Desert Solitaire

"People know Edward Abbey more for The Monkey Wrench Gang , about a group of green terrorists in the 1960s. He was a pioneer of the modern environmental movement, and as a young guy he got a job in Utah in a national park called Arches. It’s an extraordinary red stone landscape, incredibly wild and bleak, and he was out there when there wasn’t any real road going into the park. He’s a bilious character – an environmental grump who hates the idea that the park is going to build a properly surfaced road to allow tourists to get in. He thinks the only people who should be allowed this experience are people who are prepared to hike in, and do battle with scorpions and snakes and so on. But he has a deep love for this place and he’s amusing to read because he’s such a strong personality. His writing about Southern Utah is extraordinary. He was doing this in the 1950s and 60s; he’s been dead for a long time now. He was a polemicist about preservation of these landscapes. They were thought of as places you could do anything to, and the desert would survive it."

"I chose it partly to juxtapose with Shepherd. Abbey is grumpy, misanthropic, abrasive, bracing. He acknowledges the landscape’s hostility and its challenges, and accepts them as kinds of fierce instruction – desert as moral boot-camp. He’s a rightful legend in American literature, and his other great desert work is The Monkey Wrench Gang , a novel which arguably inspired the founding of the eco-activist group Earth First. Abbey is full of passion, fury and contempt. He’s about as far from Lopez’s calm, priest-like reverence and discretion as you could imagine. I wanted to end my list with a book by a pugilist – a fiery fighter to shake up the sometimes over-tranquil atmosphere of nature writing. Abbey is angry about the development of the desert, and about late-modernity more generally. The book describes the classic American retreat narrative. He goes and lives in Arches National Park, ostensibly to work as a park ranger, but really to think hard about the desert and about humanity. The desert, and his caravan there, offers a vantage point from which he can watch and witness human futility in action. He explores the canyon-lands of the area, and he drinks and thinks and speculates about stars and snakes, sand, and the disinterested, exhilarating nature of the wild."