Aren't we all? From the lowliest to the famous most humans are full of contradictions--maybe, not as profound as Abbey's, but contradictions in beliefs and actions, none the less.

I worked many years at the Grand Canyon and can identify with Abbey's rage and despair. How many more asphalt roads built and bus fumes released before people take action and speak out?

Commerce is destroying America's natural wonders and only a small majority realizes or even cares.

I read “Desert Solitaire” almost two decades ago and it transformed me into a nature lover. Until I read Edward Abbey, I didn’t know words could be so evocative of a time and a place, and that nature could be so therapeutic. I read his other books, “Beyond the Wall,” “One Life at a Time, Please,” “Down the River” and others and was hooked. Abbey remains unique and irreplaceable. When he passed away at a relatively early age, I felt his loss for days. His insight and preternatural ability to discern the genuine from the fake is something we sorely miss. In “Down the River with Henry Thoreau,” Abbey wrote, “Henry, thou should be with us now. I look for his name in the water, his face in the airy foam. He must be here. Wherever there are deer and hawks, wherever there is liberty and danger, wherever there is wilderness, wherever there is a living river, Henry Thoreau will find his eternal home.”

So true also of Edward Abbey!

-- Hasan Z Rahim

You said most of what I feel. I read Desert Solitare long ago in my youth (I am 54 years of age)and again recently. The quiet dialogue, the things noticed on a simple day, the scary journey. I loved it. The notice of things we normal people will never experience and have less chance of experiencing every day that 'progress' continues. The feeling that "here is NATURE, here is mother earth, here is what has happened for hundreds of millions of years before we ever thought about paving a road and building houses here".

Today, so many scientific advocates profess to educate us about the past.

Edward Abbey lived it, in his own way, on his job. And he managed to inspire some of us, any of us who love earth and read 'Desert Solitare'.

To end....I agree, Ed. But we both know what that is worth.

Although I don't share your wrongheaded notions about some things (i.e., jazz, gay people, etc.) all is forgiven because of the sheer ecstatic poetry and spiritual flight of "Desert Solitaire." Here is a man who knew in every fiber of his being that he was created, held up, broke apart and delivered into salvation by the uncompromising, uncaring, healing, stupefying beauty and terror of the natural world. What a gorgeous song he left us! If I were allowed to amend The Bible, "Desert Solitaire" would be what follows Revelations.

Wonderful article. Thank you.

"Desert Solitaire" is so compelling and strengthening to those of us who love Gaia in her virgin form. Because of him, I was able to stop a bulldozer in King's Canyon National Park and tell the driver to take the rest of the day off. I don't know what happened subsequently because I haven't been back. I was later accused of being one of those people who spike trees. "I hadn't thought of that," I replied, "Good idea." Fortunately, the courts have made good decisions to halt the destruction of many of our forests. Was Edward Abbey their inspiration? I hope so.

nature lovers would practice what they preach we'd all be happier. Don't live in a house. You know how much each takes away from the environment.

Don't use modern conveniences like electricity, automobiles, planes, the US mail, the internet, plumbing, etc. These all defile Gaia.

Everyone is a naturalist until it come to their life, "well I live here but don't build anymore homes/roads overthere". You can't expect future generations to sacrifice their comforts if you won't.

From Mr. Connors' presentation, Herr Abbey appears to be nothing but a cranky little misanthrope with a feverish hate for everything but the sound of his own urine falling blissfully into the canyon below.

I was particularly amused by Mr. Connors' choice to cherry-pick Abbey's circa-1954 vitriolic spew about the Lone Star State, hailing it as some sort of "prescient" view of the present, calling the quote “an assessment with even greater relevance today, given the source of so many of our (“our” being the U.S. and thus, the whole planet, I guess) troubles”

Indeed, Abbey's lyrical tirade is absolutely correct in its assessment of Texas as a “noisy” and “vulgar” place. It would take such an overwrought environment to produce the wretched corpus that has propelled a flaming idiot to the pinnacles of power. However, Abbey goes way off the switchback when calling Texas “mediocre.” Certainly a “mediocre” place would fail to inspire such a passionate response from Mr. Eco-Fascist, much less be “the source of so many of “our “ troubles,” would it not? I think I awoke most of Austin with my laughter upon reading the quote alongside Mr. Connors' commentary.

The truth is that Abbey, and dare I say from the given evidence, Connors (who resides in New Mexico as Abbey did for some time), and so many of the canyon-pissers throughout the Southwest envy Texas and the might it wields throughout the region, and apparently, from Mr. Connors' assessment, the whole known universe. Economically, New Mexico could not survive without its macho neighbor to the east. If the summer and winter vacationers from Texas' urban areas stopped going to New Mexico, its economy- what little it has- would suffer mightily, if not go absolutely belly-up. Of course, the damage from lack of Texas tourism would be a trifle compared to that which would ensue if New Mexico were abandoned by Texas Oil and Natural Gas companies.

But of course, the economic well-being and economic opportunity of a desperate people in what is essentially a third-world wasteland just isn't worth the concern of transplanted bourgeois easterners playing Grizzly Adams in the Sandias and the Sangre de Cristos. Why trouble yourself with the struggles of the darker-hued natives when your urine stream makes such a beautiful sound in the canyon wind?