of 25 miles or more. Using a network of equipment rental and return points, visitors tin custom-tailor their coulee tour past riding bikes to a destination and returning by public transit. The Greenway volition showcase Grand Canyon National Park as a model for sound resource stewardship.

Audio familiar? It should. Compare the Greenway project to this statement from Abbey's infamous "Polemic":

No more than cars in national parks. Let the people walk. Or ride horses, bicycles, mules, wild pigs — anything — but go along the automobiles and the motorcycles and all their motorized relatives out. We take agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our civilization; we should care for our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places.

Now, absolutely, Cactus Ed uses ironic rhetoric in stating his argument. He presents himself as the curmudgeonly vox of unreason in gild to grab your attention. While today his proposal and his arguments strike us equally perfectly reasonable, they were statements of near blasphemy when he uttered them in the '60s. He had to accept on the voice of a crank so as not to be immediately written off as a whiner. Remember Abbey's word of the then-current bug of Yosemite National Park and the solution he offered there as well: "Permit our people travel lite and free on their bicycles — nothing on the back but a shirt, goose egg tied to the bike just a slicker, in case of rain. Their bedrolls, their backpacks, their tents, their food and cooking kits will be trucked in for them, free of charge, to the campground of their choice in the Valley by the Park Service." Now read an excerpt from one of several alternatives recently proposed past Park Service at Yosemite National Park:

Visitors would arrive at an orientation/transfer facility in the due west terminate of the valley, at their lodging or campground, or in a gateway community and then move betwixt destinations in the valley by shuttle motorcoach, bicycle, or on foot. Day utilise company and out-of-park bus traffic would exist intercepted at an orientation/transfer facility[.]

Okay, so Park Service makes no mention of providing the service costless of charge. Still, this proposed alternative to the traffic jams that currently confront visitors to Yosemite is a dramatic first pace toward Abbey'southward vision of a people-friendly National Park, a vision acceptable to conservationists and ecologists as well equally preservationists. Mayhap Abbey was more of an environmentalist than he cared to acknowledge.

He was also a philosopher and a instructor. He was a writer who oft delved into subject matters seldom broached past whatever just serious philosophers. Simply Abbey fabricated it attainable to the residual of us. He used a peculiarly American voice to comment on the works of Nietzche, Spinoza, and Henry David Thoreau to proper noun just a few. Harold Alderman has said, "Edward Abbey was, of course, primarily a author and non a philosopher." I disagree. I recall Alderman must hateful that Abbey was not a professor of philosophy, as when Thoreau writes, "At that place are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers." Abbey was a well-educated man, extremely well-read in philosophy besides every bit literature, who truly lived his ain personal philosophy of pacifistic anarchism in the wilderness. In Walden, Thoreau goes on to explicate:

To be a philosopher is not simply to accept subtle thoughts, nor even to constitute a school, merely so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the issues of life, non just theoretically, just practically.

Edward Abbey was a philosopher. He based his philosophy on Nietzche's social anarchism, which is itself based on individualism. Only Abbey was no hermit, and his creed no misanthropic tract of violence. In his "Theory of Anarchy," he wrote, "Anarchy is republic taken seriously." In his own journal he would write, "Anarchism is a hugger-mugger yearning toward brotherhood. Anarchism is the demand for community." Edward Abbey was above all else a humanist. He lived out his philosophy and expressed information technology, taught it to the balance of us, through his writings.

Every writer worthy of the title is a instructor, just Abbey was also a teacher of writing. For several years in the later part of his life he taught writing courses at the Academy of Arizona. Author Mary Sojourner took one of his classes shortly before his death, and was surprised by the man who taught the class, here quoted in Quigley:

I knew of him as a man who had a lot of judgments, who treated women as boobies, and who kept searching for younger and younger women equally he grew older. I thought he stood for a lot of the qualities in men that make women so angry, all the manlike bullshit. But he turned out to be a nearly empathetic man. We became comrades. He listened to me. He honored my writing.

Another pupil described Abbey equally shy and awkward, merely too "a sure-handed editor, thorough, tough, and expert-humored." To get an "A" in one of Abbey's classes students had to get their work published, a standard significantly higher than most other university courses. At the same time, Abbey would use his personal influence with editors to help promising students get that "A".

However, without doubt, Abbey will be best remembered equally a author. It's all he e'er wanted to exist. He was, in fact, a author'south writer. He made continual references to literature, quoting anybody from Shakespeare to Robinson Jeffers, whom he admired greatly. Jeffers is today little known, but his poesy sold well in the mid-20th Century. Jeffers' verse was often suppressed for its vehemently anti-war, anti-Rooseveltian pacifism and misanthropic tone, but Abbey found in that location a foil worthy of his ain humanistic arguments. Consider this excerpt from Jeffers' 1948 verse form, "The Double Axe:"

But nevertheless remains the endless inhuman dazzler of things;

     even of humanity and human being history

The inhuman beauty — and there is endurance, endurance,

     expiry's nobler cousin. Endurance.

Like Jeffers, Abbey insisted on de-anthropomorphizing the earth so equally to avoid ascribing human being qualities where human qualities are simply in the mind of the observer. At the same time, he argued with Jeffers' criticism of humanity, equally in this passage from Desert Solitaire: "[H]ow could I be against civilization when all which I most willingly defend and venerate — including the wilderness — is comprehended by the term?"

Abbey was often called the Thoreau of the west by reviewers (when they deigned to review his work), and he did lean heavily on Thoreau, but he was also indebted to Thoreau'due south own mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. In his critique titled "Emerson," Abbey wrote: "Emerson appeals not to feel, logic, sense or common sense, but to our innate idealism, our instinctive need for harmony and meaningfulness, a demand which grows greater when the globe grows more drastic." The very need expressed throughout Desert Solitaire. The very desperation portrayed in The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Abbey lived and worked in a world of words. David J. Rothman writes that "Abbey was literate in the deepest sense, the point at which the written word becomes the medium of thinking, not just its tool." He wrote to entertain, only he very deliberately wrote to issue the changes in civilisation he felt we needed in order to survive, that is, the essential deconstruction of American thinking about the wilderness, most freedom. He was a very literary writer, a buzzard who gave new life to the works of others.

Comfort yourself with the reflection that inside a few hours, if all goes as planned, your human flesh volition be working its way through the gizzard of a buzzard, your essence transfigured into the fierce greedy eyes and unimaginable consciousness of a turkey vulture. Whereupon yous, too, volition soar on motionless wings high over the ruck and rack of man suffering. For virtually of u.s. a promotion in form, for some the realization of an ideal.

Edward Abbey used his typewriter similar a monkey wrench, blowing up complacency in the minds of his readers. He exhorted them to action. Once, when asked if he personally would push button the plunger on blowing up a dam or a bridge, Abbey said, "No, simply I'd hold the flashlight."

SOURCES

• Bishop, J., Jr. 1994. Epitaph For A Desert Anarchist: The Life And Legacy Of Edward Abbey


• Earth Offset!
• Earth First!
• Grand Coulee National Park Foundation
• Joyce, D.J. 1999. The Environmentalist: Environmental Law and Policy


• Leopold, A. 1949. A Sand County Almanac


• National Park Service
• Quigley, P., ed. 1998. Coyote In The Maze: Tracking Edward Abbey in a Globe of Words

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