Edward Abbey

See songs about Ed Abbey on the Environmentalists in Song page.

Robert Shetterly’s Americans Who Tell the Truth – Edward Abbey

Recommended Books

  • Desert Solitaire – I just cannot say this delicately: you cannot be a Planet Patriot without having read this book! His other books are fabulous reads too, but Desert Solitaire is the absolute must read !
  • The Monkey Wrench Gang  – the hilarious novel that was the inspiration for Earth First!
  • The Journey Home – Great collection of essays in defense of the American West — laced with trademarked Abbey humor!

Terry Tempest Williams Tribute to Abbey

“W.H. Auden tells us that when a writer dies he becomes his readers. If this is true, then Edward Abbey has had an exceptionally spirited afterlife. He has become the redrock activists…who pledge allegiance to the Colorado Plateau. He is the … myriad voices defending ecological justice on behalf of landscape and animals. He persists as the sane wit who challenges the consensus-driven bureaucrats of the New West and the thoughtless powers behind industrial tourism. He is the fuel and fire for yet another generation falling in love with the desert. He survives as the hot-tempered muse jarring us out of complacency, reminding us that ‘sentiment without action is the ruin of the soul.’ “

– Terry Tempest Williams

Robert Crumb (illustrator) and edward Abbey by Robert Waldmire, April, 1989.jpg
Ed Abbey Quote: We need wilderness...

Edward Abbey and Joseph Wood Krutch

When Edward Abbey lived in Tucson in the 1960’s,  he interviewed fellow Tucsonan Joseph Wood Krutch – only a couple of years before Krutch’s death in 1970.   An early essay by Abbey describing the interview appeared initially in an ephemeral journal called Sage.

This later appeared in Abbey’s 1978 Preface to Krutch’s 1956 book The Great Chain of Life. The essay was later included in Abbey’s 1988 essay collection One Life at a Time, Please.  By the time of the interview, Abbey had read most of Krutch’s books, and wrote that what he most admired in Krutch’s work “was not so much what he said as the say in which he said of it. Many of us…. were coming to share the sme belief in the right of the non-human world to exist – to exist not only for the pleasure and health and insstruciton of humanding but for its own sake alone.”  Krutch’s writings, Abbey said, provide the “necessary supporting structure of rational thought.”  

Abbey expressed his esteem for Krutch by praising his “Rational thought. Calm, reasonable, gentle persuasion. It was this quality of moderation in his writing that most impressed me, for my own inclinations tended toward the opposite, the impatient, the radical, the violent.”  Abbey summarized Krutch by saying: “In his unwavering insistence, to the very end of his life, on the primacy of freeedom, purpose, will, play, and joy, and on the kinship of the human with all forms of life, Krutch defended those values which form the elan vital of human history.”

Edward Abbey in 1988, Photo by Kirk McCoy, Los Angeles Times

Favorite Quotes by Edward Abbey

“My loyalities will not be bound by national borders, or confined in time by one nation’s history, or limited in the spirtual dimension by one language or culture. I pledge my allegiance to the damned human race, and my everlasting love to the green hills of Earth, and my intimations of glory to the singing stars, to the very end of space and time.”

* * *

“All men are brothers, we like to say, half-wishing sometimes in secret it were not true. But perhaps it is true. And is the evolutionary line from protozoan to Spinoza any less certain? That also may be true. We are obliged, therefore, to spread the news, painful and bitter though it may be for some to hear, that all living things on earth are kindred.”

* * *

“The love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only paradise we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need — if only we had the eyes to see … No, wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, as vital to our lives as water and good bread.”

* * *

“We have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, art museums, legislative assemblies, private bedrooms and the other sanctums of our culture; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places.”

* * *

“My final condemnation of existensialism: obsessive self-obsession. A completely homocentric egocentric anthropocentric view of life and the world … unacceptable to me now. I think I sensed something of this way back in 1951, at UNM, when I objected, in a course on existensialism, that it was an ‘indoor philosophy,’ just as jazz is an indoor musick and Christianity an indoor or man-centered religion. An infantile vanity lies at the heart of all these enterprises.

* * *

“Humanity’s view of the world as our property, our dominion, our stewarship, is like that of a child who imagines himself as the center of existence, with all other beings having no purpose but to serve him.”

* * *

“How strange and wonderful is our home, our earth, with its swirling vaporous atmosphere, its flowing and frozen liquids, its trembling plants, its creeping, crawling, climbing creatures, the croaking things with wings that hang on rocks and soar through fog, the furry grass, the scaly seas… Yet, some among us have the nerve, the insolence, the brass, the gall to whine about the limitations of our earthbound fate and yearn for some more perfect world beyond the sky. We are none of us good enough for the sweet earth we have, and yet we dream of heaven.”

* * *

One final paragraph of advice: Do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am — a reluctant enthusiast… a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still there. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, encounter the grizz, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, that lovely, mysterious and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much: I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound people with their hearts in a safe deposit box and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this: you will outlive the bastards.

Links

  • Abbey’s Web – Outstanding Website entirely dedicated to Edward Abbey.
  • Defending What You Love – An Interview of Edward Abbey by Jack Loeffler (August, 1990).  Published a year after Ed Abbey died, his close friend Jack Loeffler shows how Abbey was “a champion of the earth long before it became fashionable, Abbey held to the end that we must change the way we live, no matter how great the cost, if the earth is to survive.” In the interview, Abbey revealed his views about mankind, wildlife conservation, overpopulation, egalitarianism, and even religion, about which he said: “Call me a pantheist. If there is such a thing as divinity, and the holiness is all, then it must exist in everything, and not simply be localized in one supernatural figure beyond time and space. Either everything is divine, or nothing is. All partake of the universal divinity — the scorpion and the pack rat, the June bug and the pismire, and even human beings.”
  • Edward Abbey and Henry David Thoreau by Roger J. Wendell – 
  • Edward Abbey Matters Facebook Group – Very active discussion about Ed Abbey and his legacy.
  • Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance