Desert Solitaire. Edward Abbey

is not often compared to British writers, but at moments such as these he reminds me strongly of Nan Shepherd, who writes in The Living Mountain (1977) of following the ‘white waters’ of the Cairngorms back up to their source on the plateau, and by so doing placing herself at risk. ‘[T]his journey to the sources is not to be undertaken lightly,’ writes Nan. ‘One walks among elementals, and elementals are not governable.’ The Cairngorms are Nan’s desert; the running mountain water that ‘does nothing, absolutely nothing but be itself’ is Nan’s sandstone. I think also of J.A. Baker’s The Peregrine, a book published the year before Desert Solitaire, which shares a keen sense of species-shame with Abbey’s book, and a horror at the speed with which human activity is depredating the living world. Baker’s ‘season of hawk-hunting’ begins in autumn, ends in spring, and ‘winter glitters between like the arch of Orion’. Abbey’s ‘season in the wilderness’ begins in spring, ends in autumn, and between them the summer sun glitters off the sandstone arches. Both Baker and Abbey explicitly frame their books as elegies for landscapes that are ‘dying’: the pesticide-ravaged Essex countryside of Baker, and the development-menaced desert for Abbey. There is, too, in Abbey’s love of getting down on his belly to see what the world looks like to an ant or a lizard, something of the country-parson tradition of British natural-historical enquiry – though one can’t imagine Gilbert White or Francis Kilvert describing ants as ‘neurotic little pismires’.

      Surely the oddest word in Desert Solitaire, though, is ‘lovely’. Abbey uses it repeatedly: ten times in the opening two chapters alone. ‘Instead of loneliness I feel loveliness,’ he writes. ‘The very names [of rocks] are lovely,’ he declares a few pages later, before incanting stone-types: ‘chalcedony, carnelian, jasper, chrysoprase and agate, onyx and sardonyx, flint [and] chert’ (if Abbey were a stone, he would surely be sardonyx). To hear the genteel term ‘lovely’ dropping from the lips of this beer-drinking, snake-shooting ‘desert rat’, nicknamed ‘Cactus Ed’ for his spikiness, is bewildering – as if he might suddenly also eat cucumber sandwiches with the crusts off and raise his little finger while sipping tea from porcelain cups.

      But then voice is another aspect of this book’s inconsistencies: tonally, it can veer from barfly to baroque and back again in the course of a page. One of my favourite passages is where Abbey describes a pair of mating snakes as they ‘intertwine and separate, glide side by side in perfect congruence, turn like mirror images of each other and glide back again, wind and unwind again’. How sinuously Abbey doubles and echoes his own language in this self-entwining sentence! But another of my favourite passages is where he rages magnificently against ‘Industrial Tourism’ and the locust-like greed of the hordes who come to consume the desert through windshield and camera-lens: ‘Look here, I want to say, for godsake folks get out of them there machines, take off those fucking sunglasses and unpeel both eyeballs, look around; throw away those goddamned idiotic cameras! … and walk – walk – WALK upon our sweet and blessed land.’ The result of this mix of folksy fury and elaborate beauty is a book structured not unlike the ‘Spanish bayonet’ plant that Abbey admires at one point, a yucca with a ‘heavy cluster’ of gorgeous flowers, protected by an ‘untouchable dagger’s nest’ of leaves.

      There are, unmistakably, aspects of Abbey’s book that make very uncomfortable reading today – and that should have made uncomfortable reading half a century ago. He is brazenly ableist and casually sexist. His desert is almost wholly a man’s desert. His adventures are undertaken exclusively with men. When women do feature, they are present as the wives of prospectors or park rangers, given passing mention at best; or they exist as problematic metaphors: the cliff-rose is ‘gay and sweet as a pretty girl’; after desert rain, a flower blooms ‘suddenly and gloriously, like a maiden’. Sentences describing the Navajo as ‘the Negroes of the Southwest – red black men’ who, ‘like their cousins in the big cities … turn for solace, quite naturally, to alcohol and drugs’, are unacceptable in ways that do not need unpacking.

      It’s tempting to excuse these prejudices as subsets of an encompassing misanthropy, but that won’t do. Better to call him out on them – but also to note that Abbey himself hates haters, and that none of his prejudices is a simple case of rank bias. One of the four eco-terrorist heroes of The Monkey Wrench Gang is a formidable revolutionary feminist (though her portrayal is satirical as well as admiring), and it is obvious that, despite his intermittently objectionable language, Abbey’s respect for Native Americans is considerable. He suggests that much of western science has been anticipated by indigenous cultural knowledge, and commends the sophistication of the desert art and architecture of both the Navajo and the Anasazi, ‘the old people’. His anger flares at the way the Navajo have been cleared from desert lands and penned in reservations: ‘the Navajos are people, not personnel.’ And Abbey’s contempt for the nameless interlocutor who advances the wisdom of anti-Semitism at the book’s end is total and uncompromising.

      In 2005 the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht coined the term ‘solastalgia’ to mean a ‘form of psychic or existential distress caused by environmental change’. Albrecht was studying the effects of long-term drought and large-scale mining activity on the well-being of communities in New South Wales, when he realized that no word existed to describe the unhappiness of people whose landscapes were being transformed about them. He proposed his new term to describe this distinctive kind of homesickness. Where the pain of nostalgia arises from moving away, the pain of solastalgia arises from staying put. Where the pain of nostalgia can be mitigated by return, the pain of solastalgia tends to be irreversible.

      Solastalgia is not a malady specific to the present – we might think of John Clare as a solastalgic poet, witnessing the countryside of his native Northamptonshire disrupted by enclosure in the 1810s – but it has without doubt flourished recently. ‘A worldwide increase in ecosystem distress syndromes,’ wrote Albrecht, is ‘matched by a corresponding increase in human distress syndromes’. Solastalgia speaks of a modern uncanny, then, in which a familiar place is rendered unrecognizable by forces beyond individual control (climate change, global corporations): the home becomes suddenly unhomely around its inhabitants.

      Desert Solitaire is, unmistakably, a work of solastalgia. Abbey’s ‘distress’ is channelled largely as anger, but what pains him is seeing the landscapes he loves transformed or destroyed by large-scale human intervention. The rafting trip he takes down Glen Canyon with Ralph Newcomb, shortly before that stretch of the Colorado was drowned by damming to form Lake Powell, is the most agonizedly solastalgic chapter in the book: ‘Glen Canyon was a living thing, irreplaceable,’ writes Abbey furiously, ‘which can never be recovered through any human agency.’ The account of his journey through this doomed place is superb for its range, its rage, its beauty and its comedy (the only map the two carry with them is a Texaco road map of the state of Utah; a detail which fascinatingly anticipates the ‘oil-company map’ carried by father and boy in Cormac McCarthy’s Anthropocene novel, The Road). I still remember reading the Glen Canyon chapter for the first time fifteen years ago: jaw-dropped at the mysterious, off-planet beauty of the region through which the men raft on their ‘dream-like voyage’, gobsmacked at the loss of this mystery to the silt-sump of Lake Powell. That chapter, more than any other, advanced powerfully to me the idea of ‘irreplaceability’ as a conservation cornerstone: the proposition that certain landscapes are unique such that their loss cannot be ‘offset’ by some form of compensatory habitat creation.

      Abbey’s identity politics have not weathered well, but his thinking about conservation and wilderness was in several ways ahead of its time. In his arguments for sentience and emotion on the part of creaturely life, he foresaw what is known as the ‘more-than-human turn’ across the social sciences and the humanities. In his repeated calls for the re-introduction of apex predators into ecosystems, he – like Aldo Leopold – prepared the way for later work on trophic cascades, and successful megafauna reintroduction programmes such as that of the wolf into Yellowstone, with all its consequent transformations of that area. Abbey’s disdain for sheep as ‘hooved locusts’ finds echoes in George Monbiot’s campaign for a British re-wilding movement to prevent the ‘sheep-wrecking’ of landscapes by overgrazing.

      It is though, surely, in its defence of wilderness as a biophysical reality, with biodiversity