to extinction, but that of humanity andrnthe civilization it has created—especiallyrnin America. As Bishop points out,rnAbbey’s interest was not in saving thernworld (which he regarded as unsalvageable,rnsordid, and barbaric) but in savingrnAmerica, a special land inhabited by thernchosen people who had created forrnthemselves the Constitution and the Billrnof Rights. It was this interest, as much asrnthe vision of the vast and multisplendoredrnWestern landscape being overrunrnby tens or scores of millions of LatinrnAmericans, that prompted his notoriousrn(“racist,” “xenophobic”) stand againstrnimmigration from the Third World.rn”How many of us, truthfully, would preferrnto be submerged in the Latin-rnCaribbean version of civilization? . . .rnHarsh words, but somebody has to sayrnthem.”rnHad Henry David Thoreau’s view ofrnthe Mexican-American War carried thernday. Abbey’s Road would have beenrnpatrolled by the federales. Still, Thoreaurnwas a hero for Abbey, the man to whosernwork his own has most often been compared.rnIn fact, it is much better thanrnthat, Walden having all the natural interestrnof a walk in Central Park, enlivenedrnby transeendentalist musings inrnlieu of a few good muggings. Abbey deservesrnto be treated much more broadlyrnas a late 20th-century representative of arnlong and distinguished line of Americanrnantiurban intellectuals, many of whomrnalso opposed social, economic, andrntechnological giantism and the centralizationrnof the state, that includes Jefferson,rnMelville, Hawthorne, Poe, JosiahrnRoyce, Lewis Mumford—and Thoreau.rnAbbey’s prose, for all its revolutionaryrnmystique, has many sober and even politernantecedents. A passage from Royce’srnRace Questions, Provincialism and OtherrnAmerican Problems (1908), expoundingrnthe Harvard philosopher’s “higherrnprovincialism,” has the Abbey ring to it:rnThere [to the province] must wernflee from the stress of the now toornvast and problematic life of thernnation as a whole…. [N]ot in thernsense of a cowardly and permanentrnretirement, but in the sensernof a search for renewed strength,rnfor a social inspiration, for the salvationrnof the individual from thernoverwhelming forces of consolidation.rnFreedom… dwells now inrnthe small social group, and has itsrnsecurest home in the provincialrnlife. The nation by itself, apartrnfrom the influence of thernprovince, is in danger of becomingrnan incomprehensible monster, inrnwhose presence the individual losesrnhis right, his self-consciousness,rnand his dignity.rnThose over-consistent souls whornremark that, as Thoreau’s cabin wasrnwithin walking distance of his mother’srnhouse and her washboard, so Abbey’srnprimary residence over the years was thernsprawling ultramodern city of Tucsonrnhave missed the point. For Abbey, thernAmerican West—”All of it”—was hisrnprovince, defined not only in terms ofrnwilderness but of its (ever-decreasing)rnremoteness from the Eastern monsterrnthat the West seemed bent on recreatingrnbetween the Front Range and the PacificrnOcean. To Thoreau’s statement that,rn”What we call wilderness is a civilizationrnother than our own,” Abbey might havernadded, “What I call civilization isrnsurrounded by a civilization other thanrnour own.”rnConfessions reveals a susceptibility tornthe conviviality of city life and even tornthe aesthetics of the cityscape (thoughrncharacteristically Abbey preferred Hoboken,rnwhere he spent several years whilernmarried to one of his two Jewish wives, tornManhattan) but none at all to smalltownrnor farm life which he, having beenrnraised on a farm in western Pennsylvania,rnloathed. For Abbey, happiness was alwaysrnone thing or the other, megalopolisrnor wilderness: an unexceptionable preferencernthat nevertheless compromisedrnhis appreciation of rural culture and,rnespecially, agriculture.rnThat, for several reasons, is too bad.rnFor one thing, it left him vulnerable tornthe ideological excesses of the SocialrnDemocratic Wilderness Party, includingrnits Deep Ecology faction, and thereforernto plausible counterattack by the Enemy.rn(What right anyway have city peoplernand suburbanites—at least 90 percentrnof environmentalists in America—to creaternpolicy for the management of wildernessrnand other rural lands, of which theirrnknowledge is almost entirely theoreticalrnand secondhand? The land, as LatinrnAmerican revolutionaries say, belongs tornthose who work it. Imagine the uproar ifrnthe farmers of upstate New York insistedrnon writing crime control bills for NewrnYork City!) Another is that it preventedrnhim from recognizing that the maintenancernof a rural culture based on ranchingrnis infinitely more important to thernpreservation of the Western UnitedrnStates than any number of wildernessrnset-asides engineered by congressionalrnrepresentatives from urban Californiarnand bluestocking districts on ManhattanrnIsland. The third is that it blinkeredrnand blinded him against a truth thatrnseemed axiomatic to human beingsrnthroughout most of their history, andrnthat is being rediscovered today even as itrnis most emphatically denied.rn”The main problem of the comingrncentury,” John Lukacs says, “will be people’srnrelationship to the land. But thernpollution of land, indeed of all matter, isrnpreceded and produced by the pollutionrnof minds.” Early in the 20th century ifrnnot before, the causal connection betweenrnman’s depredation of the naturalrnworld and his own self-degradation beganrnto be noticed. Romano Cuardinirnconcluded that culture arises from a livingrnhuman relationship with nature, anrnargument that was developed in thernUnited States over the next decade byrnthe Southern Agrarians; Santayana in hisrnlast book published in 1953 wrote that anrnanimal economy, based on the breedingrnand hunting of animals, is the naturalrncondition of man: neither wilderness norrncity but rus in urbe or urbs ruri, the ruralrncenter. What Lukacs calls the “insubstantializationrnof matter”—its remotenessrnfrom our lives in combination withrnthe increasing “abstractness of patternsrnof thought”—in his opinion demandsrn”a conscious realization, not only of thernsinful nature of man, but the alreadyrnoverdue necessity to rethink the entirernmeaning of progress,” an agendum thatrnAbbey pressed for 40 years.rn”Lavender cumuli floating like armadasrnof men-o’-war over the aridrncanyons, bombarding them with lightningrnbolts; hisses and shouts of wind;rnthe irritable whining of flies; clear openrnseas of blue and green to the west andrnnorth; the charged stillness, the heat,rnthe sudden flurry of the whirlwind; . . .rndanger, pressure, tension, anticipation inrnthe air. . . .” Despite a somewhat messyrnand disordered life that included fivernmarriages and in which satyriasis yieldedrnonly to ill health and premature death,rnthere is nothing of the barbarian in thernman who could create this description ofrnafternoon storms above the summerrndesert of southeastern Utah. Nothing,rnthat is, except the alien, the dissenterrnfrom a society widely considered superiorrnto his own. <&rn50/CHRONICLESrnrnrn