In a post-9/11 world, Abbey’s dalliance with eco-terrorism has made him an even tougher sell in some quarters, while elevating him to icon in others. During one of his many appearances on college campuses, Abbey was asked if he really wanted to blow up Glen Canyon Dam. “No,” he told the students. “But if someone else wanted to do it, I’d be there holding the flashlight.”
Writer Doug Peacock, a friend of Abbey and the primary inspiration for the novel’s lead character, George Washington Hayduke, does not hem and haw about Abbey’s role in inspiring eco-terrorists. “The radical environmental group Earth First! Was a direct descendant of Abbey’s writings,” he wrote.”
Abbey rejected the notion that he was endorsing terrorism, drawing a distinction between sabotage and terrorism. “If the wilderness is our true home, and if it is threatened with invasion, pillage, and destruction—as it certainly is—then we have the right to defend that home, as we would our private quarters, by whatever means are necessary,” Abbey wrote in the essay, “Eco-Defense.”
“Whatever means are necessary” seems pretty clear, especially when standing next to his invitation to suicide bombers to take a lunge at Glen Canyon Dam.
Abbey’s defenders like to draw a distinction between damaging property and killing people.
In his essay “One Man’s Terrorist,” Michael Branch, a professor of environmental literature, justifies the destruction of earth-moving machinery, billboards, and surveyor’s stakes—prime targets of the Monkey Wrench Gang—as doing no person any harm.
“Using a chainsaw to fell a billboard is no more violent than using a welding machine to construct one,” Branch writes.
The contention that if no human is harmed, then it can’t be terrorism is faulty on its face. If you blow up a synagogue because you hate Jews, it’s an act of terrorism, whether there are any Jews inside or not.
Abbey was not unaware of the way the book could be, and was, perceived. He worried that he would be “accused of rash crimes … every time some Boy Scout sugars a bulldozer, or shellacs an earth-mover.” He was right to worry. A collection of terrorism biographies published two years after 9/11 profiled “twenty-six people who figure prominently in the story and history of terrorism,” including Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, and Ted Kaczynski. Abbey is right there at the front, his smiling, bearded countenance first alphabetically, followed by Gerry Adams and Yasir Arafat.
Am I a Racist?
Still, it is not his role as mad prophet of eco-terrorism that makes Abbey something of an untouchable among more conventional environmentalists.
