Zusammenfassung
Zusammenfassung
Ex-Green Beret George Hayduke has returned from war to find his beloved southwestern desert threatened by industrial development. Joining with Bronx exile and feminist saboteur Bonnie Abzug, wilderness guide and outcast Mormon Seldom Seen Smith, and libertarian billboard torcher Doc Sarvis, M.D., Hayduke is ready to fight the power-taking on the strip miners, clear-cutters, and the highway, dam, and bridge builders who are threatening the natural habitat. The Monkey Wrench Gang is on the move-and peaceful coexistence be damned!
Rezensionen (2)
Guardian Review
'My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving." Thus the career plan of George Washington Hayduke, hard-nut hero of Edward Abbey's 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang . Pro-conservation, pro-guns and extremely pro-booze, anti-mining, anti-tourism and extremely anti-dams, Hayduke appoints himself protector of the remaining desert regions of the American southwest, and becomes a pioneer in the art of "eco-tage", also known as "monkey wrenching" - using the tools of industry to demolish the infrastructure of industry in the name of the biosphere. Hayduke is joined by three other activists - an anarchist doctor, a revolutionary feminist and a polygamist river guide - and this quartet of Quixotes heads out into red-rock country to wage war on techno-industry. They pour sand into the fuel tanks of bulldozers. They drive quarry lorries over canyon rims. They blast power lines and disrupt strip mines. Their weapons are audacity, wit and gelignite. Their grail is the destruction of the Glen Canyon Dam that blocks the Colorado river (and, it should be noted, still does). Crunch! Kapow! Crash! Bang! The Monkey Wrench Gang is the wish-fulfilment dream of eco-Luddites everywhere. Civilisation violates the land, so Hayduke ("a good, healthy psychopath") and his pals violate civilisation. Crucially, people go unharmed in Abbey's novel. Machinery is smashed and split, exploded and eviscerated; but drivers and technicians escape. The only vital fluids that get spilt are oil, coolant and petrol. In this way, activism remains ethically distinct from terrorism. The beef of the Monkey Wrench Gang is not with the personnel of the "megalomaniacal megamachine", but with its material and ideological manifestations. The battle they fight is against developments and double-lane highways, and against the economic principle of maximised shareholder profit and the economic delusion of unlimited growth. The Monkey Wrench Gang is a magnificent snarl of genres: spaghetti westerns tangled up with the Keystone Cops, the Cervantean romance tradition and Acme cartoon capers (in an ending that comes straight from the Wile E Coyote school of resurrection, Hayduke plummets over a canyon edge and falls thousands of feet - only to reappear a few pages later, wounded but well). As a reader, Abbey had gorged on pulpfiction, and he took from the yellowbacks a Manichaean world of good (in his case, wilderness and the Pleistocene) and evil (techno-industry and the Anthropocene). In Abbey's wild west, four lone rangers (the joke is his) ride out to administer frontier justice. Land-grabbers replace cattle rustlers, mining corporations substitute for "injun" tribes, sandstone swaps for sage-brush - but the basic western traits of self-sufficiency and casual misogyny persist. Blended with all the dime-store westernism is a hippy anarchism, such that the novel's overall effect comes to resemble a pair of riding chaps woven from hemp and sported by Kropotkin. Abbey spent years in grad school in New Mexico during the 1950s, flipping between the library and the landscape. His master's thesis was entitled "Anarchism and the Morality of Violence", and it compared Godwin, Proudhon and Bakunin. When he wasn't writing his thesis (which was most of the time), he was working as a fire-watcher and forest ranger in the national parks of the southwest. During those years, he thought his way through and beyond Thoreauvian civil disobedience, and into the world of direct action. He tested out his conclusions in non-fiction in the bestselling and bracingly grumpy Desert Solitaire (1968), and then fictionally in The Monkey Wrench Gang . When it was published, Jim Harrison described it approvingly in a New York Times review as "a violently revolutionary novel". So it proved to be. Every now and then, the imaginary forms of literature feed back into the lived world with startling consequence. They assume real-world agency in ways that exceed the cliche of "life imitating art". Abbey's novel triggered one of these unusual feedback events. "This book, though fictional in form," he wrote in an enigmatic epigraph, "is based strictly on historical fact. Everything in it is real or actually happened. And it all began just one year from today." His prediction was correct, but inaccurate. It took four years, not one, for his novel to become "real" - to "begin". In 1979 the eco-activist group Earth First! was founded by a quartet of hard-drinking conservationists who had read deeply in Abbey. Like Hayduke, they were cynical of legislative process and drawn to direct action. Biodiversity was their summum bonum , and the desert states were their preferred zones of operation. Their platform included negative population growth - and a wilderness designation for the moon. Their violence was, at least to begin with, aimed at machines and not men. They proclaimed a radical rather than a reform environmentalism, mixing direct action with a kind of guerrilla theatre that anticipated the goofy goodwill performance art of contemporary climate-change activism. Earth First! was openly inspired by Abbey's novel. Dave Foreman, one of the four founders, published a now-notorious manual for direct action entitled Ecodefense: A Field Guide To Monkeywrenching . In March 1981 the Earth Firsters unrolled a 300ft-long black plastic "crack" down the side of Glen Canyon Dam, thereby accomplishing - at least metaphorically - Hayduke's dream of its demolition. Abbey had been tipped off about the event, and was there to see it happen, watching quietly from the edge of the canyon. He was thus able to witness his imagined scenario of the actual destruction of the Dam, converted into an actual scenario of the imagined destruction of the Dam. His provocative foreword ("Everything in it is real") had proved complicatedly self-fulfilling. It's because of moments like this that The Monkey Wrench Gang can usefully help us to think about the ways in which environmental politics might not only be distantly influenced by literature, but in some sense produced by literature. Abbey's novel also, I think, helps to make visible an important difference between the north American and British traditions of environmental literature: viz, that the American tradition possesses a pragmatic, effective streak which is largely lacking in Britain. American environmental writing has generally been more applied, in both senses, than its British counterpart. One thinks of John Muir's essays, which determined the national-parks policy of Theodore Roosevelt, and inspired the founding of the Sierra Club; of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), which caused the banning of DDT in the US and arguably stimulated the creation in 1970 of SEPA (the State Environmental Protection Agency); of Aldo Leopold's account in A Sand County Almanac (1949) of "the land ethic" and its impact on conservation practice; of Bill McKibben's visionary The End of Nature (1989), the first book on climate change written for a general audience; and of the vast and as yet unmapped influence of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006). The same year that The Monkey Wrench Gang was published, Gary Snyder's Pulitzer-prizewinning Turtle Island appeared, containing his commanding essay "Four Changes". Snyder dealt with the problems of Population, Pollution and Consumption, before proposing a means of Transformation. "We have it within our deepest powers," he concluded hopefully, "not only to change ourselves but to change our culture." The essay is being reissued this autumn as a stand-alone pamphlet by Artesian Press, in advance of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December. It is hard to come up with a list of such consequential environmental works from Britain. Richard Mabey's brilliant Food For Free changed the eating practices, if not the eating habits, of millions. Recent works on climate change by Mark Lynas and George Monbiot might count. But on the whole, British environmental writing has tended to be gentler in its manners and less roustabout in its aims. It has urged, not resistance, but refocusing. Edward Abbey's prose rasps you like sandstone, roughs you up, kicks your arse off the page and out into the land. Nothing like it has emerged in Britain. Perhaps the key ethical principle of British environmental literature has been that making us see differently is an essential precursor to making us act differently. So it is that each new generation of British environmental writers finds itself trying to design the literary equivalent of the "killer app": the glittering argument or stylistic turn that will produce an epiphany in scep tical readers, and so persuade them to change their behaviour. I used to believe in the possibility of this killer app, both as a reader and a writer. But I'm increasingly unsure of its existence. Or, if it exists, of its worth. At least in my experience, environmental literature in Britain gets read almost exclusively by the converted to the converted, and its meaningful ethical impact is minimal tending to zero. As Vernon Klinkenbourg noted with glum elegance last year, most documents of environmental literature are "minority reports - sometimes a minority of one. The assumptions, the hopes, the arguments [of such literature] are contradicted by the way the vast majority of us live, and by the political and economic structures that determine that lifestyle . . . sceptical readers so seldom pick up this kind of writing, or submit to its evidence." And yet. There are the examples of Abbey, Carson, Leopold, Snyder, McCarthy to bear in mind, American in origin but global in consequence. And I remain drawn to the idea that, as Wendell Berry put it, environmentally we require not "the piecemeal technological solutions that our society now offers, but . . . a change of cultural (and economic) values that will encourage in the whole population the necessary respect, restraint, and care." In my experience, Berry - a farmer and a writer - speaks only the crash-tested truth, and I suspect he has got it right again in this case. Over the past few years in Britain, there has been a heavy investment in the idea that creative responses to environmental crisis might - to borrow a phrase from Margaret Atwood's new eco-dystopia, After The Flood - "move public opinion in a more biosphere-friendly direction". Organisations such as TippingPoint, Cape Farewell, the Ashden Directory and the RSA (with its ambitious Arts & Ecology programme) and the Cambridge-based Cultures of Climate Change group have brought environmental scientists together with sculptors, poets, novelists, dancers, dramatists, essayists and poets to puzzle out the potentials of biotically-minded art. Or, as the TippingPoint manifesto puts it, to "harness the power of the imagination to stabilise the climate" (the metaphors are mixed but the intent is clear and admirable). Earlier this summer, an event called "Changing Climate Stories" was put on at the TwoDegrees festival. Its premise was that all storytelling is "performative", in the sense of committing an action or possessing agency. And its optimistic conclusion was that literature is not only science's accomplice but also its superior, at least in terms of imaginatively inhabiting the dark futures that science's climate models are currently predicting for the earth. Simultaneous with this new wave of eco-artists has been a new wave of eco-activists, carrying out direct actions at Drax, Kingsnorth, the Houses of Parliament, the London headquarters of RBS. These actions recall the stunts of Earth First! in its opening decade, as well as the Dada-inspired street-theatre of early Greenpeace and, perhaps, some of Hayduke's more moderate interventions into Abbey's fictional desert world. Many of these new activists are young, and a significant number are recent graduates, emerging from universities across Britain and moving almost immediately into environmental action. It would be fascinating to know what literary works have shaped the message and medium of their politics; and to learn who, if anybody, is their Edward Abbey. Caption: article-Rereading26.1 'My job is to save the fucking wilderness. I don't know anything else worth saving." Thus the career plan of George Washington Hayduke, hard-nut hero of Edward Abbey's 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang . Pro-conservation, pro-guns and extremely pro-booze, anti-mining, anti-tourism and extremely anti-dams, Hayduke appoints himself protector of the remaining desert regions of the American southwest, and becomes a pioneer in the art of "eco-tage", also known as "monkey wrenching" - using the tools of industry to demolish the infrastructure of industry in the name of the biosphere. One thinks of John Muir's essays, which determined the national-parks policy of Theodore Roosevelt, and inspired the founding of the Sierra Club; of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), which caused the banning of DDT in the US and arguably stimulated the creation in 1970 of SEPA (the State Environmental Protection Agency); of Aldo Leopold's account in A Sand County Almanac (1949) of "the land ethic" and its impact on conservation practice; of Bill McKibben's visionary The End of Nature (1989), the first book on climate change written for a general audience; and of the vast and as yet unmapped influence of Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006). The same year that The Monkey Wrench Gang was published, Gary Snyder's Pulitzer-prizewinning Turtle Island appeared, containing his commanding essay "Four Changes". Snyder dealt with the problems of Population, Pollution and Consumption, before proposing a means of Transformation. "We have it within our deepest powers," he concluded hopefully, "not only to change ourselves but to change our culture." The essay is being reissued this autumn as a stand-alone pamphlet by Artesian Press, in advance of the Copenhagen Climate Change Conference in December. Over the past few years in Britain, there has been a heavy investment in the idea that creative responses to environmental crisis might - to borrow a phrase from Margaret Atwood's new eco-dystopia, After The Flood - "move public opinion in a more biosphere-friendly direction". Organisations such as TippingPoint, Cape Farewell, the Ashden Directory and the RSA (with its ambitious Arts & Ecology programme) and the Cambridge-based Cultures of Climate Change group have brought environmental scientists together with sculptors, poets, novelists, dancers, dramatists, essayists and poets to puzzle out the potentials of biotically-minded art. Or, as the TippingPoint manifesto puts it, to "harness the power of the imagination to stabilise the climate" (the metaphors are mixed but the intent is clear and admirable). Earlier this summer, an event called "Changing Climate Stories" was put on at the TwoDegrees festival. Its premise was that all storytelling is "performative", in the sense of committing an action or possessing agency. And its optimistic conclusion was that literature is not only science's accomplice but also its superior, at least in terms of imaginatively inhabiting the dark futures that science's climate models are currently predicting for the earth. - Robert Macfarlane.
Kirkus-Rezension
If you can imagine any sympathy at all for the Luddites then you can't help but cheer on this likable but unlikely quartet of modern-day industrial saboteurs or ""environmental activists"" doing their part to keep the American Southwest ""as it was."" There's A. K. Sarvis, M.D., libertarian and philosopher of the group who burns billboards in his off-hours; his friend, Ms. Bonnie Abbzug, formerly of the Bronx, academic drop-out, constructor of her own geodesic dome; Seldom Seen Smith, Mormon, wilderness guide, polygamist; and George Washington Hayduke, ex-Green Beret, demolitions expert, definitely on the crazy side as a result of his Vietnam experiences. Bankrolled by Doc, the four declare their private war against a consortium of oil, power and coal companies, road builders, land developers and strip miners. They blow up bridges, derail trains, incapacitate tractors, bulldozers, caterpillars and other mechanizes monsters in their path. It's nice that no one gets hurt. Or even goes to jail, thanks to Doe's money and some nifty legal manipulation. But then that might mean more complications than even a well-paced, information-crammed, up-to-date farce could stand. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.