In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

139 — 5 — Like a Scarlet Thread Into the Political Wilderness with Edward Abbey No undertakers wanted; no embalming (for godsake!); no coffin. . . . Wrap my body in my anarch’s flag. But bury me if possible; I want my body to help fertilize the growth of a cactus, or cliffrose, or sagebrush, or tree, etc. Disregard all state laws regarding burials. —Edward Abbey’s funeral instructions, 1981 In 1888 journalist Edward Bellamy published a small novel called Looking Backward, 2000–1887. Its protagonist, Julian West, was a conservative middle-class Bostonian who had fallen asleep in his basement chamber in 1887 and awoken 113 years later to find himself in the midst of a high-tech socialist Eden. The ruthless industrial capitalism of his own day had evolved into a cooperative commonwealth where citizens labored together, shared the resulting bounty, and enjoyed cradle-to-grave health care and room and board. War, crime, and corruption had been exterminated . Education and the arts flourished. Technology enriched life in a million ways—from live music piped into homes to automated awnings that covered the sidewalks when it rained. Watching over it all was the American government, organized and staffed by specialists who had society’s best interests at heart, a paragon of benevolent social engineering to which the citizenry submitted willfully, thankfully, and completely. In an era frayed by labor strife, urban blight, and garish displays of robber-baron wealth, Looking Backward proved wildly popular.1 Whatever other attractions Bellamy’s utopia might have had, close physical or spiritual contact with nature was not one of them. The world of 140 Like a Scarlet Thread Looking Backward was a thoroughly humanized one where nature, if it was visible at all, deferred to rational planning as surely as the people did. West’s new companions were shocked to hear, for example, that nineteenth-century Boston had no sidewalk awnings, and considered it “an extraordinary imbecility to permit the weather to have any effect on the social movements of the people.” No one gave a thought to the countryside outside Boston or even expressed a desire to escape the city. Such was not the case, however, in the twentieth century’s two best-known novels about technocratic central states, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984. There the natural world offered a counterweight to authoritarian state control. Brave New World’s John the Savage was the only authentic human being in an otherwise rigidly engineered society, his New Mexico reservation home a strange, myth-haunted wildland nonetheless preferable to Soma-doped “civilization.” In 1984, Winston Smith found momentary relief from Big Brother in a secluded glade in the English countryside, entranced by the song of a thrush. In the end the State triumphed, of course, but the natural world offered escape for a while.2 Edward Paul Abbey was more confident in nature’s benefaction. Known primarily as an essayist, in 1980 he tried his hand at futuristic fiction with Good News. That book was no Bellamyesque tale of socially engineered paradise. It opened with a world where state, military, and corporate power had combined to create a regime less intensively authoritarian than 1984 or Brave New World but no less pervasive, a techno-dystopia of broken familial and social bonds, soulless work, and meaningless leisure, its anxieties medicated by television, rock music, and consumerism. “Not so much unbearable as unreal,” as Abbey described it in setting the scene, “not a nightmare of horror but a nightmare of dreariness, a routine and customary tedium.” But in Good News the central state did not triumph. Wracked by pollution, overpopulation, and scarcity, its cities collapsed in a spasm of starvation and war. Meanwhile, deliverance waited in the wild country beyond, where scattered survivors pulled together to “rebuild the simple farming and pastoral economy that had been destroyed by the triumph of the city, trying to re-create a small society of friends in a community of mutual aid and shared ownership of land.” The bulk of the novel revolved around the conflict between those survivors and the remaining technocrats and militarists who sought to reconstitute what had been lost. Abbey was vague about the eventual outcome, but it was clear where his sympathies lay. For Bellamy, nature didn’t seem to exist, and for Huxley and Orwell, Like a Scarlet Thread 141 it was overshadowed by tyranny. In Good News nature was the preservation of the world.3 So it was in reality...

Share