S1E11: Deconstructing Ed Abbey

UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT

0:00:00 - (Alicia Pike): This podcast was made possible by the generous support of our Patreon patrons. They provide us with the resources we need to produce each episode. You can join them at 90miles from needles.com Patreon.

0:00:25 - (Bouse Parker): The Sun is a giant blowtorch aimed at your face. There ain't no shade nowhere. Let's hope you brought enough water. It's time for 90 miles from Needles, the Desert Protection Podcast with your hosts, Chris Clark and Alicia Pike.

0:00:44 - (Chris Clarke): I'm Chris Clarke.

0:00:45 - (Alicia Pike): And I'm Alicia Pike. And this is 90 miles from Needles.

0:00:49 - (Chris Clarke): I will say right up front that Edward Abbey's writing has had a significant influence on my life. For all that, Abbey was, on frequent occasions, deliberately provocative in his writing. One might even say trollish. I might not have the sensibility I have today if it wasn't for Ed Abbey. I might not live where I live today if it wasn't for Ed Abbey. When I first mentioned that we were thinking of doing an episode of this podcast on some of the more unsavory things Ed Abbey had written, namely his support for the idea that white people in America were in danger of being replaced by people of color with other cultures, I got significant pushback on social media.

0:01:29 - (Chris Clarke): Most people that responded were more or less supportive of the idea. At the very least, they understood what I had in mind. But there were a few people that I think mistrusted the whole idea of looking at the less helpful things that people they hold as environmental heroes have said in their lives, mistrusted the whole idea of criticizing the opinions those heroes have expressed. And to me, this pushback seemed pretty anti progressive.

0:01:55 - (Chris Clarke): Sure, it can be uncomfortable to look at the flaws in people we admire. And I personally approach the project of looking at some of Ed Abbey's more troubling opinions with a fair bit of nuance. And I'll be the first to admit that that's a luxurious position made available to me by the privilege I have in this world. There are people in this world who I respect greatly who have no time to waste thinking about Ed Abbey, who have rejected him out of whole cloth for the misogyny in his writings, for his shoddy literary treatment of native people, for his statements on immigration.

0:02:29 - (Chris Clarke): And then, as I mentioned, there are people on another side of that divide who reject the nuance from the other direction, who fear that any criticism of the man's writing or any other aspect of his character is tantamount to what's lately called cancellation of the helpful and useful things he may have written. And I do think that he wrote some helpful and useful things. Now remember, I have no particular quarrel with people that find Ed Abbey's writing so offensive that they just want to exclude him from their own personal canon of desert writers or of environment writers. I don't have a problem with that.

0:03:06 - (Chris Clarke): I thoroughly understand that. And besides, there are so many wonderful desert writers who don't write jocularly about hitting women in the head with boat oars. To pick one particular example of an Abby ism. And who wouldn't dream of categorizing an entire race of people based on a stereotype, we have Terry Tempest Williams, Ruben Martinez, John Annarino, Bill Broyles, Anne Zwinger, Craig Childs, Gary Nabhan, Ellen Malloy, Ben Ehrenreich.

0:03:39 - (Chris Clarke): Desert writers are thick on the ground these days. We're not limited to reading Ed Abbey. If you don't want to read his work, you don't have to. It's a pretty luxurious position. But far from resisting discussion of his more problematic writings, I think those of us who still find some value in some of the things that Ed Abbey wrote, as I do, have a particular responsibility to highlight those problematic writings and to discuss them honestly.

0:04:06 - (Chris Clarke): Why this episode? Why are we looking at this now? Well, on May 14, 2022, two weeks ago, as I speak, a racist white 18 year old man from a rural part of upstate New York not far from where I was born drove to Buffalo looking for a neighborhood with the highest percentage of African American people that he could find. And on arriving, he killed 10 people, mostly elderly, mostly women, all of them black.

0:04:37 - (Chris Clarke): While he livestreamed his massacre. This 18 year old white racist shooter had written things on social media espousing the Great Replacement theory, the idea that America and other countries too, but in this particular case America, that America's white culture is under threat of replacement by non white people in their cultures. I don't think I need to explain that this is a preposterous theory based in irrational and unjustified fear, in cowardice, in bigotry and hatred.

0:05:11 - (Chris Clarke): And I lived in Buffalo in the 1970s and early 1980s, and for part of that time I lived near the neighborhood where this assassination, this massacre of grocery shopping grandmothers happened. And I'm also a desert activist and a writer, which in a sense makes me a colleague of Ed Abbey. And those two facts are sitting together in my head rather uncomfortably because Edward Abbey himself expressed support for the Great Replacement Theory, if not in name, then in essence.

0:05:45 - (Chris Clarke): And we have evidence. And I will confess to being amused at how unwilling I am to Read this next passage for fear that the Internet being what it is, someone will edit it out of context and share it and make it appear that we, at 90 miles from Needles, actually endorse this nonsense. And so I'm relegating reading of the next passage to our robot announcer.

0:06:05 - (Bouse Parker): According to the morning newspaper, the population of America will reach 267 million by 2000 A.D. an increase of 40 million, or about 1/6 in only 17 years. And the racial composition of the population will also change considerably. The white birth rate is about 60 per thousand females. The Negro rate 83 per thousand, and. And the Hispanic rate 96 per thousand. Am I a racist? I guess I am. I certainly do not wish to live in a society dominated by blacks or Mexicans or Orientals. Look at Africa, at Mexico, at Asia. Garrett Hardin compares our situation to an overcrowded lifeboat in a sea of drowning bodies. If we take more aboard, the boat will be swamped and we'll all go under mill it to rise our borders. The lifeboat is listing.

0:06:52 - (Chris Clarke): That passage was taken from a compilation of Abbey's private writings, published as Confessions of a Barbarian after his death in 1989. He wrote it. He wrote it in 1983 in a moment of frustration that the New York Times and then several other publications had rejected an essay of his entitled Immigration and Liberal Taboos, which was eventually published by the Phoenix New Times. That essay included passages such as this one.

0:07:20 - (Bouse Parker): These uninvited millions bring with them an alien mode of life which, let us be honest about. This is not appealing to the majority of Americans.

0:07:28 - (Bouse Parker): Why not?

0:07:29 - (Bouse Parker): Because we prefer democratic government, for one thing. Because we still hope for an open, spacious, uncrowded and beautiful, yes, beautiful society. For another, the alternative in the squalor, cruelty and corruption of Latin America is plain for all to see.

0:07:45 - (Chris Clarke): And there's this.

0:07:47 - (Bouse Parker): The United States has been fully settled and more than full for at least a century. We have nothing to gain and everything to lose by allowing the old boat to be swamped. How many of us, truthfully, would prefer to be submerged in the Caribbean Latin version of civilization? Howls of racism, elitism, xenophobia from the Marx Brothers and the documented liberals. Harsh words, but somebody has to say them. We cannot play let's pretend much longer.

0:08:12 - (Bouse Parker): Not in the present world. Therefore, let us close our national borders to any further mass immigration, legal or illegal, from any source.

0:08:21 - (Chris Clarke): Now, I'll give Abbey this much. He did say from any source, presumably that included England and Norway and Canada. And so it wasn't just a racist belief. Racism was Just one facet of this opinion. On occasion, you'll hear people refer to Abbwy's writings of this kind as deliberate provocation. They say he didn't really mean it. They say that in real life he was a gentle, thoughtful soul who loved people.

0:08:50 - (Chris Clarke): And enough people that I know who knew Abbwy have said the same thing. And in fact, here's Abbwy saying just that himself in an interview for an NBC News program that never actually aired.

0:09:04 - (Edward Abbey): I see myself as an entertainer. I'm trying to write good books, make people laugh, make them cry, provoke them, make them angry, make them think, if possible, to get a reaction, give pleasure. I do not see myself as a social commentator because I don't look at any of these things we've been talking about hard enough. I'm not really skilled at it, but I like to write. I like to throw words around. And if I can give pleasure in that form, I feel I'm earning my pay.

0:09:42 - (Chris Clarke): Of course, Abbwy wrote some of this stuff in his own private journal, presumably not intending it to be seen by the reading public, which undermines the provocateur argument somewhat. But here's the thing. As a writer, I'm fully aware that the face a writer presents to the world isn't the whole story. We all have our Personas. We all accentuate the rough edges that amuse us, and we grind down those rough edges that don't.

0:10:12 - (Chris Clarke): Writers curate bits of themselves to portray in writing and often inflate the importance of those bits. And there are hidden depths in any writers that hold fears and joys and flaws and strength that never make it onto the page. But all that depth doesn't change what the words say. We, the readers, aren't privy to the things the writer left out. All we have to go on is what the writer didn't leave out.

0:10:37 - (Chris Clarke): All we have to judge Ed Abbey by is this provocateur Persona. The question of whether he meant these things is kind of beside the point. To put it in modern terms, there is a point at which, after spending months and years pretending to be an asshole on the Internet, you're just an asshole. So here's a question some people ask me on social media when I mentioned this looming episode. Why is it important to point this out?

0:11:04 - (Chris Clarke): Sure, the timing reminds us of it. The timing reminds us of his unfortunate and misguided and basically hateful opinion. Why dredge it up? When I moved to the desert and I looked for other activists to work with on desert protection, I was 48 years old. This was in 2008. I would go to meetings of desert activists, and I was often the youngest or second youngest person in the room. There was a cohort of regulars, all of whom had been pivotal in the passage of the California Desert Protection act of 1994.

0:11:41 - (Chris Clarke): Some of them had worked on the establishment of the California Desert conservation area in 1980 and before. Now, these were great people. They were knowledgeable, expert, experienced, wise, and usually welcoming. And the meetings reminded me sadly of those Joshua tree forests where local conditions aren't conducive to the survival of seedlings anymore. All you see in such a forest is mature trees. The Desert protection movement in 2008 was an even age stand with near zero recruitment.

0:12:20 - (Chris Clarke): It looked as though the movement would die out of old age, like the Shakers. If you don't understand that reference, google the Shakers. You won't be sorry. The people in those Desert protection meetings were also almost entirely white people. Not all of them, but almost all of them. It's different now. The Desert protection meetings I go to, and I go to a lot of them, they're full of young people.

0:12:46 - (Chris Clarke): And the younger people I work with these days are a lot browner than that older cohort in 2008. The Desert Protection Movement looks a lot like the southwestern United States, in fact, with native people and Latinx people and African Americans and Asian Pacific Islanders and whites and people of decidedly mixed ancestry. And we have a better movement because of that change. It has a future now. But even among that diverse young cohort that's showing some enthusiasm for the desert, there's still reluctance to be found to throwing in with a movement to defend the living desert landscape, because conservation is still often seen as a white people thing.

0:13:28 - (Chris Clarke): And screeds like Ed Abbey's note in his journals about white culture being replaced only tells people that desert conservation will not welcome people like them. Once that immigration essay that Abby was complaining about finally got published in the Phoenix New Times, Its last paragraph got a lot of attention and continues to. When people are discussing Abby's opinion on.

0:13:56 - (Bouse Parker): Immigration or if we must meddle as we have always done, let us meddle for a change in a constructive way. Stop every campesino at our southern border. Give him a handgun, a good rifle and a case of ammunition and send him home. He will know what to do with our gifts and good wishes. The people know who their enemies are.

0:14:15 - (Chris Clarke): Some people find a defense of Abbey here, a sort of anti imperialist veneer. I used to agree with that. But when you talk about conscripting refugees into fighting the wars that we provoke in our client states, which we could end by striking a line item from the CIA's budget. That kind of rings hollow. You also sometimes hear the old chestnut that we can't judge a person's past statements by today's standards.

0:14:40 - (Chris Clarke): And I can only say that those words were written in 1983. I remember 1983 just fine. We knew perfectly well in 1983 that racism was bullshit. There are just two things that distinguish the sentiment in Abbey's immigration writings from those expressed by our previously reigning commander in Chief. The first is Abbey's honesty about wanting to end legal immigration, a desire the Trump regime shared but was afraid to own up to.

0:15:11 - (Chris Clarke): The the other Abbey wrote his opinions in complete, coherent sentences. I've been thinking about the massacre in Buffalo, but there are other things you can trace, other connections you can make. A friend of mine went out to the southern edge of Organ Pipe national monument in 2019 and took some photos that got a lot of attention. Border wall construction had begun in the Sonoran Desert, and contractors working for the Department of Homeland Security were killing the column cacti.

0:15:41 - (Chris Clarke): That Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument was established to protect the border wall replaced a vehicle barrier installed in the mid-2000s, and I reported on that installation at Earth Island Journal. We'll put a link to that reporting in our show notes. The intent of the vehicle barrier, which was a post every six or eight feet with a bar across it, was to keep smugglers from driving through the wilderness while allowing travelers on foot, including Sonoran pronghorn and tortoises and pinacate beetles and people from Oaxaca looking for a better life.

0:16:16 - (Chris Clarke): Free passage. And like most kinds of freedom, free passage is anathema to many people in power. So that vehicle barrier was replaced. The crews took saguaros, knocked them down, pushed them in piles with bulldozers. This shouldn't have been shocking. We've long known what the wall would do to the saguaros and the organ pipe cacti, to pronghorn and Mexican wolves and other wildlife to public safety.

0:16:42 - (Chris Clarke): One version of the wall or another has been proposed seriously since the Clinton administration. There's been study after study, report after report about the damage that the wall would cause. And of course, I am not claiming that Ed Abbey is responsible for the border wall because of his writings on the topic of immigration. I am not claiming that Ed Abbey is responsible for the massacre in Buffalo because of his writings on something very much like the Great Replacement Theory.

0:17:16 - (Chris Clarke): I like to think that if Abbey had survived the disease that killed him in 1989. If he had lived into his 90s, he would have felt the same revulsion many of us feel, the avarice and cruelty and intellectual incuriosity and ecological rapacity and sheer shitheadedness of the right wing. But thoughts like those he espoused took root in the fetid minds of the hateful, and this is a result. And that's why I feel it's incumbent on those of us who would like to see Ed Abbey maintain his place in the pantheon of desert writers to be upfront and honest about where he let us down, about where his writings threatened to exclude entire sectors of society from working to protect the deserts that he loved.

0:18:07 - (Chris Clarke): And if I'm being honest, I would much rather work with the people he would have excluded than with the people who want us to sweep Abbey's peccadilloes under the rug.

0:18:17 - (Alicia Pike): And we'll be back after the break.

0:18:19 - (Chris Clarke): Here's a 90 miles from Needle's public service announcement.

0:18:24 - (Alicia Pike): We just want to take a moment of your time to remind you that Joshua trees are in trouble and we need your help. On June 15, the California Fish and Game Commission will take a vote on whether or not to list the Joshua Tree as threatened, and we need your help to persuade them to do the right thing. Get your comments in 90 miles from needles.com Joshua we'll take you to an action alert where you can make your feelings known to the Fish and Game Commission.

0:18:49 - (Alicia Pike): You can make comments through June 13th. It may only take 90 seconds of your time to fill out an action alert, but it's protection for the Joshua Tree for the rest of all of our lives. For more information, listen to episode nine of 90 Miles from Needles, where we talk extensively about the Joshua Tree protections. Once again, that's 90 miles from needles.com Joshua.

0:19:14 - (Petey Mesquitey): Hello, I'm Petey Mesquitey, host of Growing Native from KXCI Tucson. Each week since 1992, I've been sharing stories, poems and songs about flora, fauna, family and the glory of living in the borderlands of Southern Arizona. Recent episodes of Growing Native are available@kxci.org Apple Podcasts and PRX. The desert is beautiful, my friends. Yeah, it is.

0:19:43 - (Chris Clarke): Do you have a desert related podcast or website or newsletter or something similar that you'd like us to promote? Let us know. 760392 1996.

0:19:55 - (Bouse Parker): You're listening to 90 Miles from Needles, the desert Protection podcast. Confusion and irritability are the first signs of heat injury and of hosting a.

0:20:04 - (Chris Clarke): Podcast, so it was interesting to me to know that despite your affection for the desert and your longtime commitment to being here and to protecting it and learning all you can about it, that.

0:20:14 - (Alicia Pike): You had not read, still have not read, Desert Solitaire. I've even been given a copy to read, and so it sits on my bedside table.

0:20:25 - (Chris Clarke): Why?

0:20:26 - (Alicia Pike): It's just. It's one of those classic recommendations, and it usually comes to me in the form of a recommendation from a man. I know.

0:20:36 - (Chris Clarke): You're talking about men in general. Not one particular man that keeps recommending it to you?

0:20:41 - (Alicia Pike): No, there have been at least three that I can think of in the last six. Six months.

0:20:44 - (Chris Clarke): Okay. So it's the Infinite Jest of the desert.

0:20:47 - (Alicia Pike): "You love the desert. You should read this book."

0:20:50 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:20:51 - (Alicia Pike): There's nothing quite like a recommendation like that to make me say, I guess I'm not going to read that one first, you know?

0:20:58 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:20:59 - (Alicia Pike): And for me, I've just. I've spent my time getting to know the desert through science, not through other people's lens. And I don't know that I really want to read some old codger telling me that nature's going to hell in a handbasket. I can see that with my own eyes. And I don't want to know how good he had it. And I don't want to hear about how this guy had a great time tinkering around in nature unencumbered, because that's very hard to do these days.

0:21:28 - (Chris Clarke): So when people are recommending the book to you, what do they say about it?

0:21:31 - (Alicia Pike): Literally, oh, you love the desert. You should read Desert Solitaire. I mean, I've seen it on the Internet. I've been personally referred. And there's a lot of, yes, okay, I'm being told I should do something. If I do this, then I should do that. And I just don't know what it is about that book that I just don't feel it's really necessary. I feel like I'm living my own Desert Solitaire, and I'll get there when I get there. I'm sure there's a lot of valuable perspective.

0:21:56 - (Chris Clarke): I think the fact that you have gotten where you are without reading at Abbey and you're as committed as you are is really good news, because I think of young people growing up in Southern California or Arizona who are interested in the desert. They're thinking about the development that's going on in the desert, thinking about the things that are lost. The saguaros, the Joshua trees, just the open landscape getting converted into strip malls.

0:22:27 - (Chris Clarke): And if they happen to be of Mexican or Asian or African American ancestry. They might listen to something like that op ed that he'd written criticizing immigration and decide I'm not welcome in this movement.

0:22:45 - (Alicia Pike): Yeah. What's really hitting me right now is that I feel like borders really don't matter. We are as a global population changing. There's too many of us to stay segregated. We can't self segregate anymore. It's time to evolve our way of thinking in regards to other people.

0:23:05 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:23:06 - (Alicia Pike): I know that that's not easy, but that's for me, that's the point that I try to argue.

0:23:10 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah, yeah, I agree. You hear that? While he's a product of his time and it was a different time when he wrote that for himself and he might not have written that now. And it's possible that if he had lived past 1989 and it was still around that he might be horrified by that. Who knows?

0:23:27 - (Alicia Pike): I wouldn't be surprised to see that on some conservative talk show.

0:23:32 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah. In fact, the concept that white people are going to be replaced in the United States and we need to lock down our borders is like pretty much mainstream Republican thinking at this point.

0:23:42 - (Alicia Pike): It's bizarre, really. And not working together as a global community is definitely part of that downfall. We need to look past the color of the skin, the cultural specificities, and work as a global community. We need to work together, not against each other.

0:24:00 - (Chris Clarke): I understand what it's like to really like and feel supportive of and defensive of an author, but it takes a special kind of denial to say that it is not appropriate to look at what old dead white people have written. It's the same dynamic as I used to run into when I would say, hey, this solar stuff that you're trying to put in the desert, there are downsides to it. There are reasons not to do it this way.

0:24:28 - (Chris Clarke): And people would say, why don't you work on opposing new coal fired power plants instead of getting in our way when we want to pave 400,000 acres of desert. People don't want to have to look at the downsides. And with this, it's not just about different ideas of land use and things like that. There are actual living people who are being denigrated, who are being excluded, being victimized.

0:24:54 - (Alicia Pike): You know, you're onto something that's important to talk about. When people in so many words tell you sweep that shit under the rug and focus on something else, this is more important, that's more important.

0:25:07 - (Chris Clarke): Yep. It's not like it's actually more important to them. It's just a way of short circuiting the conversation. And I'm saying this as somebody that has a copy of almost everything Ed Abby wrote on my bookshelves. And I've reread most of them several times. And I will probably continue to do so. And I will probably continue to appreciate the things in his writing that mean something to me. And analyze and take apart and think about the stuff that he wrote that rings as racist or misogynistic or just generally needlessly misanthropic. His sort of colonizer mentality about the Southwestern landscape. That's a problem, and that's worthy of analysis. It's worthy of being dissected. I thoroughly understand if people don't want to deal with Ed Abbey because of the stuff that he said that is really problematic. I am very aware that I'm an old white guy.

0:26:07 - (Chris Clarke): And it's way easier for me to be comfortable reading his stuff. I like to think that he would have paid attention and had some experiences and talked to people and said maybe I was wrong. I would like to think that. But the fact is that he didn't change his mind. And his legacy is what it is. And are we just going to blindly accept it. Or are we going to take it apart, see if there's anything useful there? I think there is.

0:26:32 - (Chris Clarke): Other people may not. I'm overjoyed to have that discussion.

0:26:37 - (Alicia Pike): There comes a point, as a young woman, I'm 38. But there comes a point where you just don't want to hear men, especially older white men, espouse their ideals any more than you have to. A lot of the books that I read, a lot of the information driving my formation from a child to an adult was given to me by white colonizing male mentality. And that's probably why I naturally bulk from doing what I'm told or what I should do or what I should know. Because this guy said so.

0:27:15 - (Alicia Pike): That's when I'm just. I'm. I'm in the science. Just. I don't care if it was a male or a female. Like they're doing it for posterity. Not just to record their own feelings, but to record activities of nature for posterity. That's where I really. My desert activism. For me, it's desert first because that's where I live. But nature, it's nature in general. All the attitudes that we talk about having towards the desert. I sincerely feel no matter where you are on the globe, these ideas and philosophies should take root. And you should feel Them. Because everywhere that we live as human beings, we need to fight to protect what we have left. Because it's rapidly going away. We need it to survive.

0:27:56 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:27:57 - (Alicia Pike): No matter what the colonizers tell you, you gotta fight for what feels right. And for me, listening very closely to what nature has to say is very, very important. And love is very important. So whenever we get into conversations that are very tacky and sticky like we're having right now, that unconditional. This is gonna sound like some New Age bullshit, but this is base spirituality, people. If you're alive, this applies to you.

0:28:23 - (Alicia Pike): Unconditional love and oneness with the universe is. That's the deal. If you can start practicing that, the world would be a better place. The love that I have for nature, the love that I have for every other human being on this planet, whether I like them or not, that makes living life a lot easier. It's still hard, but you will run into people whose life you can change just by expressing love instead of opposition.

0:28:48 - (Chris Clarke): Yeah.

0:28:49 - (Alicia Pike): We don't always have to agree. It's not easy, especially when people be giving you that face. I get it all the time. I'm a mouthy, expressive young lady, and I've been shut down plenty of times. And that's cool. That's cool. If you're not going to hear me, I'm not going to waste my energy on you. I'm just going to give you some love and I'm going to move on. I am okay with so many people who have so many different points of view than me.

0:29:16 - (Alicia Pike): On religion, on philosophy, on science, on politics. That's fine. We don't have to agree to be friends. We don't have to agree to be fighting for the same good outcome in general for the world. But we do need to have some basic respect for each other. And I feel like we really are losing that in the conversation battle. Realizing that we're trying to work towards something. We're not just spewing, you know, like, we're trying to have a productive conversation. We're not trying to just trash Ed. Abby. Yeah, and then there's value to that. There's value to looking back to our past and saying, this person felt this way. Let's have a look at that.

0:29:58 - (Chris Clarke): Yep.

0:29:59 - (Bouse Parker): Hey, if you've made it this far, you either really loved the podcast or you fell asleep partway through.

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0:30:06 - (Bouse Parker): On your favorite podcast listening place? It really helps us spread the word.

0:30:10 - (Bouse Parker): Thank you.

0:30:12 - (Chris Clarke): So I keep mentioning that I continue to find value in stuff Abby wrote. Let's take a look at one of the pieces that I still find worthwhile. This is a section of Desert Solitaire, the chapter Industrial Tourism and the National Parks, and we've excerpted it to show something that still has significant relevance to conservation world we find ourselves in today. And potentially an analysis that's helpful if on brand for Abbey and being a.

0:30:38 - (Alicia Pike): Bit cranky as I type these words, all that was foretold has come to pass. Arches National Monument has been developed. The master plan has been fulfilled. Where once a few adventurous people came on weekends to camp for a night or two and enjoy a taste of the primitive and remote, you will now find serpentine streams of automobiles pouring in and out all through the spring and summer in numbers that would have seemed fantastic when I worked there.

0:31:10 - (Alicia Pike): From 3,000 to 30,000 to 300,000 per year. The visitation, as they call it, mounts ever upward. The little campgrounds where I used to putter around reading three day old newspapers full of lies and watermelon seeds have now been consolidated into one master campground that looks during the busy season like a suburban village. Elaborate house trailers of quilted aluminum crowd upon gigantic camper trucks of fiberglass and molded plastic.

0:31:43 - (Alicia Pike): Through their windows you will see the blue glow of television and hear the studio laughter of Los Angeles. Down at the beginning of the new road at park headquarters is the new entrance station and visitor center where admission fees are collected and where the rangers are going quietly nuts, answering the same three basic questions 500 times a day. 1. Where's the john? 2. How long does it take to see this place?

0:32:08 - (Alicia Pike): 3. Where's the Coke machine? Progress has come at last to the Arches. After a million years of neglect, industrial.

0:32:17 - (Chris Clarke): Tourism has arrived, as reporter Connor Knighton shows in this piece on Arches national park run by CBS News on May 29, 2022, just a few days before we published this episode, crowds in Arches national park have grown spectacularly, to the point where local boosters such as developers in Moab are already pushing for new parking lots, new road expansions, new modifications to the park to make it easier to drive in.

0:32:49 - (Chris Clarke): It seems as though Mr. Abbey's prognostications in the piece Alicia just read are continuing to come true.

0:32:56 - (Conor Knighten): At Arches National Park. Memorial Day weekend is typically the busiest weekend of the year. Over the past two decades, crowds have more than doubled at the park. Last year it received a record breaking 1.8 million visitors, which meant a lot of days felt like Memorial Day last year. How many times did you have to close that gate?

0:33:17 - (person): Oh, gosh 158 times.

0:33:19 - (Conor Knighten): Wow.

0:33:20 - (person): A lot.

0:33:20 - (Conor Knighten): And that's for hours at a time then, right?

0:33:22 - (person): Yes, yes.

0:33:25 - (Conor Knighten): This year, for the first time ever, the park itself is requiring reservations from April to October. Tourists hoping to access Arches during peak hours need to have a Ticket obtained via Recreation.gov Moab developer Michael Liss thinks more cars could be accommodated.

0:33:42 - (Conor Knighten): The infrastructure of Arches national park was designed in the 1950s. They built the one entrance, one entry road. The parking lots have grown, you know, a little bit over the years, but substantially nothing has changed in 70 years. So when I look at this, it's like, isn't it time to upgrade the park? So you can definitely see why there are people that really still value the kinds of writings that Abbey did.

0:34:10 - (Chris Clarke): Most of park activism these days, with a few exceptions, is talking about how parks and national monuments are important to the local economy because they bring tourists in. And that used to be, that used to be a conservative point of view, and now it's something that environmentalists talk about all the time. This is justification for preserving the national monuments. This is justification for protecting more national parks.

0:34:35 - (Chris Clarke): It's because people will come visit and spend money and boost the economy. And we probably got six or seven different episodes we could do about how that actually looks on the ground near the national parks. But years ago, Abby was talking about this in ways that sound a little outmoded and a little curmudgeonly and a little elitist to be honest. But nonetheless, it was a real issue that he foresaw.

0:35:02 - (Chris Clarke): And it's only gotten worse since.

0:35:06 - (Alicia Pike): I mean, the hardest part about all of that to me is we don't view nature as valuable to our survival. And that is antithetical to being alive. We wouldn't be alive without nature doing its thing. And here we are just feeding it into the wood chipper. And I really don't know how much further we can go before all the water is not drinkable, before all the air is not breathable.

0:35:33 - (Chris Clarke): In the meantime, there are people in the world that have come to desert activism and completely sidestep the whole Ed Abbey question. And that is glorious because that means that if you are a 17 year old woman whose parents came from El Salvador and you're living in Riverside, California or in Tucson and you care about the desert, you might be able to just wander into the environmental protection movement and only face the usual amount of bullshit instead of having this whole legacy literature anvil fall on your head of Ed Abbey talking about people like you not belonging here and not being welcome here and I find the fact that he is not relevant to people really promising.

0:36:19 - (Alicia Pike): All right, that's all for this time. I'm Alicia Pike.

0:36:22 - (Chris Clarke): And I'm Chris Clarke.

0:36:23 - (Alicia Pike): This has been 90 Miles from Needles.

0:36:27 - (Bouse Parker): This episode of 90 Miles from Needles was produced by Alicia pike and Chris Clark. Editing by Chris, podcast artwork by our good friend Martin Mancha. Theme music is by Brightside Studio. Other music by Rimstunes. Follow us on Twitter or Instagram @90from needles and on Facebook at facebook.com 90miles from needles listen to us at 90miles from needles.com or wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks to our newest Patreon supporters, Dierdre Sir Konowitz, Judy Finnerty and Louise Matthias. Support this podcast by visiting us at 90 miles from needles.com

0:37:10 - (Bouse Parker): patreon and making a monthly pledge of as little as 5 bucks. Our patreon supporters enjoy privileges including early access to this episode and an exclusive Joshua Tree national park campus out in September 2022. Crucial support for this podcast came from Tad Coffin and Laura Roselle. All characters on this podcast learned to touch without surprise, the spine for the leaf, the prickled petal, the stone scorched in the shine and the wood brittle. This is Baus Parker reminding you that the desert doesn't care who your parents were or what side of an imaginary line they came from. See you next.

0:38:49 - (Chris Clarke): Sit, heart. Sit.

0:38:50 - (Chris Clarke): Good dog.