The protesters who flung pumpkin soup on the Mona Lisa within the Louvre in 2024 claimed, as all such protesters do, that they had been justified of their motion as a result of some increased precept—on this case, unsustainable meals manufacturing—was at stake.
Like their compatriots in Only for Oil, who threw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers two years earlier, they certainly didn’t doubt their ethical righteousness or query that they had been following within the honored footsteps of their eco-terrorist predecessors.
In his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey tells the story of 4 disparate eco-warriors who load their Jeep with the instruments of destruction and assault billboards, road-building equipment, and bridges in Utah and Arizona. Their final goal—contemplated however by no means deliberate—is to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam. As their violence will increase, the forces of financial improvement step up their efforts to cease the group, and finally do, not less than for some time. The gang reunites in Abbey’s posthumous sequel, Hayduke Lives!
A misanthropic provocateur, Abbey certainly would have scoffed on the oblique motion of hurling the contents of a can of Campbell’s at an unoffending image. Abbey was a proponent of what he euphemistically referred to as “direct-action environmentalism,” by which he meant the violent destruction of the instruments of improvement—bulldozers, surveyor’s stakes, the Glen Canyon Dam.
The soup throwers had been practising something however direct motion. Blowing up dams is simply too arduous. Let’s spill lunch on the Louvre.
In life, Abbey at all times had a tough time becoming in along with his erstwhile allies within the environmental motion. A half century after the publication of his seminal novel on eco-terrorism and 36 years after his loss of life, he nonetheless does.
His writing is suffused with anti-government rhetoric that at the beginning blush is perhaps interesting to some on the fitting. However his desire for “direct motion”—violence—to attain his political targets is now being wholeheartedly endorsed by sizable factions of the political left.
The Province of the Outlaw
The Monkey Wrench Gang acquired combined critiques. Gross sales grew largely by means of word-of-mouth amongst like-minded activists. The New York Instances didn’t get round to reviewing the e-book till nearly a yr after publication.
“The e-book is just not a gem of literature,” wrote reviewer Kenneth C. Caldwell in Panorama Structure Journal, who additionally doubted any potential to encourage real-life violence. “I doubt if the e-book will kindle fires of unquenchable rage in our hearts, inflicting us to solid down T-squares and take up instances of Dupont dynamite.”
Others noticed one thing else within the e-book. William Marling, an creator and literature professor, credit Abbey, possessor of two levels in philosophy, with being “set other than those that toy with the ‘conquest of nature’ paradox from an incredible philosophic peak by his means to tell apart not solely between Camus and Cocteau however between columbine and penstemon as nicely. When the substances coalesce accurately, he’s a robust author.”
Maybe too highly effective. “This e-book counsels riot and sabotage,” Marling asserts. “It accommodates specific descriptions of procedures for dynamiting bridges and destroying earth-moving equipment. Studying it, one can not assist however really feel that Abbey supposed the data to be of sensible use.”
Abbey at all times tried to keep up a strategic ambiguity on this level. However he as soon as advised an interviewer, “I write in a intentionally outrageous or provocative method as a result of I wish to startle folks.” In that, not less than, he was profitable. In his introduction to the twenty fifth anniversary version, Douglas Brinkley referred to as The Monkey Wrench Gang “revolutionary, anarchic, seditious, and, within the unsuitable palms, harmful.”
How, then, did the e-book develop into a well-liked success and a touchstone for the trendy environmental motion?
For one factor, it made environmentalists cool, “the province of the outlaw,” within the phrases of Abbey biographer David Gessner. Abbey placed on the web page what hundreds had been pondering however weren’t but ready to do. Studying about it in a comic book but critical novel allowed individuals who would by no means in actual life set ablaze a billboard or pour sand right into a bulldozer crankcase a way that they, too, had been members within the revolution.
One other Abbey biographer, James Bishop Jr., wrote that whereas the theme of The Monkey Wrench Gang was “environmental hooliganism,” it nonetheless got here “closest to reaching that place of Abbey’s most steadfast convictions: a romantically idealized world wherein the Industrial Revolution has been aborted, and society has reached a steady-state equilibrium the place man and the land can exist in concord.”
That, maybe, explains why Abbey has a deeply devoted cult following, however has not emerged past that.
Abbey’s rants towards “industrial tourism” and his insistence that we’d all be happier with out air-con, roads, cars, antibiotics, or many different conveniences of recent life quantity to a platform that tells voters: all it’s important to do is comply with be poorer, and we are able to save these rocks. As a lot as all of us love rocks, that’s a troublesome promote.
A Direct Descendant of Abbey’s Writings
In a post-9/11 world, Abbey’s dalliance with eco-terrorism has made him an excellent harder promote in some quarters, whereas elevating him to icon in others. Throughout one among his many appearances on faculty campuses, Abbey was requested if he actually needed to explode Glen Canyon Dam. “No,” he advised the scholars. “But when another person needed to do it, I’d be there holding the flashlight.”
Author Doug Peacock, a good friend of Abbey and the first inspiration for the novel’s lead character, George Washington Hayduke, doesn’t hem and haw about Abbey’s position in inspiring eco-terrorists. “The novel environmental group Earth First! Was a direct descendant of Abbey’s writings,” he wrote.”
Abbey rejected the notion that he was endorsing terrorism, drawing a distinction between sabotage and terrorism. “If the wilderness is our true dwelling, and whether it is threatened with invasion, pillage, and destruction—because it definitely is—then we’ve got the fitting to defend that dwelling, as we’d our personal quarters, by no matter means are obligatory,” Abbey wrote within the essay, “Eco-Protection.”
If “the tree of liberty have to be refreshed every now and then with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” Abbey appeared to be saying, so should the pinions and junipers of Utah’s slickrock nation.
“No matter means are obligatory” appears fairly clear, particularly when standing subsequent to his invitation to suicide bombers to take a lunge at Glen Canyon Dam.
Abbey’s defenders like to attract a distinction between damaging property and killing folks.
In his essay “One Man’s Terrorist,” Michael Department, a professor of environmental literature, justifies the destruction of earth-moving equipment, billboards, and surveyor’s stakes—prime targets of the Monkey Wrench Gang—as doing no particular person any hurt.
“Utilizing a chainsaw to fell a billboard is not any extra violent than utilizing a welding machine to assemble one,” Department writes.
The competition that if no human is harmed, then it may’t be terrorism is defective on its face. Should you blow up a synagogue since you hate Jews, it’s an act of terrorism, whether or not there are any Jews inside or not.
Abbey was not unaware of the best way the e-book may very well be, and was, perceived. He apprehensive that he can be “accused of rash crimes … each time some Boy Scout sugars a bulldozer, or shellacs an earth-mover.” He was proper to fret. A group of terrorism biographies printed two years after 9/11 profiled “twenty-six individuals who determine prominently within the story and historical past of terrorism,” together with Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, and Ted Kaczynski. Abbey is true there on the entrance, his smiling, bearded countenance first alphabetically, adopted by Gerry Adams and Yasir Arafat.
Am I a Racist?
Nonetheless, it isn’t his position as mad prophet of eco-terrorism that makes Abbey one thing of an untouchable amongst extra standard environmentalists.
Abbey’s good friend and fellow environmental icon Wendell Berry summed up the case greatest in his essay, “A Few Phrases in Favor of Edward Abbey.” Abbey, writes Berry, is “seen as an issue by people who find themselves, or who assume they’re, on his aspect.” These erstwhile defenders “have an uncontrollable itch to apologize for him.”
The central downside, in keeping with Berry, is that lots of his critics “assume that Mr. Abbey is an environmentalist—and therefore that they, as different environmentalists, have a proper to anticipate him to carry out as their device.” However, Berry writes, “he isn’t a conservationist or an environmentalist or a boxable ist of another type.”
Brinkley in contrast Abbey to Don Quixote, and “the windmill Abbey needed to tear down most was the Glen Canyon Dam.” Others have prompt Harriet Beecher Stowe or Upton Sinclair. He’s extra typically in comparison with Henry David Thoreau, however biographer James Bishop Jr. astutely notes that The Monkey Wrench Gang is “extra Orwellian than Thoreauvian.” Abbey’s imaginative and prescient is in some ways bleak—the choice futures quantity to a selection between a darkscape of commercial wasteland or a post-industrial anarchy shorn of each trendy comfort.
However on this age of intersectionality, the actual problem is Abbey’s views on non-environmental points. Abbey opposed immigration, wrote and mentioned untoward issues about racial minorities, referred to as welfare “a subsidy for child manufacturing,” was proudly sexist (“To the editors of Ms. Journal, NY: “‘Expensive Sirs …’”), referred to as the Peace Corps “an act of cultural vanity,” and owned weapons (“I load my very own ammo”).
Abbey thought of his essay “Immigration and Liberal Taboos” amongst his private favorites. Solicited after which rejected in 1982 by The New York Instances, it was subsequently rejected by Harper’s, Atlantic, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and Mom Jones. The left’s intolerance for dissenting opinions is just not a brand new factor.
The piece was finally printed in 1983 by Phoenix New Instances.
Abbey argued that “it is perhaps smart for us as Americans to contemplate calling a halt to the mass inflow of much more thousands and thousands of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-generically impoverished folks. … How many people, in truth, would favor to be submerged within the Caribbean-Latin model of civilization? … Harsh phrases: however any person has to say them.” And Abbey very cheerfully did, whereas pondering the criticism.
“Am I a racist?” he requested himself in his journal. “I assume I’m. I definitely don’t want to reside in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals. Take a look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia.” On the identical time, Abbey believed it was by no means honest “to judge the standard of any particular person by cause of race. You can’t decide the value of a person by his pores and skin colour, bone construction, I.Q., physique chemistry or genetic inheritance. … Nonetheless, there are vital variations among the many numerous races, each in character and in achievement. It’s intellectually dishonest and socially condescending to faux in any other case.”
Because the editor of his printed journals wrote, a sanitized, politically appropriate Abbey “can be—nicely, no Edward Abbey in any respect.”
Abbey, Jefferson, and Lincoln
Fifty years on, The Monkey Wrench Gang endures.
A theme working by means of retrospective essays on Abbey and his work is theory on his response to local weather change. All conclude, naturally, that he’d be on their aspect. However none surprise about his response to the destruction of habitat wrought by acres dedicated to the manufacturing of “clear” vitality.
It’s tough to think about the Don Quixote who ranted about paved roads, guests’ facilities, and flushable bogs on public lands would get behind the thought of deploying photo voltaic panels or windmills throughout his beloved desert.
Abbey wrote that “a patriot should at all times be able to defend his nation towards his authorities,” sounding suspiciously like Thomas Jefferson justifying the necessity for insurrection each 20 years. If “the tree of liberty have to be refreshed every now and then with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” Abbey appeared to be saying, so should the pinions and junipers of Utah’s slickrock nation.
It’s a harmful philosophy. When every man decides for himself how a lot violence is justified to attain political ends, probably the most violent have a tendency to come back out on prime.
Abraham Lincoln, an admirer of Jefferson, mentioned, “There isn’t a grievance that could be a match object of redress by mob legislation.”
If, in studying The Monkey Wrench Gang, conservatives are enticed by Abbey’s anti-government rhetoric, they need to heed the phrases of Lincoln and keep in mind that, finally, just like the left turning on Abbey over immigration, the revolution at all times devours its personal.