Letters from a Desert Prophet

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To Paul W. Allen
(July 24, 1976)

Dear Mr. Allen:

In reply to your letter of July 20th:

Yes, the smoke from a copper smelter looks white as it leaves the stacks. But as those gases level out and form a plume they react with sunlight and take on a yellowish-brown color. Anyone who lives in southern Arizona knows this. I have seen it for years from Tucson, from the Catalina Mts, from the air, from Table Mt above the San Pedro Valley, where I worked for three years on the Whittell Ranch, and from Organ Pipe, where I worked several winters as a park ranger. I have a friend working now as a fire lookout in the Tonto Forest; he sends me regular reports on the extent and distribution of smelter smog. The Group Against Smelter Pollution (G.A.S.P.) in Tucson has been trying for years to get the goddamned EPA to enforce the Clean Air Act in southern Arizona. Everyone knows the problem exists, except the state politicians and their employers, the officials of the copper industry.

Your response is so typical. Instead of doing something constructive about smelter pollution, you attempt to deny that it exists. Instead of attacking the problem, you attack your critics. Instead of installing the B.A.T., you build higher stacks, dispersing the filth over a wider area rather than keeping it out of the public air entirely.

It is this concern for profit above the public good that makes me question the practice of absentee or out-of-state ownership of the Arizona copper industry. Perhaps if you and other copper industry officials and the major stockholders made your homes in southern Arizona you would show a little more concern for human health, not so much for your profit margins. We can live with less copper, or with no copper at all, but we cannot long survive without clean air.

Yours sincerely, Edward Abbey-Moab

Abbey may have been a sovereign state of one, but his social concerns ran deep, as the following 'no, thank you' letter attests. 'Without courage, all other virtues are useless,' he once wrote, and he was acutely aware that speaking in dissent was easier (and more cowardly) than taking action.

To the Arizona Daily Star,
Tucson
(December 29, 1972)

Editor, the Star:

After winning the election with the fraudulent promise that 'peace is at hand,' the Nixon-Kissinger team have now revealed the true depth of their intellectual dishonesty and moral corruption. Through the tangled cobweb of official lies comes the thunder of the bombs falling on the people of Vietnam. After eight years of defoliating forests, poisoning rice fields, burning villages, napalming civilians, and torturing prisoners, our Government is now engaged in an apparent effort to obliterate the cities and destroy the population of the northern half of the little peasant nation of Vietnam.

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