My Green Manifesto (11 page)

I mention my fondness for Ed Abbey. Abbey's books, like
Desert Solitaire
and
The Monkey Wrench Gang
, had meant a lot to me, in no small part because they suggested a different way of being “environmental.” While most environmental writing has overly proper manners, Abbey revived the old
Western tradition of braggadocio and boastfulness, waxing poetic about a twisting desert juniper in one sentence and unleashing an anti-immigration tirade in the next that left your jaw dropping. On the one hand he wrote paeans to solitude; on the other, he told fart jokes. Though often poetic and high-minded, he seemed to embrace his own id; he was passionately lecherous, a desert Henry Miller. He kept his readers off guard, and until you figured him out, if you ever did, surprise was on his side: What would this hairy, bearded, cigar-smoking booze-swilling barbarian do next?

I try to explain to Dan how my own ethic changed during my years living in the West.

“It became bigger, feistier,” I say.

“That's right,” he says. “We need more fight out here. We need to take something from the West. We need bigger stories.”

Dan is right. He—
we
—are on to something. Perhaps one of the most important contributions of Western environmentalism is to break us out of Walden and add an element of senselessness and outrageousness and humor to the fight. To add both a sense of individualism and its opposite, the sense of belonging to a small group fighting the bigwigs. And of course: to do all this, as Dan says, while
outside
. Maybe this is too romantic, but romanticism has its uses, and one of those uses is to excite people.

Dan tells me about a couple of his hiking trips out West, and then I tell him about a recent trip to Moab, Utah, to meet one of Ed Abbey's oldest friends, a riverman who shared spirit, if not geography, with Dan. The drive west from Grand Junction, dropping down from Colorado into Utah is, for my money, the most beautiful in the world. Dan
was obviously exaggerating earlier when he suggested that we should all take mushrooms, but if you want to get a taste of the experience without the fungi, I suggest the drive along the river into Moab, which provides a fairly reasonable simulation.

You descend into a strange red dream world of hoodoos and mesas and buttes, a world of twisted sandstone of such mystic power that that even multiple SUV commercials can't desecrate it. As you drop off the highway and head south along Route 128, driving through canyons parallel to the twisting Colorado River, with barely another car in sight, it's hard to build up too much ire about how tourists are overrunning the West. It becomes less hard forty miles later when you pass the spanking-new Sorrel River Ranch development, a theme park cluster of buildings that inhabit a place where I used to unroll my sleeping bag on a sandbar not too many years back. And it gets plain easy when you enter Moab itself.

It's a town every bit as biblical as its name. Here is where the battle between the new and old West truly rages. Moab has ridden the highs and lows of both uranium mining and mountain biking, and if you wanted to stage a gunfight between an old timer and a fannypack-wearing bicyclist you could find no better setting than Main Street. Though, on second thought, there would barely be room for it. RVs rumble down the streets and a hundred gaudy signs try to draw in the tourists, like beckoning recreational prostitutes, selling, instead of sex, rafting and biking and jeep tours. Think Vegas for outdoorsmen. Beamed down onto Main Street, an extra-terrestrial could be forgiven for concluding that the word ADVENTURE was the most common one on our world.

Up above Moab, amid blazing yellow aspens in the La Sal Mountains, you can look down at multiple red-rock towers like a series of giant, misplaced chess pieces. There you will find the Pack Creek Ranch and there I found Ken Sleight, the eighty-year-old former river rafter and horseman who was the inspiration for Seldom Seen Smith, the wildly adventurous “Jack Mormon” who appeared in Ed Abbey's best-known novel,
The Monkey Wrench Gang.
I rented a cabin in Pack Creek for two nights, and discovered Sleight over by his truck the next morning. He was wearing jeans and two dungaree shirts, despite the early heat. I told him I was heading into town to get a cup of coffee—I certainly did not tell him that the coffee would be a soy latte, light on the foam—and asked if we could meet up later. He said sure and pointed to where he'd be—“My office”—an aluminum-roofed bunker above his horse pasture. Later, caffeinated, I sat across from him while he stretched his legs out and regaled me with stories of his early days as one of Utah's original river guides. We had only talked for twenty minutes when he asked me if I wanted a beer. So I chased my latte with a Milwaukee's Best while he told stories of floating down the river with Abbey.

“We both loved it all—the goofing off, the food, being part of the crew. Lots of good happens on those trips—they're so spontaneous and joyful. It's true: most campfires are very joyous. Very romantic. There's a sense that everything is right in the realm.”

At one point I sheepishly confessed that I'd been a mountain biker, and asked him what he, having spent most of his life living near Moab, made of the biking craze.

“Well, I don't think they hurt the land all that much. Mostly what they hurt is the spirit of the wilderness.
I'll be out taking a hike and they'll come roaring down. Never one of them, of course. They run in packs in those colorful clothes. Anytime you bring fashion into wilderness I think you're in trouble. I think I'd like to get on my horse and ride down into town all clad in Spandex. Just to show them how ridiculous they look.”

I laughed, picturing Sleight, grizzled with white hair and shining blue eyes below his shaggy white-gray eyebrows, decked out in skin-tight clothes.

“I'd do it too,” he said “I'd put the tight Spandex over my asshole body and get on my horse and boy, would I shine. It would just be a symbol of course, but there's value in a symbol.”

He took a sip of his beer and leaned back.

“I have no problem making an ass of myself,” he said.

Which, I've come to believe, is a valuable tool. Ken Sleight, like his old friend Ed Abbey, still knew a thing or two about the importance of grand symbolic gestures, gestures that can sometimes make you look silly. When Sleight ran for the State Legislature a decade ago, registering hundreds of previously unregistered Native Americans in the process, he vowed to ride up the State House steps on his horse if he won.

Around that time he made a similar gesture when he discovered that loggers were deforesting the nearby Amasa Back wilderness, dragging chained trees over Native American archeological sites. What further outraged Sleight was the fact that the logging was going on without the required BLM (Bureau of Land Management) monitor. So he climbed on his horse and rode up the mountainside to confront the loggers.

“I pulled up in front of them so that they had to either
stop or run me over,” he told me that morning in his trailer. “My horse bucked when they kept coming. But they finally stopped. We had a standoff until the cops came. I was hoping they would arrest me but they didn't. You can say it was just a symbol but the next time they logged they had a BLM man with them.”

When I think about the state of the environmental movement today, this is what I think: Not only do we need more guys who stop the bad guy loggers on horseback but we need more
stories
about men and women who stop the bad guy loggers on horseback. That is, we need more eco-legends or, as the writer Jack Turner would have it, we need
lore.

An obvious reason that the American West plays such a vital role in our current environmental thinking is that, as Dan said, the fights are starker there, the land bigger. There's more to lose. The memory of the wild past is less distant. But lore may be another reason that the West is so important; not just its realities but also its language. I think of Terry Tempest Williams singing ecstatic praises of her red rock desert, but also working to pass the Escalante wilderness bill through Congress. I think of Dave Foreman who, influenced in part by Ed Abbey literary monkeywrenching, went on to found Earth First! And I think of Susan Zakin, an environmental journalist and novelist who would chronicle Dave Foreman's exploits in her first book,
Coyotes and Town Dogs.
In that book Zakin, calling Foreman and his gang “buckaroos,” describes the origin story of Earth First! as a fateful trip away from civilization to the Pinacate Desert in 1980 during which the group decided that
they
would break from the more stodgy style of environmentalism that had prevailed in organizations like the Sierra
Club. In other words, they decided to take matters into their own hands: advocating monkey-wrenching, disabling bulldozers, and cutting down billboards and spiking trees.

And of course, inevitably, they indulged in that greatest of Western eco-obsessions: battling against the building of dams. Dams, from Hetch Hetchy to Dinosaur Canyon to Glen Canyon, are central to the eco-myths of the West. John Muir set the tone when he famously employed biblical language to rail against the developers who would build a dam that would flood his beloved Hetch Hetchy Valley: “These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.” Ed Abbey kept the invective up when he railed against the flooding of Glen Canyon, calling it the “damnation of a canyon.”

For Ken Sleight the death of Glen Canyon and the creation of Lake Meade by the Glen Canyon Dam was almost unbearable.

“I'd been thinking about it for a long time before it happened,” Sleight said to me. “I loved those side canyons and those arches and couldn't imagine them buried in a big bathtub. The total realization of the enormity of it all didn't hit me until they started building the dam. It was physically painful. I felt rage. And deep sadness.”

Fittingly, the Glen Canyon Dam was Earth First!'s first strike. This act was a symbolic one, when, with Abbey himself in attendance, they unfurled a giant three hundred foot sheet with an illustration of a crack on it in front of the dam, making it appear the dam itself was splitting. It was, as I say, a symbolic event, with no policy repercussions, and in truth a large part of Earth First!'s importance over the next
decade was symbolic. But that is not to say it wasn't effective. Symbols, like the image of Ken Sleight stopping the loggers on horseback, play an import role in environmental fights and what Earth First! symbolized was a new kind of environmentalism, something more dangerous, and more fun, than old school environmentalism. Of course Earth First! would soon enough be tarred with the brush of terrorism, and the FBI would crack down and the party would be over. But before the party ended the organization opened a window into which some could peek and maybe get an idea of what a future environmental movement might look like. That movement would be kind of wild, kind of fun, and would have a communal sense of a band of fighters, of merry men and women, fighting against the powers that be. Thumbing their nose, giving the collective finger, all that.

I am aware that these buckaroos and nose-thumbers only make up one front in the overall environmental war. The Nordhauses and Shellenbergers make up another, a very necessary front, pushing policy through and working in the bureaucratic mines. Furthermore, there are plenty of big problems with the Ed Abbey mythology, even beyond the obvious one that his macho rants take occasional detours into the sexist and xenophobic. As much as I may like the idea of the environmental fighter as a Rooster Cogburn character, taking the reins in his mouth and his six-guns in hand, after yelling out to the enemy, “Fill yer hand you son of a bitch,” I must admit that the cowboy myth has some serious limitations.

Which is not to say it should be tossed out altogether. It just needs some revision. Ken Sleight himself seemed surprisingly receptive to this idea, surprisingly ready to acknowledge his own hypocrisy and contradictions. Ken had grown
up in a conservative Western home, but had, in his words, “evolved.”

He, too, worried about a distortion and oversimplification of the standard Western myths. He admitted that despite his own bursts of civil disobedience, and the fact that some people thought he was “way out there,” he had actually spent the better part of his life in the tourism business running his rafting company and felt some culpability in Moab's recreation boom.

“When I went down the river with Abbey we were both kind of like double agents. We both loved the wildness of it all, but at the same time we had our
uses
for the thing. He was always writing and thinking about the places and people we were with. He was doing it with his writing and I was doing it with the trips. ‘Come with me and I'll show you Cathedral in the Desert.'

“I remember when I was living down in Escalante, taking trips down Escalante Canyon to Coyote Gulch. When I first went there the place was empty and I would put out these little mimeographed sheets in town, trying to drum up business. But then I took some reporters from
Sunset
magazine down the river and they wrote an article on me. A few weeks later I saw people hiking in the canyon and when I asked them they said yes, they had read the article. And people led to more people. I began to see you had to be careful. Began to see you could love a place to death.”

His motivation for taking the reporters along had been a simple economic one—“Heck, I could do a little better”—and Sleight admitted he had had his hand in how things ended up going. What he was admitting to, in effect, was being one of Dan Driscoll's hypocrites. But he had also tried to slow things down, fighting to regulate and keep
roads out of Moab. In fact, many of Sleight's battles over the last four decades had been, despite his cowboy image, efforts at restraint.