Letters from a Desert Prophet

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The fat pink soft slobs who go roaring over the landscape in these over-sized over-priced over-advertised mechanical mastodons are people too lazy to walk, too ignorant to saddle a horse, too cheap and clumsy to paddle a canoe. Like cattle or sheep, they travel in herds, scared to death of going anywhere alone, and they leave their sign and spoor all over the back country: Coors beer cans, Styrofoam cups, plastic spoons, balls of Kleenex, wads of toilet paper, spent cartridge shells, crushed gopher snakes, smashed sagebrush, broken trees, dead chipmunks, wounded deer, eroded trails, bullet-riddled petroglyphs, spray-painted signatures, vandalized Indian ruins, fouled-up water holes, polluted springs and smoldering campfires piled with incombustible tinfoil, filter tips, broken bottles. Etc.

It is not the bureaucrats back in Washington who are trying to stop this motorized invasion of what little wild country still remains in America; on the contrary, the bureaucrats are doing far too little. What feeble resistance has so far appeared comes from concerned citizens here and there who are trying to prod and encourage the bureaucrats to do their duty: namely, to save the public lands for their primary purpose, which is wildlife, habitat, livestock forage, watershed protection and non-motorized human recreation.

Thank God for the coming and inevitable day of gasoline rationing, which will retire all these goddamned ORVs and 'escape machines' to the junkyards where they belong.
Ed Abbey-Moab

Abbey's philosophy drew heavily from the Thoreauvian tradition, valuing individual human freedom highly, even as he went further and saw through the eyes of lizards and 'buzzards' (as he referred to vultures).

To High Country News,
Lander, Wyoming
(October 4, 1986)

Dear Editor:

Sorry to intrude upon your columns once again, but I would like to correct a few errors in the account of my remarks at the Telluride 'Ideas Festival.'

About growth, I said that 'Growth is the enemy of progress.' (Figure that out for yourselves.) I said, furthermore, that 'every normal, healthy organism, plant or animal, human or otherwise, grows to a certain optimum size (not 'space,' a meaningless notion); and then, having reached maturity, stops growing physically.' Anything which grows without ceasing we call a monster-or a tumor.

As to reason and common sense, I believe in both. What I said at Telluride was that, judging from human history, so far, I have little hope or faith that reason and common sense will be applied in our attempts to resolve our ever-growing problems. (One more example of the self-contradicting nature of 'healthy growth.') What will probably happen, I said, is that nature will solve our troubles for us in the traditional manner: through plague, famine, civil war, earthquake, flood and climatic changes. Since we humans choose to breed and multiply like rabbits, mule deer, fruit flies or bacteria in a culture dish, we must expect to enjoy a similar fate-over and over again, as in the past. Nothing to regret here, it's simply one aspect of the grand pageant of life. I merely wish to insist that we must stop pretending that we are somehow different from, or in some fashion superior to, the other animals on this planet.

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