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
EC, your reply landed under a different story, but here's more belief that tax cuts can lead to deficits:
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/2017/12/08/what-we-learned-from-...
http://www.econdataus.com/taxcuts.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/02/upshot/a-tax-cut-might-be-nice-but-re...
http://money.cnn.com/2010/09/08/news/economy/reagan_years_taxes/index.htm
http://www.ushistory.org/us/59b.asp
You can believe it can all you want. It has never happened. (and it is tax RATE cuts not tax cuts) .
Yes, the debt wen up under Reagan. It had nothing to do with tax rate cuts. Tax collections soared after the rate cuts. The deficit went up because SPENDING went up.
Reading Desert Solitarie would seem to be beyond the President's 15 minute comprehension of reading material. EC is correct that the National Debt increased several trillion dollars during Obama's Presidency. To be fair, he inherited the Great Recession, and much of the early deficit spending was an effort to spend ourselves out of it largely with infrastructure projects. Both parties are equally at fault with the National Debt; the last time we had a budget surplus it was largely because President Clinton and Speaker of the House Gingrich, each from the other Party, were able to work together.
Some of EC's other postings are ludicrous. Trump has not "Virtually decimated ISIS". Not true. Trump has largely continued with Obama's strategy, which already had the ISIL "Caliphate" on the ropes and rapidly shrinking by the time Trump took office. And ISIS is not virtually decimated. Without territory to defend, it will probably resort to more random worldwide terrorist operations, and could be just as dangerous as before. EC posted that Mueller's latest indictments showed "There was no evidence 1 of collusion or 2 that Russian efforts had any impact on the results of the election". These issues were not even addressed in Mueller's indictments, and the investigation is far from over. I have little doubt that there is much more to come, especially from Mueller's forensic auditors, which may well bring down the Trump financial empire if not his Presidency.
I'll stop here because we've strayed far off-topic.
Let's not forget that there are different forms of ignorance.
What alarms me is that Trump is totally ignorant of such things as Honesty; Integrity; Morality; Fair Play and virtually all the other virtues that allow others to trust and respect a person.
On the other hand, he is obviously very well acquainted with Lying; Cheating; Fraud; Immorality; Bullying; Conniving; Manipulation and a host of others that can do nothing but tear down, cheapen, weaken, and eventually destroy.
It scares the wits out of me that this man is smearing his excrement all across our land and over virtually every part of the fabric that has made this the great nation a place admired by most of the rest of the world. It completely baffles me that anyone, anywhere, anyhow could allow themselves to allow him to do that -- and, by failing to try to stand up against him, actually enable him.
Wrong - he totally changed the rules of engagement which allowed our soldiers to actually fight.
They weren't addressed in the indictment because they didn't exist. Pay attention Glad, Kurt used these indictments to suggest Trumps election wasn't "against all odds" Rosenthal specifically said there was no evidence of knowing contact by Americans with these entities/people and that there is no evidence these activities had any impact on the election.
Been going on a year and nada yet evidence of Hilary collusion and other crimes is rampant. Why aren't they going after her?
"They weren't addressed in the indictment (sic) because they don't exist". That's your belief, but it has not been proven by any stretch. Mueller did not address, one way or the other, whether Russian interference affected the outcome of the election, which Trump won by a few thousand votes in a few key states. Nor has he cleared Trump of collusion as the President has falsely claimed.
"He totally changed the rules of engagement which allowed our soldiers to actually fight". That's quite an exaggeration. Trump did allow field commanders more independence to order airstrikes and operations, but the overall strategy remained unchanged. Most of the ground fighting is being done, as it was before, by local forces trained and advised by U.S. special forces, not U.S. combat troops.
"Been going on a year and nada yet evidence of Hilary collusion and other crimes is rampant". Yeah, Trump TV (formerly known as Fox News) resurrects that deflection whenever there are new revelations about Trump. Mueller has just turned another key Trump advisor into a cooperating witness. Mueller is going about this systematically, and I expect the end result will be something you won't like.
I'm going to end my participating on this thread considering your obsession with having always having the last word.
Glad, you still aren't paying attention. Kurt used the indictments to suggest the election wasn't on the up and up. Rosenthal explicited stated that there is no evidence the activities that are subject of the indictment had any influence on the outcome of the election. You are correct that there was no statement about ALL potential activities, but that wasn't the subject of our discussion nor the point I was making. However, given the investigation has been going on for a year with absolutely nothing indicating collusion or an altered outcome I feel pretty comfortable that nothing is going to come of it. Unfortunately, that nothing will likely include the blatant illegal activities of Hilary who lost the election all on her own.
As to ISIS - changing the rules of engagement was a major change in the strategy. It is amazing how you can win a war when you are allowed to fight.
This is so reminiscent of a little kid telling the adults that they aren't paying attention, because - of course - the Autobots are the 'good' transformers, and that the Decepticons are the 'bad' transformers.
And, folks, don't forget that the man here who is explaining anti-ISIS strategy is the man who, by his own choice, has zero military education or experience.