Edward Abbey and the Arches He Tried to Save

In the spring of nineteen fifty-six, a writer named Edward Abbey drove his pickup truck to a small outpost in the Utah desert and took a job as a seasonal park ranger at Arches National Monument. He made about a dollar eighty an hour. He lived in a trailer. He kept journals.

What he wrote in those journals, revised over the following decade and published as "Desert Solitaire" in nineteen sixty-eight, became the founding document of American desert environmentalism. Abbey was not a gentle narrator. He wanted the roads into Arches unpaved, the parking lots removed, the tourists made to walk. He wrote that industrial tourism was destroying the thing it claimed to celebrate, and that the desert required slowness to be understood at all.

He had a point that the numbers later confirmed. When Abbey worked at Arches, the park received roughly five thousand visitors a year. By two thousand nineteen, nearly one point seven million people came through the entrance station. The entrance road he wanted left as dirt is now paved and wide enough for oversize vehicles. A timed-entry permit system manages the crowds he feared.

Abbey's philosophy, which ran considerably past environmentalism into territory that made many readers uncomfortable, directly shaped the radical conservation movement of the nineteen eighties. Earth First! was founded in nineteen eighty by activists who took his ideas, particularly those in "The Monkey Wrench Gang," as something closer to an instruction manual. Abbey himself kept a studied distance from the consequences. He died in nineteen eighty-nine and was buried in the Sonoran Desert in an unmarked grave, as he had requested.

The desert he wrote about is still here. It looks different than his journals described. The question he was really asking, about what a landscape is for and who gets to decide, has not been answered.