Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner
left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, award-winning
nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable
writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to
the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah,
braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all
those who care about the West.
These two great westerners had very different ideas about what it meant
to love the land and try to care for it, and they did so in distinctly
different styles. Boozy, lustful, and irascible, Abbey was best known as
the author of the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (and also of the
classic nature memoir Desert Solitaire), famous for spawning the idea
of guerrilla actions--known to admirers as "monkeywrenching" and to law
enforcement as domestic terrorism--to disrupt commercial exploitation of
western lands. By contrast, Stegner, a buttoned-down, disciplined,
faithful family man and devoted professor of creative writing, dedicated
himself to working through the system to protect western sites such as
Dinosaur National Monument in Colorado.
In a region beset by droughts and fires, by fracking and drilling, and
by an ever-growing population that seems to be in the process of loving
the West to death, Gessner asks: how might these two farseeing
environmental thinkers have responded to the crisis?
Gessner takes us on an inspiring, entertaining journey as he renews his
own commitment to cultivating a meaningful relationship with the wild,
confronting American overconsumption, and fighting environmental
injustice--all while reawakening the thrill of the words of his two
great heroes.
