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The protesters who flung pumpkin soup at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in 2024 claimed, as all such protesters do, that they were justified in their action because some higher principle\u2014in this case, unsustainable food production\u2014was at stake.<\/p>\n
Like their compatriots in Just for Oil, who threw tomato soup at Van Gogh\u2019s Sunflowers<\/em> two years earlier, they surely did not doubt their moral righteousness or question that they were following in the honored footsteps of their eco-terrorist predecessors.<\/p>\n In his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang<\/em>, Edward Abbey tells the story of four disparate eco-warriors who load their Jeep with the tools of destruction and attack billboards, road-building machinery, and bridges in Utah and Arizona. Their ultimate aim\u2014pondered but never planned\u2014is to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam. As their violence increases, the forces of economic development step up their efforts to stop the group, and eventually do, at least for a while. The gang reunites in Abbey\u2019s posthumous sequel, Hayduke Lives!<\/em><\/p>\n A misanthropic provocateur, Abbey surely would have scoffed at the indirect action of hurling the contents of a can of Campbell\u2019s at an unoffending picture. Abbey was a proponent of what he euphemistically called \u201cdirect-action environmentalism,\u201d by which he meant the violent destruction of the tools of development\u2014bulldozers, surveyor\u2019s stakes, the Glen Canyon Dam.<\/p>\n The soup throwers were practicing anything but direct action. Blowing up dams is just too hard. Let\u2019s spill lunch at the Louvre.<\/p>\n In life, Abbey always had a hard time fitting in with his erstwhile allies in the environmental movement. A half century after the publication of his seminal novel on eco-terrorism and 36 years after his death, he still does.\u00a0<\/p>\n His writing is suffused with anti-government rhetoric that at first blush might be appealing to some on the right. But his preference for \u201cdirect action\u201d\u2014violence\u2014to achieve his political goals is now being wholeheartedly endorsed by sizable factions of the political left.<\/p>\n The Province of the Outlaw<\/strong><\/p>\n The Monkey Wrench Gang<\/em> got mixed reviews. Sales grew mostly through word-of-mouth among like-minded activists. The New York Times<\/em> didn\u2019t get around to reviewing the book until almost a year after publication.<\/p>\n \u201cThe book is not a gem of literature,\u201d wrote reviewer Kenneth C. Caldwell in Landscape Architecture Magazine<\/em>, who also doubted any potential to inspire real-life violence. \u201cI doubt if the book will kindle fires of unquenchable rage in our hearts, causing us to cast down T-squares and take up cases of Dupont dynamite.\u201d<\/p>\n Others saw something else in the book. William Marling, an author and literature professor, credits Abbey, possessor of two degrees in philosophy, with being \u201cset apart from those who toy with the \u2018conquest of nature\u2019 paradox from a great philosophic height by his ability to distinguish not only between Camus and Cocteau but between columbine and penstemon as well. When the ingredients coalesce correctly, he is a powerful writer.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps too powerful. \u201cThis book counsels insurrection and sabotage,\u201d Marling asserts. \u201cIt contains explicit descriptions of procedures for dynamiting bridges and destroying earth-moving machinery. Reading it, one cannot help but feel that Abbey intended the information to be of practical use.\u201d<\/p>\n Abbey always tried to maintain a strategic ambiguity on this point. But he once told an interviewer, \u201cI write in a deliberately outrageous or provocative manner because I like to startle people.\u201d In that, at least, he was successful. In his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition, Douglas Brinkley called The Monkey Wrench Gang<\/em> \u201crevolutionary, anarchic, seditious, and, in the wrong hands, dangerous.\u201d<\/p>\n How, then, did the book become a popular success and a touchstone for the modern environmental movement?<\/p>\n For one thing, it made environmentalists cool, \u201cthe province of the outlaw,\u201d in the words of Abbey biographer David Gessner. Abbey put on the page what thousands were thinking but were not yet prepared to do. Reading about it in a comic yet serious novel allowed people who would never in real life set ablaze a billboard or pour sand into a bulldozer crankcase a sense that they, too, were participants in the revolution.<\/p>\n Another Abbey biographer, James Bishop Jr., wrote that while the theme of The Monkey Wrench Gang<\/em> was \u201cenvironmental hooliganism,\u201d it nevertheless came \u201cclosest to reaching that place of Abbey\u2019s most steadfast convictions: a romantically idealized world in which the Industrial Revolution has been aborted, and society has reached a steady-state equilibrium where man and the land can exist in harmony.\u201d<\/p>\n That, perhaps, explains why Abbey has a deeply devoted cult following, but has not emerged beyond that.\u00a0<\/p>\n Abbey\u2019s rants against \u201cindustrial tourism\u201d and his insistence that we\u2019d all be happier without air conditioning, roads, automobiles, antibiotics, or many other conveniences of modern life amount to a platform that tells voters: all you have to do is agree to be poorer, and we can save these rocks. As much as we all love rocks, that\u2019s a tough sell.<\/p>\n A Direct Descendant of Abbey\u2019s Writings<\/strong><\/p>\n In a post-9\/11 world, Abbey\u2019s dalliance with eco-terrorism has made him an even tougher sell in some quarters, while elevating him to icon in others. During one of his many appearances on college campuses, Abbey was asked if he really wanted to blow up Glen Canyon Dam. \u201cNo,\u201d he told the students. \u201cBut if someone else wanted to do it, I\u2019d be there holding the flashlight.\u201d<\/p>\n Writer Doug Peacock, a friend of Abbey and the primary inspiration for the novel\u2019s lead character, George Washington Hayduke, does not hem and haw about Abbey\u2019s role in inspiring eco-terrorists. \u201cThe radical environmental group Earth First! Was a direct descendant of Abbey\u2019s writings,\u201d he wrote.\u201d<\/p>\n Abbey rejected the notion that he was endorsing terrorism, drawing a distinction between sabotage and terrorism. \u201cIf the wilderness is our true home, and if it is threatened with invasion, pillage, and destruction\u2014as it certainly is\u2014then we have the right to defend that home, as we would our private quarters, by whatever means are necessary,\u201d Abbey wrote in the essay, \u201cEco-Defense.\u201d<\/p>\n If \u201cthe tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,\u201d Abbey seemed to be saying, so must the pinions and junipers of Utah\u2019s slickrock country.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n \u201cWhatever means are necessary\u201d seems pretty clear, especially when standing next to his invitation to suicide bombers to take a lunge at Glen Canyon Dam.<\/p>\n Abbey\u2019s defenders like to draw a distinction between damaging property and killing people.\u00a0<\/p>\n In his essay \u201cOne Man\u2019s Terrorist,\u201d Michael Branch, a professor of environmental literature, justifies the destruction of earth-moving machinery, billboards, and surveyor\u2019s stakes\u2014prime targets of the Monkey Wrench Gang\u2014as doing no person any harm.<\/p>\n \u201cUsing a chainsaw to fell a billboard is no more violent than using a welding machine to construct one,\u201d Branch writes.\u00a0<\/p>\n The contention that if no human is harmed, then it can\u2019t be terrorism is faulty on its face. If you blow up a synagogue because you hate Jews, it\u2019s an act of terrorism, whether there are any Jews inside or not.<\/p>\n Abbey was not unaware of the way the book could be, and was, perceived. He worried that he would be \u201caccused of rash crimes \u2026 every time some Boy Scout sugars a bulldozer, or shellacs an earth-mover.\u201d He was right to worry. A collection of terrorism biographies published two years after 9\/11 profiled \u201ctwenty-six people who figure prominently in the story and history of terrorism,\u201d including Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, and Ted Kaczynski. Abbey is right there at the front, his smiling, bearded countenance first alphabetically, followed by Gerry Adams and Yasir Arafat.<\/p>\n Am I a Racist?<\/strong><\/p>\n Still, it is not his role as mad prophet of eco-terrorism that makes Abbey something of an untouchable among more conventional environmentalists.<\/p>\n Abbey\u2019s friend and fellow environmental icon Wendell Berry summed up the case best in his essay, \u201cA Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey.\u201d Abbey, writes Berry, is \u201cseen as a problem by people who are, or who think they are, on his side.\u201d These erstwhile defenders \u201chave an uncontrollable itch to apologize for him.\u201d<\/p>\n The central problem, according to Berry, is that many of his critics \u201cassume that Mr. Abbey is an environmentalist\u2014and hence that they, as other environmentalists, have a right to expect him to perform as their tool.\u201d But, Berry writes, \u201che is not a conservationist or an environmentalist or a boxable ist of any other kind.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Brinkley compared Abbey to Don Quixote, and \u201cthe windmill Abbey wanted to tear down most was the Glen Canyon Dam.\u201d Others have suggested Harriet Beecher Stowe or Upton Sinclair. He is more often compared to Henry David Thoreau, but biographer James Bishop Jr. astutely notes that The Monkey Wrench Gang<\/em> is \u201cmore Orwellian than Thoreauvian.\u201d Abbey\u2019s vision is in many ways bleak\u2014the alternative futures amount to a choice between a darkscape of industrial wasteland or a post-industrial anarchy shorn of every modern convenience.\u00a0<\/p>\n But in this age of intersectionality, the real challenge is Abbey\u2019s views on non-environmental issues. Abbey opposed immigration, wrote and said untoward things about racial minorities, called welfare \u201ca subsidy for baby production,\u201d was proudly sexist (\u201cTo the editors of Ms. Magazine, NY: \u201c\u2018Dear Sirs \u2026\u2019\u201d), called the Peace Corps \u201can act of cultural arrogance,\u201d and owned guns (\u201cI load my own ammo\u201d).<\/p>\n Abbey considered his essay \u201cImmigration and Liberal Taboos\u201d among his personal favorites. Solicited and then rejected in 1982 by The New York Times<\/em>, it was subsequently rejected by Harper\u2019s<\/em>, Atlantic<\/em>, The New Republic<\/em>, Rolling Stone<\/em>, Newsweek<\/em>, and Mother Jones<\/em>. The left\u2019s intolerance for dissenting opinions is not a new thing.\u00a0<\/p>\n The piece was eventually published in 1983 by Phoenix New Times<\/em>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Abbey argued that \u201cit might be wise for us as American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-generically impoverished people. \u2026 How many of us, truthfully, would prefer to be submerged in the Caribbean-Latin version of civilization? \u2026 Harsh words: but somebody has to say them.\u201d And Abbey very cheerfully did, while pondering the criticism.<\/p>\n \u201cAm I a racist?\u201d he asked himself in his journal. \u201cI guess I am. I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals. Look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia.\u201d At the same time, Abbey believed it was never fair \u201cto evaluate the quality of any individual by reason of race. You cannot judge the worth of a man by his skin color, bone structure, I.Q., body chemistry or genetic inheritance. \u2026 However, there are significant differences among the various races, both in character and in achievement. It is intellectually dishonest and socially condescending to pretend otherwise.\u201d<\/p>\n As the editor of his published journals wrote, a sanitized, politically correct Abbey \u201cwould be\u2014well, no Edward Abbey at all.\u201d<\/p>\n Abbey, Jefferson, and Lincoln<\/strong><\/p>\n Fifty years on, The Monkey Wrench Gang<\/em> endures.\u00a0<\/p>\n A theme running through retrospective essays on Abbey and his work is speculation on his reaction to climate change. All conclude, naturally, that he\u2019d be on their side. But none wonder about his response to the destruction of habitat wrought by acres devoted to the production of \u201cclean\u201d energy.<\/p>\n It\u2019s difficult to imagine the Don Quixote who ranted about paved roads, visitors\u2019 centers, and flushable toilets on public lands would get behind the idea of deploying solar panels or windmills across his beloved desert.<\/p>\n Abbey wrote that \u201ca patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government,\u201d sounding suspiciously like Thomas Jefferson justifying the need for rebellion every 20 years. If \u201cthe tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,\u201d Abbey seemed to be saying, so must the pinions and junipers of Utah\u2019s slickrock country.\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s a dangerous philosophy. When each man decides for himself how much violence is justified to achieve political ends, the most violent tend to come out on top.\u00a0<\/p>\n Abraham Lincoln, an admirer of Jefferson, said, \u201cThere is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.\u201d<\/p>\n If, in reading\u00a0The Monkey Wrench Gang<\/em>, conservatives are enticed by Abbey\u2019s anti-government rhetoric, they should\u00a0heed the words of Lincoln and remember that, eventually, like the left turning on Abbey over immigration, the revolution always devours its own.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n