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.

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.”