Elmer’s Sunnybank inn is a mansion built in 1840 and 1887 – the oldest building in Hot Springs. It first hosted an AT hiker in 1947. It hosted Elmer himself for two days in 1976. Since the late 70s, Elmer continued hospitably welcoming hikers into this home. That history speaks. As hospitality shared through Elmer’s skilled cooking – he had started a restaurant prior to hiking the trail. As a collection of books common to each room: among them, Walt Whitman‘s Leaves of Grass, Lao Tsu’s Dao Te Ching, Walden, and The Diet for a New America. As a place where Southern balladry, activism, the aromas of hundreds of thousands of meals, and the hopes of thousands of hikers mingle in the air. No cell phones.
The people, the books, the atmosphere provide a huge dose of something the Internet does not. Trust, integrity, the abundance of realness. The Internet is funded by cloud storage (quite useful) and a whole lot of advertising (deception not trust, persuasion not integrity). Maybe in this antediluvian space there’s a different path to the future.
What to do about big problems
My favorite thing: Elmer and I talked about the problems facing the world. It is strange when you think about it, that there are these catastrophic challenges that you become a part of as you’re born into the world, even though you didn’t create them, and then you have an obligation to try and fix them. Things like war, hunger, migration, politics, unequal treatment, climate change. Elmer actually held a more cynical view than me on most issues (perhaps cynicism does just increase with age), and one example was the idea of a cosmically cyclical history. The idea that planetary habitation leads to civilization building, leads to environmental destruction, leads to civilizational collapse, leads to extinction, and then perhaps repeats. It’s an interesting sort of cosmically Buddhist concept. But it fails to tell us what we ought to do with our short lives.
A magnet prominently hangs by Elmer’s main entrance that says ‘It is what it is, unless we change it.’ I think this is precisely the antidote to cynicism. Sure things might be broken in a big and complicated sort of way, but we still have some non-zero efficacy to make change. This emphasis on efficacy empowers us to be a small agent off change using whatever skills we have.
Time to open a book
At Elmer’s, I read poetry. Whitman’s classic “Give Me the Splendid Sun:”
Give me the splendid silent sun with all his beams full-dazzling Give me juicy autumnal fruit ripe and red from the orchard Give me a field where the sorrow'd grass grows Give me an arbor, give me the trellis'd grape.,.
And I finally got the chance to read Edward Abbey‘s Monkey Wrench Gang. The book is rabid, a cartoon, almost a fan fiction style of anarchic environmentalism. Boy does Abbey despise the destruction of wild spaces, the concrete, the pollution, the roads. As the things he loved were dammed and paved, this book feels like an outlet for rage. Elmer and I talked quite a bit about what Abbey might say about climate change today. We decided he would be fall strongly in the degrowth camp. Disgusted with the industrialists, convinced there are still too many people on the planet using too many resources, too many people trying to get rich, his solution would be to stop the industrialists, to use far less resources, and to live much simpler lives.
Hypocrisy of anarchy
I struggled with a major acknowledged hypocrisy in Monkey Wrench Gang: as the characters sabotage the coal mines, the oil rigs, the air strips, the dams, and the roads, they drive oil-guzzling trucks down the road, fly out of small airports, and use coal- and dam-powered electricity. in the ideal libertarian, anarchy world, you block the stuff you don’t like and still personally happily consume resources, as is your God-given right. But society ceases functioning if more than a very few act this way. We mighty need more responsible resource management, but the hypocrisy of anarchy does not compute for me.
This is why, as I also alluded to in my review of Abbey’s Desert Solitaire, I believe that environmentalism must aggressively enter a new building-not-blocking era. If we want to continue using electricity – even the anarchists do – if we want to continue our easy access to transportation – which we do – if we want to have good homes that are heated and cooled – it would be unjust not to – and not have catastrophic climate change, we necessarily must build out tons of renewable energy. Sorry Abbey, this is development.
I appreciate Monkey Wrench Gang as a radical piece and a wildly entertaining ride. I love and almost fear Edward Abbey’s polemic, witty, specific, sarcastic. He has found his voice, and it’s inspiring. It’s not my style, but I want to be on the same team as this guy because he cares. The book is not for everybody. You have to be ready for it.
It is what it is until we change it. To me, that means a future line of work somehow related to accelerating the build-out of clean energy and the electrification of industry, transportation, and buildings.
