Trail blazer

Edward Abbey was passionate about the American west and wrote a novel about his environmental activism. Eric Schlosser celebrates his radical legacy
The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
Buy The Monkey Wrench Gang at Public domain

Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Barbie, Britney Spears; Ronald Reagan, Ronald McDonald, the Terminator and George W Bush - viewed from overseas, American culture often seems like a series of extraordinary characters produced by an insidious machine. But there's another American culture, dating back to the origins of the republic, that stands for some opposing values - a tradition of rebels and iconoclasts, of people who don't fit and don't follow, who won't smile and tell you to have a nice day.

Tom Paine set the standard for free-thinking, and without his Common Sense there'd be no USA today. Edward Abbey was one of those Americans, like Jack Kerouac and Kurt Cobain, the difficult, non-conformist kind, whose philosophy is beautifully expressed in The Monkey Wrench Gang. "I have sworn upon the altar of God," its hero vows, paraphrasing Thomas Jefferson, "eternal hostility against every fucking form of tyranny."

Abbey liked to say that he was born on a farm in Home, Pennsylvania. But he was born in 1927 at a hospital in the town of Indiana, about a dozen miles away. His mother was a schoolteacher, loving, cultivated and proper. His father was a working-class radical, who loved a line from Walt Whitman, "resist much, obey little". It later became an epigraph in The Monkey Wrench Gang.

At the age of 17, Abbey hitchhiked alone across the United States, as his father had once done, taking odd jobs along the way. He fell for life on the road, with its sense of limitless possibility. The desert landscape of the American southwest left a powerful impression on him. After returning to Home, Abbey wrote about his exploits for the high-school paper, and for the rest of his life he'd do much the same thing, going to wild places where others rarely ventured and then spinning stories about what he'd seen. He joined the army just as the second world war was ending and spent a couple of years in Italy as a motor-cycle cop, fighting boredom and chasing women. "Let's stop coddling criminals," Abbey wrote to his mother. "Let's put father in jail where he belongs."

Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness was Abbey's first bestseller, and it gained him much critical praise in 1968. Based on journals that he'd kept nearly a decade earlier as a ranger in Arches National Park, the book was strongly influenced by Henry David Thoreau. Its uncompromising defence of America's open spaces struck a nerve at the height of the hippie counterculture, as the environmental movement grew and the war in Vietnam loomed as a perfect symbol of murderous, unchecked state power. "A civilisation which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original," Abbey argued, "is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilisation itself."

For years Abbey and his friends had been performing small acts of industrial sabotage out west, torching billboards, pulling up survey stakes, tampering with the engines of bulldozers and earth-movers. The Monkey Wrench Gang was loosely inspired by those exploits. Once again Thoreau served as a literary guide. "Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine," Thoreau proposed in his famous essay on civil disobedience. That's exactly what the protagonists of The Monkey Wrench Gang do, trying to launch a "counter-industrial revolution" that will destroy the "megalo-maniacal megamachine" of American capitalism.

The novel also has a strong cinematic quality. The great dream of the book's monkey-wrenchers - to bring down the massive Glen Canyon dam - was shared by many other environmentalists. Built to generate electricity for the growing suburbs of the southwest, the dam had submerged one of the most beautiful canyons in the United States, replacing it with an eerie man-made lake soon popular among jetskiers and the owners of large houseboats. Abbey was outraged that Utah's Lake Powell was named after one of America's great conservationists and explorers, John Wesley Powell. Such a desecration, he felt, cried out for the explosives.

Published in 1975, The Monkey Wrench Gang turned Abbey into a literary celebrity. Environmentalists had long been disparaged as brie-eating, white-wine-drinking, upper-middle-class intellectuals. Abbey brought a new and radical sensibility to the movement. He drank beer, liked guns, and could be funny as hell. Like all great writers, he was a deeply complex, often contradictory person. "The real Edward Abbey is a shy, timid fellow," he once admitted, "but the character I create in my journalism is perhaps a person I would like to be: bold, brash, daring."

Abbey was married five times, slept with countless young co-eds, and had five children, despite a fervent belief in zero population growth. Though a proud anarchist, he spent most of his life employed by federal agencies and state universities. An outspoken opponent of gas-guzzling, air-polluting automobiles, he drove a red Cadillac convertible and enjoyed tossing empty beer cans out of the car.

Though popular among members of the 60s counter-culture, Abbey clearly was of a different, politically incorrect generation. The Monkey Wrench Gang contains disparaging jokes about Native Americans, Hindus, Jews and women. His views on illegal immigration proved to be the source of much controversy. "I've already been called fascist, racist, elitist," Abbey wrote in a letter near the end of his life, "as well as communist, terrorist, misanthrope, bleeding heart, etc., so often it doesn't bother me anymore." He died in 1989, at the age of 62, from internal bleeding most likely caused by heavy drinking.

Almost 30 years after The Monkey Wrench Gang first appeared, it remains a terrific read - and extremely timely. The "expand-or-expire agro-industrial empire" that Abbey long fought against has grown more powerful, threatening fragile ecosystems worldwide. Inspired by the book, a new set of radical environmentalists is waging war against the system. Although the Earth Liberation Front targets property and not people, the FBI has labelled the organisation America's top domestic terrorist threat. It's hard to say how Abbey would have felt about the group; he advocated subversion and sabotage only "when political means fail".

As for Lake Powell, it is increasingly polluted with oil, toxic chemicals and other unpleasant things. And after years of severe drought its water level has dropped almost 30 metres. Long-submerged sandstone arches have reappeared, along with an old Hollywood movie set. Used as a backdrop in The Greatest Story Ever Told, a Biblical epic shot in 1965, the set is a re-creation of ancient, decadent Babylon.

· This is an edited version of the introduction to a new paperback edition of The Monkey Wrench Gang published by Penguin on July 29