Sometimes it doesn’t pay to praise things you want to protect. Let me explain. Edward Abbey who became known for his advocacy of environmental issues and criticism of public land policies wrote a number of books in defense of his stance. In one of them, ‘Desert Solitaire,’ a million-seller, he told of working as a seasonal ranger in Arches National Park and loving its beauty and solitude interrupted by very few tourists. People strewing trash, trampling rare plants, damaging geologic formations, and endangering wildlife upset him, but since his writing extolled the park’s virtues and awakened public desire, people wanted to step into this beauty themselves.
Partly because of his book, visitation rose from about 30,000 visitors at the time he wrote in 1968 to almost two million now, a number which prompted park officials to draw up a traffic congestion management plan in 2015.
Although he authored several books and essays, one other title became very popular, ‘The Monkey Wrench Gang.’ If taken too seriously, it might encourage acts of anarchy and vandalism. The story centers around a gang of four people who set out to protect the wilderness and destroy or booby-trap heavy construction machines. A favorite pastime of the gang was sawing through posts holding billboards that blocked their view of the landscape.
An anecdote from Abbey’s younger self illustrates that a bit of deviltry and anarchy ran through his veins. As a college student at the University of New Mexico, he and a few others rounded up some old tires one evening and dumped them into a dormant volcano. After setting the tires alight, they enjoyed the worried reaction around town next morning when people spotted the dark smoke rising from the presumed-dead cone.
One of Abbey’s often repeated quotes states, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Some ranchers too near a burgeoning Denver, Colorado seem to agree because seven of them have placed conservation easements on their 86 square miles of shortgrass prairie, an endangered ecosystem.
A picture accompanying this article in the Washington Post shows a housing development abutting this large parcel that’s surely left the developers salivating when prevented from gobbling it up. These easements will prevent any developers from ever building on this land. Some call such agreements as “cows over condos” and currently protect about 5 million acres in Wyoming, Montana and Colorado.
I’ve commented before about my distaste of the spreading footprint in cities like Fargo which is covering oh-so many acres of the world’s richest land “where they paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” The option would be to grow upwards, but for now, city limits continue to swell outward.
While a student at Stanford University, Abbey studied creative writing under a highly regarded voice of the West Wallace Stegner. In class, he joined other soon-to-become notable writers Wendell Berry, Thomas McGuane, Sandra Day O’Connor, and Larry McMurtry to name a few. Stegner earned a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize in his own career and is considered “the dean” of Western writers. Stegner is one I would like to have studied under. We’ll look a bit closer at Stegner next week.
After living his mischief-making life, four of Abbey’s friends honored his request for burial. He did not want a normal burial. Friends followed his instructions and wrapped him in his sleeping bag, cooled him down with dry ice, placed him in the bed of a Chevy pickup, stacked five cases of beer beside his body, and sped off to a secret spot in the desert and dug his grave. His burial was much the same as the way he lived his life, fighting the norms.
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