A rebel wild and free

[Plus audio version]

by Paul Cudenec, who reads the article here

Edward Abbey (1927-1989) was a writer, a defender of nature and an important inspiration for the radical environmentalist movement in the USA and beyond.

He was in many ways the embodiment of the idea of nature defending itself through people, with his life and thinking being an eruption of undomesticated human nature.

Abbey’s writing features some nice evocations of landscapes, such as, in The Fool’s Progress, of “the green and the vernal, the deep and haunted, the dark transpiring forests of the Appalachian hills”. [1]

And also in the same novel: “Ravens squawked at him from the rimrock. Hummingbirds throbbed before the scarlet monkeyflower of gardens hanging from seeps a hundred feet above the river. Winding tributary canyons like the corridors of a labyrinth led away from the river into the bowels of the plateau, gorges in the seamless stone that were so deep, so narrow that for hundreds of yards he could not see the sky”. [2]

He affirms: “It is an honor to be a visitor at the Grand Canyon of Colorado, as it is an honor and a privilege to be alive, however briefly, on this rare, sweet, delicate, one and one only planet we call Earth”. [3]

Abbey’s personal preference was less for the verdant than for the arid and austere – “the bright skies, the bracing air, the open space, the abundant wildlife, the desert plant life, the sheer physical delight of physical freedom”. [4]

All too often his descriptions come in the context of the threats facing beautiful places and their inhabitants, or of the debased state in which he now finds them, thanks to everything from overgrazing and tourism to mineral extraction and industrial development.

Take this scene from Hayduke Lives!: “The Mitsubishis came grumbling close, snorting through their blowholes, tracks clacking, ‘dozer blades gleaming as they plowed the dirt, tore loose the living shrubs, crushed the homes and children of gopher, chipmunk, cottontail, vole, mole, bannertail mouse and kangaroo rat, ripped up the sod, scraped off the bunch grass and flowers, the wild buckwheat and the wild ricegrass”. [5]

Abbey’s characters want as little as possible to do with cities and think with horror of “Phoenix, Mesa, Tempe, Scottsdale, Tucson, Nogales, where the huddled masses endured their muddled lives amidst a welter of smog, crime, noise, drugs, police, traffic, disease, heart transplants, sphincter transplants, two-headed babies; hydrocephalic preemies, endless conflict, smouldering hatred, an ever-rising Irritability Level, enjoying the pleasures of Growth, Prosperity and Progress”. [6]

New York City was even worse: “Wherever he looked the view was the same: steel, cement, glass, iron, brick, asphalt, extending, as he knew from bitter experience, for miles, for leagues, for eternities in every direction, north to Boston, south to Baltimore, the world’s greatest labyrinth, full of Minotaurs”. [7]

He rejects the life of “an industrial serf” [8] and argues: “Our debased popular culture – television, rock music, home video, processed food, mechanical recreation, wallboard architecture – is the culture of slaves”. [9]

“How can humans endure this mad mechanical circus? No one should have to live this way”. [10]

Abbey sees the big picture and condemns the insane whirlpool which is dragging us ever deeper into industrial hell.

He writes: “Growth is good, they say, reciting like an incantation the prime article of faith of the official American religion. Bigger is better and best is biggest.

“Growth, they tell us, means more jobs, more bank accounts, more cars, more people, leading in turn to the demand for more jobs, more economic expansion, more industrial development. Where, when, and how is this spiraling process supposed to reach a rational end – a state of stability, sanity, and equilibrium?” [11]

“The religion of endless growth – like any religion based on blind faith rather than reason – is a kind of mania, a form of lunacy, indeed a disease.

“And the one disease to which the growth mania bears an exact analogical resemblance is cancer. Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. Cancer has no purpose but growth; but it does have another result – the death of the host”. [12]

As his character John Vogelin declares in Fire on the Mountain: “I say, let’s turn back the clock. Why does progress have to progress over me and the coyotes?”. [13]

The author identifies the dark force behind all of this in his fiction, dubbing a $37m Giant Earth Mover known as GOLIATH, the world’s largest mobile machine, “Moloch the insatiable”. [14]

He writes: “The only purpose of freeway projects, highway building, river-damming, pro-development reasoning, and opposition to wilderness preservation, naming but a few measures, is to make possible, encourage and create the runaway growth that enriches a few and gradually impoverishes the rest of us”. [15]

And this massive ongoing theft is not random and spontaneous, but deliberately planned by a vast and malevolent entity.

Abbey describes “the oligarchy and oligopoly beyond: Peabody Coal only one arm of Anaconda Copper; Anaconda only a limb of United States Steel; US Steel intertwined in incestuous embrace with the Pentagon, TVA, Standard Oil, General Dynamics, Dutch Shell, I.G. Farben-industrie; the whole conglomerated cartel spread out upon half the planet Earth like a global kraken”. [16]

“The cheap false synthetic structures inspired by greed spread along the highways like mustard weed, like poison ivy, like the creeping kudzu vine. The vampires of real estate, the leeches of finance, the tapeworms of profit, have fastened themselves to the body of my nation”. [17]

“What happens to democracy when 2 percent of America’s families – according to Federal Reserve Board reports – control 40 percent of our national wealth?” [18]

Abbey also knows that the god of greed advances hand in hand with the power of the state, the means by which it can “legally” impose its rule on the victim population.

As Seldom Seen Smith tells fellow Monkey Wrench Gang member George Hayduke: “They own the guvmint, George, you know that. They own the politicians, the judges, the Tee Vee, the army, the po-lice. They own ever’ damn thing they need to own”. [19]

Abbey aptly sums up the police: “The proud sensitive flunkies of the rich and powerful. Armed and dangerous”. [20]

“If I should object to force I will be arrested. If I object to arrest I will be clubbed. If I defend myself against clubbing I will be shot. These procedures are known as The Rule of Law”. [21]

Abbey sometimes finds hope by taking a very long-term view, looking beyond his own lifespan: “Nobody lives forever. Neither do civilizations. They come and they go, like you and me”. [22]

Vogelin reckons he was born forty years too late and is going to die forty years too soon.

Why the latter? “I figure in forty years civilization will collapse and everything will be back to normal. I wish I could live to see it”. [23]

But more often Abbey finds positivity in encouraging courageous resistance to the thing he calls the global kraken.

For Vogelin, this takes the form of a simple refusal to accept that the state wing of the military-industrial complex can “legally” dispossess him of his ranch so as to expand a missile base – declaring that he is following in the tradition of the Apaches who resisted the confiscation of their land by European colonialists.

“‘No!’ Grandfather thundered, cigar in hand. ‘No!’ he roared, as he did a thousand times that summer”. [24]

But the Monkey Wrench Gang resist joyfully with feisty and funny exploits of anti-industrial sabotage – illustrated in one edition by the artist Robert Crumb, [25] who, as I have written, continues his critique of the system to this day. [26]

The tone of the novel is nicely summed up by the words with which George Hayduke wakes fellow gang member Bonnie Abbzug.

“Back to work”, he growled, rousing her. “We got three bridges, a railroad, a strip mine, a power plant, two dams, a nuclear reactor, one computer data center, six highway projects and a BLM scenic overlook to take care of this week. Up, up, up”. [27]

When one of the gang asks why they are doing all this, Hayduke patiently explains, not for the first time: “Because somebody has to do it. That’s why”. [28]

Abbey writes: “One way or another they were going to slow if not halt the advance of Technocracy, the growth of Growth, the spread of the ideology of the cancer cell”. [29]

“The megamachine means slavery. Submission to slavery is the ultimate moral disgrace. Live free or die. Death before dishonor. Code of the eco-warrior, code of the free, motto of the noble in spirit… win or lose, the important thing is resistance. Defiance. Rebellion. Better to die on our feet than live on our knees”. [30]

“There’s one thing worse than being defeated and that’s not making any fight at all”. [31]

The Monkey Wrench Gang had a direct impact on the real world, as Eric Schlosser explains: “Fed up with the timidity of mainstream environmental groups and inspired by Abbey’s work, a group of activists founded Earth First!, vowing to monkey-wrench on behalf of the land”. [32]

In Hayduke Lives! Abbey describes an Earth First! gathering – “seven days of fun, frolic and anarchy” [33] attended by Earth First! Journal editor Dave Foreman, woke hecklers and a number of state spies (there may have been some overlap in those two categories, as we will see).

“Flags, pennants, T-shirts and buttons, clenched fists and flying monkey wrenches, the import might be construed as suggesting a certain vague dissatisfaction with the ‘oligarchic swine’ (as one wag put it) who ‘own and operate America’ (in the phrase of another)”. [34]

“It was that sense of life that cannot be expressed – or depressed – through mere words. It was the message of the wolf’s cry, the lion’s roar, the whispering of the forest, the thunder of a storm, the silence of the canyon, the wail of wind, the meaning of the moon. The fire of the blood. The drumming of the heart. The beating of the drums”. [35]

But, of course, “mere words” were the backbone of Abbey’s resistance, even if it seems he may well have participated in nocturnal activities of the kind his novels describe.

And he spells out the sense of duty, of necessity even, that pushed him to write what he did.

“The more freedom the writer possesses the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic… When necessary the writer must be willing to undertake the dangerous, and often ridiculous, and sometimes martyrlike role of hero or heroine…

“I mean involvement, responsibility, commitment: the writer’s duty to speak the truth – especially unpopular truth. Especially truth that offends the powerful, the rich, the well-established, the traditional, the mythic, the sentimental. To attack, when the time makes it necessary, the sacred cows of his society”. [36]

Abbey was obviously guided by a powerful personal philosophy, which I would very much include under the organic radical banner, hence the addition of a version of this profile to that library of inspirations. [37]

He mentions in his writing several of those also featured there – on more than one occasion in the case of Henry David Thoreau [38] and Leo Tolstoy [39] – and his radicalism is combined, as is typical of that half-forgotten and now half-remembered current of thought, with “the conservative instinct to keep things not as they are but as they should be… to keep it like it was”. [40]

Abbey grew up in an Appalachian hillbilly family and was undoubtedly influenced by what W.D. James calls the “Organic Libertarianism” of that mountainous region. [41]

More specifically Abbey was, of course, an anarchist – he even researched the subject at the University of New Mexico. “His Master’s thesis was a study of Godwin, Proudhon, Kropotkin and Bakunin, among others, with the title ‘Anarchism and the Morality of Violence’”. [42]

He wrote an article for Earth First! called ‘Theory of Anarchy’ in which he explains: “Anarchism means maximum democracy: the maximum possible dispersal of political power, economic power, and force – military power.

“An anarchist society consists of a voluntary association of self-reliant, self-supporting, autonomous communities. The anarchist society would consist (as it did in preagricultural and preindustrial times) of a voluntary association of free and independent families, self-reliant and self-supporting but bound by kinship ties and a tradition of mutual aid”. [43]

Abbey, like the English green anarchist Richard Hunt, [44] says this free society would be armed and prepared to defend itself: “A healthy community polices itself: a healthy society would do the same. Looters, thugs, criminals, may appear anywhere, anytime, but in nature such types are mutants, anomalies, a minority; the members of a truly democratic, anarchistic society would not require outside assistance in dealing with them”. [45]

“Like a bulldozer, government serves the caprice of any man or group who succeeds in seizing the controls. The purpose of anarchism is to dismantle such institutions and to prevent their reconstruction.

“Ten thousand years of human history demonstrate that our freedoms cannot be entrusted to those ambitious few who are drawn to power: we must learn – again – to govern ourselves.

“Anarchism does not mean ‘no rule’, it means ‘no rulers’. Difficult but not utopian, anarchy means and requires self-rule, self-discipline, probity, character”. [46]

It is not just the ideology of anarchism that inspires Abbey and his rebellious characters, but its vital spirit.

“Hayduke followed hard on his heels, sweating with excitement, fear, joy, the lust for action. For heroic and noble action. The urge to destroy that which is evil, said the anarchist Prince Bakunin, is a creative urge. How true. How bloody awful true”. [47]

However, as many of us have subsequently discovered, being a real organic anarchist – a rebel wild and free – does not go down at all well with the fake anarchists who seek to hijack, divert and undermine the movement and its thinking.

In the last few years of his life Abbey came under particular attack from Murray Bookchin, a Marxist turned “anarchist” who eventually abandoned that misleading label to peddle an insipid “Green Left” reformism he called “social ecology”.

Bookchin vehemently attacked Abbey and his friends in Earth First! for their so-called “eco-fascism” – an oft-used slur against deep ecology and nature-based spirituality that I thoroughly debunked in my 2018 article ‘Organic radicalism: bringing down the fascist machine‘. [48]

The main stick with which Bookchin attacked Abbey was an article in which the latter declared his opposition to ongoing mass immigration into the USA.

Abbey denied being “racist”, as Bookchin claimed him to be, conceding that “we are all the descendants of illegal aliens” [49] and clearly sourcing his stance in his opposition to industrialism, growth and exploitation.

He writes in ‘Immigration and Liberal Taboos’: “A large, cheap, frightened, docile, surplus labor force is exactly what the economy needs. Put some fear into the unions: tighten discipline, spur productivity, whip up the competition for jobs.

“The conservatives love their cheap labour, the liberals love their cheap cause… Both factions are supported by the cornucopian economists of the ever-expanding economy, who actually continue to believe that our basic resource is not land, air, water, but human bodies, more and more of them, the more the better in hive upon hive, world without end”. [50]

In truth, as the poet Gary Snyder told the Los Angeles Times in 1989, Bookchin (pictured) simply seized upon this issue in a desperate attempt to cling on to the ideological leadership that he wrongly imagined he had gained over the eco-anarchist scene.

“Murray launched an attack that I feel really misrepresents what deep ecology literature has been saying in a scandalous way,” Snyder said. “Although he claims to be an anarchist, he writes like a Stalinist thug”. [51]

In Abbey’s last novel, Hayduke Lives!, he provides an entertaining account of the appearance at the aforementioned Earth First! wilderness gathering of a fictional character whose name alone suggests a strong resemblance to Bookchin.

“Bernie Mushkin took the microphone, red in the face and panting. A man of sixty or so, bald on top, flatfooted at bottom, wide-assed narrow-minded and slope-shouldered, he resembled in shape a child’s toy known as Mr. Potato-Head”. [52]

“Bernie Mushkin, old-time Marxist, sectarian revolutionary, tenured professor, academic writer, pedagogue, demagogue, ideologue, was drawn to political controversy as a moth to the flame – or a blowfly to a rotting hog. Inept and passionate, fiery-tempered and humorless, graceless but relentless”. [53]

Having delivered a Nazi salute and barked out “Sieg Heil!” two or three times to the bemused eco-crowd, Mushkin starts to read out a statement from a piece of paper in his hand.

“Earth First! eco-fascists… I congratulate you on setting back the cause of justice, decency, ecology and environmentalism by at least fifty years in America”. [54]

“Your well-publicized advocacy of sabotage and monkey-wrenching has made Earth First! a synonym for terrorism”. [55]

He says the deep ecologists have been revealed to be “nationalists and xenophobes, quite the opposite of the fun-loving anarchists you pretend to be… a hypocritical mob of creeping fascist hyenas and elitist Nazi racists. Sieg Heil!”. [56]

Abbey continues:

A fat little boy, wearing a T-shirt that argued “No Guts No Glory”, broke the silence by piping up. “Mister Mushkin”, he squeaked.
“Yes?”
“Wanta get rid of ten pounds of ugly fat?”
“What?”
“Cut your head off!” the boy squealed and broke down howling. Every child in the audience, and there were at least a hundred of them, listening intently when they heard the tip-off line, joined in the chorale of laughter. The contagion spread, the hilarity became general”. [57]

Mushkin’s three female supporters then “drove him to his hotel in nearby Las Vegas only three hundred miles away; in their eyes and in his the nearest outpost of proper civilization in the entire northern Arizona-Utah-Nevada region.

“At least there is a university in Las Vegas. Hospitals. A foreign-film cinema. Fern bars. Lesbian bookstores. And a synagogue or two or three…” [58]

I do not consider it irrelevant that Bookchin met his wife-to-be Beatrice Applestein while speaking to a zionist youth organization at City College, New York, [59] or that he enthused in print about the prospect of using sensing devices to automatically operate machines such as “a giant shovel in an open-strip mine” – the very industrial monsters that Abbey and Earth First! were resisting. [60]

As I have previously written, [61] I strongly suspect him to have been an agent of ZIM, the zio-imperialist mafia which globally controls government and industry alike.

It is very telling that the real-life Bookchin, like the fictional Mushkin, used the very dangerous “terrorism” label to attack people who were supposedly fighting for the same broad cause as he was. [62]

Later the US authorities were to use the same term in the wave of repression against the Earth Liberation Front (ELF), a new generation of eco-activists inspired by Abbey’s work.

Despite the fact that the ELF was strictly opposed to violence against people or other living beings, in 2004 the FBI branded the network “America’s top domestic terrorist threat”. [63]

This is an obvious and odious inversion of real justice – throwing spanners into the cogs of the industrial monster is a desperate attempt to stop the very real terror that it is unleashing on our world.

We have seen the same inversion operating in the UK recently, with the unbelievable branding of people as “terrorists” for speaking out against the genocidal terror being inflicted by the criminal state of Israel.

I say “unbelievable” but it is utterly believable when you know that the British state is owned and controlled by those who own and control “Israel”.

And the elevation of resistance to both industrialism and zionism to “terrorism” status merely confirms what I have been saying for a while now – industrialism is a judeo-supremacist operation to pillage, enslave and exploit across the world.

Abbey points to the same criminocracy at work, albeit in a fictional context, in his description of an EF! action against strip mining.

He notes how comfortable liberal demonstrations in well-off American cities were both tolerated by the authorities and considered “newsworthy” by the media.

“But let a bunch of hairy redneck rabble in some wasteland western American state interpose their living bodies between the industrial megamachine and a little patch of free country, open space, old-growth forest, natural nature, wildland and wildlife, and the horror runs deep through the hierarchy of upper management.

“That kind of subversion (non-commercial) cannot be accepted; will not (anti-business) be tolerated; has to (pro-populist) be most severely punished both legally and – in so far as possible – illegally; and last but categorically imperative, shall not be encouraged through the power of example by publicity in any form.

“As in any well-ordered oligarchy, not only the event must be suppressed but all news of it as well. Therefore the ‘media’ did not appear”. [64]

The same supremacist mafia which owns the media, industry and finance – as well as an impressive track record in child-trafficking, warmongering and ethnic cleansing – also of course owns Hollywood.

So it is also less-than-unbelievable that, as Eric Schlosser explains: “Although the film rights to The Monkey Wrench Gang were optioned in 1975, repeated efforts to make a movie based on the book went nowhere”. [65]

To be honest, it is probably a good thing that they did not turn the book into a film – they would probably have completely ruined it and even inverted its morality to suit the needs of Abbey’s “global kraken” of which showbiz forms part.

But the fact that they did not want his voice to reach and inspire millions of young people confirms the potential power of that voice.

Let’s all keep reading Abbey, talking and writing about him, defending his memory, forgiving his failings as we forgive our own, following his example and battling to ensure that his message of joyful resistance is passed on from generation to generation until nature’s uprising at last succeeds in toppling the malignant megamachine!

[1] Edward Abbey, The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1998), p. 2.
[2] Abbey, The Fool’s Progress, p. 433.
[3] Edward Abbey, ‘Forty Years as a Canyoneer’, One Life at a Time, Please (New York, Henry Holt & Co, 1988), p. 126.
[4] Edward Abbey, ‘Arizona: How Big is Big Enough?’, One Life at a Time, Please, p. 22.
[5] Edward Abbey, Hayduke Lives! (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1990), p. 246.
[6] Abbey, Hayduke Lives!, p. 138.
[7] Abbey, The Fool’s Progress, p. 263.
[8] Abbey, The Fool’s Progress, p. 293.
[9] Edward Abbey, ‘Theory of Anarchy’, One Life at a time, Please, p. 28.
[10] Edward Abbey, ‘A San Francisco Journal’, One Life at a time, Please?, p. 79.
[11] Abbey, ‘Arizona: How Big is Big Enough?’, One Life at a Time, Please, p. 20.
[12] Abbey, ‘Arizona: How Big is Big Enough?’, One Life at a Time, Please, p. 21.
[13] Edward Abbey, Fire on the Mountain (New York: Avon Books, 1992), p. 32.
[14] Abbey, Hayduke Lives!, p. 249.
[15] Abbey, ‘Arizona: How Big is Big Enough?’, One Life at a Time, Please, p. 23.
[16] Edward Abbey, The Money Wrench Gang (London: Penguin Random House, 2004), pp. 171-72.
[17] Abbey, The Fool’s Progress, p. 438.
[18] Abbey, ‘A San Francisco Journal’, One Life at a time, Please?, p. 77.
[19] Abbey, Hayduke Lives!, p. 121.
[20] Abbey, The Monkey Wrench Gang, p. 1.
[21] Abbey, The Fool’s Progress, p. 76.
[22] Edward Abbey, ‘TV Show: Out There in the Rocks’, One Life at a Time, Pleaser, p. 148.
[23] Abbey, Fire on the Mountain, p. 55.
[24] Abbey, Fire on the Mountain, p. 88.
[25] ‘Edward Abbey and R. Crumb’,