Postcards from Ed
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In between writing novels, essays and non–fiction books, Edward Abbey, a cult hero who became a touchstone for the rise of environmentalism, was a prolific letter writer, firing off missives to friends and foes, editors and publishers, government agencies and the folks back home. Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast, compiled and edited by David Petersen, contains four decades of Abbey’s correspondence, from 1949 to 1989, and will leave fans longing for more. Here’s Abbey’s take on the U.S. Forest Service, off–road vehicles, grazing and the definition of “terrorist,” as well as some advice for Jimmy Carter. OUTSIDE MAGAZINE, CHICAGO (18 SEPTEMBER 1987) Editor: Mr. Alston Chase, in your October issue, alludes to Earth First! and the Sea Shepherd Society as “eco–terrorist” groups. Mr. Chase, as a writer and philosopher, should consult his Oxford dictionary of common usage. “Terrorism” means the deliberate killing of human beings in pursuit of a political end (e.g., as in Nicaragua by Reagan’s mercenaries). No one in EF! or Sea Shepherd, so far as I know, has ever preached, practiced or condoned such policy or tactics for any purpose. Civil disobedience, yes; sabotage, perhaps—but violence directed at human life, never. Anyone unable to grasp such simple distinctions has no business fooling about with a typewriter. Mr. Chase owes EF! and Sea Shepherd a complete, abject and public apology. E.A.—Moab, Utah Director, Bureau of Land Management, Washington, D.C. (11 July 1987) Dear Sir: As a hunter, fisherman and camper on our public lands, I strongly object to your proposed new regulations concerning livestock grazing on BLM lands. Your regulations go in exactly the opposite direction of what is needed: i.e., we need far more restrictions on cattle grazing, not less. In fact, the grazing of domestic livestock—cows, horses, sheep—on our public lands (ours, not the ranchers’) should be phased out completely during the next ten years. Those taxpayer–supported parasites have been abusing our public property for over a century now: it’s time to call a halt to it. In every western state human recreation, or tourism, is a far bigger money maker for local people than ranching, mining and logging combined, and even aside from mere economic considerations, the health of the land requires that we give first priority to wildlife habitat, watershed protection and ample opportunity for the public enjoyment of what is a public treasure: the free and open spaces of our western states, especially the vast areas under BLM administration. Those cows are eating grass that belongs to our elk! And most hunters out here are getting fed up with that unjust and destructive situation. Your new regulations would be a big step in the wrong direction. If you don’t soon start reducing the number of cattle on our public lands, then we hunters are going to begin a stock reduction program without your help. I feel, and most of my friends agree, that every domestic cow found stumbling around on our public lands should be regarded as a game animal. Open season, no bag limit. Sincerely, Ed Cartwright—Oracle, Arizona cc: Arizona Wildlife Federation, National Wildlife Federation, National Rifle Association, Trout Unlimited, Big Game Hunters’ Trophy Association THOMAS MCGUANE, LIVINGSTON, MONTANA (25 SEPTEMBER 1979) Dear Tom, Read your piece on Montana in the current Mariah/Outside. Cryptic and clever, wise and wry, as always. (Now the “but.”) But I am puzzled by your attitude toward environmentalists, conservationists, eco–freaks, whatever you want to call them. They are not, as you seem to think, a bunch of doomsayers and despair–mongers, nor are their publications, like High Country News or Friends of the Earth, filled with nothing but jeremiads of outrage. What they are mainly concerned with is letting people know what’s going on and then organizing intelligent opposition to the greedy and stupid; intelligent support for the good and generous. That’s all, and that’s enough. I don’t consider myself a crusader. I give a tithe of my income, in good years and bad, to the eco–freaks, spreading it around among many, and mostly local, groups. I write letters to Congressmen, since it apparently does help. I give a free speech now and then, mainly for the laughs and the girls. And of course I write about it all in about ten percent of what I write. (Plus the joys of Eine kleine Nachtwerk.) I don’t know if we can prevent the eventual industrialization of the West. But we can slow it down, if we make a fight, and in delay may lie our best hope. Passive non–resistance, on the other hand, merely hastens the destruction. If we love our country, how can we refuse to defend it? When I first came to the West to live, back in the ‘40s, I spent a lot of time playing cowboy in the corral. I roomed with a “native,” a New Mexican named Buddy Mack Adams, who owned a little bronco ranchette in the hills east of Albuquerque. In the mornings we raced to school in his black Lincoln convertible—thirty miles in twenty minutes. In the evenings and weekends we played with those goddamned horses, trying to make dude ranch hacks out of rodeo renegades. I spent more time climbing back on than I did riding. And the day before deer season we went deer hunting—with revolvers. Fun. But after a couple of years I discovered things more interesting: women, books, music, ideas, the call of the canyons and the freedom of the hills. I have never given a damn since whether those who were born out here accept me as an equal or not, to hell with them; and besides, I have now lived in the West longer than most of those (like my children) who were born here. Thirty–three years. As for “light–hearted developers” and “lively speculators,” here in Arizona they are mostly Mafioso types, and in Utah they are Mormons: a deadly serious lot. Not funny at all. (Ridiculous, but not funny.) Okay, enough lecturing. Write us another novel. (Panama is great.) See you in Livingston one of these days. Best regards—Oracle JIMMY CARTER (NEXT PRES., U.S. OF A.), PLAINS, GEORGIA (THANKSGIVING DAY, 1976) Dear Jimmy, A few helpful suggestions for your first Hundred Days:
Edward Abbey—Pariah, Utah THOMAS BRUMLEY, MOAB, UTAH (20 OCTOBER 1974) RE: “Brumley’s Bromides” column in Moab Times Dear “Thomas Brumley” The national forests, like other public lands, are the property of all Americans. They do not belong to the beef industry, the logging industry or the mining industry. All such commercial uses of our national forests are subject to whatever limits and constraints we the public, acting through our public servant the Forest Service, believe to be desirable at any given time. The question of cattle grazing in our forests, therefore, does not involve any issues of personal rights or “liberty.” Why should a few have rights denied the rest of us? If cattle grazing were a right, then each of us would have the equal right to run a few head—or a few thousand head—up on the mountain whenever we felt like it. We would have the right to hack down a swath of timber or bulldoze a cabin site or strip–mine Brumley Ridge at our own discretion, anytime. Is that really what you wish to advocate, “Brumley”? Think carefully now. Furthermore, the live human beings who serve us in the Forest Service are neither “anonymous” nor “faceless.” Nor are they hard to find or to argue with. They all have names and faces, telephone numbers and addresses. For instance, “Brumley,” you’ll find a U.S. Forest Service office right beside the main highway at the south end of Moab. Anyone there would be happy to give you the whole roster, I’m sure, right up to Chief McGuire and his office number in Washington, D.C. Of course the Forest Service is part of a monstrously overgrown and cumbersome bureaucracy, no doubt about it. But then we all live in a monstrously overgrown and cumbersome industrial society, dependent slaves of a gigantic machine which we can neither control nor even understand, as contemporary events make clear. What’s the solution? Damned if I know—but one small step, which might help, would be to keep as much of that machine out of Utah as we can, before it tears up, paves over, plagues, blights and rapes this state as it has already raped so many of the forty–nine others. Ed Abbey—Moab ED MARSTON, PUBLISHER, HIGH COUNTRY NEWS, PAONIA, COLORADO (14 DECEMBER 1988) Dear Ed: How come you and C.L. Rawlins sayin’ all them mean and nasty things about me? I thought we were friends and allies. To say that people like Foreman and I regard monkey–wrenching as an end in itself is plain silly. Dumb. Stupid. Eco– sabotage is a last resort, desperation, balls–to–the–wall defense strategy and you know it. Nothing else has worked. This probly won’t work either, but at least we’ve got to try it. Your interpretation of that brief quote from my “Life & Death of the American West” article in Mother Earth [News] makes no sense. Where do you get such cockeyed notions? My friends and I live in the American SW because we love it, and love it for its own sake—not merely because it’s the last region of the forty–eight states to be buried under asphalt and greed. My whole life, everything I’ve written, has been an expression of that belief. Nor do I want to see the small towns of the West disappear; where’d you get that idea? I certainly don’t have any respect for the greedheads who tend to dominate them, but I like most of the people I’ve known here, including the cowboys (not ranchers), miners and loggers—even a few realtors. And why does Rawlins accuse me of “rant and rave”? Humor is my style, in the old Mark Twain tradition, and that’s probably why none of my books ever go out of print. When I made that speech in Missoula attacking “The Cowboy & His Cow,” a few cattlepersons got mad and stormed out, but the majority of the audience laughed, and laughed with me, all the way through. As an essay, it’s proved to be one of the most popular pieces I’ve ever done, appearing and reappearing so far in about forty newspapers and half a dozen anthologies. And who are these “recreational elitists” Rawlins imagines I speak for? The Winnebago tourists? The safari–type trophy hunters? The O.ff R.oad V.ermin? The Ivy–League fly fishermen? I doubt if he likes them, as types, any more than I do. The main reason I want to get the stinking cattle out of our public forests and those four–leg range maggots [sheep] off our public rangelands is to make room for elk, pronghorn, bighorn, mule deer, javelina, desert turtle, wolf, grizzly, black bear, mountain lion, etc. etc.—and I’ve said so a hundred times. By what warp of the imagination does that make me a “recreational elitist”? Enclosed is another $100 for your lousy little rag and don’t print this letter neither. Edward Abbey ESQUIRE MAGAZINE, NEW YORK CITY (11 SEPTEMBER 1976) Dear Sirs: I read with interest your two stories in the September issue promoting “Traction”— ORVs or “escape machines,” as your writers call them. Let me tell you what a lot of us who live out here in the American West think about your goddamned Off–Road Vehicles. We think they are a goddamned plague. Like the snowmobile in New England, the dune buggy on the seashore, the ORV out here in the desert and mesa country is a public nuisance, a destroyer of plant life and wildlife, a gross polluter of fresh air, stillness, peace and solitude. The fat pink soft slobs who go roaring over the landscape in these over–sized over–priced over–advertised mechanical mastodons are people too lazy to walk, too ignorant to saddle a horse, too cheap and clumsy to paddle a canoe. Like cattle or sheep, they travel in herds, scared to death of going anywhere alone, and they leave their sign and spoor all over the back country: Coors beer cans, Styrofoam cups, plastic spoons, balls of Kleenex, wads of toilet paper, spent cartridge shells, crushed gopher snakes, smashed sagebrush, broken trees, dead chipmunks, wounded deer, eroded trails, bullet–riddled petroglyphs, spray–painted signatures, vandalized Indian ruins, fouled–up waterholes, polluted springs and smoldering campfires piled with incombustible tinfoil, filter tips, broken bottles, etc. It is not the bureaucrats back in Washington who are trying to stop this motorized invasion of what little wild country still remains in America; on the contrary, the bureaucrats are doing far too little. What feeble resistance has so far appeared comes from concerned citizens here and there who are trying to prod and encourage the bureaucrats to do their duty: namely, to save the public lands for their primary purpose, which is wildlife, habitat, livestock forage, watershed protection and non–motorized human recreation. Thank God for the coming and inevitable day of gasoline rationing, which will retire all these goddamned ORVs and “escape machines” to the junkyards where they belong. Ed Abbey—Moab EUGENE C. HARGROVE, EDITOR, ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS, UNIVERSITY OF GEORGIA (3 NOVEMBER 1982) Dear Mr. Hargrove: Thank you for inviting me to respond to your editorial re: Earth First! and The Monkey Wrench Gang: So far as I know, Earth First! as an organization—though it’s more a spontaneous grouping than an organization, having neither officers nor by–laws—is not “pledged to ecological sabotage.” If Newsweek said that, Newsweek is hallucinating (again). We are considering acts of civil disobedience, in the usual sense of that term, when and where they might be useful. For example, when and if the Getty Oil Co attempts to invade the Gros Ventre wilderness (Wyoming) with bulldozers, we intend to peaceably assemble and block the invasion with guitars, American flags, live human bodies and maybe an opposing D–9 tractor. If arrested, we shall go to jail, pay the fines and try again. We invite your readers to join us. A good time will be had by all. As for that book, please note that The Monkey Wrench Gang is a novel, a work of fiction and—I like to think—a work of art. It would be naive to read it as a tract, a program for action or a manifesto. The book is a comedy, with a happy ending. It was written to entertain, to inspire tears and laughter, to amuse my friends and to aggravate our enemies. (Aggravate their ulcers.) So far, about a half million readers seem to have found that approach appealing. The book does not condone terrorism in any form. Let’s have some precision in language here: terrorism means deadly violence—for a political and/or economic purpose—carried out against people and other living things, and is usually conducted by governments against their own citizens (as at Kent State, or in Vietnam, or in Poland, or in most of Latin America right now), or by corporate entities such as J. Paul Getty, Exxon, Mobil Oil, etc. etc., against the land and all creatures that depend upon the land for life and livelihood. A bulldozer ripping up a hillside to strip mine for coal is committing terrorism; the damnation of a flowing river followed by the drowning of Cherokee graves, of forest and farmland, is an act of terrorism. Sabotage, on the other hand, means the use of force against inanimate property, such as machinery, which is being used (e.g.) to deprive human beings of their rightful work (as in the case of Ned Ludd and his mates); sabotage (le sabot dropped in a spinning jenny)—for whatever purpose—has never meant and has never implied the use of violence against living creatures. The characters in Monkey Wrench engage in industrial sabotage in order to defend a land they love against industrial terrorism. They do this only when it appears that in certain cases and places all other means of defense of land and life have failed and that force—the final resort—becomes morally justified. Not only justified but a moral obligation, as in the defense of one’s own life, one’s own family, one’s own home, one’s own nature, against a violent assault. Such is the basis of my characters’ rationale in The Monkey Wrench Gang. How the reader chooses to interpret all this is the reader’s business. And if the reader is impelled to act out in real life the exploits of Doc, Bonnie, Slim & Hayduke, that too is a matter for decision by the individual conscience. But first and last, it should be remembered that the book is fiction, make–believe, a story and no more than a story. As for my own views on environmental ethics, I have tried to state them explicitly in essay form: see The Journey Home (1977), Abbey’s Road (1979), and Down the River (1982). Sincerely, Edward Abbey—Oracle |