This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first press run of Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang, the novel that launched environmental activism and eventually sold more than a million copies.
Unfortunately, successful as the book has been, a big loss was the original opening chapter that I read as it came out of Ed’s typewriter, in which the gang blew up the Glen Canyon Dam. He decided it was “too unbelievable” to include in this instruction book about environmental preservation, explaining how to seize up the engines of bulldozers, tear up train tracks, deconstruct wilderness roads, bring down big, invasive billboards, and more.
Alas, the dam still stands today, neither taken down nor blown up, damning the drying river’s side canyons to weedy plants and trees taken root where they should not be, dead humpback chubs and razorback suckers, flooded caves where the walls once showcased Stone Age art, and the halt to the red rock silt load that has been deepening the canyon for millions of years.
Today Lake Powell, backed up behind the dam, is just a huge mud puddle, which hopefully will one day shove the dam out of its way.
Memories Burn
The female character in The Monkey Wrench Gang, Bonnie Abbzug, is a ballerina from the Bronx. I am too. Or, I should say, I was. My days of double pirouettes and split leaps are long gone. Today I am a prisoner of noisy, overpopulated, polluted New York City because I cannot persuade my offspring’s family to move with me to Kanab, Utah — among the places where Ed and I lived — where the town’s population is the same size as the Manhattan block I live on.
Alas, moving back to North Rim at the Grand Canyon where Ed and I spent our summers is also not an option. Climate change has just burned it to the ground.
When we lived there, no television or radio connections were available at our Canyon lodgings 8,000 feet in elevation; we were fine with that. Noise pollution was limited to crickets, and the unpolluted sky was filled with thousands of blinking stars every night. Once a week, however, the mailman would deliver a copy of Newsweek and we’d skim through it to see if the world was at war. Again.
Though our time as a couple would end before long, our friendship lived on. I saw Ed just before his 1989 passing. I will always regret this loss — and so do the undisturbed lands and threatened species everywhere that are struggling for protection.
Artificial Intelligence vs. Genuine Stupidity
While Ed sitting at his manual typewriter would not have foreseen electrified, computerized, desktop artificial intelligence, he certainly knew that people everywhere were inexcusably uninformed about preserving our natural environment and foresaw that they would grow in number.
When Ed was born in 1927, there were 120 million people populating the United States and 2 billion people in the world. Now our population has grown to more than 330 million in the U.S. and soared above 8 billion worldwide.
Overpopulation is the root of all evil: 100 countries currently at war cross-border or internally; poisoned air and land and waters; climate chaos; every large mammal and millions of other species suffering dangerous population decreases — all evils traceable to man.
Ed, now lying in his illegal desert-wilderness burial site, can’t see the worst of his fears coming to pass: Too many people and too few surviving grizzlies, lions, crocodiles, and polar bears to eat them.
The Movie That Never Was
Robert Redford was the first to buy movie rights to The Monkey Wrench Gang, and he was expected to take a role in the movie. But, no.
Since then the rights have switched hands a number of times, always owned by someone — I have two completed screenplays — but nothing has come of it.
And why? Because it’s OK to produce movies about killing people, but not about decommissioning bulldozers or backhoes, or blowing up unwelcome bridges or dams. That’s illegal.
I doubt that the movie will ever come to the screen, because with proper instruction smithereened bridges and dams would fly into the air, paved wilderness roads and rail tracks would disappear, and lawsuits directed at the movie’s producer, actors, writers — all — would fly.
Ed for President
While Abbey was no advocate of violence against people, he would have long ago set up a Go Fund Me page to pay for all the dynamite needed to bring down the Glen Canyon Dam and free the once-mighty red river.
That task completed, as the donations would have poured in, with the remaining funds I would have persuaded him to run against Trump. Lots of people would have voted for Ed — excluding the rich, greedy ones who live off their mining and drilling and environmental poisons production as the world speeds to the lemming cliff.
Perhaps Ed should be on the next ballot for president anyway, 2028, because even though he is dead, the current president is brain dead, which is the same thing.
So, while Trump trashes environmental protections, remember the write-in ballot:
2028
Vote for Edward Paul Abbey
The Real EPA