Saturday would have been Edward Abbey’s 84th birthday. (I think he’s still waiting for someone to take out the Glen Canyon Dam.*) Here are two of my favorite quotes of his:
“Completely passive, acted upon but never acting, the desert lies there like the bare skeleton of Being, spare, sparse, austere, utterly worthless, inviting not love but contemplation.”
and
“A drink a day keeps the shrink away.”
Amen, brother.
*dear FBI, if you are monitoring the interwebs, I’m not a terrorist. That was just the plot point of The Monkey Wrench Gang.
I’m not saying we should, I’m just saying that he’s probably a little disappointed. 🙂 But yes, that fight has been lost.
I have to confess I’ve never quite understood Abbey’s strain of environmentalism, i.e., the “blow up the dam” mentality. I value undeveloped spaces, but I also think there’s a time to admit you’ve lost a specific fight and go find other windmills to tilt at. Can you imagine what the bottom of Glen Canyon would look like at this point if they did drain Lake Powell? The paradisaical landscape the neo-Abbeyites reminisce about is long gone.