SOURCE: Loeffler, Jack. “Edward Abbey, Anarchism and the Environment.” Western American Literature 28, no. 1 (spring 1993): 43-49.

[In the following essay, Loeffler offers a personal remembrance of Abbey's contribution to literature and environmentalism.]

One time, Ed Abbey and I were talking about an upcoming election. Ed said to me, “I'm a registered anarchist.”

I asked him, “How long have you been a registered anarchist?”

Ed said “Oh, about 5000 years. In the realm of ideal politics, I'm some sort of an agrarian, barefoot wilderness eco-freak anarchist. One of my favorite thinkers is Prince Kropotkin. Another is Henry Thoreau.”

Professionally, Abbey's greatest wish was to be regarded as a fine writer, a literary man. Many's the time Abbey confided that he felt that New York publishers thought he'd been born on the wrong side of the Hudson. But after due consideration, he concluded that the wrong side was actually the right side—and that New York writers were a boring lot, in the main. Most of them were “toadies” and “sycophants,” “brown-nosers” and “ass-kissers.” What most of them write about has little to do with reality. Rather, they spread a patina of anthropomorphism across the fabric of their lives in the dim hope that something might register as meaningful. Sez Ed, “How can you get excited about someone named Rabbit, for Chrissake?”

Good question.

A major principle of Edward Abbey's character was to follow the truth no matter where it leads. This has to be a part of the longterm Abbey heritage. I know this was inherent in both his parents. His father, who passed away earlier this year [1992], had been something of a political iconoclast in his youth, proud of having met Eugene Debs, a quoter of Walt Whitman, and a crack shot to boot. He was a Pennsylvania woodcutter still active with his axe and saw four months before he died at the age of ninety-one. He was self-sufficient and self-directed and he influenced Abbey enormously.

Abbey's mother was a tiny lady, sharp of wit, a fine musician, and a talented writer whose journals revealed that her son, Ned, as he was known, had already turned cantankerous at the age of four years!!

Ed Abbey was my best friend, el compañero de mi vida. We went on dozens of camping trips together and hiked thousands of miles carrying on a conversation that lasted for decades. We kept no secrets from each other and we talked about anything and everything that either of us could think of. After four of us carried him deep into the wilderness desert to bury him, there was plenty of time to ruminate on the nature of my friend, and the meaning of his life.

Nearly two years after his death, the folks at Crown Publishers asked me if I would be interested in doing a book about Ed. At first I didn't want to. Ed was my friend, not a subject for a book by me. But I remembered that on at least three occasions Ed had suggested that I be his “chronicler” as he put it. Since 1982, he and I both knew the odds favored my outlasting him. It was that summer that he keeled over in my living room and the doctors who treated him at the hospital in Santa Fe erroneously told him he would die in two months. Ed turned to me and said, “At least I don't have to floss anymore.”

So I agreed to write his biography. In order to do a proper job of it, I've tried my best to remember all of our conversations together. I've reread all of Ed's books and pored over his journals prying as deep into his mind as I can. I spent Ed's sixty-second birthday with him in Tucson. He told me then, as he had on the previous Thanksgiving and Christmas, that he wasn't going to last much longer. His greatest hope was that he could finish writing Hayduke Lives! before he died. He loaded me up with his books making sure that I had extra copies of everything he had written. We were doing our level best to be honest with each other, but we had our own myths to live out. I remember as we walked from his writing cabin back up to his house I said, “Ed, we still have another thousand campfires together.”

He said, “You're goddam right, frijol viejo.”

Ed died six weeks later.

So now I'm 155,000 words into a book that feels like it's being ghost-edited by Abbey. I'll say this. I accept full responsibility for all of its flaws. After all, it's my fingers that are pushing down the keys on the keyboard. But the spirit of this book is definitely in keeping with the spirit of my compañero.

Ed was the most consistent person I've ever known. Even his handwriting remained essentially the same from the time he was nineteen onward. I have a letter he wrote to his mother in his own hand when he was an MP in Italy back in 1946 which corroborates this.

Abbey was consistent but he was also extremely complex. While I can mention some of his outstanding characteristics, I have to say that he was infinitely greater than the sum of these characteristics. He was a real man of flesh and blood subject to the same array of emotions and biases as any other human. He has to be perceived within the context of his milieu. He felt that he had been born either fifty years too late or a hundred years too soon. His widow, my dear friend Clarke Abbey, said that he was born at exactly the right time, that who would he have been without his cause? I say that no matter when he had been born, he would have emerged as a powerful voice in behalf of justice. There are those who feel that Edward Abbey was a great man. I knew him as well as anyone, and I would agree.

His intellect was enormous. He read incessantly and well and was able to quote major passages that had caught his fancy. Many a time when we went camping, we would each take a few books making sure that we weren't duplicating anything. We would both read in the afternoons when the sun was high. Usually by the end of a camping trip, Ed would have read all of the books that we had both brought. If there was a book that he regarded particularly highly, he would buy me a copy of the same edition so that we could discuss it. He added dozens of books to my library including works by Lucretius, Schopenhauer, Woodcock, Eastlake, McGuane, Harrison, Celine, McCarthy, Thoreau, Hardin, and Whitman. He had read all the major and many of the minor western philosophers. He devoured good fiction. I remember one time he had come to help my wife and me build our house. We were camped under a juniper tree and Ed was reading Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow by kerosene lamp as we three crowded under a lean-to trying to stay dry that rainy summer night in 1973. Abruptly, Ed snapped the book shut and said, “There. I finished it. Someone had to do it. Now you do it.” He handed me the book, rolled over in his sleeping bag and went to sleep.

Abbey had an enormous appreciation of music that lasted his entire life. His mother was a keyboard player and many a night Ed and his siblings fell asleep listening to her playing. He strongly considered devoting his life to musical composition rather than writing literature. He had a huge collection of long-playing records that featured composers from the Baroque period to the present. It must have been around 1970 and Ed was still living in the rock house in Sabino Canyon. I had gone to visit him. I was sleeping in my truck in front of his house. Sometime before dawn, Ed stealthily carried a speaker out and mounted it just beyond the open window of my camper. Then, just before the sun came up, Ed turned on his phonograph player full blast and I was suddenly listening to a Beethoven symphony. Ed came rushing out of the house with a big grin, looking anxiously at me. “What in the hell are you doing?” I asked. “I just wanted to see what you looked like waking up to Beethoven,” he said.

Abbey loved women. He regarded his desire to make love to many women as a biological imperative that has absolutely nothing to do with chauvinism. A billennia of monkey genes do not a monogam make. When he was younger, he seriously considered himself to be victimized by satyrmania. He was married five times, divorced thrice, widowered once, and was finally reshaped by his commitment to his last wife for whom he proved to be a good husband.

Abbey believed in friendship. To him this was sacred. He was as loyal a friend as one could ever have. When he was a student recipient of a Fulbright scholarship in Edinburgh, Scotland in 1951, he wrote the following: “God help me, I will never sacrifice a friend to an ideal. I will never betray a friend for the sake of any cause. I will never reject a friend in order to stand by an institution. Great nations may fall in dusty ruin before I will sell a friend to save them. I pray to the god within me to give me the power to live by this design.”

This appeal was central to one of Abbey's finest novels, The Brave Cowboy. Being a true friend was fundamental to Abbey's nature and hearkens back to a time when a man's word was inviolate, when an agreement between men was sealed with a clasp of the hand.

Abbey was a true anarchist. It was not a subject to which he paid lip service. He was the real McCoy. When he was a graduate student at the University of New Mexico back in the '50s, he wrote his Master's thesis which was entitled, “Anarchism and the Morality of Violence.” It focused on the works of Proudhon, Sorel, Godwin, Bakunin and Kropotkin. In his journal, Ed wrote, “My favorite melodramatic theme is of the harried anarchist, a wounded wolf, struggling toward the green hills, or the black-white alpine mountains, or the purple-golden desert range, and liberty. Will he make it? Or will the FBI shoot him down on the very threshold of wilderness and freedom? Obviously.”

Variations on this theme prevailed in most of Abbey's eight novels. He was convinced that “Government derives its moral authority from those whose ends it serves.” He fully realized that “his own liberty was to a high degree dependent upon respecting the rights of others, thus limiting his own liberty in order to secure and increase it.” For years, it was Abbey's great fantasy that a small group of families comprised of trusted friends who were creative and commited to wilderness preservation should buy land together and thus found an anarchist commune which would be governed by consensus and NOT laws. Ed had a hell of a time even identifying three or four other true anarchists, let alone getting us to agree where to buy land. Together, Abbey and I looked at land from the Henry Mountains to the Sonoran Desert to the Chihuahuan Desert to the high country of northern New Mexico. We came close a couple of times for we dearly wanted to be neighbors. But we never did buy land together.

Then there was the anarchist adobe houseboat. If ever there was a symbol of absolute evil in Ed's mind it was the Glen Canyon Dam that plugs the once mighty Colorado River. We would build an adobe houseboat, fill it with high explosives, sink it just upstream from the damn dam after having pre-set a triggering device, and watch it blow the dam to smithereens, our rubber rafts ready to catch the crest of the first wave and take what was sure to be the swiftest, most exciting trip down Grand Canyon any boatman has ever had!

Abbey loved the natural world, or wilderness. He loved it for its own sake. His refined sense of egalitarianism extended far beyond the realm of man to include all species of fauna and flora, and even beyond that to include the rocks, the air, the water. He perceived everything to be part of a whole.

The adventurer in Abbey required wilderness in order to become a part of it. Wilderness challenged Ed, but not in the sense that one would defeat the other. Rather, there ensued a collaboration between Ed and wilderness that would profoundly affect environmentalist thinking by the final decades of the twentieth century. Ed would disappear into the desert, or deep into a canyon, or up a mountain, or down a river. There he would open himself to the flow of Nature and absorb its message. In Desert Solitaire he wrote, “I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a non-human world and somehow survives still intact, individual, separate.” He spent many years of his life as a back-country ranger or fire lookout, always ranging, always looking. He loved wilderness with a total and abiding love that was fired by an enormous, powerful passion. He came to fully realize that as wilderness is reduced by the hand of man in his personal or corporate greed, biotic diversity is threatened, reduced—and that Nature is seen simplistically as a reservoir of natural resources and not what it really is—a planetary biotic community of which humanity is simply a single species, a member species, perhaps a species which has worn out its welcome!

As Ed would withdraw from wilderness solitude profoundly refreshed in spirit, his anger at human encroachment grew. His anarchist tendencies matured. His love of wilderness and his sense of anarchism melded into a single, complex fundament of his being. Through his great talent for writing, he himself became a vehicle and launched a relentless attack against those who would inordinately prosper at the expense of wilderness. He attacked developers who would claim the land and then sell the land for profit. He attacked extractors of natural resources who left in their wake mountains of overburden, thousands of roads, polluting poisons, and general devastation. He attacked public land ranchers whose cattle steal habitat from wildlife. He attacked government agencies including the Bureau of Reclamation for damming, condemning wild rivers; the BLM whom he regarded as the Bureau of Livestock and Mining; the Animal Damage Control who kill—murder—predatory wildlife in the erroneous belief that the lifestyle of a rancher is worth more than the life of a mountain lion. He attacked the entire panoply of bureaucracies which he was convinced had driven American society over the edge of ruin.

Now that Ed lies far beyond the reach of the statute of limitations, it can be revealed that he did not limit his attacks against wilderness rapists to his writings. He was an activist, a warrior armed with the tools of a warrior. With firearms, flammables, wit and courage, he physically destroyed those metal marauders that raze wilderness. He pulled up stakes. He closed roads. He did everything he could think of to thwart the juggernaut of so-called human progress save one thing—he never, ever caused harm to another human being. However, he did tell me that he could easily foresee a time when even that terrible situation might arise—a time when the government would so impose a police state on what remains of wildlife habitat, that battles would rage between man and man. But by then it would already be too late and the only spoils of such a conflict would be principles.

Edward Abbey has thus far inspired two generations of environmentalists to seek means of decentralizing control of the land. He has inspired people to think of the land in terms of ecosystems, not geopolitical systems.

It is my opinion that Edward Abbey's greatest single contribution to western culture has been to meld environmentalism and anarchism. Abbey has inspired a coterie of discerning, stout-hearted, wilderness loving thinkers to fully understand that, “A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government.”

Thank you for listening.