In Postcards From Ed, a welcome volume of Edward Abbey's thoughts and dreams, hopes and fulminations, the distinguished Terry Tempest Williams writes, "I miss you. We all do." She is not alone. Charles Bowden, Abbey's friend and fellow author, observes that "Ed taught us to see the Southwest as something else besides real estate to butcher. And now we have to see it without him."Eighteen years have passed since the 20th-century polemicist and desert anarchist, whose often sardonic, always lyrical words delighted or infuriated his readers, died of an incurable disease and was buried secretly in the desert he loved. "I love it so much that I find it hard to talk about," he wrote. "Nothing but desert, nothing but the silent world . . . both agonized and deeply still. Like death? Perhaps."Impossible to label in political terms - left, right or center - Abbey was a genuine rebel whose lifelong motto was borrowed from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. "Resist much, obey little." Beginning in the 1950s, in 20 books, lectures, and countless magazine pieces, he portrayed Arizona and the Southwest as a region under siege because of government incompetence, corporate greed and citizens who never bothered to value nature's gifts.With the zeal of a Biblical Ezekiel, he exclaimed time and again, "God bless America, let's save some of it," and he warned in many different ways that unless we become reconnected with nature, we run the risk of being cut off from the primary wellspring of our spiritual strength: the wild places."No more cars in national parks," he proclaimed in Desert Solitaire. "Let the people walk. Or ride horses. Bicycles, mules, wild pigs . . . we have agreed not to drive our automobiles into cathedrals, concert halls, private bedrooms; we should treat our national parks with the same deference, for they, too, are holy places."Faced with a dam on the Colorado River at Glen Canyon that created "Lake Foul," coal-fired polluting power plants, gasification plants, vehicle pollution, sprawling housing developments, he knew that the odds were against him, and that his love for wild places was the beginning of pain.Nonetheless, he never gave up believing in his heart that our spiritual resources, after all, may be the most valuable and potent and the least renewable once cut off irretrievably from the last destroyed wilderness. "Somehow, now or never," he said so often, "we must draw a line and announce in plain language: Enough is enough."Many faces, always a writerIn his lifetime, this Appalachian country boy of Swiss and German extraction put forward numerous poses to the world; alternatively he was the Lone Ranger, Pancho Villa, a "green" Jesse James, river rat, radical crank, mountain man, scholar, angry lover, and father - but always the writer. Often, he would tell audiences that the radical crank image in most of his books bore no resemblance to the "shy, timid, reclusive rather dapper little gentleman who, always correctly attired for his labors in coat and tie and starched detachable cuffs, sits down each night for precisely four hours to type out the further adventures of that arrogant blustering macho fraud that counterfeits his name."Sure, Ed!Why did he become so popular? Peter Wild, a disputatious colleague of Abbey at the University of Arizona in the 1980s, hit the bull's-eye, in my view: "We needed Abbey to show us how preposterously the nation had become tangled in the century's glitter. He often spoke the truth that lay in our hearts, unrecognized until he brought it to the surface from his."Abbey went to his death confronting the arrival of Koyaanisqatsi. That's a Hopi word meaning life out of balance, despair, turmoil as the U.S. careened away from the hopes and dreams of true conservatives such as Henry Adams, William James, Walt Whitman and Reinhold Niebuhr.Were he to return to celebrate his 80th birthday on Monday, the first thing that would please him is that if politicians have forgotten his warnings, book readers have definitely not.To the contrary, reports Joe Neri of Sedona's Well Red Coyote. He has 17 Abbey titles in stock, both fiction and non-fiction and all are selling well, most particularly The Monkey Wrench Gang, a satiric postmodern pulp Western that "lampooned everything from the Lone Ranger to John Wayne to the woman's movement," historian Douglas Brinkley wrote in the forward to the latest edition.Bad news to AbbeyIndeed, so popular are Abbey's books that Neri plans an open-house reading on Monday at his independent bookstore in West Sedona.Were Abbey alive today, someone would surely show him a photo from The Ahwatukee Republic slugged "Peering through the gunk - a smog attack." He'd worry that if Phoenix residents kept selling today to profit the hour, the LA basin's polluted air would be replicated in Phoenix. And he'd wonder why no one in the high-priced offices awakened to this reality. Filthy air is not good for tourism.Then he'd be told that Arizona plans to spend hundreds of millions on new highways so that people can drive faster in U.S.-made vehicles that get 50 percent fewer miles per gallon than vehicles from South Korea.Next, he'd hear that the latest Bush in the White House lifted a ban on oil and gas drilling in Alaska's Bristol Bay, an area known for its endangered whales and the world's largest run of sockeye salmon. The action clears the way for the Interior Department to open 5.6 million acres of the fish-rich waters northwest of the Alaska Peninsula as part of its next five-year leasing plan. "What about security for the whales and the salmon?" he might ask.But before he'd get an answer, he'd likely learn about government plans to weaken protection for the bald eagle and that a governor in the Northwest wants to organize a program to kill wolves. What's more, new missile installations are being constructed in Alaska at a cost of $9 billion a year and a new program is under way to build nuclear warheads.A final messageBeyond that, the Pentagon and the CIA have shattered precedent by breaking into peoples' bank accounts and credit records. To that he might ask, "Why aren't the people marching? Is George the Third back on the throne?"Closer to home, he'd hear that the Sedona District in the Coconino National Forest is becoming a dumping ground for hazardous materials and that officials in charge have no funds for cleanup. Is it expected by most of our elected officials that a new bridge at Red Rock Crossing will facilitate the long-standing imbroglio."Not that bridge again?" Abbey would bellow. "ADOT doesn't even want it. Well, guess my time is up. Sounds like nothing much has changed since I departed. Koyaanisqatsi!"Then as now we need patriots who are always ready to defend their country against their government. They say that I was a myth in my own lifetime. I say that Phoenix and Tucson and Sedona will become myths, too, unless enough citizens realize that unchecked growth may leave them parched and dry sooner than they think. Adios, compañeros. I won't be back again."And then he'd vanish into the canyons.James Bishop Jr. is a 20-year resident of Sedona and was a journalist for Newsweek from 1958 to 1977. He is author of "Epitaph for a Desert Anarchist, Life and Legacy of Edward Abbey." His newest book is "Lost in the New West, Tall Tales but True."
