2014 read #9: Beyond the Wall by Edward Abbey.

Beyond the Wall by Edward Abbey
210 pages
Published 1984
Read from January 25 to January 26
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5

Is it possible to feel nostalgic for an era's better qualities, while acknowledging how horrible and bigoted and disgusting it was in its other aspects? Well, if hipsters can idealize the 1920s, I can take the eccentric position that, except for the systematic racism, sexism, homophobia, exploitation, fears of nuclear war, and destructive engineering and environmental policies, I miss certain aspects of the 1950s and 1960s.

Only a couple of aspects, actually. One is the sense of optimism in scientific progress. It was that era's ill-considered boosting of "progress" that destroyed the credibility of scientific progress in the first place -- it only takes a few Aswan Dams or destroyed forests to suggest that, hey, maybe "taming" the natural world is an outmoded worldview and that we as a species have achieved enormous power without the sense of perspective and consequences to know when to limit its use, and in the mid-twentieth century, we built a lot of Aswan Dams and denuded many many countries. Imagine how much better off we'd be today if cultural attitudes had shifted toward conservation instead of exploitation, if there'd been general awareness of how readily fish stocks could be depleted and how vital biodiversity is to sustainable resource extraction -- if, in other words, the heroic scientist figure of the Johnny Quest era used that globe-trotting optimism to further preservation and sustainability rather than profit and immediate returns.

The other thing I miss about the mid-century is one Abbey communicates with exceptional clarity: being able to find and explore hidden places, before dams and tourists and park service blacktop could ruin them. Chapters like "How It Was," depicting the weekend trips Abbey and his college buddies would take into the Glen Canyon and Escalante country, tooling his truck up forgotten tracks in magical green and red canyons, manipulate me with the force of two decades of daydreams. Again, Abbey and friends' cavalier attitude toward these jaunts would have been unsustainable in the long run -- tooling around canyons in pickups now leads to eroded trails, petrochemicals in the water, ugly fire rings, cans and other trash scattered deep in the backcountry, precisely because so many people have discovered it. Maybe Abbey was relatively responsible back then, but the hordes who came after him certainly are not. The problem with hidden places is that they never stay hidden. Exploring hidden places hastens the process of overcrowding and overrunning. All the same, reading accounts like "How It Was" make me wistful, as well as angry that such places can be destroyed so much more efficiently by monstrosities like the Glen Canyon Dam.

The rest of this book, unfortunately, is Abbey being just a little bit too Abbey-like. His misanthropy only soured and sharpened in his years of fame, until in some cases it's hard to tell his misanthropy from outright bigotry. (Blaming native peoples for squalor and alcoholism seems like a classic case of boosting the bootstraps myth, and is definitely a case of the privileged imagining a slew of "choices" not so plausible in the affected communities themselves.) After a while, late-stage Abbey becomes a tiresome companion. His descriptions of natural environments, as always, are superb, evocative and delightful. And I'm happy that such passages constitute the bulk of this essay collection. But when he comes down from the desert hills, I don't really feel like sticking around with him.