One of the dominant themes in "Desert Solitaire" is Abbey's disgust with mainstream culture and its effect on society. His message is that civilization and nature each have their own culture, and it is necessary to survival that they remain separate: "The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to escape for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us."