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Edward Abbey and the American West

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Paradox and bedrock.'--Desert Solitaire ' ... say in Desert Solitaire? I. Critique of ... Desert Solitaire, Episodes and Visions. Culture in contrast... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Edward Abbey and the American West


1
Edward Abbey and the American West
2
  • Benedicto
  • May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome,
    dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May
    your mountains rise into and above the clouds.
    May your rivers flow without end, meandering
    through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells,
    past temples and castles and poets' towers into a
    dark primeval forest where tigers belch and
    monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious
    swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue
    mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless
    stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient
    unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on
    profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white
    sand beaches, where storms come and go as
    lightning clangs upon the high crags, where
    something strange and more beautiful and more
    full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for
    you --- beyond that next turning of the canyon
    walls."?

3
Edward Abbey 1927-1989
  • American writer, essayist, park ranger,
    environmentalist
  • Thoreau of West
  • Militant conservationist, anarchist, polemicist

4
Often compared to Thoreau, but not from elite
background or Emerson
  • More like Muir.
  • Grew up on farm in Indiana, Pennsylvania
  • 1944, headed west, hitchhiked around west, fell
    in love with Four Corners Region
  • Masters from UNM, later tried to attend Yale,
    quit after two weeks
  • Self described redneck

5
"I am a redneck myself, born and bred on a
submarginal farm in Appalachia, descended from an
endless line of dark-complected, lug-eared,
beetle-browed, insolent barbarian peasants, a
line reaching back to the dark forests of central
Europe and the alpine caves of my Neanderthal
primogenitors."-- from "In Defense of the
Redneck", Abbey's Road.
6
Passionate defender of wilderness
  • Hard to pigeonhole, and not at all stereotypical
    liberal environmentalist
  • Loved to hunt and shoot, advocate of right to
    bear arms supporter of NRA
  • Drink beer and red meat
  • Argued important role for wilderness was as
    refuge from authoritarian government, place to
    hide out in times of tyranny and launch rebellion

7
Hardly right-wing either
  • Defended revolutionaries of Bolivia, Vietnam
  • Opposed Vietnam war, conscription, foreign wars
    in general
  • Railed against power of oil industry, road
    industry.Control of Washington DC by industry,
    generally.

8
Keep America beautiful burn a billboard
9
Like Thoreau, a passionate advocate of individual
liberty, bordering on anarchistAnd like
Thoreau, saw indissoluable link between
wilderness and liberty
10
Like Thoreau, a poet
11
Like Thoreau, a poet
I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which
the naked self emerges with a nonhuman world and
yet somehow survives still intact, individual,
separate. Paradox and bedrock.--Desert Solitaire
12
The personification of the natural is exactly
the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to
eliminate for good. I am here not only to evade
for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of
the cultural apparatus, but also to confront,
immediately and directly if its possible, the
bare bones of existence, the elemental and
fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us.
13
I want to be able to look at and into a juniper
tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and
see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly
ascribed qualities, even the categories of
scientific description. To meet God or Medusa
face to face, even it it means risking everything
human in myself.
14
I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which
the naked self merges with a nonhuman world ad
yet somehow survives still intact, individual,
separate. Paradox and Bedrock.Well, the sun
will be up in a few minutes and I havent even
begun to make coffee.--Desert Solitaire, The
First Morning
15
Wrote 21 books
  • Most famous, Desert Solitaire (1968)
  • Meditation on beauty and solitude of nature,
    based mostly on experience as ranger in
    Canyonlands (15 years as with Park Service )
  • Meditation on human folly, progress and
    culture
  • Many aphorisms
  • Reason has seldom failed because it has seldom
    been tried.
  • Who will save the parks from the park service?

16
The Monkey-wrench gang (1975)
  • Novel about a group of misfits who become
    saboteurs, wrecking dams in American west to
    restore landscape
  • Said to have been inspiration for Earth First!
  • Direct action to protect wilderness against
    industrial tourism and other forms of
    development
  • Monkeywrenching--to damage machinery or commit
    sabotage without hurting people (to throw a
    monkey wrench, or British to throw a spanner in
    works

17
What does Abbey have to say in Desert Solitaire?
18
I. Critique of Industrial Tourism
  • What is industrial tourism?
  • Why is it bad?
  • Why does the park service foster it?

19
Congress is always willing to appropriate money
for more and bigger paced roads, anywhere,
particularly if they form loops. Loop drives are
extremely popular with the petroleum industry
--they bring the mortorist right back to the same
gas station from which he started.
20
Pinchot and U.S. Forest Service Reconciling
competing interests
  • National Park Service a bit different
  • Established in 1916 to provide for the enjoyment
    of the parks in such manner and by such means
    as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment
    of future generations.
  • Provide for enjoyment v. unimpaired
  • Are these goals compatible?

21
Utilitarianism maximize good, greatest happiness
for greatest number
  • What would Abbey think of this philosophy?

22
Critique of Civilization What does Abbey think
of Civilization?(how does he characterize it?
  • commerce, traffic and rubbish
  • Clamor, filth and confusion

23
II. What is the role of wilderness?
  • Wilderness is a necessary part of civilization
    and it is the primary responsibility of the
    national park system to preserve intact and
    undiminished what little still remains.

24
How should we understand the enjoyment part?
  • Usufructuary
  • The right to enjoy something belonging to
    another, so long as no damage is done

25
How can we save the parks from damage?
26
  • Resistance. Esp. to automobiles.
  • It is the responsibility of the Park Service, as
    well as that of everyone else concerns with
    preserving both wilderness and civilization, to
    begin a campaign of resistance. The auto-motive
    combine has almost succeeded in strangling our
    cities we need not let it destroy our national
    parks.

27
Is this pie-in-the-sky? Why should it be?
  • We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into
    cathedrals, concert halls, art museums,
    legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the
    other sanctums of our culture we should treat
    our national parks with the same deference, for
    they, too, are holy places.

28
Prescription for national parks
  • No more automobiles
  • 2) No new roads.
  • Existing roads only for bicycles or horses.
  • Provide free bikes.
  • Fraction of cost of road building and
    maintenance.

29
3) Make rangers range
  • What would happen if we did this?
  • If we could learn to love space as deeply as we
    are now obsessed with time, we might discover a
    new meaning in the phrase to live like men.

30
Civilization v. Culture
  • I was accused of being against civilization,
    against science, against humanity
  • Is he?

31
Civilization v. culture
  • Civilization is a semi-independent entity,
    precious and fragile, drawn through history by
    the finest threads of art and idea, a procfess or
    series of events wthout formal structure or clear
    location in time and space. It is the conscious
    forefront of evolution, the brotherhood of great
    souls, and the comradeship of intellectthe
    Invisible Republic open to all who wish to
    participate, a democratic aristocracy based not
    on power or institutions but on isolated men

32
Who are these men?
  • Lao-Tse Socrates Jesus Paine and Jefferson,
    Blake and Burns and Beethovern, John Brown and
    Henry Thoreau, Whitman, Tolstoy, Emerson, Mark
    Twain, .Nietzsche and Thomas Mann, Lucretius and
    Pope John XXIII, and ten thousand other poets,
    revolutionaries and independent spirits, both
    famous and forgotten, alive and dead, whose
    heroism gives to human life on earth its
    adventure, glory and significance.
  • --Desert Solitaire, Episodes and Visions

33
Culture in contrast
  • means the way of life of any given human society
    considered as a whole.
  • Examples?
  • Industrial culture
  • State socialism
  • Monopoly capitalism
  • Popular culture

34
  • Civilization is the vital force in human
    history, culture is that inert mass of
    institutions and organizations which accumulate
    around and tend to drag down the advance of life.
  • Civilization is tolerance, detachment and humor,
    or passion, anger, revenge culture is the
    entrance examination, the gas chamber, the
    doctoral dissertation, and the electric chair.

35
  • Civilization is Jesus turning water into wine,
    culture is Christ walking on the waves.
  • Civilization is the wild river culture, 592,000
    tons of cement.

36
Inter-textualityWho is Abbey in conversation
with?Definitely Thoreau and Emerson
37
Maybe T.S. Eliot
  • British poet
  • Wrote of emptiness of western culture.
  • Turned to Christianity, had nervous breakdown,
    ultimately eastern religion

38
The Wasteland (1922)Unreal cityUnder the
brown fog of a winter dawn,A crowd flowed over
London Bridge, so manyI had not thought death
had undone so many
39
The Hollow Men (1925)We are the hollow menWe
are the stuffed menLeaning togetherHeadpieces
filled with straw. Alas!Our dried voices,
whenWe whisper togetherAre quiet and
meaninglessAs wind in dry grassOr rats feet
over broken glassin our dry cellar Shape
without form, shade without colour,Paralysed
force gesture without motionThose who have
crossed With direct eyes, to deaths other
KingdomRemember us--if at all--not as
lostViolent souls, but onlyAs the hollow
menThe stuffed men
40
What is Abbeys goal in living alone in the
desert?
41
Abbeys politics
  • How would you describe them?
  • Is Abbey the Thoreau of the west?

42
Elitism Is Abbey elitist?
  • A man could be a lover and defender of the
    wilderness without ever in his lifetime leaving
    the boundaries of asphalt, powerlines, and
    right-angled surfaces. We need wilderness whether
    or not we ever set foot in it. We need a refuge
    even though we may never need to go there. I may
    never get to Alaska, for example, but I am
    grateful that its there. We need the possibility
    of escape without it the life of the cities
    would drive all men into crime or drugs or
    psychoanalysis.

43
What does Abbey think of men in general?
44
Does Abbey have a coherent philosophy of the
environment?
45
Wilderness Ethics and Roadless Wilderness Debate
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