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by The Sylvan Hivə of Turbeaux. . 54 reads.

September: Ed Abbey & Industrial "Wilderness" Tourism

I am going to start this month's dispatch with a brief profile of the environmentalist Ed Abbey.

Ed Abbey

Edward Paul Abbey was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, on January 29, 1927 to Mildred Postlewait and Paul Revere Abbey. Mildred was a schoolteacher and a church organist, and gave Abbey an appreciation for classical music and literature. Paul was a socialist, anarchist, and atheist whose views strongly influenced Abbey.

Ed graduated from high school in Indiana, Pennsylvania, in 1945. Eight months before his 18th birthday, when he would be faced with being drafted into the U.S. Military, Abbey decided to explore the American southwest. He traveled by foot, bus, hitchhiking, and freight train hopping.[2] During this trip, he fell in love with the desert country of the Four Corners region. Abbey wrote: "[...]crags and pinnacles of naked rock, the dark cores of ancient volcanoes, a vast and silent emptiness smoldering with heat, color, and indecipherable significance, above which floated a small number of pure, clear, hard-edged clouds. For the first time, I felt I was getting close to the West of my deepest imaginings, the place where the tangible and the mythical became the same."

In the military, Abbey had applied for a clerk typist position but instead served two years as a military police officer in Italy. Abbey was promoted in the military twice but, due to his knack for opposing authority, was twice demoted and was honorably discharged as a private. His experience with the military left him with a distrust for large institutions and regulations which influenced his writing throughout his career, and strengthened his anarchist beliefs.

Ed then used the GI Bill to attend the University of New Mexico, where he studied English as well as philosophy. He received BAs in both areas before earning a master's degree in philosophy.

While an undergraduate, Abbey was the editor of a student newspaper in which he published an article titled "Some Implications of Anarchy". A cover quotation of the article (from Voltaire), stated: "Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest." University officials seized all of the copies of the issue and removed Abbey from the editorship of the paper.

Upon receiving his honorable discharge papers, Abbey sent them back to the department with the words "Return to Sender". The FBI took note and added a note to his file which was opened in 1947 when Edward Abbey committed an act of civil disobedience; he posted a letter while in college urging people to rid themselves of their draft cards. Abbey was on the FBI's watch-list ever since then and was watched throughout his life. In 1952, Abbey wrote a letter against the draft in times of peace, and again the FBI took notice writing, "Edward Abbey is against war and military." Throughout Abbey's life the FBI took notes building a profile on Abbey, observing his movements, and interviewing many people who knew him. Towards the later part of his life Abbey learned of the FBI's interest in him and said, "I'd be insulted if they weren't watching me."

After graduating, Schmechal and Abbey traveled together to Edinburgh, Scotland, where Abbey spent a year at Edinburgh University as a Fulbright scholar. During this time, Abbey and Schmechal separated and ended their marriage. In 1951, Abbey began an affair with Rita Deanin, who in 1952 would become his second wife after he and Schmechal divorced. Deanin and Abbey had two children, Joshua N. Abbey and Aaron Paul Abbey.

Abbey's master's thesis explored anarchism and the morality of violence, asking the two questions: "To what extent is the current association between anarchism and violence warranted?" and "In so far as the association is a valid one, what arguments have the anarchists presented, explicitly or implicitly, to justify the use of violence?" After receiving his master's degree, Abbey spent 1957 at Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Creative Writing Fellowship.

Ed's greatest works are the non-fictional narrative Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness and the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. The former contains wonderful observations of wilderness based on his experiences working as a forest ranger and the latter highlighted his opposition to the Glen Canyon Dam as well as serving as inspiration for environmentalist groups that utilized the types of direct action featured in the book.

Ed died on March 14, 1989, aged 62, in his home in Tucson, Arizona. His death was due to complications from surgery; he suffered four days of bleeding into his esophagus due to varices caused by portal hypertension, a consequence of end stage liver cirrhosis.

Being an anarchist to the core, Ed insisted to friends that he did not want his burial to be restricted by laws and insisted that he should be buried in the desert wilderness where he could "help fertilize the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree." His grave is marked with an engraved rock "in the Cabeza Prieta Desert in Pima County, Arizona, where 'you'll never find it.'" Two wakes were held for him after his burial. One was in Tucson's Saguaro National Monument (now a NP) and the other (much larger, featuring notables as Terry Tempest Williams and Wendell Berry speaking) was just outside Arches National Park near Moab, Utah. He once served as a ranger there before it became a NP and it held a special place in his heart.

Born an Easterner, Ed became a greater Westerner than anyone reading this will ever be.

Further biographical information can be found here:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edward-Abbey

Ok, I can hear your thoughts: "cool story Turbeaux, but what does any of this have to do with an environmental agenda item?"

Avoiding Industrial Tourism

in Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness, Ed wrote:

“Industrial tourism is a threat to the national parks. But the chief victims of the system are the motorized tourists. They are being robbed and robbing themselves. So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while.”

Obviously. some amount of accessibility is important in National Parks because seniors and/or the disabled should not be deprived of nature. However, please consider getting out of the hotels and off the roads so you can hike and camp whenever possible. This will be good for you as well as the environment. It is also important to note that there are vast areas of awe-inspiring beauty outside of NPS-administered land. I have made an effort to visit some of the areas and points where Abbey served as a ranger that are not within NPS land and am a better person as a result.

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