Roger J. Wendell
Defending 3.8 Billion Years of Organic EvolutionSM
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Edward Abbey and Henry David Thoreau |
| Edward Abbey was born in the town of Indiana, Pennsylvania on January 29, 1927. He died on March 14, 1989 from surgery complications at age 62. |
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Henry David Thoreau was born on July 12, 1817 in the village of Concord, Massachusetts. He died from Tuberculoses on May 6, 1862 at the age of 44. |
Neither Edward Abbey or Henry David Thoreau would have wanted to be anyone's hero. Although I, myself, could consider them both heroes I mostly just admire what they wrote and stood for. Why? Despite personal faults and idiosyncrasies, they both excelled at speaking their minds regardless public ridicule and government pressure (Thoreau was jailed for failing to pay war taxes and the FBI spied on Abbey for nearly two decades).Equally important, both were passionate protectors of wilderness and Nature - commodities definitely in short supply throughout our so-called modern world. How could anyone devote even part of a career, let alone nearly all of it, to nature advocacy and things not of man? Well, these two writers did it, and they did it well.
Admittedly, Thoreau and Abbey weren't the only ones who did good things for Nature, there were many others who did so too. It's just that these two caught my imagination from a very early age so I created this page as a kind of "quick reference" to parts of their work that captivated me most. I'm not an "expert" on either Abbey or Thoreau, what's here are just bits and pieces that I've picked up over the years like any reader. Luckily, unlike most readers, I got to meet Abbey, privately, to conduct some business for a local environmental group. Unfortunately, in the case of Thoreau I was born about a dozen decades too late...
- Roger J. Wendell
 Oracle, Arizona - an alleged stompin' ground of Cactus Ed... |
I was also lucky enough to meet Dave Foreman a couple of times (he's cofounder of Earth First!) and here's what Dave had to say about Abbey:
"Ed Abbey was the Mudhead Kachina of the conservation movement, perhaps
of the whole goddamn social change movement in the country. He was the
coyote. Farting in polite company. Enraging pompous twits, prudes
and prigs. Goosing the true believers. Pissing on what was politically
correct. And thereby doing sacred work. "It is our joy that he lived and spoke so eloquently that which we feel so deeply. We cannot replace such a man. None of us can emulate him or fill his shoes. But we can continue the work we shared with him His life, like each of his books, is a rock. A piece of sandstone that fits comfortably in the hand. You know what to do with it. He told you."
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With the permission of photographer Charles "Chip" Hedgcock, I use this photo of "Cactus Ed" here and on my main web page.
Chip had this to say about Ed's photo; "That photo by the way is of Ed's last public appearance, a reading at an Earth First! rally for Mt Graham. Ed had just finished reading from his newly completed Hayduke Lives!. As he finished the room jumped to it's feet with wolf howls and applause. Ed lifted his arms to embrace the roaring crowd. Days later he was dead." |
This is the page Ed Abbey autographed for me out of Dave Foreman's book, EcoDefense. Ed wrote, "For Wilderness Defense! (in recognition of a group I had formed) and Dave Foreman too! At the time of the signing Ed was having a bit of fun since I didn't have one of his own books with me. Dave Foreman then signed beneath Ed's entry 11 months later - just a few weeks before Ed's death...
- Roger J. Wendell
 "Cactus Ed" lies in his illegal burial site somewhere in Arizona's Cabeza Prieta wilderness... |
 Thoreau lies on "Authors' Ridge" at the Sleepy Hollow cemetary in Massachuessettes |
 Thoreau's sister, Sophia, drew this of his one room cabin at Walden Pond. The cabin was later removed from the property and eventually broken up into scrap wood... |
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Click Here for other memorials... |
Thoreau:
from Walden
"Where I lived and what I lived for"
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"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartanlike as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and to be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to 'glorify God and enjoy him forever.'" |
At age twenty, in 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested to Throeau that he maintain a journal
to develop his writing and observation skills. Thoreau kept up the habit, two million words
later, until his death at age 44 in 1862. I'll post some of his journal entries as time permits:
January 21, 1852
"This winter they are cutting down our woods more seriously than ever, - Fair Haven Hill, Walden, Linnaea Borealis Wood, etc., etc.
Thank god, they cannot cut down the clouds!"
Abbey:
from Desert Solitaire
"The First Morning"
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"The personification of the natural is exactly the tendency I wish to suppress in myself, to eliminate for good. I am here not only to escape for a while the clamor and filth and confusion of the cultural apparatus but also to confront, immediately and directly if it's possible, the bare bones of existence, elemental and fundamental, the bedrock which sustains us. I want to be able to look at and into a juniper tree, a piece of quartz, a vulture, a spider, and see it as it is in itself, devoid of all humanly ascribed qualities, anti-Kantian, even the categories of scientific description. To meet God or Medusa face to face, even if it means risking everything human in myself. I dream of a hard and brutal mysticism in which the naked self merges with a nonhuman world and yet somehow survives still intact, individual, separate. Paradox and bedrock." |
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At age 19,while serving in the army in 1946, Edward Paul Abbey begain keeping a personal journal as a resource for his hoped-for-career as a "writer of creative fictions." He, too, kept the practice up until his death almost 43 years later - creating 20 handwritten volumes (the first three were lost in the flooding of his family's rural Pennsylvania basement where they were in storage.)of about a half million words or more. I'll post some of his journal entries as time permits as well: |
Mother Earth News
(Ed's response to Plowboy asking about wilderness and civilization)
May/June 1984
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"A true civilization, for me, embraces tolerance as one of its cardinal virtues: tolerance for free speech and differences of opinion among humans, and tolerance for other forms of life... bugs and plants and crocodiles and gorillas and coyotes and grizzly bears and eagles, and all of the other voiceless, defenseless things everywhere that are in our charge. Any true civilization must provide for those other life forms. And the only way to do that is to set aside extensive areas of the Earth where humans don't interfere, where humans rarely even set foot."
It's good for us to live on a planet of great diversity and variety. I think that a completely industrialized planet, a completely humanized planet would be intolerable. It would be a diminished life, as if the whole world were one great city. We'd lose the small-town way of life, the agrarian way of life, the farms, ranches, open spaces, forests, deserts, mountains and seashores. All of them would be completely taken over, devoured. That seems to be the direction in which we're moving right now. And if we succeed with this mad project of trying to dominate the whole planet and reduce everything to an industrial culture, we'll then turn on each other and start devouring one another even more vigorously and ferociously than we already are." |
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