Hayduke Lives!

The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey

I've been a fan of Edward Abbey since I read Desert Solitaire in the summer of 2001, and partly based by dissertation on his perceptions of the wilderness. But while Solitaire is (largely) non-fiction, an autobiographical account of a season Abbey spent living in "the wilderness" of Arches National Park, Utah, The Monkey Wrench Gang is quite different.

The novel follows the adventures of four individuals who band together to take a stand against the establishment -- and are probably the first accounts of eco-sabotage in fiction. In 1975 when it was published it was shocking enough -- in today's political climate, the book would probably never get published. Gary Snyder once said that Hollywood had no problems showing blood, gore and mass murder but that "the gleeful destruction of private property" seemed dangerous un-American. It's no surprise that although rights to the book were bought, no film was ever made.

The prologue to The Monkey Wrench Gang opens with the "gleeful destruction" of a bridge linking Utah to Arizona, and the book then follows events leading towards the act.

Throughout the book, the unlikely misfits together undertake increasingly larger and more ambitious acts of sabotage. Starting with Abbey's own hobby of destroying billboards -- either by arson or with a chainsaw, they upgrade to sabotaging bulldozers, and on to attempting to destroy strip mining operations and later the bridges spanning White Canyon, Narrow Canyon and Dirty Devil Canyon. Their ultimate goal is one that many people -- then and now -- could agree with: the destruction of the Glen Canyon dam.

Abbey wrote at length elsewhere about the "damnation" of the Colorado river, which flooded some of the most beautiful canyons in the US and replaced them with a large, stagnant and increasingly polluted lake. The saboteurs dream of bringing down the dam, and of returning the country to the way it used to be.

Edward Abbey's books have inspired radical environmentalists, like Earth First! -- who following Abbey's anarchist influence insist they are not a group, but individuals following common goals. Similarly, there is the Earth Liberation Front who over the years have taken responsibility for defacing SUVs, destroyed construction equipment, vandalised fast food outlets, burned down apartment complexes before they were built -- and even more, even more extreme acts. The ELF are officially designated a terrorist organisation, and have been know to leave behind the tag "Hayduke Lives!" (after George Washington Hayduke, the protagonist of The Monkey Wrench Gang.

The book makes for slightly uneasy reading today -- even those who feel the text's anti-establishment rallying cry can't help but feel that what happens is perhaps a too close to terrorism. Although the "gang" have a very strict policy of not hurting anyone, in recent years we've all been witness to the actions of extreme groups of people who wish to change the world and influence people through the use of violence. Some of these people are parts of terror organisations, and some are our politicians -- sometimes it can be hard to tell the difference between them. Just the same, it is hard to wholeheartedly support the acts in the book. But it raises the question; what else can be done? What should be done?

Abbey said that sabotage and subversion should be a last resort "when political means fail", but just the same -- he considered it a valid option, and the novel opens with a statement that although the book is "fictional in form" everything in it really happened.

The novel is compelling reading even if it isn't necessarily well-written. Abbey lacked the poetry of Gary Snyder or the style of Thoreau -- but The Monkey Wrench Gang captures a moment in time, and it remains just as relevant today.