Abbey was born in the Pittsburgh DMA town of Indiana, Pennsylvania and grew up in nearby Home, Pennsylvania. In the summer of 1944 he headed west, and fell in love with the desert country of the Four Corners region. He wrote, “For the first time, I felt I was getting close to the West of my deepest imaginings, the place where the tangible and the mythical became the same.” He received a Master’s Degree in philosophy from the University of New Mexico and also studied at the University of Edinburgh. In the late 1950s Abbey worked as a seasonal ranger for the United States Park Service at Arches National Monument (now a national park), near the town of Moab, Utah, which was not then known for extreme sports but for its desolation and uranium mines. It was there that he penned the journals that would become one of his most famous works, 1968′s Desert Solitaire, which Abbey described “…not [as] a travel guide, but a eulogy.”

Edward Abbey

Desert Solitaire is regarded as one of the finest nature narratives in American literature, and has been compared to Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and even Thoreau’s Walden. In it, Abbey vividly describes the physical landscapes of Southern Utah and delights in his isolation as a backcountry park ranger, recounting adventures in the nearby canyon country and mountains. He also attacks what he terms the “industrial tourism” and resulting development in the national parks (“national parking lots”), rails against the Glen Canyon Dam, and comments on various other subjects.

Abbey died in 1989 at the age of 62 at his home near Oracle, Arizona.

Abbey’s abrasiveness, opposition to anthropocentrism (sometimes mischaracterized as misanthropy), and outspoken writings made him the object of much controversy. Conventional environmentalists from mainstream groups disliked his more radical “Keep America Beautiful…Burn a Billboard” style. Based on his writings and statements (and apparently in a few cases, actions), many believe that Abbey did advocate ecotage. The controversy intensified with the publication of Abbey’s most famous work of fiction, The Monkey Wrench Gang. The novel centers on a small group of eco-warriors who travel the American West attempting to put the brakes on uncontrolled human expansion by committing acts of sabotage against industrial development projects. Abbey claimed the novel was written merely to “entertain and amuse,” and was intended as symbolic satire. Others saw it as a how-to guide to non-violent ecotage–the main characters do not attack people. The novel inspired environmentalists frustrated with conventional methods of activism. Earth First! was formed as a result in 1981, advocating eco-sabotage or “monkeywrenching.” Although Abbey never officially joined the group he became associated with many of its members, and occasionally wrote for the organization.

Sometimes called the “desert anarchist,” Abbey was known to anger people of all political stripes (including environmentalists). In his essays the narrator describes throwing beer cans out of his car, claiming the highway had already littered the landscape. Abbey has been criticized by some for his comments on immigration and women. He differed from the stereotype of the ‘environmentalist as politically-correct leftist’, by disclaiming the counterculture and the “trendy campus people” and saying he didn’t want them as his primary fans, and by supporting some conservative causes such as immigration reduction and the National Rifle Association. He devoted one chapter in his book Hayduke Lives to poking fun at left-green leader Murray Bookchin. However, he reserves his harshest criticism for the military-industrial complex, “welfare ranchers,” energy companies, land developers and “Chambers of Commerce,” all of which he believed were destroying the West’s great landscapes. Abbey refused to be ideologically pigeon-holed by the left or the right; above all he was a staunch advocate for wilderness preservation and ecological protection. Abbey thrived on controversy and his popularity has proven to span generations.

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Dave Foreman (born 1947) is a US environmentalist and co-founder of the radical environmental movement Earth First!

The son of a US Air Force career officer, as a young man Foreman supported the Vietnam War. He received the highest honor of the Boy Scouts of America, the rank of Eagle Scout. Foreman first became involved in political activism as a college student, supporting Republican Senator Barry Goldwater’s unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1964 and founding the New Mexico branch of the conservative youth organisation Young Americans for Freedom. After graduating from college in 1968, and attending the Officers Candidate School of the US Marine Corps, Foreman’s radicalism began to take shape.

Foreman had been interested in environmental issues since childhood, and from 1971, he became involved with wilderness protection. Between 1973 and 1980, he worked for The Wilderness Society as Southwest Regional Representative in New Mexico and the Director of Wilderness Affairs in Washington, DC. From 1976 to 1980, he was a board member for the New Mexico chapter of The Nature Conservancy.

By the late 1970s, Foreman had become increasingly disillusioned by what he viewed as the “professionalisation” of the environmental movement. After the United States Forest Service’s Roadless Area Review and Evaluation II resulted in the opening of thirty-six million acres (146,000 km²) of land for logging in 1979, Foreman left Washington and abandoned his job as an environmental lobbyist.

In April 1980, Foreman and friends Howie Wolke, Bart Kohler and Mike Roselle took a week long hiking trip in the Pinacate Desert. It was during this trip that Foreman is believed to have coined the phrase “Earth First!”

The movement that subsequently bore that name was inspired, in some part, by the writings of Edward Abbey, author of the satirical novel The Monkeywrench Gang. In contrast with the cautious lobbying efforts of the established environmental organisations, “monkeywrenching” – industrial sabotage traditionally associated with labor struggles – would become the chief tactic of the Earth First! movement in the 1980s; the Earth First! Journal, which Foreman edited from 1982 to 1988, featured lively debates on the ethics and effectiveness of this controversial tactic.

In 1985, Foreman published the first edition of the book Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching, sharing the editing credits with one “Bill Haywood”. Ecodefense collected articles published in Earth First! Journal’s “Dear Nedd Ludd” column, which provided advice to would-be monkeywrenchers on sabotage techniques.

In 1990, Foreman was one of five people arrested by the Federal Bureau of Investigation following operation THERMCON, in which FBI agents infiltrated an Arizona Earth First! group, encouraging them to sabotage a powerline feeding a water pumping station. While Foreman had no direct role in the attempted sabotage, he was arrested on a charge of conspiracy. He was permitted to plead guilty to a misdemeanor for handing two copies of Ecodefense to an FBI informant, and received a suspended sentence.

Following his 1990 arrest, Foreman ceased acting as a spokesperson for Earth First! In 1991, he co-founded the Wildlands Project, which aims to establish a network of protected wilderness areas across North America. From 1995 to 1997, he served on the Sierra Club’s board of directors, but departed after the organisation rejected his proposed policy on restrictive immigration. In 1997, Foreman co-founded the New Mexico Wilderness Alliance. In 2003, Dave Foreman and the board of directors of the Wildlands Project founded a new think tank, the Rewilding Institute, dedicated to “the development and promotion of ideas and strategies to advance continental-scale conservation in North America and to combat the extinction crisis.”

Foreman is the author of The Lobo Outback Funeral Home, a novel, Confessions of an Eco-Warrior, a collection of essays, and Rewilding North America: A Vision for Conservation in the 21st Century. He also co-authored The Big Outside with Howie Wolke.