The Monkey Wrench Gang
Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang is a madcap tale of four unlikely companions united by their love of untrammeled wilderness and detestation of unfettered industrialism destroying the natural beauty of the southwestern United States. These avengers of humanity’s wrongs against nature engage in acts of industrial sabotage across Utah and Arizona. The novel chronicles their adventures in a narrative style unique to Edward Abbey yet with an energy reminiscent of the gonzo journalism of Hunter S. Thompson and a sardonic wit akin to some of the other counter-cultural writers of the 1960s and 1970s such as Michael Herr (Dispatches), Kurt Vonnegut (Breakfast of Champions), and Charles Bukowski (Post Office).
Although the novel is decidedly in favor of environmental activism, its characters are aware of the irony that they themselves are contributing to its degradation by driving around in cars and littering in the desert. In their minds, though, they are working for a higher purpose, a sentiment revealed by the character Seldom Seen Smith in a prayer: “Dear old God, you know and I know what it was like here, before them bastards from Washington moved in and ruined it all. You remember the river, how fat and golden it was in June […] How about a little old pre-cision earthquake right under this dam?” (p. 33). God performs no miracles for these characters, so they take it upon themselves to restore the wilderness to the state in which God had left it before humanity began paving it with roads, blighting it with billboards, bridging the canyons, and damming the rivers.
The novel is replete with descriptions of environmental degradation caused by human activity. This includes the flooding of canyons, the demolition of escarpments and ridges, the bulldozing of vegetation, and the general destruction of animal habitats. The characters also note the adverse health effects on humans, particularly the Native American tribes that live near coal-burning powerplants such as the “Navajo Power Plant, named in honor of the Indians whose lungs the plant was
treating with sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide, nitrous oxide, carbon monoxide, sulfuric acid, fly ash, and other forms of particulate matter” (pp. 34–35). In this way, readers are reminded that environmental concerns aren’t simply about landscape aesthetics and wildlife preservation but are also about human health.
Who the gang blames for defiling the wilderness and poisoning the air isn’t reductive. They do not pin blame on a single scapegoat, such as a corporation, and instead cast a wide net that ultimately implicates nearly everyone, including themselves. In one passage, highway engineers are derided as dreaming of “the planet Earth with all irregularities removed, highways merely painted on a surface smooth as glass. […] they are patient tireless little fellows; they keep hustling on, like termites in a termitorium” (p. 80). In this imaginative passage, the engineers aren’t conspiring—this is merely the logical outcome of their jobs if left unchecked. It isn’t just engineers: tourists, government agencies, Native Americans, and everyone else are held to blame, some aware of the destruction they wreak and others unwitting contributors. The gang considers all of them either directly or indirectly responsible for the growth of cities such as Las Vegas and Phoenix beyond what the land could sustain and for the further degradation of the land due to the extraction of resources needed to build the cities and provide electricity and water to their ever-growing populations.
Abbey uses various narrative strategies in the novel, including anthropomorphism—the ascription to non-human beings and inanimate objects certain human characteristics. For example, as bulldozers plow over pinyon pines and juniper, the novel anthropomorphizes both the machines and the trees: “The crawler-tractors pushed them all over with nonchalant ease and shoved them aside, smashed and bleeding […] left to die and decompose” (p. 79). It is notable that the workers driving the tractors are not specified, so the tractors themselves appear autonomous, while also serving as synecdoche for the human drivers and the corporations that ordered them into action. Later, the gang avenges the deaths of the trees by sabotaging the tractors, with Hayduke using a wrench to drain their oil: “The great machine began to bleed; its lifeblood drained out with pulsing throbs, onto the dust and sand” (p. 92). Like the trees, the machines are anthropomorphized, their oil metaphorically transformed into blood. But the machines don’t receive the same sympathy as the trees, upon whose fate the novel muses: “No one knows precisely how sentient is a pinyon pine, for example, or to what degree such woody organisms can feel pain or fear […] but this much is clearly established as scientific fact: a living tree, once uprooted, takes many days to wholly die” (p. 72). In this way, the novel uses anthropomorphism to pull at the reader’s conscience by questioning long-held human assumptions about the sentience of vegetation.
The Monkey Wrench Gang also draws explicit attention to the practice of greenwashing, which by 1975 had already been a strategy of corporate polluters for several decades, although the term was not coined until 1986. Greenwashing enters the novel when Dr. Sarvis turns on the television and notices:
“the commercials full of sly art and eco-porn. Scenes of Louisiana bayous, strange birds in slow-motion flight, cypress trees bearded with Spanish moss. Above the primeval scene the voice of Power spoke, reeking with sincerity, in praise of itself, the Exxon Oil Company—its tidiness, its fastidious care for all things wild, its concern for human needs. […] Long shot of an offshore drilling rig. Music rising on conluding phrase. The words ‘We thought you’d like to know’ passing across the screen” (p. 236).
The commercial described here is not dissimilar to the 1985 Chevron campaign described in the article “The Troubling Evolution of Corporate Greenwashing” (Watson, 2016): “the campaign showed Chevron employees protecting bears, butterflies, sea turtles and all manner of cute and cuddly animals.” It remains reminiscent of any number of commercials airing in the early 21st century by oil and gas companies. And it highlights the deceptive PR and hypocrisy of these companies, who have long known about the dangers their actions posed to the climate and to human health, yet worked repeatedly to deceive the public.
In the face of the continued destruction of wilderness and obstinate posture of fossil fuel companies, The Monkey Wrench Gang inspired eco-activists in the 1970s and 1980s. Ultimately, despite some sexist language and slurs, The Monkey Wrench Gang remains well worth reading today. In particular, I think it makes for an interesting companion to Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory (2015) and to the historical nonfiction book Cadillac Desert (1993). The cities that Abbey laments in The Monkey Wrench Gang in 1975 have since grown exponentially, and their competition for scarce water and resources has only intensified. One novel that images a future in which that competition turns violent is The Water Knife (2015) by Paolo Bacigalupi, which was our reading group selection in December 2023 and which I also highly recommend.
Additional Resources
Dembicki, Geoff. “US oil company ran 1977 article predicting climate crisis could cause starvation.” The Guardian, 18 July 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/18/us-oil-marathon-petroleum-climate-change.
Noor, Dharna. “Big oil spent decades sowing doubt about fossil fuel dangers, experts testify.” The Guardian, 1 May 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/may/01/big-oil-danger-disinformation-fossil-fuels.
