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Defending Ed Abbey's Environmentalism A Rebuttal to The Woman Thing

By Mark Richards

The August-September issue of Inside/Outside magazine was billed as "A Tribute to Cactus Ed." I sat with a cup of morning coffee in hand thoroughly enjoying the articles celebrating Ed and his body of work, until I came across a critique of Edward Abbey the man, written by Katharine Niles and titled, "My Abbey-esque Response to, Well, Abbey."

Here was Niles telling us that she had "suspicions" that "Ed's environmentalism wasn't ultimately about becoming reunited with earth, not about fusing the split this culture generates between humans and the rest of the natural world, but about getting to be a free-rompin' gun-totin' beer can throwin' rugged individualist in the only land left big enough to let such a creature out . . .. And if it's true, then he's . . . full of the kinds of attitudes about what it means to be a man, and what wilderness and women mean within that context, that have brought us to the brink of ruin in the first place."

I began shaking, fumbled my cup of coffee, burned my thigh, and obscenities tumbled from my lips. My wife of 26 years, my high school sweetheart sitting in the other room of our cabin, asked, "What the hell is wrong with you this morning?"

"What's wrong with me? What's wrong with me! You won't believe what this critic just implied about Abbey!"

And just what did Niles base her "suspicions" of Ed Abbey's environmentalism upon?

The "Woman Thing."

Just what the Woman Thing is wasn't made exactly clear, though Niles made references to the Cheyenne belief that you can judge "how truly 'civilized' a culture is" by taking a "good look at how women are treated within it," and to Black Panther founder Eldridge Cleaver bragging in his book, Soul on Ice, that he was a rapist. Just after doing so, she begins the next paragraph with the line: "Not that Ed was that bad."

What Cleaver and the Cheyenne belief really have to do with Abbey's environmentalism, again, is unclear, but Niles later says that she spends "a great deal of time looking at the tracks people leave, not the words they speak. And Ed's tracks, with five wives and a good ol' boy attitude toward what Erica Jong called the Zipless F*ck, aren't so hot."

Mathematically, her argument adds up thusly: Patriarchal societies that treat women unfairly also mistreat the Earth. Ed was part and parcel of our patriarchal culture, and he himself, according to Niles' suspicions, mistreated or disrespected women. Therefore, Ed Abbey didn't really care about the Earth as he said he did. A + B = C, simple as that.

I could quote at length from Ed's journals (Confessions of a Barbarian), which expose his soft underbelly to the world and open all his closets for skeleton viewing, and which at times do make it appear that he disrespected women. The operative word is "appear," for one has to read the full journals to see him grow as a person and explain and even apologize for his behavior at times. Ed was, after all, a mere mortal, not some God. He was far from perfect (as we all are), and faced the same trials and tribulations in life that we all do with relationships, work, friends and family.

One quote from Confessions in particular is relevant here, because Niles said that "good, creative, useful anger" - an Abbey trademark - "rings truest [for her] if it comes out of the mouth of a woman."

Ed's thoughts, from July 5, 1973: "I find, more than ever, that I respect only men - and women - who can act, who can do good things well, who are responsible to others, who are honest in all ways, who really care about this earth we live on."

Ed didn't always live up to the "responsible to others" part, in terms of his wives and children . . . and he admitted as much. Maybe this Woman Thing is about some who can't get past that. One thing, however, that Abbey understood - and that Niles doesn't seem to - is that the truth espoused by good, creative, useful anger isn't (nor should it be) dependent upon gender.

Did Abbey disrespect women? Niles asks for confirmation that "maybe late in life he got a clue." And she says that, "until other genuine evidence is in," she'll hold on to her suspicions about Abbey's environmentalism. Sigh . . . this misplaced righteous anger that seeks to paint Abbey as a poseur in terms of his environmentalism deeply saddens me.

Ed once remarked, "Women: I only got the ones who wanted me."

Let's give these women some credit and responsibility for all this, too. I know and respect women too much to do otherwise. What's ultimately distressing about Niles' critique is that it was ironically a damning appraisal of every woman Ed was ever with.

Edward Abbey was an iconic environmentalist. He deeply cared about the Earth for the same reasons so many of us do. To question these facts about him, as Niles has done, and the way she did it, is absurd.

[Postscript: At the end of Niles' essay, she states that Abbey's body was picked apart by ravens after he died, and her bio asserts that "she would just as soon let ravens pick her apart at death as he did." Ed was buried by close friends and family in the desert, as was his wish, a fact widely known by those who read about Abbey before they write about him.]

Mark Richards lives and writes from his home deep in the Alaskan bush, where for the last 25 years he and his wife, Lori, have lived a subsistence lifestyle while raising three children, along with a few generations of beloved sled dogs.