Introduction

The story behind the publication of this book and the making of my two documentary films Drowning River (2007) and Wrenched (2014) began when I met Charles Chuck Bowden.

His book Blue Desert struck me for its descriptions of how growth had ravaged the lands of the West and the people who lived there. I had just moved to Tucson in 1989 to finish a degree in photography. Chuck and I agreed to have supper in a south Tucson restaurant, where he introduced me to his favorite Mexican soup, menudo, of tripe and pigs feet. I remember pretending to love it as much as he did. This was the year author Edward Abbey died, and Tucson was feeling the loss of one of America’s most uncompromising, irascible, and humorous defenders of Southwest lands.

At dinner, Chuck talked about the loss of his friend Ed. In our conversation, and in many to follow, the force of what Chuck believed, the way he spoke about his love of birdwatching, and his passion for a place or person riveted my attention.

Years later, in his interview for Wrenched, Chuck said,

An odd thing happened in my life. As long as Ed Abbey was alive, I thought I could just drink, fornicate, and do whatever I wanted—because he was tending the shop. When he died, I suddenly realized I had this crushing burden. I got far more involved in practical land issues than I had before. Over about a ten-year period, I worked with people to lock up about a million acres.

Wrenched from the Land

In March 2017, I was fuming over the reckless and regressive politics of the new administration, which placed the environment and Native American lands under siege. In front of me was a bookcase with twenty-five large notebooks of thousands of pages of transcripts of interviews that I had amassed during the making of Wrenched. Here were the heroes that carried the legacy of Edward Abbey’s ideas into the twenty-first century. They represent a potent counter to anti-conservation politicians and climate deniers. Suddenly something clicked. I remembered Kieran Suckling, cofounder of the Center for Biological Diversity, saying to me, Activism is not waiting for your opponent to retire. That’s when I decided to publish this book.

Out of forty interviews, my editor, Diane Sward Rapaport, and I chose to feature sixteen. Some were Abbey’s closest friends and staunchest allies who tell stories about hiking or monkeywrenching with Abbey. They are not an idol worshipper’s crowd. None put him on a pedestal.

Four reveal how they became the inspiration for Abbey’s most memorable characters in his comic masterpiece, The Monkey Wrench Gang. Although they admit to likenesses, they also say that the characters most resembled Abbey himself.

Many talk about the impact of Abbey’s words. As climate activist Tim DeChristopher said in his interview,

The really powerful thing I learned from Edward Abbey is this. It really does take action to make us whole again, to put us in that right place, and to fix our soul. So I really feel like I owe Abbey a debt of gratitude. He planted seeds in my head a long time ago, and my thoughts grew and grew until finally I couldn’t hold them in anymore.

Beyond Abbey’s influence are the mesmerizing stories activists tell about what motivated them to become passionately committed to their causes. Many started formidable movements and gathered impressive followings of their own. They lit the flame of environmental activism and changed the course of contemporary conservation history. They turned their rage into lifelong commitments and gave the movement its soul. None considered what they were doing as a job or career. To them it was what Dave Foreman, cofounder of Earth First!, calls holy work.

The Lure of Wild Places

Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.

—EDWARD ABBEY, Desert Solitaire, 1968, p. 211

My first connection with wilderness began when I was a child. We were living in rural Connecticut, which had its own special geology. When the Ice Age glaciers receded, they revealed spectacular rock formations, rolling hills, and lakes. My brother and I were explorers as we ventured out all day long with our collie Texas as our babysitter.

In the 1960s, I lived a very simple life in the Vermont woods in a cabin with no electricity or running water. I grew a garden and bathed in the cold stream out back. I fell in love with the expansive silence and beauty.

From then on I understood what connection means to wild places and sought them out. They nourished my curiosity and kept me sane. I hiked the canyons of the Colorado Plateau, visited remote ruins in the Yucatan, and trekked in the western Himalayas in Nepal, naïvely hoping to enter Tibet.

In the early 1990s, my feisty activist friend, seventy-five-year-old Katie Lee, invited me to be her tentmate on a twenty-one-day trek in the Pamir Mountains of central Asia’s Tajikistan (formerly of the Soviet Union) and the Silk Road cities of Uzbekistan. It wasn’t just the untrammeled wilderness of these remote high mountain ranges and wild rivers that awed me but also my encounters with its nomadic people. As natural healers and ecologists, they taught me much about their deeply rooted connection to the earth and the plants and animals on which their health and spiritual lives depended.

One day I came down with flu-like symptoms. I was dizzy and heard helicopters when there were none. Along the trail we stopped at an isolated yurt, and a young Tajik woman served tea, bread, and yogurt. As we left to continue on our fifteen-mile trek to camp, the woman suddenly rushed out to hand me her baby daughter. As I held her, I understood that the mother wanted me to take her out of the Soviet Union. Strange as it seems, though, I had previously considered adopting. But in this encounter I knew it was impossible.

A Call to Action

The world has changed since Edward Abbey died. So much of what he predicted has come to pass. The Southwest lands he fought to save are overwhelmed by millions of visitors and industrialists bent on pillaging its natural resources.

Ed would likely not have foreseen hundreds of thousands of teenagers from all over the world skipping school so they could protest a planet wounded and imperiled by climate change. Ed would have applauded the courage and noncomplacency of sixteen-year-old Swedish student Greta Thunberg, who, in April 2019, challenged members of the English Houses of Parliament with her words: You lied to us. You gave us false hope. You told us that the future was something to look forward to . . . We children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back.

The importance of our collective call to action is summed up by the statement made by Tim DeChristopher at his sentencing hearing on August 4, 2011, for bidding on oil and gas leases, which months later were termed an illegal Utah BLM auction:

Those who are inspired to follow my actions are those who understand that we are on a path toward catastrophic climate change. They know their future is on the line. Given the destruction of our democratic institutions that once gave citizens access to power, my future will likely involve civil disobedience. Nothing that happens here today will change that. You have authority over my life but not my principles . . . I want you to join me in valuing this country’s rich history of nonviolent civil disobedience . . . The choice you are making today is: What side are you on?

The strong alliances forged between early conservationists like John Muir and Rachel Carson, the activist leaders in this book, and legions of new protestors give us hope that the increasingly disastrous effects of climate change can yet be mitigated. We can no longer be passive against mass extinction, nihilism, and greed. We are being wrenched from the lands that sustain us.

Edward Abbey in Turkey Pens Ruins, Grand Gulch, Utah, 1988. Photographer Mark Klett.

WRENCHED FROM THE LAND

1 | CHARLES CHUCK BOWDEN

Biography

Charles Chuck Bowden’s activism bears out the old adage: The pen is mightier than the sword. His writing is renowned for its passionate defense of wilderness; relentless condemnation of the hypocrisy of corrupt politicians, border police, drug dealers, and criminals; and his eloquence on behalf of the Mexican poor.

He has written more than twenty-five books including Killing the Hidden Waters (1977), Blue Desert (1986), Frog Mountain Blues (1987), and Red Line (1989).

Bowden was the first American to write about the anarchy that resulted from the drug wars in Mexico and border violence in such books as Down by the River: Drugs, Money, Murder and Family (2002), Murder City: Ciudad Juárez and the Global Economy’s New Killing Fields (2010), and Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future (2009). He once walked across the desert with the immigrados in the heat of June just to be able to report with firsthand veracity on its brutality. When he came out, he laid on the floor of a Basque Bar in Tacna, Arizona, and told the bartender to keep bringing him water: I drank for eight hours before I could urinate. That’s how far gone I was.

Chuck was introduced to Ed Abbey by conservationist Dave Foreman in the early 1980s in Tucson, Arizona, and they became friends. Bowden said, Ed Abbey made us understand that we were killing the last good place.

Charles Bowden meets Edward Abbey. Chuck had an interview with Dave Foreman so I came along to make a few images for the Tucson Daily Citizen newspaper, and when we arrived Abbey said no photos. So I slung the camera around my neck and, using a wide angle lens, grabbed a few images without looking through the camera. I was not fooling anyone, but they really didn’t care just so I wasn’t posing folks, and I grabbed a few spontaneous moments like the introduction and a pensive Abbey. (Mid-1980s.) Photographer P. K. Weis.

When Bowden died in 2014, all those who knew of his work felt they had lost a most powerful voice for the Southwest.

Bowden partnered with many photographers to capture these last good places—among them, The Sierra Pinacate (1998; with Julia D. Hayden), Stone Canyons of the Colorado Plateau (1996; with Jack W. Dykinga), and Inferno (2006; with Bill and Alice Wright).

My interview with Chuck took place at a historic inn, in Mesilla, New Mexico, and on the banks of the Rio Grande. Chuck commented, This is the second-greatest river in the American West. The Colorado is the greatest. Now they’re both tombs of their ecosystems.

ML Lincoln: To read any of your work is to understand that you have a deep love of the natural world. Can you talk about this?

Chuck Bowden: When people ask me what love of the land means, I say if you ask the question, you’ll never understand the answer. Love of the land is just a bunch of little noises you make in a language. I was born feeling closer to the earth than I felt to my government or human beings. It just is. I’ve never had any interest in nature as other people talk about it. I love life. I hate national parks—even though I helped create a few—because, in a sense, they say, Well, this is the part of nature that’s special.

My favorite part of the desert isn’t Monument Valley or some cretinous place where people go with their goddamn cameras. It’s to stop the car, get out, walk a couple of miles into a creosote flat where there’s no topography, but just these carefully spaced creosote bushes.

If you do a 360-degree turn you can’t find a center to it. You just sleep, lie down there, and spend days. The key to the desert is that it has no center. There’s such a diminution of water that it gives you this sense of limitless place.

When you’re in the desert, God—if there is a God—is everywhere. It’s not: you go to the desert to find the Holy Mountain. The desert is a Zen state. It’s a very sparse biomass that hasn’t got a Jerusalem. That’s what I like. I like being in a place where I cease to exist. I once spent ten days in June fifty miles from a road in the Cabeza Prieta, which gets maybe one to three inches of water a year. I was alone. I plopped down in this totally uninhabited place that is thousands of square miles.

What I noticed as the days went on is that I lost consciousness of where my body ended and the world began. It’s called the oceanic experience in Freudian psychology. I lost all boundaries. I also noticed the wildlife lost all boundaries. Every night I’d lay down on my tarp with my sheet—Christ, it was 110 degrees out there—and just doze off. And at the same time every night, a coyote would crawl up near my head and howl and then run away. It would wake me up.

I was camped with twelve vultures. There was a dead coyote about twenty yards from where I threw down my bag. The vultures spent a whole week disassembling a coyote, and we just lived together. I’d walk a half a mile up to the water hole and there were hundreds of bighorn sheep grouped there because it was the heart of June, and there was hardly any water left.

Charles Bowden hiking Paria Canyon. Photographer Jack Dykinga.

I would sit on a rock, and they’d walk around me. And every day, I think it was at noon, a golden eagle landed and took a bath. And he would leave. As soon as he left, a red-tailed hawk would land and take a bath. And the vultures would come up once a day and they’d all line up like penguins, based on their pecking order. And they would each drink, each in turn. This went on for days.

I lost my identity. You go out there and think you’ll write and be profound. I couldn’t even write words. I became a very happy idiot. And I regretted coming back. I’ve always regretted that I returned from that trip.

When I came back, I started a magazine. It was like entering hell. I had employees, advertisers, all the things you never want to meet in life.

ML: I was living in Tucson then and remember one of your first articles in City Magazine was about the Colorado River.

Bowden: The history of the Colorado River is progressive murder.

The Colorado Compact in 1922 divided the water in the river among seven states. It said the flow was sixteen million acre-feet. Big lie. Then came the dams. Hoover Dam cut off the flow to the Colorado Delta, which was one of the richest biological zones in North America. Aldo Leopold said it was the greatest wilderness he’d ever seen on Earth. It was the nursery of a lot of species in the Pacific. The Delta died. Never got another drop of water. It was a kind of genocide of species. The most endangered porpoise on Earth, the vaquita, is virtually gone from there.

Finally, the Bureau of Reclamation tried to put a dam at the confluence of the Yampa and Green Rivers at Echo Park, Utah, in Dinosaur National Monument and got beaten back. During the late fifties and early sixties, the Bureau built Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River between Arizona and Utah. Now we’re dealing with a manmade disaster. What was the greatest river in the American West is now one big pipe full of chemicals, sewage, and spillover from agriculture. It’s a tomb of an ecosystem. And it gets worse as you go down the stream.

That’s it in a nutshell. The short version: human greed destroyed life.

ML: I read that someone once asked Floyd Dominy, who was the former head of the Bureau of Reclamation and helped push Glen Canyon Dam through Congress in the 1950s, What about the silting? What are you going to do about that? And he said, Well, I’m going to let the next generation think about it.

Bowden: That’s right. Look, there are two things that have time stamps on them, and then they expire. One is irrigated land. No one has ever irrigated on Earth without eventually having a problem when silt builds up. And the second thing is a dam. No matter what you do, it fills in behind with silt.

All you have to do is go up in the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. Walk up any stream and you get these little benches of meadows, and they’re almost invariably from beaver dams. Beavers build a dam, it silts in, becomes meadow stream, and cuts other channels—that’s just life.

They tried to stabilize the Mississippi River and destroyed the wetlands and the Delta of the Mississippi in Louisiana. But the river is still going to move. Eventually, New Orleans will not be on the river. The river will swing further west, and New Orleans will be stranded. In the meantime, we’ve spent billions channelizing it.

Building dams is always temporary. Now, in the United States, we literally—except for a few places—ran out of dam sites. Between the Corps of Engineers and the Bureau of Reclamation, two organizations dominated by cement heads, they put the goddamn things everywhere and created natural disasters.

Now we’re in a circumstance where the Colorado River is dying and silting is occurring behind Glen Canyon Dam. Someday there might not be a dam. It may just be a wall with no water behind it.

ML: What was The Monkey Wrench Gang influence on dam building?

Bowden: What Ed Abbey did in The Monkey Wrench Gang was make a shift in people’s heads from moaning about the canyon they lost to deconstructing the dam. He made us realize we’ve gone down a road that’s fatal to us, to the ground around us, and to what we call our civilization. Ed made us recognize that we’d done something terrible, and we’re not going to do it anymore. We need to fix and restore. He made that almost a national idea.

What the book says is that the salvation of the United States and of the planet is blowing up the property that’s killing it—in this case, Glen Canyon Dam. And the reason the book has never been made into a movie, in my opinion, is for one simple reason: the boys who sign the checks get frightened when you want to make a movie about destroying the infrastructure of the country to save it.

The Monkey Wrench Gang is an incendiary device bound as a book, but it’s a ribald, comic novel so the reader will accept it. If it were a serious novel, nobody would ever be able to make it through it. I never could get through Walden Pond. As far as I’m concerned, Thoreau is a goddamn bore. But there are millions of people, literally, who read The Monkey Wrench Gang—and considered it a great contribution—and laughed as they read it and remembered every scene.

And it really worked. I talked to Senator Barry Goldwater a couple of years before he died up at his house in Phoenix, and he said, There’ll never be another Glen Canyon Dam built in this country. That’s over. I knew Stewart Udall, who served as US secretary of the interior from 1961 to 1969, and he said that creating the dam was the tragedy of his generation.

STEWART UDALL

Throughout Stewart Udall’s distinguished career (1920–2010), he fought, wrote, and lectured about the preservation of wilderness treasures and the importance of clean air and water. Among Udall’s accomplishments as secretary of the interior from 1961 to 1969 was overseeing the addition of four national parks, six national monuments, eight national seashores and lakeshores, nine national recreation areas, twenty national historic sites, and fifty-six national wildlife refuges, among them Canyonlands National Park in Utah, North Cascades National Park in Washington, and Redwood National Park in California, according to a March 28, 2010, article written by Kurt Repanshek, Stewart Udall: A Model of a Conservationist, in NationalParksTraveler.org.

A pioneer of the environmental movement, Udall warned of the dangers of pollution, overuse of natural resources, and dwindling open spaces in the United States in his best-selling book The Quiet Crisis (1963), revised in 1988 with the addition of nine new chapters, including The Myth of Superabundance.

The book isn’t even a novel of imaginary characters. Anybody that actually knows Ed’s world knows he just copied people he knew for the novel. I told him once, You know, I really think you’re a pretty good novelist, except I know your friends. Abbey’s imagination gave a plot to their lives. Everybody around Ed, including me, wanted to blow up the goddamn dam. He invented a sort of comic scenario and he implanted the idea. The real idea about blowing up Glen Canyon Dam was that Abbey was talking about a real tragedy that had to be undone so that the Colorado River would run free again.

But that was part of the joy of Abbey, at least to me, because I find life ridiculous. Once you know life’s a tragedy, which it is, you have to laugh or you’re not going to make it. It’s a kind of strange movie God created, that nobody gets out of life alive. Even when you start this movie, you know how it’s going to end. You die. That’s why humor is essential—and red wine.

ML: Disaster to the Dam almost happened in 1983? What did you do?

Bowden: In the spring of 1983, there was such massive flow in the Colorado River that Glen Canyon Dam started to shake, and the engineers thought it might go. You know, I almost went back to church. I thought: There is a God, if he gets rid of this bastard.

What I wanted was to see the effect of the flows on the Delta at the Sea of Cortez. I had a friend, Bill Broyles, and we consulted the tide charts. We wanted to be there when we could get the highest tides in the Sea of Cortez that year, which I think was late February or early March. We rented a canoe, drove to Yuma, threw it in the river, and rode the river all the way to the sea. For the first time since Hoover Dam was built, the river made it to the Sea of Cortez.

We got down to the Delta, which had been dead for, what, fifty years, and it was exploding with life: plants, animals, everything. It was magnificent.

At the Gulf, you get one of the highest tides in the world. When the tide comes in, it is so high that it rides on top of the river and races north. And if you’re on the river when this happens, you die. It took out steamboats in the nineteenth century. So we rolled the goddamn canoe down there, pulled it way up on shore—we had a tide chart—and waited. The moon came out. And this huge wall of water raced up the Colorado River. Thousands of birds started screaming, because it was a freak occurrence.

Now, that has never happened again in my lifetime, and it won’t happen again until we blow up Hoover and Glen Canyon. So I have a feeling for the Delta that’s not just based on Aldo Leopold saying it was a great wilderness. I’ve been carrying that with me. I was there for this brief moment when it came back to life before it got murdered again by the US government and my fellow citizens.

ML: You devoted some part of your life to creating national monuments. Could you talk about why?

Bowden: An odd thing happened in my life. As long as Ed Abbey was alive, I thought I could just drink, fornicate, and do whatever I wanted—because he was tending the shop. When he died, I suddenly realized I had this crushing burden. I got far more involved in practical land issues than I had before. Over about a ten-year period, I worked with people to lock up about a million acres.

During that period I asked Doug Peacock, whom I’ve known for years, Well, how did you decide what to do? He said, When I’m out there and I see something that doesn’t belong there, I fuck with it. I said, Okay. Now I know the ground rules!

What I did was help create the Sonoran Desert National Monument in south-central Arizona. I also had a hand in establishing the Escalante Grand Staircase National Monument in Utah. I didn’t do it by myself. Nobody can do it alone. I contributed everything I could at the time.

I knew when I was doing this that refuges would never be permanent solutions, they’re stopgaps. I helped create these monuments to save species—kind of like Noah’s Ark—until this firestorm of destruction and greed passes, so that when the war of human beings against other life forms had passed, these other life forms could repopulate.

I never would have done that if Ed hadn’t died. So in that sense, Edward Abbey fucked up my life. It’s the best I could do in my lifetime. When I come back in my next life, and I’m God, I’ll do a fuller job.

SONORAN DESERT NATIONAL MONUMENT

The 496,400-acre Sonoran Desert National Monument is located east of Gila Bend, Arizona, and is but a portion of the 120,000-square-mile Sonoran Desert, which extends into California and Mexico. The monument contains some of the most biologically diverse species of plants in that desert, as well as an extensive Saguaro cactus forest. The monument contains three congressionally designated wilderness areas, which include three distinct mountain ranges, separated by wide valleys, many significant archaeological and historic sites, and remnants of several important historic trails. The monument was established by Bill Clinton’s Presidential Proclamation in 2001 and is administered by