Desert Solitaire (Edward Abbey 1968) review

A park ranger at Utah’s Arches National Monument during the summers of 1956 and 1957, Edward Abbey befriended a host of plants, animals, and landscapes but never acquired much of a taste for the human visitors to his park. “Hey ole buddy, how far from here to Lubbock?” Abbey recalls a tourist asking. “Well sir, I don’t know exactly how far that is but I’d guess it’s not nearly far enough” Abbey dryly responded. “Any dangerous animals out here, ranger?” asks another. Abbey: “Just tourists.”

“Metallic shells like molluscs on wheels”

Abbey decries the Developers and the Industrialists throughout Desert Solitaire but reserves particular disdain for those particular Industrialists promoting the automobile. “The automobile,” he wrote, “has become a bloody tyrant.” Hard to argue. Automobiles killed over 40,000 Americans in 2021 and (likely) 2022 – one fatal crash every 15 minutes. The built landscape of America – as much now as in 1968 – is built for people-in-cars, not people. Roads smear across precious landscapes like fingernails scraping through an oil painting. Just go to Yosemite valley on a summer weekend. You will see tens of thousands of cars as you attempt to glimpse a waterfall or granite cliff. The noise alone spooks the natural world into flight. Worse, Abbey argues, those aluminum walls separate the human from the outdoors, “isolating [them] within a synthetic prison of [their] own making.” Abbey’s role as naturalist is in unremitting conflict with the car: “Sealed in their metallic shells like molluscs on wheels, how can I pry the people free? The auto as tin can, the park ranger as opener.” Alas, Abbey is fighting a losing battle. “Where once a few adventurous people came […] to enjoy a taste of the primitive and remote, you will now find serpentine streams of baroque automobiles pouring in and out.” Much of Desert Solitaire thus reads as a requiem for the once-primitive lifestyle at Arches National Monument, for the condemned Glen Canyon – that “sacrosanct, condemned cathedral,” and for Canyonlands. It is a lament for the disregard with which people set about paving the parks, plowing the wilderness, shooting the wildlife, and ignoring the lessons wild spaces could teach us, if only we would listen.

The car is largely a proxy for wanton overdevelopment. “[The industrialists] cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness,” Abbey seethes. When the Developers stake out a new paved road in Arches, Abbey proudly uproots the stakes. “A futile effort in the long run, but it made me feel good,” he concludes. Even more than the automobile, Abbey’s true adversary: the progress-or-perish human being. He was an early degrowther.

“A necessity of the human spirit”

What is good then? The larkspur, blue flax and Sego lilies. “Abbey’s country, the red wasteland.” The “compatible” gopher snake who shared Abbey’s trailer house for a week and chased away the mice. The observation that “after the winter snows and a trace of rain in the spring, [the cliffroses bloom] suddenly and gloriously like a swan, like a maiden.” The “sense of cradlelike security, of achievement and joy” of drifting down the muddy Colorado River, the parapet rocks rising on both sides. The sentiment sometimes feels selfish. Abbey just wants his own space free from the corruption of other tourists. Yet when you read Abbey closely, the converse emerges – the sentiment is unequivocally generous. Abbey shares with the reader how to disregard tourism’s grossly extractive behaviors and participate in nature by melding into its melody. He teaches us how to listen, to be still. describing what this is like. It is hard to pick a quote as an example of this; it is the essence of the book. Perhaps the most oft-quoted line is this: “Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread.” Deference, not dissociation, is how this longing of the human spirit is satisfied.

Desert Solitaire was mostly a description of one summer at Arches National Monument, filled with diverse adventures and interspersed polemic. This lack of a story arc lends itself to a high density of quotable phrases – the density of quotes in this review reflects this. There is not a story arc, but there is an abundantly clear main point: a lot of places (most conspicuously Arches itself) are better without people messing them up. I think Abbey communicated this point effectively in 1968 to both ordinary citizens and the powers that were. A lot of things were paved over in the 1960s, and a lot of people were upset about it. Abbey was outraged, though sometimes his apparent cynicism belies his passion.

Caveat and gratitude

As a 2023 reader, I find myself resisting Edward Abbey’s anti-industrialism. In national parks and wilderness areas, I completely agree with Abbey. Kick the cars out, make the parks bus-or-bike-accessible, and make it clear that these lands are for the people, not for their vehicles. But because of the tremendous environmental wins that occurred around the time of Desert Solitaire‘s release – the Wilderness Act (1964), the National Environmental Policy Act (1970), the Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1972), the Endangered Species Act (1973) – development is not the primary threat wild places face anymore. Because of insufficiently abated carbon emissions, climate change is. Addressing climate change requires advancing some sectors of industry – the opposite argument of Abbey’s. Therefore, the modern day environmental movement must concern itself with building, not (only) obstructing. We need to build out renewable energy generation, which requires development on some open spaces. We need to build a more extensive electricity transmission system – and quickly – as uptake of electric cars and heat pumps accelerates. We need to mine minerals but to do so responsibly and with respect toward native peoples.

I am grateful to Abbey and his contemporaries for pushing the environmental movement forward. I am grateful for the wilderness, the rivers, the forests, the deserts, and the canyons that were preserved in the latter decades of the 20th century due to successful advocacy. I am grateful to Desert Solitaire for reflecting on the wild places of the Southwest and on the adventurousness of the human spirit. Still, I leave Desert Solitaire thinking of the book’s angle on environmental advocacy as a beautiful relic, like the ancient red rock spires Abbey writes of. In 2023, we need environmentalism that recognizes the gains of Abbey’s era but that focuses on building infrastructure to reduce carbon emissions and thus protect nature’s goodness.

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