In Defense of Walden and Desert Solitaire

In Defense of Walden and Desert Solitaire
31 March 2014
M. Burget

Our Chief Scientist here at The Nature Conservancy, Peter Kareiva, surprised some of us when he ridiculed as hypocrites the American writers Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and Edward Abbey (1927-1989) in a series of speeches, some now easily found in a quick web search.

Intrigued by the charges, I felt compelled to do some reading. It took some time, but I went back to review what Thoreau wrote in Walden and Abbey wrote in Desert Solitaire. Having done my homework, I believe that Peter missed the enduring message of both books.


Let’s address Thoreau first. Even if you have not read Walden, you may have seen this oft-quoted passage:

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.

Perhaps based on this and other select passages, Peter asserts that Thoreau was a fake because while he sat and wrote about nature in the woods at Walden Pond, Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, washed his laundry at home in town.

This critique misses the point of the book. Although Thoreau extols the virtues of solitude, he does not claim that he was living a wholly solitary life in an untouched wilderness. In Walden, he writes openly about his walks into the nearby town, he writes about the nearby train tracks and whistling locomotives carrying goods and people to and fro, and he talks extensively about his neighbors, in one passage celebrating the fact that although he had only three chairs (“one for solitude, two for friendship, three for society”) he could fit twenty-five friends into his little cabin:

It is surprising how many great men and women a small house will contain. I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another.

Thoreau did not claim to be living a life wholly removed from the rest of humanity. What he did claim is that sitting quietly in observation of nature rather than responding to the 1850’s equivalent of endless emails is a good idea from time to time, especially if you want to clear your addled brain and get a different perspective on things. Here is a passage that I think is especially funny:

For my part, I could easily do without the post-office. I think that there are very few important communications made through it. To speak critically, I never received more than one or two letters in my life—I wrote this some years ago—that were worth the postage.

In short, the main message that I take from reading Walden, a message perhaps as old as humanity itself, is this: A walkabout in nature is good for us every now and then.

How good? Well, the author who practiced thoughtful interludes in nature also developed and socialized a theory justifying civil disobedience, a theory that inspired some remarkable people who came a bit later and did extraordinary things. Both Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King openly celebrated their debt to Thoreau’s essay Civil Disobedience. And of course it doesn’t take a giant leap to get from King and Gandhi to the extraordinary life of Nelson Mandela.

Thoreau didn’t stop at theory. He was an inspired abolitionist in the years leading up to the American Civil War, perhaps the most prominent and essential defender of the abolitionist martyr John Brown. Some have argued that without Thoreau there would have been no John Brown phenom and without John Brown there would have been a much longer delayed emancipation.

Long and short -- good things followed from Thoreau’s contemplation at Walden Pond, even if he walked into town every now and then to grab a home cooked meal and clean laundry.

But my primary purpose here is not to defend Thoreau (I think his life’s work defends itself pretty well). I want to focus on Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire.

About Edward Abbey, here is what Peter said, after researching Abbey’s personal journals:

Edward Abbey wrote a book called Desert Solitaire. A fascinating book. I loved it. I recently discovered his personal journals. In Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey has a couple lines in there in one of the opening chapters about sitting out there in Utah and being by himself looking up at the stars and writing poetically about: “Oh I am alone, there's nobody else around, it is beautiful I feel nothing but exhilaration and happiness.” At the same time, in his personal diary, he wrote: “Oh my God I'm so lonely why did my wife Rita have to go back to New Jersey?” It's a lie! It's a total lie.

Not surprisingly, this got a lot of attention from people who found it convenient fodder. The “Breakthrough Institute” has posted it on their website, cleverly flashing the headline “It’s a lie!” Bloggers, some very prominent (for example, Andrew Revkin of the New York Times), have cited this passage as evidence of an over-reaching, overly alarmist environmental community in the United States.

So because of all of this, I found a copy of Desert Solitaire and I spent a weekend reading (thank goodness!). I wanted to see for myself whether Edward Abbey, icon of the conservation movement in the American Southwest, really was a hypocrite.

Here I found Abbey, writing in Desert Solitaire about living in the middle of Arches National Monument (now Park) in Southern Utah:

But how, you might ask, does living outdoors on the terrace enable me to escape that other form of isolation, the solitary confinement of the mind? For there are the bad moments, or were, especially at the beginning of my life here, when I would sit down at the table for supper inside the house trailer and discover with a sudden shock that I was alone. There was nobody, nobody at all, on the other side of the table. Aloneness became loneliness and the sensation was strong enough to remind me (how could I have forgotten?) that the one thing better than solitude, the only thing better than solitude, is society.

By society I do not mean the roar of city streets or the cultured and cultural talk of the schoolmen (reach for your revolver!) or human life in general. I mean the society of a friend or friends or a good, friendly woman.

From this passage alone, it’s rather clear that Edward Abbey openly and directly confessed his loneliness out there in the beautiful desert.

This passage is no aberration. Toward the end of the book, Desert Solitaire builds to a crescendo, a conclusion -- the lesson. The chapters extolling the virtues of that remote canyon country, and the chapters decrying quotidian stupidity, inhuman bureaucracies, inhumane corporations, callous disregard for other living creatures, and, yes, also decrying the racism of those times, the chapters of Desert Solitaire build to a grand conclusion in the book’s final pages.

Expecting Abbey to close with praise for wilderness solitude, imagine my surprise when I read the following passage at the end of the book (the part you are meant to read carefully):

Balance, that's the secret. Moderate extremism. The best of both worlds. […] After twenty-six weeks of sunlight and stars, wind and sky and golden sand, I want to hear once more the cackle of clamshells on the floor of the bar in the Clam Broth House in Hoboken. I long for a view of the jolly, rosy faces on 42nd Street and the cheerful throngs on the sidewalks of Atlantic Avenue. Enough of Land's End, Dead Horse Point, Tukuhnikivats and other high resolves; I want to see somebody jump out of window or off a roof. I grow weary of nobody's company but my own--let me hear the wit and wisdom of the subway crowds again, the cabdriver's shrewd aphorisms, the genial chuckle of a Jersey City cop, the happy laughter of Greater New York's one million illegitimate children.

If I'm serious, and I am, the desert has driven me crazy. Not that I mind…

Okay, one might say, but Abbey still exaggerated, talking about pristine wilderness, fooling an entire generation into believing that wilderness is special because it is so fragile.

Well, here is what I found in the closing pages of Desert Solitaire:

The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert. Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelop the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas--the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course. I have seen the place called Trinity in New Mexico, where our wise men exploded the first atomic bomb and the heat of the blast fused sand into a greenish glass--already the grass has returned, and the cactus and the mesquite. On this bedrock of animal faith I take my stand, close by the old road that leads eventually out of the valley of paradox.

Wow, that is good stuff. A need for balance. A sense that being in nature provides us with the perspective we need in order to understand our place in this world.

Nature matters for food, water, shelter; we at TNC are talking about that all of the time these days, as we should. But nature matters for even more than these provisioning services. Our “basic necessities” include more than food, water and shelter. For millennia, perhaps even before our ancestors first moved from the trees out onto the savannah, we have known this.

Thoreau, Abbey and a pantheon of others have been writing for centuries about the relationship between humanity and the rest of life on Earth; they have something to contribute to our conversation. If we are to understand how and why we think about these things today, we should take the time to listen (carefully!) to what they have said. For me, Walden and Desert Solitaire endure because they make the case for the value of nature in helping us understand ourselves. If we can understand ourselves, perhaps we can better tackle the challenges of our time.

I concede that many of us in the environmental community have exaggerated at times, and that we are occasional hypocrites. Maybe we are all liars at one time or another. But you know, I don’t think that we exaggerate any more, or live any more hypocritically, or lie any more, than others I could name. Like those who, fully aware of the coming climate catastrophe, have spent millions of dollars deceiving the American public into the belief that climate change is not happening. And those who claim that the mercury and other toxins spewing from outdated power plants do no harm to the poor children living downwind. And those who argue that in order to save civilization we must destroy our homeland.

Thoreau, moved by nature to contemplate meaningful purpose, inspired others to press for human freedom. I believe that through our work, we at The Nature Conservancy should continue to preserve the opportunity for nature to inspire future generations to rise to a greatness that we cannot today predict or understand. We should make this case for nature, proudly. On this we stand with Thoreau and Abbey and so many others who have come before us.

Like Peter Kareiva, I loved reading Desert Solitaire. If you care about these things, leave your emails behind and take a weekend with the book. Head out to Walden Pond, or the Utah Canyonlands, or some other wonderful, quiet spot in nature. Read it! See if it speaks to you.

Imagine Edward Abbey reading aloud out there among the trees and rocks, providing the solid ground that maybe you really do need after all in this crazy swirling world:

Yes. Feet on earth. Knock on wood. Touch stone. Good luck to all.