Nature Journal #3 - Edward Abbey

In class this week, Anna, Ciara, and I led the class discussion about Edward Abbey’s The Best of Edward Abbey: “Selections from the Journals” and “Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks.” As I read through the journal entries that Abbey shares and tried to reconcile this behind-the-curtain look into who he was with the argument he shares in “Polemic,” I wondered whether Abbey’s and his argument’s flaws were outweighed by his and his argument’s strengths. 

Throughout “Selections from the Journals,” Abbey shares his inner thoughts, eccentricities, and outbursts of emotion with us in his assortment of journal entries. He is honest with himself and with us – often to the point of being crude; he is forthcoming about his fears, anxieties, and his life’s regrets. He shares freely his criticisms and resentments, he reflects on the fragility of life and the looming reality of death, and he chronicles all of the beautiful sights and phenomena of the natural world around him. Throughout the journal entries, some of his biggest flaws and strengths can be inferred. At his best, he is free, determined in his pursuit of wilderness and truth, self-aware, perceptive, honest, alive, and rebellious. At his worst, he is bitter, haunted, regretful, self-sabotaging and self-destructive, extreme, harsh, angry, isolated, crude, and rebellious. In “Selections from the Journals,” I found a quote that, I think, helps us to better understand Abbey’s flaws versus strengths and to step into his shoes to understand why he argues in as an abrasive and extreme way as he does:

“B. Traven, Dreiser, James Jones et all – their prose was so bad, so crude, so stupid, that it’s painful to read. And yet these lads often wrote better books than such master stylists as Henry James, Nabokov, Proust. Why? ... their work, while repellent in style and detail, achieves great cumulative power through its steadfast devotion to fact, which equals and in the long run is equivalent to, the supreme poetry of truth.” (p. 431-432)

But, bringing this question to class discussion, something that I found particularly interesting was the insight shared by Dr. Jared Wood, the Natural Resource Manager for the Fort Worth Nature Center and Reserve. Dr. Wood shared that, while he admires the passion and boldness of Abbey’s argument against industrial tourism, it might have gotten him further to move from a somewhat naive, overly idealistic view of how the world should be to a pragmatic, realistic understanding of how the world is. In other words, whereas Abbey stood in staunch opposition to industrial tourism, an unyielding defender of untouched wilderness, he could have understood/embraced the way of the world and worked strategically and cooperatively with the powers that be (namely, the politics and big business spurring the commercialization of the national parks) to shape how industrial tourism bled into the parks. The reality was that the flood was coming (the tourists were coming) and, so, he could have tried to “play the game” for greater effect in confronting the inundation in the best way possible.