Review: Joy Williams on Edward Abbey and Ecotage
The book that made other environmental movements look timid, ineffectual, compromising, and dull, and its inheritors
This is the fiftieth anniversary of the great American ecotage novel, The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey, wilderness lover, provocateur, scold, a wild man really, one of a kind, the finest writer on the American desert west we’ve had and ever will. It’s a fine comic, highly opinionated brawl of a book, lavishly unwoke, munificently detailed in describing the natural grandeur of wild lands and the machinery employed to destroy it.
Abbey had already written a classic, the 1968 Desert Solitaire, recounting his time as a park ranger at Arches National Park outside Moab, Utah. It’s an exuberant yet bitter book (Abbey’s specialty), personal and present. The naturalist Joseph Wood Krutch, finding it extraordinary and eloquent, called it a “hymn of hate,” because of Abbey’s railings against the industrialization of national parks, foretelling their ruin by roads and Coke machines. Desert Solitaire was published two years after the Glen Canyon Dam was completed three hundred and fifty miles from Arches, choking the Colorado River and creating the massive reservoir Lake Powell (a. k. a., Lake Foul) by submerging and destroying 180 miles of the complex Colorado River and Glen Canyon ecosystem. This was the largest deliberately created ecological disaster in our history (putting aside the slaughter of the buffalo and the ploughing of the Great Plains in the name of Manifest Destiny). Abbey was aggrieved by the horror and engineering stupidity of the dam—it inspired him to devise the Monkey Wrench Gang’s fantastical literary correction of blowing it up. The book’s merry group of anarchists became famous, particularly the ex-Green-Beret George Washington Hayduke, dedicated, resourceful, and a little unhinged. Hayduke was based on Abbey’s friend Doug Peacock, who went on to become a great advocate for the grizzly bear, writing his wild classic Grizzly Years with a lyrical and persuasive style all his own.
When the New York Times belatedly reviewed The Monkey Wrench Gang a year after it was published, Abbey wrote in his journal
Favorable notice: but misrepresents the book as “revolutionary” tract for the old “New Left.” Jeez! No mention of the comedy, the word-play, the wit, humor and brilliance! I’m reading MWG for the seventh time—not bad, but too many words.
Our Abbey was never one to take praise graciously. Yet despite his desire for The Monkey Wrench Gang to be seen as a literary masterpiece it was received as a call to revolution. The book inspired the formation of the rambunctious wild-centric group “Earth First!,” which made other environmental organizations look timid, ineffectual, compromising, and dull dull dull in the extreme. In 1985 two of its founders wrote Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching. It presents itself quite reasonably in the manner of a wholesome Cub Scout handbook with detailed instructions on disabling motor vehicles of all kinds, spiking trees and roads, sabotaging power lines and computers, and cutting traplines and fences. Abbey wrote a forward, “… Forward! …,” in praise of direct action and meaningful preservation of wild lands, quite contrary to the “Land of Many Uses” drivel our Forest Service is condemned to uphold as enshrined in the Multiple Use Sustained Yield Act of 1960; the Act is so distorted under the present administration that none of our public lands—park, monument, national forest—is safe from repurposing pillage. Abbey wrote: “Representative government in the USA represents money, not people, and therefore has forfeited our allegiance and moral support.”
