The two Edward Abbeys

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A father of five and a supposed anarchist who admired Thoreau’s dictum, “That government is best which governs not at all,” an implacable enemy of the “Anthill State” which was a “technocratic despotism…the enemy of personal liberty, family independence, and community sovereignty,” Abbey was also an advocate for state-imposed birth control. The protagonist of his book Brave Cowboy, Jack Burns, was an archetypical old-fashioned, freedom-loving, authority-hating, barbed-wire loathing cowboy. Abbey grew up idolizing cowboys. For a brief time, he cowboyed. But he hated cowboys. He hated the ranchers who employed them. And he once quipped that if he had enough money, he’d run off and buy a ranch. He also hated cows but loved steak. He personally didn’t like walking. He avoided it when possible. He tore up the desert and ran down closed roads in his famously decrepit pickup truck. But when it came to the approaches of the southwest desert’s natural wonders, he wanted everybody else to walk in. He advised visitors to crawl. He was a “hard-nosed empiricist” who believed in what he could “hear, see, smell, grab, bite into.” And he thought that the whole earth was a living being and that rocks had rights....