The protesters who flung pumpkin soup at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre in 2024 claimed, as all such protesters do, that they were justified in their action because some higher principle—in this case, unsustainable food production—was at stake.

Like their compatriots in Just for Oil, who threw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s Sunflowers two years earlier, they surely did not doubt their moral righteousness or question that they were following in the honored footsteps of their eco-terrorist predecessors.

In his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey tells the story of four disparate eco-warriors who load their Jeep with the tools of destruction and attack billboards, road-building machinery, and bridges in Utah and Arizona. Their ultimate aim—pondered but never planned—is to destroy the Glen Canyon Dam. As their violence increases, the forces of economic development step up their efforts to stop the group, and eventually do, at least for a while. The gang reunites in Abbey’s posthumous sequel, Hayduke Lives!

A misanthropic provocateur, Abbey surely would have scoffed at the indirect action of hurling the contents of a can of Campbell’s at an unoffending picture. Abbey was a proponent of what he euphemistically called “direct-action environmentalism,” by which he meant the violent destruction of the tools of development—bulldozers, surveyor’s stakes, the Glen Canyon Dam.

The soup throwers were practicing anything but direct action. Blowing up dams is just too hard. Let’s spill lunch at the Louvre.

In life, Abbey always had a hard time fitting in with his erstwhile allies in the environmental movement. A half century after the publication of his seminal novel on eco-terrorism and 36 years after his death, he still does. 

His writing is suffused with anti-government rhetoric that at first blush might be appealing to some on the right. But his preference for “direct action”—violence—to achieve his political goals is now being wholeheartedly endorsed by sizable factions of the political left.

The Province of the Outlaw

The Monkey Wrench Gang got mixed reviews. Sales grew mostly through word-of-mouth among like-minded activists. The New York Times didn’t get around to reviewing the book until almost a year after publication.

“The book is not a gem of literature,” wrote reviewer Kenneth C. Caldwell in Landscape Architecture Magazine, who also doubted any potential to inspire real-life violence. “I doubt if the book will kindle fires of unquenchable rage in our hearts, causing us to cast down T-squares and take up cases of Dupont dynamite.”

Others saw something else in the book. William Marling, an author and literature professor, credits Abbey, possessor of two degrees in philosophy, with being “set apart from those who toy with the ‘conquest of nature’ paradox from a great philosophic height by his ability to distinguish not only between Camus and Cocteau but between columbine and penstemon as well. When the ingredients coalesce correctly, he is a powerful writer.”

Perhaps too powerful. “This book counsels insurrection and sabotage,” Marling asserts. “It contains explicit descriptions of procedures for dynamiting bridges and destroying earth-moving machinery. Reading it, one cannot help but feel that Abbey intended the information to be of practical use.”

Abbey always tried to maintain a strategic ambiguity on this point. But he once told an interviewer, “I write in a deliberately outrageous or provocative manner because I like to startle people.” In that, at least, he was successful. In his introduction to the 25th anniversary edition, Douglas Brinkley called The Monkey Wrench Gang “revolutionary, anarchic, seditious, and, in the wrong hands, dangerous.”

How, then, did the book become a popular success and a touchstone for the modern environmental movement?

For one thing, it made environmentalists cool, “the province of the outlaw,” in the words of Abbey biographer David Gessner. Abbey put on the page what thousands were thinking but were not yet prepared to do. Reading about it in a comic yet serious novel allowed people who would never in real life set ablaze a billboard or pour sand into a bulldozer crankcase a sense that they, too, were participants in the revolution.

Another Abbey biographer, James Bishop Jr., wrote that while the theme of The Monkey Wrench Gang was “environmental hooliganism,” it nevertheless came “closest to reaching that place of Abbey’s most steadfast convictions: a romantically idealized world in which the Industrial Revolution has been aborted, and society has reached a steady-state equilibrium where man and the land can exist in harmony.”

That, perhaps, explains why Abbey has a deeply devoted cult following, but has not emerged beyond that. 

Abbey’s rants against “industrial tourism” and his insistence that we’d all be happier without air conditioning, roads, automobiles, antibiotics, or many other conveniences of modern life amount to a platform that tells voters: all you have to do is agree to be poorer, and we can save these rocks. As much as we all love rocks, that’s a tough sell.

A Direct Descendant of Abbey’s Writings

In a post-9/11 world, Abbey’s dalliance with eco-terrorism has made him an even tougher sell in some quarters, while elevating him to icon in others. During one of his many appearances on college campuses, Abbey was asked if he really wanted to blow up Glen Canyon Dam. “No,” he told the students. “But if someone else wanted to do it, I’d be there holding the flashlight.”

Writer Doug Peacock, a friend of Abbey and the primary inspiration for the novel’s lead character, George Washington Hayduke, does not hem and haw about Abbey’s role in inspiring eco-terrorists. “The radical environmental group Earth First! Was a direct descendant of Abbey’s writings,” he wrote.”

Abbey rejected the notion that he was endorsing terrorism, drawing a distinction between sabotage and terrorism. “If the wilderness is our true home, and if it is threatened with invasion, pillage, and destruction—as it certainly is—then we have the right to defend that home, as we would our private quarters, by whatever means are necessary,” Abbey wrote in the essay, “Eco-Defense.”

If “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” Abbey seemed to be saying, so must the pinions and junipers of Utah’s slickrock country. 

“Whatever means are necessary” seems pretty clear, especially when standing next to his invitation to suicide bombers to take a lunge at Glen Canyon Dam.

Abbey’s defenders like to draw a distinction between damaging property and killing people. 

In his essay “One Man’s Terrorist,” Michael Branch, a professor of environmental literature, justifies the destruction of earth-moving machinery, billboards, and surveyor’s stakes—prime targets of the Monkey Wrench Gang—as doing no person any harm.

“Using a chainsaw to fell a billboard is no more violent than using a welding machine to construct one,” Branch writes. 

The contention that if no human is harmed, then it can’t be terrorism is faulty on its face. If you blow up a synagogue because you hate Jews, it’s an act of terrorism, whether there are any Jews inside or not.

Abbey was not unaware of the way the book could be, and was, perceived. He worried that he would be “accused of rash crimes … every time some Boy Scout sugars a bulldozer, or shellacs an earth-mover.” He was right to worry. A collection of terrorism biographies published two years after 9/11 profiled “twenty-six people who figure prominently in the story and history of terrorism,” including Osama bin Laden, Timothy McVeigh, and Ted Kaczynski. Abbey is right there at the front, his smiling, bearded countenance first alphabetically, followed by Gerry Adams and Yasir Arafat.

Am I a Racist?

Still, it is not his role as mad prophet of eco-terrorism that makes Abbey something of an untouchable among more conventional environmentalists.

Abbey’s friend and fellow environmental icon Wendell Berry summed up the case best in his essay, “A Few Words in Favor of Edward Abbey.” Abbey, writes Berry, is “seen as a problem by people who are, or who think they are, on his side.” These erstwhile defenders “have an uncontrollable itch to apologize for him.”

The central problem, according to Berry, is that many of his critics “assume that Mr. Abbey is an environmentalist—and hence that they, as other environmentalists, have a right to expect him to perform as their tool.” But, Berry writes, “he is not a conservationist or an environmentalist or a boxable ist of any other kind.” 

Brinkley compared Abbey to Don Quixote, and “the windmill Abbey wanted to tear down most was the Glen Canyon Dam.” Others have suggested Harriet Beecher Stowe or Upton Sinclair. He is more often compared to Henry David Thoreau, but biographer James Bishop Jr. astutely notes that The Monkey Wrench Gang is “more Orwellian than Thoreauvian.” Abbey’s vision is in many ways bleak—the alternative futures amount to a choice between a darkscape of industrial wasteland or a post-industrial anarchy shorn of every modern convenience. 

But in this age of intersectionality, the real challenge is Abbey’s views on non-environmental issues. Abbey opposed immigration, wrote and said untoward things about racial minorities, called welfare “a subsidy for baby production,” was proudly sexist (“To the editors of Ms. Magazine, NY: “‘Dear Sirs …’”), called the Peace Corps “an act of cultural arrogance,” and owned guns (“I load my own ammo”).

Abbey considered his essay “Immigration and Liberal Taboos” among his personal favorites. Solicited and then rejected in 1982 by The New York Times, it was subsequently rejected by Harper’s, Atlantic, The New Republic, Rolling Stone, Newsweek, and Mother Jones. The left’s intolerance for dissenting opinions is not a new thing. 

The piece was eventually published in 1983 by Phoenix New Times. 

Abbey argued that “it might be wise for us as American citizens to consider calling a halt to the mass influx of even more millions of hungry, ignorant, unskilled, and culturally-morally-generically impoverished people. … How many of us, truthfully, would prefer to be submerged in the Caribbean-Latin version of civilization? … Harsh words: but somebody has to say them.” And Abbey very cheerfully did, while pondering the criticism.

“Am I a racist?” he asked himself in his journal. “I guess I am. I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks, or Mexicans, or Orientals. Look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia.” At the same time, Abbey believed it was never fair “to evaluate the quality of any individual by reason of race. You cannot judge the worth of a man by his skin color, bone structure, I.Q., body chemistry or genetic inheritance. … However, there are significant differences among the various races, both in character and in achievement. It is intellectually dishonest and socially condescending to pretend otherwise.”

As the editor of his published journals wrote, a sanitized, politically correct Abbey “would be—well, no Edward Abbey at all.”

Abbey, Jefferson, and Lincoln

Fifty years on, The Monkey Wrench Gang endures. 

A theme running through retrospective essays on Abbey and his work is speculation on his reaction to climate change. All conclude, naturally, that he’d be on their side. But none wonder about his response to the destruction of habitat wrought by acres devoted to the production of “clean” energy.

It’s difficult to imagine the Don Quixote who ranted about paved roads, visitors’ centers, and flushable toilets on public lands would get behind the idea of deploying solar panels or windmills across his beloved desert.

Abbey wrote that “a patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government,” sounding suspiciously like Thomas Jefferson justifying the need for rebellion every 20 years. If “the tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” Abbey seemed to be saying, so must the pinions and junipers of Utah’s slickrock country. 

It’s a dangerous philosophy. When each man decides for himself how much violence is justified to achieve political ends, the most violent tend to come out on top. 

Abraham Lincoln, an admirer of Jefferson, said, “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.”

If, in reading The Monkey Wrench Gang, conservatives are enticed by Abbey’s anti-government rhetoric, they should heed the words of Lincoln and remember that, eventually, like the left turning on Abbey over immigration, the revolution always devours its own.