The Heyday of the Environmental Movement, 1960–1979 147
logging and fire roads have been eradicated. Such
areas are now used only for camping and as wildlife
preserves, and a higher risk of forest fire is appar-
ently accepted.
Source: Ernest Callenbach, Ecotopia (Berkeley, CA: Banyan
Tree Books, 1975), pp. 55, 57-58.bituminous facings, and many other modern
materials occupy with us.
An important by-product of the Ecotopian
forestry policies is that extensive areas, too steep
or rugged to be lumbered without causing erosion,
have been assigned wilderness status. There all
DOCUMENT 122: Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975)
The more radical environmental groups, inspired by Thoreau and borrowing their tactics from the civil rights
and anti-Vietnam War protesters, engaged in civil disobedience and even sabotage to bring their environmental
message to government and the public and to urge industry to stop its environmentally destructive behavior.
Edward Abbey’s fact-based novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, which describes the acts of sabotage committed
by a group of eco-warriors, acquired a cult following and has served as a handbook for some of the most radical
environmental activists. In October 1998 a group of activists, in an effort to stem the expansion of the ski resort at
Vail Mountain in Colorado, set fire to buildings and lifts, causing an estimated $12 million in damages. Earth First!,
whose members elsewhere have chained themselves to trees to prevent logging activity, condoned the sabotage.^4
In this selection from Abbey’s novel, Glen Canyon Dam’s intrusive presence in the landscape offers sufficient
justification for one of the gang members to make plans to blow it up. In 1997 some less radical Americans,
in a House Resources Committee hearing about Lake Powell, actually proposed that Congress take action to
restore Glen Canyon by draining the lake.^5and Glen Canyon Dam. Smith parked his truck
in front of the Senator Carl Hayden Memorial
Building. He and his friend got out and walked
along the rail to the center of the bridge.
Seven hundred feet below streamed what was
left of the original river, the greenish waters that
emerged, through intake, pen-stock, turbine and
tunnel, from the powerhouse at the base of the
dam. Thickets of power cables, each strand as
big around as a man’s arm, climbed the canyon
walls on steel towers, merged in a maze of trans-
former stations, then splayed out toward the
south and west—toward Albuquerque, Babylon,
Phoenix, Gomorrah, Los Angeles, Sodom, Las
Vegas, Nineveh, Tucson, the cities of the plain.
Upriver from the bridge stood the dam, a
glissade of featureless concrete sweeping seven
hundred feet down in a concave facade from the
dam’s rim to the green-grass lawn on the roof of
the power plant below.
They stared at it. The dam demanded atten-
tion. It was a magnificent mass of cement. Vital
statistics: 792,00 tons of concrete aggregate; costThey passed the Wahweap Marina turnoff.
Miles away down the long slope of sand, slick-
rock, blackbrush, Indian ricegrass and prickly
pear they could see a cluster of buildings, a
house-trailer compound, roads, docks and clus-
ters of boats on the blue bay of the lake. Lake
Powell, Jewel of the Colorado, 180 miles of res-
ervoir walled in by bare rock.
The blue death, Smith called it. Like Hay-
duke his heart was full of a healthy hatred.
Because Smith remembered something differ-
ent. He remembered the golden river flowing
to the sea. He remembered canyons called Hid-
den Passage and Salvation and Last Chance and
Forbidden and Twilight and many many more,
some that never had a name. He remembered the
strange great amphitheaters called Music Tem-
ple and Cathedral in the Desert. All these things
now lay beneath the dead water of the reservoir,
slowly disappearing under layers of descending
silt. How could he forget? He had seen too much.
Now they came, amidst an increasing flow
of automobile and truck traffic, to the bridge