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'm sure glad ecbuck defends the president, particularly saying "it works". Yes, it does work when you remove environmental protections, decrease enforecement of pollution laws, and increase pollution. Pollution kills more than wars, you know? The president is killing his own people. Sure glad it works
Boys! Boys! Hillary lost. Get over it. As for this comment, I disagree:
"Let's not spend too much time looking into the past to justify the present."
There is your problem, good people. No one studies history anymore. Worse, no one believes in it--unless they're looking for Russians under every bush. What are we?--our history. What we are today is but a pittance of our existence. How we think, feel, and act has EVERYTHING to do with history.
Same for our country. The problems we have today have been decades in the making. Mr. Trump did not make those problems. Nor can he alone hope to solve them. You don't like what he did to the national monuments? Well, I didn't like it when my party in the 1960s wanted to dam Grand Canyon. Which party was that? Not the Republicans, I can assure you.
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL reports on Saturday that no one has filed oil, gas, or mineral claims in the affected monuments. Why not? Because they don't want the legal hassles. They would prefer to mine-dig-drill somewhere else. It's all for show. Trump is paying back his base. You see? I'm NOT a Democrat! Believe me, the Grand Canyon dams were NOT for show. Nor was the cutting of the old-growth redwoods in Redwood Creek.
You want purity--consistency--credibility--accountability--integrity? Don't look for any of those things in politics. It's still a sausage factory--and always has been. Just remember not to get ground up with the other rats. Read history. Read it until your eyes bug out. Then you might understand.
And oh, yes. Don't make it women's history, minority history, or any of the other so-called equity histories. Make it real history. Study war, politics--the give and take of nations. This isn't half pipe at the Olympics. When people screw up in real life other people die. A century ago, my family was dying on the battlefields of Belgium and France. You don't want your family to die? Then you had better know some history. And yes, there Mr. Trump--and Mr. Obama--and Mr. Bush--and Ms. Pelosi--and Mr. Schumer--have done a good job scaring the hell out of me.
Context, my good Dr. Runte, context. My comment about the past had to do with EC's implication that because "liberals," as he put it, didn't mind spending under President Obama, that it shouldn't be an issue today. It wasn't intended as a sweeping comment that we shouldn't learn from the past.
Too much deflection is used today to obscure what is transpiring. The old magic trick where you focus on the right hand while the left hand does something else.
I never said or implied any such thing. I explicitly stated that the $7 trillion deficit was $7 trillion too much. I have been consistent about having to reduce spending. My reference to the Obama $10 trillion was to highlight the Liberals haven't been consistent. When Obama added $10 trillion to the deficit the liberals happily sang along. Now that the deficit is growing under a Republican, they are horrified. We all should be horrified both then and now. But then when one won't admit that 2.52 is larger than 1.72 how intellecutally honest can we expect people to be.
Exactly. Context. Of course the deficit should be an issue, but does either party want the deficit explained? No. So why should President Trump always have to "explain" it as if he caused it all by himself? He's gambling with his tax breaks, no doubt about it. And now that "liberal" Seattle just raised my property taxes by 20 percent, I am hoping he is right. Seattle has already spent my tax "break."
I'm curious if anyone can explain to me, in simple, non patronizing partisan terms, the functional difference between tax rate cuts and tax cuts. Smoke and mirrors, for the rich kids.
Tax cuts would be aimed at reducing total taxes collected. Tax rate cuts are aimed at stimulating economic activity resulting in an overall increase in tax collections.
That may be the 'aim', but I've yet to see the difference, other than in the minds of partisans. I did not ask about intent, which could be anything [ask any kid who is punished by a parent who says, "This hurts me more than you. You need to see the error of your ways"]. I asked how it has played out on the ground.