SOURCE: Lucas, Susan M. “Counter Frictions: Writing and Activism in the Work of Abbey and Thoreau.” In Thoreau's Sense of Place: Essays in American Environmental Writing, edited by Richard J. Schneider, pp. 266-79. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Lucas argues that the popular images of Abbey and Henry David Thoreau distort their importance as protest writers.]

Words on a page do not accomplish anything by themselves; but words taken to heart, words carried in mind, may lead to action.

—Alison Hawthorne Deming, Richard Nelson, Scott Russell Sanders, “Letter to Orion Readers”

In American nature writing, two of the most vehement, influential voices to inspire environmental activism belong to Henry David Thoreau and Edward Abbey. Though writing a century apart and about different regions, Abbey and Thoreau openly advocate individual resistance to institutional oppression through jeremiadic rhetoric and acts of civil disobedience. Environmental groups have adopted them as ideological leaders or figureheads for their organizations and have used their words as indictments against land developers, miners, politicians, and others who would injure the environment. The images of Thoreau as hermit of Walden Pond and of Abbey as ecoranger of Arches National Monument continue to dominate their literary legacies and fuel the perceptions of Thoreau as wilderness advocate and Abbey as expert monkey wrencher. While these “green” portraits celebrate the importance of these men to the modern environmental movement, they also misrepresent Abbey and Thoreau as environmental leaders. For both of these writers, the site of resistance occurs primarily on the page, contrary to their glorified images as environmental crusaders in the field. My discussion examines how these portraits distort the actual physical and literary activism of Thoreau and Abbey and how these writers' opposition emerges from the pen rather than through collective protests, petitions, laws, or acts of sabotage.

Writer Wendell Berry compares Abbey with Thoreau, particularly regarding their dubious roles as environmental leaders. Berry explains that “Thoreau was an environmentalist in exactly the same sense that Edward Abbey is: he was for some things that environmentalists are for. And in his own time he was just as much an embarrassment to movements, just as uncongenial to the group spirit, as Edward Abbey is. … As a political activist [Thoreau] was a poor excuse.”¹ Berry questions the political value of Thoreau's reform writings and suggests that we need not take them seriously. Berry quotes several lines and leaves others out of Thoreau's poem “Great God, I Ask for No Meaner Pelf,” attempting to convince us that Thoreau is too self-absorbed to be politically diplomatic. His criticism of Thoreau follows the familiar pattern of those who also criticize Abbey, choosing lines out of context and using them to undermine any of his serious statements. Thoreau's poem actually anticipates themes he will continually revisit in his prose: namely, living according to principle, following one's calling, and rejecting others' expectations of him. In particular, Thoreau's writings on slavery and John Brown are important and enlarge our view of him as a literary figure beyond his environmental writing to include his ideas on social reform. Environmentalists and ecocritics often disregard these works since they have less to do with nature and more to do with society—a position that assumes the social (human) world does not affect our perceptions of the natural world. Thoreau's own political position is difficult to pin down, but it remains important to acknowledge that he was a man involved in his culture, not simply self-absorbed and living in solitude. Many of his literary projects overlapped with his involvement in social issues: his incarceration described in “Civil Disobedience” occurred while he was living at Walden Pond, and during the time he was revising proofs of Walden, he delivered one of his most caustic speeches against slavery on July 4, 1854.

Berry's criticism of Thoreau's political activism also applies to Abbey's environmental activism. In “Monkey Wrenching, Environmental Extremism, and the Problematical Edward Abbey,” Daniel Payne examines Abbey's efficacy as an environmental polemicist, observing that while Abbey's literary devices of paradox and ambiguity may enhance his literary work for students, scholars, and critics, they ultimately undercut the effectiveness of his environmental rhetoric. Further, Payne observes that Abbey's combative tone and “non-liberal stances on immigration, gun control, and other social issues” have aroused antagonism from the public and criticism from the environmental movement.² In “A Writer's Credo,” Abbey explains that a writer should be political and “speak the truth—especially unpopular truth … truth that offends.”³ Moreover, he says the role of the writer in a free society is “to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture.”⁴ Both Thoreau and Abbey exercise this political duty as writers; both argue for less government control and lament a culture that accepts laws without question and supports unlimited growth disguised as progress. Neither Abbey nor Thoreau was known for collective resistance, preferring individual action instead, and neither was opposed to using aggressive language or violence to defend his convictions.

James A. Papa, Jr., acknowledges a direct influence of Thoreau on Abbey but argues that “what Abbey does, however futile, goes beyond anything ever thought or done by Thoreau.”⁵ While bolstering Abbey's persona as radical ecowarrior, Papa, like Berry, oversimplifies Thoreau's own involvement in major issues of the mid-nineteenth century, contending that “Thoreau's fervent opposition to society's mad thirst for material wealth and comfort never developed into anything beyond literary rhetoric or a somewhat eccentric lifestyle.”⁶ His analysis focuses only on Walden, where he finds no evidence of activism on Thoreau's part. He fails to consider Thoreau's own ideas of monkey wrenching Billerica Dam with a crowbar in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and neglects to mention “Civil Disobedience,” Thoreau's most famous demonstration of resistance that influenced Mahatma Gandhi, Leo Tolstoy, Martin Luther King Jr., and Edward Abbey. Despite his threat, Thoreau never took any action against Billerica Dam when he saw it on his river trip in 1839; however, his interest was renewed twenty years later when he was “hired to make a study of the depths of the Concord River and its dams and bridge abutments” for a court case involving the “flooding, caused by the raising of dams, of the haying land in the river meadows.”⁷ Thoreau worked tirelessly on this project.⁸ In his Journal on June 24, 1859, Thoreau mentions the process of surveying the area and talking with residents about the environmental changes, and later on February 17, 1860, he refers to people's responses to the controversial trial, one saying that the Concord River “‘is dammed at both ends and cursed in the middle.’”⁹ J. Ronald Engel finds great power in Thoreau's “parable” of the dam because stories of ecojustice have “the capacity to communicate the meaning of our love for the earth and for people as citizens.”¹⁰ Engel believes Thoreau's words are as compelling as any physical action because they sustain our enthusiasm to fight for “the people and the land we love.”¹¹ Without such stories, action would cease. Walter Harding notes Thoreau's physical work reforesting the woods around Walden Pond: “with two men, a horse, and a cart, he set out four hundred pines, fifteen feet apart, on two acres of the Walden property. While one man dug up the trees, another dug new holes and Thoreau himself did the planting.”¹² Later, Thoreau planted “a hundred two-year-old larch trees imported from England[,] … some birch trees,” and some white pine trees.¹³

Regardless of Thoreau's planting efforts in Walden Woods, Papa criticizes him for not taking action in support of wilderness preservation, a critique that seems to be the result of Thoreau's erroneous image as wilderness advocate. Papa concedes that, perhaps, Thoreau's time did not demand any aggressive environmental acts: “given the fact that wilderness may have yet seemed an inexhaustible commodity in mid-nineteenth-century America.”¹⁴ Wilderness preservation, as an environmental movement, was not the concern of the 1850s, but abolition, slavery, and the Mexican War were, and Thoreau ardently responded to these issues.

Since the 1960s, Thoreau has been deliberately co-opted as wilderness advocate. In 1962, David Brower used one of the most often quoted sentences from Thoreau's essay “Walking” as the title of a Sierra Club book: “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”¹⁵ Again and again, we see this statement extracted from the essay and wildness used to promote wilderness preservation. Jack Turner points out that Thoreau's statement is misquoted on a hanging plaque at the visitors' center at Point Reyes National Seashore, and that the statement surfaced in its faulty form in a “recent Newsweek article on wolf reintroduction.”¹⁶ Turner doesn't try to explain what Thoreau meant by wildness, but he does examine the lack of wildness in our wilderness areas in his own essay entitled “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World.” But Turner's questions overlook an important element in Thoreau's concept of the wild—wildness exists not only in remote areas but locally. Thoreau's life and work demonstrate that the two terms are not synonymous. He made contact with the wild in the woods surrounding Concord and on the summit of Mount Katahdin. If Walden and “Walking” reveal anything, it is the presence of wild nature in immediate environments, not only in “pristine” areas where humans are merely visitors. At the end of Walden, Thoreau retells a story of a “strong and beautiful bug” that emerges from “the dry leaf of an old table” that had been in a kitchen for sixty years.¹⁷ This image of the wild latent in the domestic also occurs in “Walking” when he speaks of the wild seed inherent in domesticated cattle and horses and how farms he has surveyed in the past look quite different when his mind, body, and spirit are attuned to the wild. Thoreau declares himself spokesman for wildness, not wilderness: “I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,—to regard man as an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member of society.”¹⁸ Part of Thoreau's work on behalf of nature exists in the late natural history essays collected in Faith in a Seed. His records of the natural world reveal how much time he spent outside to write over 4,000 pages of natural history, which was left unpublished at his death. This vast amount of information clearly represents a figure who lived a life in service to the wild natural world. Neil Evernden finds Thoreau's emphasis on the wild a “prerequisite to any serious defense of life on Earth.”¹⁹ Thoreau's immersion in wildness, as evident from these late essays, illustrates a vision of nature that expands the meaning and mode of activism beyond monkey wrenching and political advocacy. These texts exhibit a language-based activism that combines reading, writing, and field research.

While Thoreau was used as wilderness advocate in the 1960s, this same decade of literary criticism primarily lauded him for “Resistance to Civil Government” or “Civil Disobedience,” perpetuating his reputation as the voice of passive resistance. This essay does not concern wilderness issues but radically addresses some of the major sociopolitical issues of his day—the U.S. war with Mexico and the abolition of slavery. Thoreau was arrested and incarcerated for refusing to pay a poll tax to support the war, and though he spent only a single night in jail, his articulation of the experience serves as an influential document for justice. “Civil Disobedience” challenges the conventions of what is just and unjust. As a citizen in a democracy, he exercises his right—his responsibility—to criticize the government and the unjust practices it condones: “All men recognize the right of revolution; that is, the right to refuse allegiance to, and to resist, the government, when its tyranny or its inefficiency are great and unendurable.”²⁰ For Thoreau, resistance begins by living a life according to principles, then taking action on behalf of these principles. He believes that “Action from principle, the perception and the performance of right, changes things and relations; it is essentially revolutionary, and does not consist wholly with anything which was.”²¹ His economic protest of the Mexican-American war occurs without any physical violence, yet as a call to action, he urges readers to resist unjust governments by breaking the law, a call Abbey will hear. Thoreau writes, “If the injustice has a spring, or a pulley, or a rope, or a crank, exclusively for itself, then perhaps you may consider whether the remedy will not be worse than the evil; but if it is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine” (233). If government or any other force demands that one act unjustly, then breaking the law becomes imperative—a necessary resistance. “Civil Disobedience” lays out important ideas of resistance that anticipate his later writings on slavery and John Brown, whose extreme measures in combating slavery exemplify Thoreau's ideal of action from principle, of one's life as a counter friction, whether violent or not.

Thoreau's Framingham address, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” complicates his well-known pacifist image. Len Gougeon views this speech as Thoreau's most “acerbic,” since it openly advocates militant action to resist the oppressive forces of slavery.²² No doubt the inflammatory rhetoric appealed to his audience of abolitionists and recalls some of the political events that occurred earlier that year: the Kansas-Nebraska Act became law in May, reversing the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited the expansion of slavery in the territories; and fugitive slave Anthony Burns had been arrested and returned to his owner despite abolitionists' attempts to free him.²³ In his address, Thoreau admits that he would fight to preserve “a free State, and a court truly of justice.”²⁴ Moreover, he excoriates the people of Massachusetts for supporting a government that enacts unjust laws. His militancy reaches its zenith when he threatens to blow up a government system that supports commerce over humanity: Thoreau avows, “Rather than do thus, I need not say what match I would touch, what system endeavor to blow up,—as I love my life, I would side with the light, and let the dark earth roll from under me, calling my mother and my brother to follow.”²⁵ Truman Nelson says that Thoreau's is “one of the most violent statements ever written, or spoken before a mass audience,”²⁶ and his willingness to destroy an unjust system for denying independent thought or action anticipates Abbey's rage against Glen Canyon Dam for restricting the rights of the Colorado River. Responding to the crisis of slavery and unjust government, Thoreau declares, “It is not an era of repose. We have used up all our inherited freedom. If we would save our lives, we must fight for them.”²⁷ Thoreau calls for action throughout this address, and he envisions the kind of men needed to combat the social plague of slavery: “What is wanted is men not of policy, but of probity—who recognize a higher law than the Constitution, or the decision of the majority.”²⁸ John Brown exactly fits this criteria; he believed fighting against slavery was his moral mission sanctioned by God.

Within two weeks of the Harper's Ferry raid, Thoreau called a public meeting in which he delivered “A Plea for Captain John Brown.” His quick response came when most people were still reeling from the shocking events. Not all Northern abolitionists supported Brown's actions, and certainly white Southerners were alarmed by the bloody attack on Harper's Ferry. In “Thoreau and His Audience: ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown,’” Robert Albrecht analyzes Thoreau's preparation for his public address and his careful consideration of the audience. Thoreau had to “defend a notorious man before an unfriendly audience. He had to convince his audience of the rightness of John Brown's principles and the act proceeding from those principles.”²⁹ Consciously crafting this address, Thoreau criticizes unjust government, but levels his harshest criticism at the press, for perpetuating the image of Brown as insane. He refers to his own meetings with Brown and represents him as a personal friend and a true patriot. For Thoreau, Brown was different from other reformers: he was a “man of rare common sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles,—that was what distinguished him. Not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life.”³⁰ Thoreau admired Brown for responding to his calling and for living his life according to principle even though it meant death. Thoreau engages in activism, setting himself in opposition to popular opinion by publicly defending Brown.

Thoreau admires Brown's “directness of speech as of action” and finds the two modes of resistance interconnected: “Truth is his inspirer, and earnestness the polisher of his sentences. He could afford to lose his Sharps' rifles, while he retained his faculty of speech, a Sharps' rifle of infinitely surer and longer range.”³¹ With this statement, Thoreau clearly expresses his opinion on the power of words: they are more accurate and longer lasting than a rifle shot. A similar idea occurs in “Civil Disobedience” when Thoreau explains how he maintained his freedom in jail and how the very institution fails to confine the true source of subversion—the mind. He expresses his amusement at “how industriously they locked the door on my meditations, which followed them out again without let or hindrance, and they were really all that was dangerous.”³² Although his body is confined, his mind remains free. The ability to think, speak, and write are the tools of freedom and revolution. Thoreau also participated in the Underground Railroad, and though he never took any direct, violent action against slavery, he was not opposed to doing so, admitting, “A man may have other affairs to attend to. I do not wish to kill nor to be killed, but I can foresee circumstances in which both these things would be by me unavoidable.”³³ He hopes Brown's words and acts will stimulate a “revival,” and believes John Brown and Harper's Ferry are “the best news that America has ever heard.”³⁴

Despite the subversive nature of Thoreau's reform writings, many ecocritics and radical activists find Edward Abbey a more daring, effective environmentalist and celebrate him for introducing “full-blown rage” into conservation literature.³⁵ In his book Pioneer Conservationists of Western America, Peter Wild mentions Thoreau as one of the “noble voices” from the East who wrote of “saner approaches to our natural heritage.”³⁶ Wild's impression of Thoreau as a “sane” voice for the environment ignores his involvement and rage against slavery in his reform writings. In contrast, Don Scheese positions Thoreau as radical forefather of Abbey. Acknowledging the zeal of the antislavery writings, Scheese also aligns Thoreau and Abbey in their respective wars against the state.³⁷ Scheese describes Abbey as heeding Thoreau's call in “Civil Disobedience”: “Abbey's life and work have become a counter-friction against those forces that would destroy wilderness.”³⁸ In Desert Solitaire, Abbey depicts Ranger Ed dismantling five miles of survey stakes that mark plans for a paved road into Arches National Park. He admits that his action is a “futile effort, in the long run, but it made [him] feel good.”³⁹ Earlier, he portrays Ed as an ecowarrior on winter hiatus, living in some “grimy, cheap … decayed, hopelessly corrupt” place and dreaming of “nights of desperate laughter with brave young comrades, burning billboards, and defacing public institutions. … Romantic dreams, romantic dreams.”⁴⁰ Later on in the book, in the chapter “Down the River,” he fantasizes about the destruction of Glen Canyon Dam by “some unknown hero with a rucksack full of dynamite strapped to his back.”⁴¹ Abbey continues the imaginary sequence, describing the explosion of the dam at the opening ceremony, and later calls his mental games “idle, foolish, futile day dreams” (188). While Abbey's romantic ideals of ecotage may inspire readers to take action, his insistence on them as “futile” and “foolish” sustains his ambivalence as a radical activist.

Abbey, however, fulfills these “futile day dreams” in his most famous novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which takes as its subject four characters (Doc Sarvis, Bonnie Abbzug, George Washington Hayduke, and Seldom Seen Smith) and their resistance to the industrial machine destroying the Southwest. In the first chapter, Abbey describes the destruction of the Glen Canyon Bridge spanning the Colorado River, using images similar to the “day dreams” in Desert Solitaire. The novel recounts numerous examples of monkey wrenching: from leveling billboards and pulling up survey stakes to destroying industrial equipment by mutilating engine wires and pouring sand in crankcases and karo syrup in fuel tanks. On another mission, the gang blows up a railroad bridge leading to Peabody Coal Company, destroying a train and overturning a load of coal in the process. The destruction of Glen Canyon Dam looms as a goal throughout their exploits. Abbey published twenty-one books in his lifetime, but The Monkey Wrench Gang and Desert Solitaire remain his most popular and have made him most famous as a western environmental writer and radical environmentalist, two labels he refuses to fully accept.

Unlike The Monkey Wrench Gang, Desert Solitaire refuses to be pinned down by genre. This book is structured much like Walden, in that several years' experience are condensed into a single seamless account. Moreover, readers have a difficult, perhaps even impossible, time separating the narrator of the book from the author, a distinction that contributes to the problems of valorizing Abbey for a single ideological view of environmental protection. In a 1977 interview with James Hepworth, Abbey discusses the disparity between the persona in his books and his real self, explaining that the person “who writes these articles and books and so on is just another fictional creation, not much resemblance to the real one, to the one I think I know. The real Edward Abbey—whoever the hell that is—is a real shy, timid fellow, but the character I create in my journalism is perhaps a person I would like to be: bold, brash, daring. … I guess some people mistake the creation for the author but that's their problem.”⁴² Is Edward Abbey the wily, offensive narrator who graces the pages of his personal narratives, or is he the husband and father who makes a living by writing and cares about wilderness? His persona is just as difficult to discern as his views on resistance: one moment he poses as expert monkey wrencher and the next as a writer with an interest in wilderness preservation.

In “Eco-Defense,” he advocates tree spiking and encourages breaking the law to save wilderness: “Eco-defense is risky but sporting; unauthorized but fun; illegal but ethically imperative.”⁴³ He instructs readers how to act: “Next time you enter a public forest scheduled for chainsaw massacre … carry a hammer and a few pounds of 60-penny nails in your creel, saddlebag, game bag, backpack, or picnic basket. Spike those trees; you won't hurt them; they'll be grateful for the protection; and you may save the forest. … It's good for the trees, it's good for the woods, and it's good for the human soul. Spread the word.”⁴⁴ The final words of this essay, “Spread the word,” illustrate the most common form of his own mode of activism, despite his reputation as mastermind of monkey wrenching. Abbey views ecodefense as a form of self-defense, identical to the right of defending one's home, one's property, by any means necessary: “if the wilderness is our true home, and if it is threatened with invasion, pillage, and destruction—as it certainly is—then we have the right to defend that home, as we would our private quarters, by whatever means are necessary” (31). Like Thoreau, Abbey is willing to take extreme measures to preserve the environment and to preserve justice; likewise, most of his activism emerges from the pen, with a mission to inspire action and raise consciousness.

In an interview with close friend Jack Loeffler, Abbey reveals himself as an activist through his writing, more than saboteur. He separates himself from activists like David Brower, Dave Foreman, and others who do the tedious work to organize public resistance, lobby, litigate, petition, and run for office, and he respects these people more than those like himself “who merely sit behind a desk and write about it.”⁴⁵ Abbey admits, “Actually, I've done most of my defending of the West with a typewriter, which is an easy and cowardly way to go about it.”⁴⁶ In this interview, however, he repeats his willingness to resort to sabotage when political means fail to defend the land he loves (8). The documentary Edward Abbey: A Voice Crying in the Wilderness portrays him primarily as an environmental writer and activist. In interviews with close friends, some who inspired the characters in The Monkey Wrench Gang, the film continually suggests, though never fully acknowledges, the degree of Abbey's monkey wrenching. It records his participation in an Earth First! demonstration of ecotheater that symbolically cracked Glen Canyon Dam, and refers to various “field studies” Abbey undertook in researching The Monkey Wrench Gang, but gives no definitive answer about his involvement in ecosabotage. The image of Abbey from this documentary fuels the perception of him as a radical environmental crusader—an image he both embraces and refuses.

In the essay “Of Protest,” Abbey tells the story of an inspiring act of civil disobedience that occurs after proper political channels have failed to defend the environment in Rocky Flats, Colorado. For six months, activists protested the manufacturing of thermonuclear devices by putting their bodies in front of the trains that delivered radioactive materials to the plant weekly. Abbey distinguishes his own ideas of activism—sabotage—from those of the protesters. Examining their home base of operations, a canvas teepee blocking the railroad spur leading to the plant, Abbey notices electric power lines on wooden poles running parallel with the tracks and thinks “that one resolute man with a chain saw could put that place out of business for a short while, easily and quickly.”⁴⁷ But he acknowledges that sabotage is not the preferred method of these activists, who “were opposed both in principle and in practice to violence in any form. Even to moderate violence, technically restrained, tactically precise, against mere inanimate property.”⁴⁸ Abbey's short-term solution is an individual effort, whereas the protesters engage collectively and nonviolently and end up arrested and charged with trespassing.

Abbey records the trial of the railway trespassers, and while the jury deliberates, he talks with the defendants, who remain uplifted and strengthened through their resistance: “They are happy people, these crusaders, at ease with themselves and with others, radiant with conviction, liberated by their own volition from the tedious routine of passive acquiescence in which most of us endure. … One single act of defiance against power, against the State that seems omnipotent but is not, transforms and transfigures the human personality. … Perhaps that is enough” (108). This demonstration of civil disobedience restores the protesters' enthusiasm for their cause and Abbey's belief in justice and the importance of resistance. He self-consciously examines his own attitude prior to witnessing these events, recalling that he was “vaguely sympathetic with the protesters, but basically skeptical” (108). He admits sometimes falling into cynicism “that our most serious problems are finding a place to park the car, the ever-rising costs of gasoline and beefsteak, and the nagging demands of the poor, the old, the disinherited” (108). Setting himself apart from the activists, Abbey confesses “a guilty envy of the protesters, of those who actually act, and a little faint glow of hope—perhaps something fundamental might yet be changed in the nature of our lives” (108). Contrary to his own opinion, I believe Abbey engages in activism by recording the events of Rocky Flats and the trial, retelling the story of those courageous enough to defend their principles and suffer the consequences. His activism through writing remains an individual rather than a collective effort.

Though Abbey tells Loeffler that writing is an easier, more cowardly way to defend the West, in classic Abbey fashion he contradicts this statement in “A Writer's Credo,” asserting, “I believe that words count, that writing matters, that poems, essays and novels—in the long run—make a difference.”⁴⁹ Looking in other works, however, one can find other versions of Abbey's conflicting views between acting and writing. In the preface to Beyond the Wall, he addresses the need for action rather than “more words on the matter” of wilderness preservation: “What we need now are heroes. And heroines. About a million of them. One brave deed is worth a thousand books. Sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul. Or as an old friend of mine once said, If I regret anything, it is my good behavior: What demon possessed me that I behaved so well?”⁵⁰ The “old friend” Abbey invokes is Thoreau, his literary forebear who ardently took action from principles, albeit in writing. Abbey repeats this passage later with some alteration in a letter to Earth First! members, yet interprets Thoreau's statement as one of regret from an “overly-bookish man.”⁵¹ Thoreau's statement comes from Walden and, rather than indicating regret, it indicates his defiance of society's definition of “good behavior.” In the preceding lines of the quote from Walden, Thoreau writes, “The greater part of what my neighbors call good, I believe in my soul to be bad, and if I repent of anything, it is very likely to be my good behavior.”⁵² Thoreau sets himself in opposition to cultural conventions—a position, it seems, Abbey would admire, though he misquotes Thoreau's statement and uses it out of context. Perhaps Abbey is trying to demonstrate how easily words can be manipulated, whereas direct action, once taken, is more difficult to control or reverse.

In a sense, Thoreau's late natural history essays resist this sort of manipulation, as they are based on empirical research, and expand the literary image of him from an overly bookish man to a figure in the field. To record so much information, Thoreau had to spend time walking the land, observing nature, and reading scientific texts. The dominant argument within “The Dispersion of Seeds” refutes the popular idea of spontaneous generation: that a plant can grow from nothing—without a seed, root, or cutting. It is important to acknowledge that Thoreau and Abbey did engage in physical activism, though to a lesser degree than many environmentalists like to imagine. Their activism remains rooted more in language than in physical acts of defiance; yet without their words the modern environmental movement would be unrecognizable. Thoreau and Abbey have sown the seeds of activism in their writing, producing words that continue to stir our hearts and inspire us to envision paths of activism for ourselves.

Notes

1. Berry, “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey,” 6.

2. Payne, “Monkey Wrenching, Environmental Extremism, and the Problematical Edward Abbey,” 195-96.

3. Abbey, “A Writer's Credo,” in One Life at a Time, Please, 163.

4. Ibid., 161.

5. Papa, “The Politics of Leisure,” 321.

6. Ibid.

7. Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 410-11.

8. Harding cites Emerson, who comments on Thoreau's “energetic enthusiasm,” 411.

9. Thoreau, Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Torrey and Allen, vols. XII, 211-14, and XIII, 149. In The Days of Henry Thoreau, Harding attributes this emphatic quote to Thoreau, though in his Journal Thoreau quotes someone else: “Minott says that he hears that Heard's testimony in regard to Concord River in the meadow case was that ‘it is dammed at both ends and cursed in the middle’” (149).

10. Engel, “Teaching the Eco-Justice Ethic,” 467.

11. Ibid.

12. Harding, Days of Henry Thoreau, 410.

13. Ibid.

14. Papa, “The Politics of Leisure,” 321.

15. Thoreau, “Walking,” in Writings of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Torrey, vol. V, 224.

16. Turner, “In Wildness Is the Preservation of the World,” 617.

17. Thoreau, Walden, 222.

18. Thoreau, “Walking,” 205.

19. Evernden, Social Creation of Nature, 132.

20. Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” 67.

21. Ibid., 72.

22. Gougeon, “Thoreau and Reform,” 204.

23. Ibid.

24. Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” in Reform Papers, 106.

25. Ibid., 102.

26. Nelson, “Thoreau and John Brown,” 143.

27. Thoreau, “Slavery in Massachusetts,” 108.

28. Ibid., 104.

29. Albrecht, “Thoreau and His Audience,” 393.

30. Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” in Reform Papers, 115.

31. Ibid., 127.

32. Thoreau, “Resistance to Civil Government,” 238.

33. Thoreau, “A Plea for Captain John Brown,” 133.

34. Ibid., 134-35.

35. Wild, Pioneer Conservationists of Western America, 186.

36. Ibid., xiii.

37. Scheese, “Desert Solitaire: Counter-Friction to the Machine in the Garden,” 223.

38. Ibid., 213.

39. Abbey, Desert Solitaire, 67.

40. Ibid., 48.

41. Ibid., 188.

42. Hepworth, “The Poetry Center Interview,” 44.

43. Abbey, “Eco-Defense,” in One Life at a Time, Please, 31.

44. Ibid., 31-32.

45. Loeffler, “Edward Abbey,” 9.

46. Ibid., 8.

47. Abbey, “Of Protest,” in Down the River, 99.

48. Ibid.

49. Abbey, “A Writer's Credo,” 162.

50. Abbey, Beyond the Wall, xvi.

51. Abbey, “Ed Abbey to Earth First! Mabon 1983,” in The Earth First! Reader, ed. John Davis, 248.

52. Thoreau, Walden, 6.

Works Cited

Abbey, Edward. Beyond the Wall. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1984.

———. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Ballantine, 1968.

———. Down the River. New York: Plume, 1982.

———. “Ed Abbey to Earth First! Mabon 1983,” In The Earth First! Reader: Ten Years of Radical Environmentalism, edited by John Davis, 247-49. Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1991.

———. The Monkey Wrench Gang. New York: Avon, 1975.

———. One Life at a Time, Please. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1988.

Albrecht, Robert C. “Thoreau and His Audience: ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown.’” American Literature 32 (1961): 393-402.

Berry, Wendell. “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey.” In Resist Much, Obey Little: Some Notes on Edward Abbey, edited by James Hepworth and Gregory McNamee, 1-14. Tucson, Ariz.: Harbinger House, 1989.

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