Abbey, Edward
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Edward Abbey was a denizen of the Southwest desert and canyon country and the author of numerous fiction and non-fiction books including: Desert Solitaire, The Brave Cowboy, The Monkey Wrench Gang, Fool's Progress, and Hayduke Lives! Confessions of a Barbarian, published in 1994 consists of selections from his journals edited by David Petersen and is an interesting book, exciting, provocative, and melancholy in turn. Edward Abbey died in 1989. |
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To the east, under the spreading sunrise, are more mesas, more canyons, league on league of red cliff and arid tablelands, extending through purple haze over the bulging curve of the planet to the ranges of Colorado - a sea of desert. Desert Solitaire, 1968.
We are obliged . . . to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred. Ibid.
For there is a cloud on my horizon.
A small dark cloud no bigger than my hand.
Its name is progress. Ibid.
Industrial Tourism is a threat to the national parks. Ibid.
Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Ibid.
When I write "paradise" I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanos and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes - disease and death and the rotting of the flesh. Ibid.
For the rest of the afternoon, keeping to the shady side, we drift down the splendid river, deeper and deeper and deeper into the fantastic. Ibid.
The sandstone walls rise higher than ever before, a thousand, two thousand feet above the water, rounding off on top as half-domes and capitols, golden and glowing in the sunlight, a deep radiant red in the shade, Ibid.
Under the desert sun, in that dogmatic clarity, the fables of theology and the myths of classical philosophy dissolve like mist. Ibid.
There was a serpent, a red racer, living in the rocks of the spring where I filled my canteens; he was always there, slipping among the stones or pausing to mesmerize me with his suggestive tongue and cloudy haunted primeval eyes. Ibid.
What can I tell them? Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener. Ibid.
The tourists have gone home. Most of them. A few still rumble in and ramble around in their sand-pitted dust-choked iron dinosaurs but the great majority, answering a mystical summons, have returned to the smoky jungles and swamps of what we call, in wistful hope, American civilization. Ibid.
. . . We know so very little about this strange planet we live on, this haunted world where all answers lead only to more mystery. Audubon magazine, Nov., 1975.
Man the pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain. Ibid.
When you kill a machine, you create jobs. - Remarks made at the International Wildlife Film Festival, Missoula, Montana.
One dead bulldozer means life to a trout stream, or a hundred bears, or a thousand trees. Ibid.
God bless America. Let's save some of it. -A bumper sticker on Doc's car in The Monkey Wrench Gang.
Not only the pretty birds, but also the predators and reptiles, the ugly and unloved, the organic and inorganic&emdash;all belong here, with us, on the same small planet. &emdash;Preface to The Great Chain of Life, by Joseph Wood Krutch, 1978.
Mr. Krutch's contribution . . . has been his recognition and communication of the discovery that the natural world must be treated as an equal partner. That a world entirely conquered by technology, entirely dominated by industrial processes, entirely occupied by man and machine, would be a world unfit to live in. Perhaps impossible to live in. Ibid.
We have never entered into an animal's mind and we cannot know what it is like, or even if it exists. The risk of attributing too much is no greater than the risk of attributing too little. Ibid.
. . . I am sometimes forced to the conclusion that the whole truth is not always represented in certain of the orthodox attitudes. The intuitions of a lover are not always to be trusted; but neither are those of the loveless. Ibid.
It is my fear that if we allow the freedom of the hills, and the last of the wilderness to be taken from us, then the very idea of freedom may die with it. Down the River, 1982.
Every river I touch turns to heartbreak. Ibid.
Floating down a portion of Rio Colorado in Utah a rare month in spring, twenty-two years ago, a friend and I found ourselves passing through a world so beautiful it seemed and had to be&endash;eternal. Such perfection of being, we thought&endash;these glens of sandstone, these winding corridors of mystery, leading each to its solitary revelation&endash;could not possibly be changed. Ibid.
The philosophers and the theologians have agreed, for three thousand years, that the perfect is immutable-that which cannot alter and cannot ever be altered. They were wrong. We were wrong. Glen Canyon was destroyed. Everything changes, and nothing is more vulnerable than the beautiful. Ibid.