It was a foundational belief for Abbey, but many scientists and environmentalists today would argue that it reflects an outmoded, even reactionary image of the wild as we push deeper into the twenty-first century. But appreciation of the wilderness was for Abbey also a deeply moral act, an expression, he writes, of “loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need-if only we had the eyes to see.”īeyond the human. The wild provided an opportunity for a type of freedom and experience, he believed, that just wasn’t available in more overtly humanized and technological environments. It’s a vision in which the wilderness provides an alternative set of values, an ethos counter to the uniformity, artificiality, and technological control of modern life. It boils down to first principles: Abbey’s ideal of wilderness as a realm “beyond the human” was the bedrock of his philosophical approach to the wild. But, at the same time, the Abbey renaissance is fighting some newly powerful intellectual and political currents within American environmentalism.
Given that Desert Solitaire is often mentioned in the same breath as Thoreau’s Walden and Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, the renewed interest in the prickly avatar of the desert Southwest makes some sense. His raucous 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, about a group of environmental merry pranksters and saboteurs running wild in the American Southwest, would further cement Abbey’s reputation (for better or worse).
He’s been at the center of conversations (and more often than not, arguments) about wilderness preservation and environmental politics since the publication of his 1968 classic, Desert Solitaire, a captivating mix of nature writing, environmentalist polemics, and autobiographical musings. This little burst of attention to Abbey shouldn’t be that surprising. Photo by Mark Klett, 1988 Ed Abbey in Grand Gulch, Utah. Next month, they’ll be joined by Abbey in America, a multi-author collection of personal and scholarly reflections on Abbey’s continuing influence (full disclosure: I’m one of those doing the reflecting). Two new books - All The Wild That Remains by David Gessner and Finding Abbey by Sean Prentiss - explore the life and legacy of the writer and wilderness firebrand. There seems to be a good deal of interest in Edward Abbey these days.
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