Edward Abbeys Desert Solitaire as a Narrative of Ecological Sustainability

Ambika Bhalla, PhD Scholar, SLIET, Longowal ambikabhalla@ymail.com

"A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourist can in a hundred miles." Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire While the social and political protest movements of the 1960s and 1970s entailed a radical revision of Americas cultural constitution along the conceptual lines of race, class, and gender, resulting in the canon debates of the 1980s, the new environmental sensibility emerging in the same period made significant academic impact. The theoretical project most central to the new discipline of ecocriticism is understood as a truthful representation of ecological facts. By keeping faith with the natural environment, it is assumed, literary mimesis can bring about a biocentric reorientation of the reader. For this purpose, the arguments put forward by Edward Abbey, the leading American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, may be taken as representative. Edward Paul (January 29,1927- March 14, 1989) was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental; issues and criticism of public land policies. His best- known works include the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which has been cited as an inspiration by radical environmental groups, and the non- fiction work Desert solitaire. Writer Larry Mc Murtry referred to Abbey as the Thoreau of the American West. Abbey was included in the list of nature writers along with Thoreau, Annie Dillard and Aldo Leopold, though he had resisted it. He said that it was a title that he had not earned or wanted or enjoyed. But the fact is that Abbey is indeed a nature writer.

2 Nature writing is not just any writing that happens to mention the outdoors, the flora and the fauna. It is the voice born out of a relationship with nature developed during the interconnections and interrelationships with nature. And Abbey's Desert Solitaire is all this and more. Desert Solitaire is a founding text of ecocriticism that encourage the readers to reflect on the conditions that enable an ecological perspective that positions humans with nature while recognizing that the nonhuman exists in its own right. It is regarded as one of the finest nature narratives in American literature, and has been compared to Aldo Leopolds A Sand Country Almanac and Thoreaus Walden. In it, Abbey vividly describes the physical landscapes of southern Utah and delights in his isolation as a backcountry park ranger, recounting adventures in the nearby canyon country and mountains. He also attacks what he terms the industrial tourism and resulting development in the national parks (national parking lots), rails against the Glen Canyon Dam, and comments on various other subjects. In this paper, I will argue that if we seek to understand how texts reshape attitudes towards nature, we should focus our attention on a texts faithfulness to ecological facts, and also on the way in which it picks up and transforms the narratives circulating in a culture.

Critic Edward S. Twining writes, Let it be said simply: Abbeys writing registers major changes in the America of our time with clarity and force (Twining 19). The environmental movement known as monkeywrenching, whose conception is credited to Abbey, had its genesis for the American public in Desert Solitaire. It succeeds by painting a portrait of earthly beauty in grave danger, then offering a solution: personal actions taken against the industrial/governmental machinery that threatens this tender landscape. Abbey wanders into the wilderness just after it has lost its status as frontier. Exploitative industry has discovered a mother lode of resources, and the government has set itself up as overseer of exploitation. In this cozy arrangement, Abbey finds a crying need for public outrage and action. Twining writes, Like Whitman, Abbey was an optimist whose optimism was founded in a belief in the essential good sense and good will of ordinary people not their institutions, not their governments, not the economic systems (Twining 21).

3 Desert Solitaire was born out of Abbeys experiences as a park ranger in the Arches National Monument in southeast Utah. For three six-month periods he had inhabited 33,000 acres of slick rock wilderness thus accumulating detailed notes and sketches. Abbey tells, ...most of the substance of this book is drawn, sometimes direct and unchanged, from the pages of the journals kept and filled through the undivided, seamless days of those marvelous summers. Desert Solitaire is a powerful polemic for the preservation of wilderness, and the critic Peter Quigley notes Abbeys literary use of the desert, saying, The desert becomes a focal point for Abbey for one of the most classic literary reasons: tension. The desert is a medium inhuman yet humanizing, in which civilization is in danger of losing itself to the destruction of wilderness. Abbey expresses his love for the wilderness thus: Wilderness. The word itself is music. We scarcely know what we mean by the term, though the sound of it draws all whose nerves and emotions have not yet been irreparably stunned, deadened, numbed by caterwauling of commerce, the sweating scramble for profit and domination (207). Abbey thinks that there is something about the desert that human sensibility has so far not been able to assimilate. That is why it remains to be the scarcely approached landscape in poetry, fiction, music or painting. Though the desert continues to be strange even after years of intimate contact and search, Abbey succumbs to its irresistible lure, in a futile but fascinating quest for the great unimaginable treasure which the desert seems to promise (303). And he wishes to possess the desert, embrace the entire scene intimately, deeply and totally. No wonder that Abbeys love for the desert sounds eccentric to any outsider. Abbey tells about a conversation he had with a tourist from Ohio, who said that the desert would be a great place if only there was some water. Abbey wittily replied that if only there was water, it would be like Ohio-wet, humid and hydrological. To the tourist, the idea of living in the desert is madness. Whereas, for Abbey, the idea of living in Ohio, is madness. Abbey observes that there is no shortage of water in the desert. He says, There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be (159).

4 Abbeys eco-centered perspective is obvious as he emphasizes the harmony and delicate balance of the desert ecosystem. The sparse but interconnected ecosystem includes trees like the cottonwood, willows, juniper, and mammals like the bobcat, deer, fox, bighorn sheep and a score of insects, and reptiles. This flora and fauna have survival tactics to withstand the heat. It is when man interferes in this ecosystem that disaster strikes. Abbey cites the example of the death of the pinyon tree, known for its good looks and tasty nuts. The wildlife service had encouraged the shooting of coyotes and mountain lions resulting in the undue increase of porcupine population. In turn, the porcupines gnawed at the bark of the pinyon trees leading to their death. Another disastrous consequence of the extermination of lions and coyotes is the multiplication of the deer population. They dont have enough to eat and are condemned to slow death by starvation. Abbey strongly argues that wilderness and motors are incompatible. He is thoroughly opposed to the idea of reclamation of wilderness under the pretext of promoting industrial tourism. The policy of the Congress is not only to administer the parks but also to provide for enjoyment, whereas conservationists like Abbey want them to be left unimpaired. Since these enjoyment seekers are not willing to get out of their cars, they want the landscape paved. Abbey reacts to these pseudo-nature lovers by saying: So long as they are unwilling to crawl out of their cars they will not discover the treasures of the national parks and will never escape the stress and turmoil of the urban-suburban complexes which they had hoped, presumably, to leave behind for a while (64). Abbey suggests measures like banning of cars enabling tourists to have recreation without spoiling the wilderness. He says, Is there any spot on earth that men have not proved accessible by the simplest means - feet and legs and heart? (60). He feels that by banning roads and by making the park rangers work harder, the holiness of the parks could be preserved. He boldly says: .the forests and mountains and desert canyons are holier than our churches (65). Abbey raises another issue of vital concern, i.e. construction of dams over rivers. He questions the need for dams in the Glen Canyon and the Grand Canyon leading to the death of the Colorado River:

5 To grasp the nature of the crime that was committed, imagine the Taj Mahal or Chartres Cathedral buried in mud until only the spires remain visible. With this d difference: these man-made celebrations of human aspiration could conceivably be reconstructed while Glen Canyon was a living thing, irreplaceable, which can never be recovered through any human agency. (189) In utter desperation, Abbey hopes that a miracle will happen to stop the dam construction. Theyll run out of cement or slide rules, the engineers will all be shipped to Upper Volta (205). Fantasying further, he hopes that some unknown hero will descend into the bowels of the dam and blow it up. He wants the explosion to happen precisely at the grand opening ceremony: ... when the President and the Secretary of the Interior and the governors of the Four Corner states are all in full regalia assembled, the button which the President pushes will ignite the loveliest explosion ever seen by man, reducing the great dam to a heap of rubble in the path of the river(206). Abbey uses the term intersubjectivity to describe his life lived in unison with nature. In fact, the same term can be used to describe Abbey's eco-vision, his philosophy and his life all working in unison. In Desert Solitaire he dwells on the abstract concepts of God, paradise, sin and death and offers remarkably concrete explanations to them. Intentionally, he calls himself not an atheist but an earthiest, one who is true to the earth. Paradise, for him, is not the banal heaven of the saints (208). It is not a garden of bliss and changeless perfection but it is the here and now, the actual, tangible, dogmatically real earth on which we stand (209). This paradise contains not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas, and flies and rattle snakes, flash floods and quicksand and also disease and death. Original sin, according to Abbey is the blind destruction of the natural paradise the earth - for the sake of greed. Death is a ruthless brutal process-but clean and beautiful because it makes way for the new. Abbey wishes to die in the open: To die in the open, under the sky, far from the insolent interference of leech and priest, before this desert vastness opening like a window into eternity - that surely was an overwhelming stroke of rare good luck (267).

6 Abbey completes his narrative by relating his reluctant departure from the desert. He knows that he could get back there the next season but he is not sure whether the desert will be the same. But he is absolutely sure of his commitment to the cause. His oft-repeated words are, We can have wilderness without freedom, we can have wilderness without human life at all; but we cannot have freedom without wilderness ( Brinkley xvi). Abbey makes the statements that connect humanity to nature as a whole. He makes the acknowledgement that we came from the wilderness, we have lived by it, and we will return to it. This is an expression of loyalty towards nature: But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever needif only we had the eyes to see (208). Desert Solitaire is a work of perennial appeal because it is a work that reflects profound love of nature and a bitter abhorrence of all that would desecrate it. Abbey is one of the very best writers about wilderness country, observed Wallace Stegner in the Los Angeles Times Book Review; he is also a gadfly with a stinger like a scorpion. The significance of Desert Solitaire lies not in its poetic descriptions of nature, though they be among the best, not in its call to arms in protecting the environment, but rather in its literary approach to the fundamental questioning of human existence. The time has come to reconsider the scope of Abbeys work. Werner Bigell aptly says: Although he is a central figure in radical environmentalism, many of his texts go beyond advocacy of monkeywrenching and the shallow-versus-deep debate in environmentalism to ask questions about the meaning of life.

With all his radical views, Abbey is easily mistaken and accused of being against civilization, science and humanity. He has often been derided as an anti-anarchist. However, Abbey makes his stand clear when he says that he is not opposed to mankind but only to man-centeredness, anthropocentricity, the opinion that the world exists solely f for the sake of man, not to science, which means simply knowledge, but to science misapplied ... not to civilization but to culture (306). Abbey explores our strong

7 connection to nature in Desert Solitaire, and he urges everyone to take something from his story to try and make the connection for themselves. That is Abbeys final goal.

Works Cited
Abbey, Edward. Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness. New York: Ballantine, 1971. Bigell, Werner. Biocentrism and Green Existentialism: Conflicting Conceptualizations of Nature in Ed Abbey, in Coyote in the Maze Tracking Edward Abbey in the World of Words. By Peter Quigley (Editor), Jim Stiles (Photographer), Stewa Cassidy Univ of Utah Press, 1998 Brinkley, Douglas. Introduction. The Monkey Wrench Gang. New York: Harper Perennial, 1975. Scheese, Don. Desert Solitaire: Counter Friction to the Machine in the Garden. Glotfelty and Fromm. University of Georgia Press, 1996. Twining, Edward S. The Roots of Abbey's Social Critique. In Coyote in the Maze: Tracking Edward Abbey in a World of Words, edited by Peter Quigley, pp. 19-32. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998.