I swooned at his tributes to secret red-rock canyons and agreed with his sentiments about the urgency of preserving wild lands. Despite identifying as a feminist, I was swept away by the adventure and romance of Abbey’s love song to the desert.
My boyfriend, Darren, adored Abbey, so I picked up Desert Solitaire to see what the hype was about. I first read him in 1989 when I was a twenty-three-year-old rookie interpretive ranger at the south rim of Grand Canyon National Park. I have a complicated history with Abbey’s work.
This type of possession of wild lands is the opposite of what Abbey wanted, but when people-specifically white people-yearn for possession, they assert their power. It tacitly endorses “manhandling” of wilderness for human gain, like what we have seen in the recent government rollbacks of the Grand Staircase Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments, which the current administration is auctioning off to the highest bidder for mining and oil extraction. If we sing Abbey’s praises, we must equally highlight what he gets wrong: wilderness is not gendered, and it is detrimental to us all to anthropomorphize nature as a feminine and racialized object to rescue or conquer.Īlthough Abbey’s intent was to preserve wilderness by spreading the gospel of conservation, the sexism and racism (the latter of which is more often documented than the former) in his writing works against his cause: writing about the natural world as a sexualized, commodified feminine entity that needs rescuing girds the interpersonal and institutional racist, patriarchal power structures in our country. Few, if any, of these articles, however, look at Abbey’s work through a feminist lens. In the wake of this anniversary, numerous tributes to Abbey and his books appeared, reflecting at length on the importance of his writings. Among other things, Abbey argues on behalf of the desert’s stark beauty and against modernity’s influence on humans-specifically, that it alienates us from the natural world, thus blinding us to the perils of an unbalanced environment. This book recounts Abbey’s two seasons as a National Park Service ranger at Arches National Monument in the late 1950s. January 2018 marked fifty years since Edward Abbey published his paean to America’s southwestern deserts, Desert Solitaire: A Year in the Wilderness.
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