Mckibben on Berry/Abbey

My first real introduction to the modern environmental movement came through reading Outside magazine. It didn't take too long to realize the eminent figures in Outsides account of caring for the Earth: David Brower, Gerry Lopez, Yvon Chounaird, and the great "Cactus Ed" Abbey.

Abbey is known as the greatest defender of the American west he combined a keen observers eye, with writing skill, a penchant for shock value, and a curmudgeonly individualism. In many ways he was the Hunter S. Thompson of the environmental movement. In the same career he penned one of the most moving tributes to a place I've ever read "Desert Solitaire" and a book that is probably best described as eco-warrior pulp fiction "The Monkey Wrench Gang". In a few short months I read "Desert Solitaire", "The Monkey Wrench Gang", "Hayduke Lives!" and (my favorite) "Fire on the Mountain". Abbey is the patron saint of green peace, a womanizer, a trouble maker, and one of the greatest American nature writers of all time.

My two other favorite nature writers are Bill Mckibben and Wendel Berry. Mckibben is young (aged somewhere between me and my parents), writes for the New Yorker, and drives a hybrid. Berry is an anachronism, an old fashioned man of letters who gave up a successful academic career to return home to rural Kentucky to farm the same soil as his parents and his parents-parents. Obviously these three writers are very different but with the similar agenda. They all think that in today's life the halting of destructive human living is of tantamount importance. Mckibben I read in high school but my college learning is all about Berry. His pastoral writing captivate me, his emphasis that choosing to live our lives in a certain way ( a faithful, careful, hopeful, simple way,) as the most important thing we can do "a man with a garden does more for the earth than the entire environmental movement" provides one or two of the shaky underpinnings of my even more shaky worldview.

It is obvious that Abbey and Berry seem to be at loggerheads (I'll let Mckibben tsort it out)

"One, "Cactus Ed," was wildly and rudely funny, irresponsibly in marriage, likely to be drunk in the evening or at least to imply that he had bee. The other is very nearly solemn in his writing, valuing fidelity above all else. One seemed most alive in motion(his essay on the joy of abusing rental cars is a masterpiece); the other draws his strength from what he calls "sticking." It seemed at first to me as if a reader had to choose one vision or the other. But both appealed enormously to me, and as I got to know both men, they were deeply appealing, too. As it turned out, in fact, they were great fans of each other, attempting one the backs of various books to pin each other with the title of our finest national essayist".

So whose right? the ultimate individualist or the ultimate family man? I say Berry.

Again Mckibben "they each held part of the puzzle: the iconoclastic, individualistic, rebellious defense of the wild as necessary for our sanity; the communalistic, enduring defense of the pastoral as necessary for our culture"

That is Mckibben's word here is Berry's last word on Abbey. A poem read at his funeral

I pass a cairn of stone
Two arm-lengths long and wide
Piled on the steep hillside
By plowmen years ago.
Now oaks and hickories grow
Where the steel coulter passed.
The Sabbath of the trees
Returns and stands and is.

And i'll let Cactus Ed have the last word on life (I first saw this when I was sixteen or seventeen and still find myself returning to it)

One final paragraph of advice: do not burn yourselves out. Be as I am - a reluctant enthusiast....a part-time crusader, a half-hearted fanatic. Save the other half of yourselves and your lives for pleasure and adventure. It is not enough to fight for the land; it is even more important to enjoy it. While you can. While it’s still here. So get out there and hunt and fish and mess around with your friends, ramble out yonder and explore the forests, climb the mountains, bag the peaks, run the rivers, breathe deep of that yet sweet and lucid air, sit quietly for a while and contemplate the precious stillness, the lovely, mysterious, and awesome space. Enjoy yourselves, keep your brain in your head and your head firmly attached to the body, the body active and alive, and I promise you this much; I promise you this one sweet victory over our enemies, over those desk-bound men and women with their hearts in a safe deposit box, and their eyes hypnotized by desk calculators. I promise you this; You will outlive the bastards.