The landscape of Bears Ears National Monument/BLM, Bob Wick
Editor's note: The following essay by Douglas Brinkley initially appeared in the New York Times Book Review section. It is reposted here with the author's permission.
In a 1973 TV spot, the United States Forest Service sage Smokey Bear admonished that “one careless second with a match and America the beautiful becomes America the ugly.” So what would Smokey say now when a few careless seconds with a pen allowed President Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to remove protections from two million acres of precious American wilderness? If courts uphold Trump’s executive orders of last December, they would reduce southern Utah’s Bears Ears and Grand Staircase-Escalante monuments by 85 and 46 percent, respectively, constituting the biggest rollback of federally protected land in American history.
But fear not, lovers of the Utah canyon country, for the ghost of free-spirited eco-warrior Edward Abbey once again gallops to the rescue via his eloquent and funny memoir “Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness,” first published 50 years ago this month and reviewed by The Times on this exact day in 1968. Set among the very Colorado Plateau ecosystem targeted by Trump’s executive orders, every gleaming page of Abbey’s autobiography virtually shouts out the necessity of protecting our public lands from desecration, and sings the nobility of wilderness defenders whose intrinsic value system rejects the “sweating scramble for profit and domination.” While at various junctures Abbey delineates on John Wesley Powell’s Geographic Expedition of 1869, the history of Mormonism and the night life at bars from Moab to Mexican Hat, it’s his fierce stewardship of the desert environment that continues to shine brightest.
When “Desert Solitaire” first appeared in 1968, its prose galvanized environmentalists toward bold action to save the American Southwest from the maw of hyper-industrialism. Only Aldo Leopold’s “A Sand County Almanac” and Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” equal “Desert Solitaire” in transforming the genre of naturalist studies into manifestoes for social change. Paradoxically gruff and tender, starkly Darwinian in scientific exactitude yet brimming with mystical flourishes, Abbey’s enlivening nonfiction storytelling — anchored around his two compressed seasons as a ranger in Utah’s Arches National Monument during the late Eisenhower era — is a perfectly rendered hybrid of transcendental joy, coyote humor, in-your-face wrath, field science detail, philosophical righteousness, and moral clarity. Half a century after its debut, it retains its potency as a motivational weapon of resistance, a polemic against despoilers and a reasoned paean to biological diversity, priceless petroglyphs and the heavenly solitude of wilderness. Facing Trump’s short-term vision of America’s public lands, it takes little imagination to read Abbey’s masterpiece today as a prescient counter-statement for defending not only Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante, but the entire slickrock Colorado Plateau.
Metate Arch in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument/BLM
Abbey’s detailed journals and notes from his time in the unfenced Utah backcountry formed the basis of “Desert Solitaire.” When out-and-about as a ranger he felt intoxicated, as if time were suspended. Awed by the eternal beauty all around him, mirthful and full of delight, he melted into the landscape, living in rustic simplicity and natural fellowship with the desert’s wildlife while developing a firm foundation in desert ecology. Inspired by Walt Whitman’s dictum “Resist much, obey little,” Abbey became an aggressive watchdog of Arches and the surrounding Utah canyonlands held sacred by the Hopi, Navajo, Ute and Pueblo of Zuni tribes. Patrolling in a Park Service pickup, often in uniform, he came to revile the bulldozers, dams, paved roads and industrial tourism that define Southwest development, and to channel that revulsion into ferocious, and at times anarchistic, prose.
In “Desert Solitaire” he denounces the mere thought of large-scale uranium mining in Utah’s howling salmon-pink tableland, and he reminds a cynical and distrustful public — both a half-century ago and today — that the mission of the Park Service, from its 1916 establishment onward, is to preserve our treasured landscapes in an “unimpaired” fashion. “Wilderness preservation, like a hundred other good causes, will be forgotten under the overwhelming pressure of a struggle for mere survival and sanity in a completely urbanized, completely industrialized, even more crowded environment,” he warned. “For my own part I would rather take my chances in a thermonuclear war than live in such a world.”
There is a fine set-piece in “Desert Solitaire” where Abbey tacks a scarlet bandanna to a ridgepole outside his government-issued trailer house, then hangs Chinese wind-bells to chime in the dry breeze — a ritual of “poetry and revolution before breakfast.” Then Abbey, the ranger, dutifully hoists Old Glory up the flagpole at Arches’ entrance station, as mandated by the Park Service. Wishing “good swill” to all nations in a kind of off-handed prayer, he savages “swinish politics” for wrecking his beloved Southwestern landscapes. When he was writing, the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversaw decades of real improvement in protecting American lands and scrubbing pollutants from our air and water, still did not exist. It’s a reminder both of how activism can break over dark times, and how, after notching victories, it can again get darker still. Were Abbey alive to see Trump’s proposal to slash the agency’s budget by a third in 2018, he would be apoplectic.
It’s not too late for salvation. If Zinke would read “Desert Solitaire,” hike Comb Ridge and the Grand Staircase–Escalante as Abbey regularly did, run the awesome San Juan River around Slickhorn Canyon, or camp under the lonely sky of Cedar Mesa, he might undergo a miraculous awakening and push Trump to rescind his reckless executive orders — but that, of course, is unlikely. Instead, Zinke behaves like an errand boy for the coal and petroleum industries, a faux cowboy who made his showboat debut as interior secretary by riding a horse to his first day in office, where he got right to work ransacking national monuments and pillaging Native American shrines, all to further the president’s war on America’s natural legacy and ingratiate himself to Utah’s quick-dollar Senator Orrin Hatch.
Facing the most egregious rape of Western lands since the Glen Canyon Dam bisected the swift-flowing Colorado River, environmental crusaders are already fighting tooth-and-nail to preserve Bears Ears and Grand Staircase–Escalante. Within hours of Trump’s executive orders, the Grand Canyon Trust, the Sierra Club, the Wilderness Society and others filed suit. As these conservation heroes go to bat for us all, they’d do well to keep “Desert Solitaire” in their back pockets, providing a call to action or, at the least, uplifting smelling salts to boost their resolve.
Abbey’s voice, like that of Thomas Paine in “Common Sense,” never fades away. When confronted by industrial tyranny he would fume like a geyser basin. Outdoor recreation was his rebellion against the decaying and overcrowded cities. In the 1980s, as a succession of Reagan-era appointees sought to weaken protection of federal lands, “Desert Solitaire” became a must-read for environmentalists and Abbey found himself speaking to crowds of hundreds, denouncing money-grubbers who willy-nilly looted the public domain. His death in 1989 silenced his outraged voice, but no one will ever be able to silence the power of “Desert Solitaire,” his wild-goat cry to leave it as it was. “A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original,” Abbey warned, “is cutting itself off from its origins.”
Douglas Brinkley is a professor of history at Rice University and author of “The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.”
Comments
I'd settle for our ignorant so-called President just reading his daily national security briefings.
Our "ignorant" President that built a multi-billion dollar empire, got himself elected President against all odds, who has virtually decimated ISIS and isn't sending billions to rogue nations. I don't know what he is reading, but what ever it is, or isn't, it works.
And then there's that staggering national debt that is turning into a national security issue...
http://thehill.com/policy/finance/373647-intelligence-chief-federal-debt...
And in light of the recent indictments, not sure Trump got himself elected "against all odds"....
Finally, why has the president ignored Congress's directive, under the law that Trump signed, to impose sanctions on Russia for its cyberattacks? (And why hasn't Congress pushed back?)
I agree 100% on the debt. Democrats and Republicans are failing the county on that issue. But it didn't seem to bother the liberals when it was Obama doubling the debt.
And as was indicated with the indictments, there was no evidence 1 of colusion and 2 that the Russian efforts had any impact on the results of the election. What the Russian's did was different from Obama's meddling in Israel only in its method and was no more effective.
As to santions - which are even farther afield from this topic or even tohama's off topic rant, you will find the admin's explaination in this article: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-sanctions/trump-administra...
Let's not spend too much time looking into the past to justify the present. That said, between 2009 and 2017, President Obama's actions generated a cumulative deficit of $983 billion. In his first year, President Trump and the GOP -- which once was a deficit hawk -- have approved a tax cut that will add an estimated $1 trillion to the deficit over the next decade. And Trump's budget proposal would add $7 trillion more over ten years. (Fortunately, it's DOA)
https://www.thebalance.com/national-debt-under-obama-3306293
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/12/us/politics/white-house-budget-congre...
As for the indictments, last time I checked Mr. Mueller was still at work...and those in the intelligence community have said there's no surefire way to say what impact the Russian efforts had on the election.
As to the administration's explanation for not imposing sanctions -- that the threat is just as good as actual sanctions -- that's pretty laughable, no? Especially when the administration is being warned that the Russians already are at work on the mid-terms. From your Reuters story:
Now, I apologize for this off-topic discussion. With that said, I would second Dr. Brinkley's suggestion that the president and Secretarty Zinke read Desert Solitaire. Though unlike the professor, I do fear it's too late.
With his well documented aversion to the printed word, I fear that this is a lost cause, and absolutely any off topic partisan fantasy of Cadet Bonespurs decimating ISIS is only that - a partisan fantasy.
Wrong, Obama added $10 trillion to the debt over his terms. As much as every President before him combined. But nice to see you are now becoming deficit hawk.
And Trump's budget proposal would add $7 trillion more over ten years.
That is total BS. We have never had a deficit created by a tax rate cut.
Which is $3 Trilllon less than Obama in 8 years. Nevertheless it is $7 trillion too much.
EC, read the first link I provided that describes three ways to measure Obama's impact on the deficit. And provide your own that claims $10 trillion.
Analysts seem to disagree with your view on tax cuts and deficits.
https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/15/experts-rip-trumps-spending-spree-as-foo...
Trump's budgeting seems to match that as when he was a businessman, when he described himself as the "king of debt." Even you have defended his practice of declaring bankruptcy as a tool of business.
The U.S., however, is not a business, and let's hope we can avoid bankruptcy.