Parry Lodge, Kanab, Utah
Several years ago I was in Kanab, Utah on the Fourth of July. When the segment of the town parade representing the local office of the Bureau of Land Management went by, a man standing near me in the crowd yelled out “Management, not ownership!” The people around him laughed and slapped him on the back good-naturedly. It was obvious that he was just saying what they were all thinking. This was just a few years after President Clinton’s controversial establishment of Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, which is administered by the BLM’s Kanab Field Office, and there was still a lot of obvious bitterness about that.
Sign for Anasazi Indian State Park, Boulder, Utah
I was there because my family had decided to do a big trip that summer to explore the new monument. I was a teenager at the time and had never been to that area, but my parents used to go to Kanab and the surrounding area a lot before I was born and they were curious to see if and how it had changed with the new designation. (It’s also just a beautiful area; I went through it again last year when I did a big road trip to California.)
Sign Describing Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument, Kanab, Utah
We did a lot of things on that trip. We camped at Calf Creek in the monument itself and visited Anasazi State Park in Boulder, Utah, which is a fascinating place, of considerably more importance archaeologically than I realized at the time. We ended up in Kanab, where we stayed at Parry Lodge, which prides itself on its history of housing movie stars who came to film in the area, and which was also where my parents used to stay when they had come to Kanab years before. It’s a nice little town, but it’s definitely part of southern Utah and has its share of the political attitudes typical there, as shown clearly by the man’s outburst at the parade.
Linear Roomblock at Coombs Village (Anasazi State Park), Boulder, Utah
That kind of attitude toward the BLM in particular, and the federal government in general, is very common in southern Utah. It’s particularly obvious right now in light of the outrage over a leaked government document mulling the possibility of establishing new national monuments throughout the West, including at two sites in southern Utah, but it’s been there for as long as there have been white people in the area and it’s never really diminished. Another recent example of the same attitude is the local reaction to the arrests in the Blanding pothunting sting, many of which portrayed it as an example of the BLM and FBI overreacting to a harmless hobby and oppressing good people for no reason except to show that they could.
Entrance Sign for Natural Bridges National Monument
There’s a fundamental selfishness and sense of entitlement lurking behind this attitude, a feeling by many of these people that they should be allowed to do whatever they want just by virtue of being who they are. How exactly “who they are” is defined differs in different contexts, but most of the time I think it boils down to being white people (often specifically white men) in a country where the untrammeled right of certain white people to do anything they want has long been a powerful ideal. It’s an easy attitude to imbibe as a white person growing up in America, and I think it’s much more widespread than extreme examples in the rural West would suggest. I’ve encountered plenty of good liberals who are quite happy to propose and support policies that restrict the ability of others (corporations, polluters, police, soldiers, etc.) to do whatever they want, but whenever their own freedom is threatened suddenly change their tune. It’s an easy enough attitude to understand, and I don’t mean to be accusing anyone of hypocrisy here. I’ve certainly done plenty of this sort of thing myself. I’m mostly just suggesting a bit more humility and a bit less self-righteousness on everyone’s part, not as a transcendent moral principle but as a practical way to get along in a pluralistic society with lots of conflicting interests and opinions.
Southern Utah Regional Map, Kanab, Utah
It’s in that context that I note a good post by Keith Kloor on the monument kerfluffle, which includes a link to a very good meditation on some of these issues from an environmental journalist who is very clearly aware of his own sense of entitlement when it comes to issues of wildness and preservation. Resource management and preservation are fundamentally difficult issues to address, and there are no easy answers. There are too many conflicting priorities and contrasting opinions for there to ever be a simple way out.
Sign for Butler Wash Ruins Overlook, Southern Utah
Keith’s quote from Ed Abbey is a case in point. I’ve never read any Abbey, but I know my dad hated him, more for The Monkey Wrench Gang than for Desert Solitaire, which I don’t remember him ever mentioning. I’m not sure what it was exactly about Abbey that rubbed him the wrong way, but I suspect it had to do with what Abbey represented: the outsider blundering crudely through a place extolling its virtues without ever really understanding it the way the locals did. My dad was very much a local in the Southwest, and while he had his own strain of entitled-white-guy thinking, it was very different from Abbey’s. It wasn’t so much Abbey’s environmentalism per se that annoyed people like my dad and his relatives, many of whom were strong supporters of the Sierra Club, Rachel Carson, and the “mainstream” environmental movement that they saw as totally compatible with their small-town petit bourgeois Republican worldview. Abbey, though, was different, a representative of a worldview that, while “environmentalist” in some sense, seemed to be more about self-indulgent destruction and nihilistic romanticism than about stewardship and preservation. It was people like Abbey, and especially his more extreme acolytes, who I think contributed heavily to the souring of local white people in the rural West on environmentalism in general and activist groups composed mainly of people from elsewhere in particular. It’s a shame, too, because there is actually a lot of sentiment among westerners in favor of conserving natural resources and limiting destructive development, but these days that sentiment seems to be used mainly as a rhetorical cudgel against environmental groups, giving cover to exploitative corporations, some of which have become pretty good at ingratiating themselves with local communities. I don’t mean to try to pin all of this on Abbey, since there has obviously been a lot of other stuff going on that has contributed to this dynamic, but I do think he played a role.
Butler Wash Ruins Overlook, Southern Utah
One other thing about Abbey that Keith notes in his post, however, is the fact that he was living in Hoboken, New Jersey when he completed Desert Solitaire, and he may even have written the whole thing there. One way to interpret this, in light of what I wrote above, is that it reinforces his “outsider” status relative to the West, but I think there’s a better way to look at it. Abbey’s West, like most people’s, existed primarily in his mind, and his perception of the landscapes he wrote about was filtered through his experiences and preconceptions. That doesn’t make it any less “real,” however. Abbey’s books, which I emphasize again I have not read, should stand or fall on their own merits, regardless of how much or how little time their author spent in the places they describe. I’m a strong believer in the idea that physically being in a place, while helpful and perhaps necessary to having a “complete” or well-rounded understanding of it, is not a necessary precondition for talking about it at all. Indeed, I could hardly think otherwise, given that I write all about the Southwest on this blog while living in (a different part of) New Jersey myself. For me, then, the idea of Abbey sitting in a bar in Hoboken recalling the canyons of Utah makes me more sympathetic to him, not less.
Slickrock along Trail to Butler Wash Overlook, Southern Utah
Personally, I’m not a very adventurous type. I’ve been a lot of places and I’ve seen a lot of things, and those experiences have been immensely valuable to me, but I’d fundamentally prefer to be sitting in a cute little coffeeshop somewhere, reading or writing a book, rather than hiking across slickrock canyon rims contemplating the beauty of the landscape. Not that I don’t enjoy the latter, but it’s not my usual preference. Personal preferences don’t matter that much to larger issues most of the time, but when aggregated across large numbers of people they do add up, and in the context of resource protection there are actually some important implications. One way to look at it, and by no means the only one, is to ask a simple question: On the margin, who is impacting the landscape more, the reader in the coffeeshop or the hiker on the canyon rim?
Bench on Trail to Butler Wash Overlook, Southern Utah
Gambler's House 
Well this ought to stir up a few comments! So what th’ hell
1. Read Abbey: If the only way one can understand or love a place is to be born there then a lot of folks are disqualified all around. ( and I’m no Abbey Accolite )
2. There’s a fundamental selfishness and sense of entitlement lurking behind this attitude, a feeling by many of these people that they should be allowed to do whatever they want just by virtue of being who they are.
I think a more precise term than selfishness or entitlement is righteousness: In a deeper sense then mere entiltlement; as in this is our land BY GOD pronoun and uppercase intended.
I look froward to reding the linked articles. As always thanks for your work!
Well this ought to stir up a few comments!
You’d think so, but so far, not so much. Although it is a weekend.
If the only way one can understand or love a place is to be born there then a lot of folks are disqualified all around.
Absolutely, and I don’t mean to imply otherwise. But I do think that the way people experience places is strongly affected by the degree of personal choice involved in experiencing them.
I think a more precise term than selfishness or entitlement is righteousness
I like that idea, and I think specifically self-righteousness is a good way to characterize either the feeling itself or an important subset or expression of it.
Well I agree there’s enough self-righteousness on the protection side to gag the average person. Remember when smearing fecal material was all the low-impact rage for example? There’s this palpable sense of “we know what is right ( you dummy ) and how you ought to conduct your life and it can be extremely irritating. OTOH while irritating and pompous it is usually well intended in the sense of intending to protect the resource, environment or whatever. The best way to effectively protect Cedar Mesa or any similar resource may be debateable; unintended consequences and etc., but it is undeniable based on unbroken factual record that BLM for whatever reasons does not seem able to handle the job. Get Jonathan Thompson to ask his Cortez neighbor Fred Blackburn about that and if Fred says BLM is handling the job as best it can be done I’ll shut up, butt out and offer apologies for my ignorance.
I was disappointed with Thompson’s article and the premise that creation of the Monument in and of itself resulted in accelerated destruction of the resource. That is incredibly simplistic taken at face value which leads me to suspect his intention was to dissimulate. Then he closes with a discussion of a visit presumably to Calf Creek Falls and the effect it had on his daughters which came off like a Rodney King like plea to all just get along which I’ll have to credit to youthful optimism or more likely naivite. It is pretty mind-boggling to observe the extremely aggressive development stance of local politics in Southern Utah ( as long as it’s US doing the developing) and contrast that to bellyaching over crowded trails, highways and countryside. In my experience this is a common sentiment coast to coast and north to south. Gee I wonder what that’s all about?
BTW the 95 highway cut through Comb Ridge to which Thombson refers was a fairly central event in “The Monkey Wrench Gang”
Cheers!
Yeah, one issue I had with Thompson’s post was the way he just sort of assumed that it was the designation of the monument that increased visitation. It’s impossible to know what would have happened if it hadn’t been designated, of course, but it’s entirely possible that it would have been “discovered” without any action by the government and that it would now be experiencing the same impacts with less BLM control over the situation. This is basically what’s happened in Grand Gulch, for example.
As for BLM more generally, honestly I think they’ve basically just been handed an impossible task. There are other reasons for their uneven record, and it’s important to note that different field offices have done things differently in many ways and gotten different results, but I think a major part probably stems from fundamental flaws in the government’s whole approach to land management.
That’s a fair appraisal of the BLM and doesn’t include yet another mitigating circumstance which would be some likely vulnerability to local political pressure. I didn’t mean to imply that the problem was incompetance or corruption on the part of the BLM but as you note the impossible scope of the job given limited personnel and material resurces.
I absolutely and aggressively disagree that just because I don’t live in southern Utah that I don’t have a stake in protecting the wild places there. Utahns have a vicious sense of self-righteousness and not a little bit of xenophobia when it comes to “their” natural spaces. But just because I don’t live in the state doesn’t mean I shouldn’t be able to work toward protecting my country’s natural spaces; Utahns would debate me to the death about this, I think.
I was in Salt Lake when the leak you referred to occurred. The media went ballistic. Not ONE media outlet described it in neutral terms–all of them used headlines like “land grab” and “federal takeover” and “not again!” (I didn’t catch any NPR articles; could have been much different). Not ONE media outlet discussed the possible positive impacts of the proposal. Not ONE media outlet mentioned any positive impacts of protecting Grand Staircase-Escalante. As a person who lives in an area where the media at least *tries* to explore multiple sides of a story, and as a person who lives in an area where conservation is part of the culture, this was BEWILDERING.
But that’s just it–it’s a huge cultural difference. I don’t think the sense of entitlement comes from being a white male. But if you look at the demographics of Utah, it’s one of the whitest states in the country (93%), so the fact that a sense of entitlement oozes from the pores of the population means that it oozes from a whole lotta white people.
White people don’t have the best track record of living in balance with the land.
It’s been a while since I read Desert Solitaire, but I remember it as a meditation on how being removed from civilization affects your thinking about both civilization and the wild. If he wrote it from New Jersey after being in the wilderness, it wouldn’t surprise me; I personally am much more likely to wax poetic about the mountains after I’m forced to leave them to return to the workaday world. As for The Monkeywrench Gang, if anyone reads that and sees it as more than fantastic hyperbole (with a touch of eco-terrorism), their high school English teacher didn’t do a very good job. Sure, I’ve smiled at the though of chopping down billboards or sinking my explosives-laden houseboat at the base of Glen Canyon Dam–just like others have smiled at the thought of leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Was he a romantic? Sure. Nihilistic? Maybe, at least to push people’s buttons. Did he love the land? Absolutely. Should a person not be allowed to extol the virtues of a place merely because they don’t own the land, live on the land, live near the land, or live in the state or country where the land is? Hell no.
This topic reminds me of the book Encounters With the Archdruid in which famed environmentalist David Brower has encounters with three different environmental foes. One of them, a land developer, asserts that HE–not Brower–is a true conservationist, and that Brower is a *preservationist*. He argues that what Brower calls conservation is actually just an ideal to leave the land completely alone, whereas conservationists want to use the land in a way that leaves it intact. Without stalling on semantics, I would say that the idea of using the land and leaving it “intact” means something much different to a developer (or a miner, or the head of the Bureau of Reclamation) than it does to the president of the Sierra Club.
My opinions are obvious. I am a raging liberal and a raging environmentalist and lover of wild places, and therefore I’m all in favor of using the government to help establish laws that will protect the places that I love. If this is self-serving, all the better. But you know what else it is? Forward thinking. If we protect the land, it will be there for our posterity to enjoy in much the same way we did. If we blow the tops of mountains like in Appalachia, we get to use cheap coal NOW and lose the mountain FOREVER (not to mention poison streams and pollute air for untold numbers of years).
(/rant)
I’m with Meredith on the poorly reported, lacking-in-context nature of news coverage on the “leaked memo” or whatever it was — and I was a member of “the media” for nearly 33 years.
Ouch, it hurts to see one’s supposed ex-colleagues (though I didn’t work for any Utah newspapers or outlets, except as a college copy desk intern at the Trib the summer that Richard Nixon resigned, so we’re talking a lonnnng time ago) succumb to the rants of public lands conspiracy theorists!
I have watched with wonder (OK, more like horror) as the spinning of the central theme here — Obama wants to lock up your lands, everybody! — has progressed (or rather, digressed) with each new western legislator’s grandstand rant and Interior West editorial page’s or columnist’s condemnation. I think the latest headline this weekend, over an Orrin Hatch guest op-ed in the Ogden paper, said something like, “Creating national monuments without Utahns’ input and consent is an abuse of power.” Well, yeah, that’s right — but that’s not anything remotely CLOSE to what has occurred here.
I’ll reserve the right to eat my own words, but does anybody actually think Obama and his folks would actually WANT to go down the monument-by-presidential-designation path after the Clinton experience . . . and THIS EARLY in his administration? It simply doesn’t make sense.
But then, conspiracy theorists don’t, either . . .
P.S. — Here’s another “nice one” from this afternoon, from something called the “Who Runs Gov Blog” . . . the ALL CAPS are my emphasis (can’t figure out how to boldface here):
“LAND LOCKED: Republicans are calling on Interior Sec. Ken Salazar to release all documents related to HIS UNPOPULAR DECISION TO TAKE LAND FROM NINE WESTERN STATES FOR MONUMENTS. SALAZAR’S ANNOUNCEMENT HAS CREATED QUITE THE DUST-UP — THE WASAHINGTON EXAMINER WENT SO FAR AS TO CALL SALAZAR A ‘COMMISSAR.’ ”
“Decision to take land” ? “Announcement”? Groan . . .
Who Runs Gov is a project by the Washington Post to keep track of the actions of government officials. Ideologically, I think it probably suffers from a lot of the pathologies that have afflicted the political media in the recent past, including a misguided emphasis on “balance” and a tendency to emphasis process over policy substance. They have one blog by Greg Sargent, who used to work for Talking Points Memo and is quite good, but this particular post came from their main blog, which seems to be done by someone named Amanda Erickson who apparently used to write for the Chicago Tribune. And yeah, that’s a really terrible way to characterize the issue.
(To put things in bold, use <b> tags, like this: <b>bolded text</b> = bolded text.)
Thanks, teofilo!
I haven’t read, or thought, about Abbey for a long time. But back when I was outdoorsy, I read something like seven of his books – four novels, three non-fiction, judging by the bibliography on wikipedia – followed by the book of excerpts from his diaries.
Looking back, I would say that The Monkey Wrench Gang would be the least interesting of the ones I read, if I hadn’t read its sequel. I think it’s what I read first, and while it’s entertaining and all, it just doesn’t have the quality* of his essays or of the earlier novels I read. The sequel is pretty awful and silly.
If you read just one of his books, I’d say Desert Solitaire is the one to read – if only as a historical document. It’s probably the only one I’d re-read now, anyway. It may be that he wrote the book in the sense of physically writing the words that appeared in it in Hoboken, but Abbey worked as both a seasonal ranger and a fire lookout, among other things, and if I remember correctly, he sometimes went back and forth between the east in the off-season and the west when there was work there, and sometimes he stayed in the west year-round.
He doesn’t seem to have had a particularly stable life – in more than just a geographical sense. He was from Pennsylvania but spent a significant amount of his life in the west, if not all at one time. Given his age, he probably wasn’t all that different demographically from other migrants to the west at the time, except he kept re-migrating. He also studied at the University of New Mexico for grad school and possibly undergrad too. So I don’t think it was a case of a guy going west for a bit, then going back east and then only there deciding to write up a book based on his experience. And if I recall his diary excerpts correctly, it appears that he based his writings on both memory and his own personal writing (like diaries). Those might not be formal notes for a planned book, but he was already a published writer by the time he started Desert Solitaire, so I doubt the idea of writing a book just came to him in Hoboken.
Desert Solitaire is polemical**, sure, and environmentalist in a modern sense, but it’s really quite different than The Monkey Wrench Gang. And I think that quote from the intro makes it sound more provocative in a destructive way than the book actually is. There is something about rock-throwing in the book, but it’s about whether a solipsist would duck, and he does talk about Bakunin and the idea that destruction can be creative, but I remember that being pitched at a more abstract level. He studied philosophy – though I don’t think he was or considered himself to be a philosophical – and wrote a thesis on anarchy, so it was something on his mind. But I don’t remember any straight up monkey-wrenching or the advocacy of it from that book.
It’s also more a collection of essays than a singularly focused book, and I remember some of it being – like some of the essays in The Journey Home and Abbey’s Road – pretty much straightforwardly travel or nature writing (or both). I can’t remember if it includes stories of various adventures he had in the backcountry, hiking alone and getting lost – once nearly getting boxed in a canyon with no clear way out – but those kinds of stories and reflections on them are a substantial part of his larger body of non-fiction writing. Hiking across canyon rims and contemplating nature is something he seems to have done quite a bit, but – and he says this somewhere – he decided somewhere along the way that he wasn’t cut out for the John Muir style of writing about that kind of experience of nature.
Anyway, as I said above, he was already a writer by the time he got to Desert Solitaire and he had already written about the west in his early novels. I’d argue, even from distant memory, that both The Brave Cowboy – about a ranch hand struggling in his own way with modern society – and Fire on the Mountain – about a man who refuses to give up his land when the government wants to take it (for military use, but you could draw an analogy to the government wanting land for other uses) – show a whole lot more empathy, and even sympathy, for people who likely would be on the opposite side of Abbey in a political dispute than you would expect from his later writing, from people’s characterizations of his writing, and from looking at the attitudes and positions of many of his fans. I think he was somewhat ambivalent about the way his writing was received, and that quotation from the Desert Solitaireintro*** expresses some of that ambivalence.
That said, Abbey’s environmental views were much more along the lines of humans being separate from nature than I could accept even back when I was reading him (my rejection developed over time, and I started out a huge fan), and I’ve come to agree with the argument that that sort of approach often leads to oppositions between absolutes like “wilderness” or “the wild” on one side, and “civilization” on the other, that in turn help fuel disputes where the parties involved can’t or won’t find the grounds for potential compromises.
I guess this comment is more an argument for reading him – or at least his earlier stuff, and his non-fiction more than his fiction – than a defense of him, as I wasn’t particularly a fan of his by the time I stopped reading him. Or if it’s a defense, it’s more on historical grounds – he and his writings were more complicated than one might expect, and that complexity is worth exploring.
*this term left intentionally vague
**I’m pretty sure I learned the word “polemical” from that book. I remember using it once and being accused of having adopted very academic vocabulary in my ordinary speech. I said no, actually, I got that particular locution**** from Edward Abbey. I probably learned “elegy” there too, once I realized it wasn’t “eulogy.”
***That may be his best introduction to a book, but my favorite excerpt from his introductions is the letter he quotes in Abbey’s Road from someone who seems to have confused him with Edward Albee. Apparently, his turn from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? to The Monkey Wrench Gang was very, very disappointing.
****I didn’t actually say “particular locution.”
Interesting. I’d say my lack of interest in reading Abbey is less a matter of distaste for his perceived opinions or his subject matter (though there is some of that), and more just a matter of lack of interest in the genres he specialized in. Fiction and essays really just aren’t things I read, and I’m not inclined to go out of my way to read them when the subject matter is something I don’t really want to read about either. It’s similar to my lack of interest in reading Craig Childs, who I think occupies a similar niche to Abbey’s. But you do make some good points, and if I ever do read any Abbey it’ll probably be Desert Solitaire.
In general, I have a resistance to reading certain things that I really should read if I’m going to be writing about the topics they cover, which is something I really should get over if I’m going to contribute actively to the public discourse on those topics.