C L A S S I C S

DANIEL J. PHILIPPON

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Edward Abbey's Remarks at the Cracking of Glen Canyon Dam

The "cracking" of Glen Canyon Dam in 1981 is best known as the first public action of Earth First! but it was also the occasion for one of the more significant speeches Edward Abbey ever delivered. Abbey spoke frequently to large groups, often without notes, but in this instance he prepared a written text, composed in longhand on the front of seven, yellow, letter-size pages, which he numbered in the upper right-hand corner. The speech, which Abbey titled simply, "Remarks, Glen Canyon Dam, Spring Equinox 1981," is significant for several reasons. Although it shows little evidence of revisionaside from a few crossed-out notes on the bottom of page three and an occasional deletion and interlinear substitutionthe text is remarkably well structured, suggesting that Abbey's previous public appearances had taught him how to craft an effective speech with ease. It also underscores Abbey's skills as not only a natural history writer (although he hated that label) but also a political activist (although he claimed not to be one), seeing how the speech moves effortlessly from a lyrical description of Glen Canyon to a stirring call to arms in defense of the American West. And the speech also testifies to Abbey's centrality to the formation and development of Earth First!a fact to which scholars have often alluded but have rarely documented in detail. Abbey begins his remarks with a joke, employing clever wordplay and aggressive rhetoric to characterize his opponents as wholly ignorant of their cultural and natural context. Taking the geological perspective they do not, he prophesies the eventual demise of Glen Canyon Dam by the very force it was built to controlthe Colorado Riverand he predicts the rebirth of the canyon's flora and fauna, making full use of the symbolic value of the Spring Equinox. Recalling his own trip
Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 11.2 (Summer 2004)

Copyright 2004 by the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment

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through Glen Canyon (as recounted in the "Down the River" chapter
of Desert Solitaire) and alluding to The Place No One Knew (the Sierra

club volume that memorialized the canyon in word and image), Abbey describes the canyon's democratic characterit is accessible to anyone "from Cub Scouts to little ole ladies in inner tubes," he saysand he summarizes its human and natural history in what must be one of the most moving single paragraphs ever written about a lost landscape. Abbey's purpose, of course, is more than mourning the dead, and he employs his Utopian vision of rebirth to inspire his audience to work for social, political, and ethical change. Although he simplifies the complex forces at work in Western land conflicts, he likely recognized that the acknowledgmentmuch less explanationof social and political complexity rarely moves a crowd. Abbey seems to have known that if his listeners were to be spurred into action on behalf of the land, they needed a clearly defined enemy living in a black-and-white worldbad guys to be fought by good guys. Rachel Carson knew this, too, and she used the same agonistic rhetoric to great effect in Silent Spring. Abbey grounded his politics in a similarly uncompromising ethic of intrinsic value"all creatures great and small, animal and plant, have the inherent, basic, self-evident right to exist" but the bedrock idea on which he based this ethic is nothing if not complex: "that human life is a part and only a part of the great web of life; and that all life depends, first and foremost, upon the preservation of a livable earth." While one can surely argue about the politics that should result from such an ideology, it is hard to deny the fundamental soundness of its logic. Abbey delivered a version of this speech to about seventy-five protesters gathered at the visitor's center parking lot near Glen Canyon Dam on March 21, 1981. Immediately before he spoke, four men and one womanDave Foreman, Howie Wolke, Tony Moore, Bart Koehler, and Louisa Willcoxunfurled a three-hundred-foot wedge of black plastic sheeting over the edge of the dam to simulate a long, narrow "crack" in the dam's face. In the version of the speech that follows, I have incorporated Abbey's interlinear changes, expanded his abbreviations, inserted several commas for readability, and added three missing words in brackets. Thanks to Clarke Abbey for permitting me to publish this version of Abbey's speech and to Roger Myers of the University of Arizona's Department of Special Collections for assisting me with my research in the Edward Abbey Papers.

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Remarks, Glen Canyon Dam, Spring Equinox 1981 by Edward Abbey

Greetings. How nice to be back in Pageor Paje, Arizonashithead capital of Coconino County. We are gathered here today to celebrate three important occasions: the rising of the full moon, the arrival of the Spring Equinox, and the imminent removal of Glen Canyon Dam. I do not say that the third of these events will necessarily take place todayalthough I should warn you that some of my born-again Christian brothers and sisters have been praying, night and day, for one little pree-cision earthquake in this here immediate vicinity, and I do predict that one of these times their prayers will be answeredin fact, even now, I think I perceive an ominous-looking black fracture down the face of yonder cee-ment plugand this earth will shake, and that dam will fall, crumble, and go.1 Glen Canyon Dam is an insult to God's Creation, and if there is a God he will destroy it. And if there isn't we will take care of it, one way or another, and if we don't then Mother Nature most certainly will. Give her a few more centuries and the Colorado River will fill Lake Foul2 with mud, right to the brim, and plug its penstocks and jam [its] pressure tubes with sand; then the river will come flowing over the top and Glen Canyon Dam will erode away, rapidly, down to grade level, down to the bedrock sandstone of Glen Canyon. Another century or twoat mostand the river will clean out Glen Canyon, Narrow Canyon, Cataract Canyon, the Dirty Devil, and the San Juan, and the Escalante and the hundred other beautiful, mysterious side canyons now temporarily buried beneath the stagnant, stinking waters of Lake Foul. Open once again to sunlight, these canyons will awake from the dead. The willows and the cottonwoods will return, the ricegrass and the cliffrose and the juniper, and the birds will come back, and the deer, and the lion and the bighorn sheep, and then, once again, human beings of some kind. Peopleour descendants, will also return, for Glen Canyon and all its hundred side canyons will again be open to human access, to human habitation, to human delight, as well as to other creatures which have an equal right to the enjoyment of this earth. The good news I bring will certainly come to pass. The collapse of Glen Canyon Dam is as inevitable as the rising of the moon, or the revival of spring, or the flow of the river home to the sea. Let the engineers build fifty more dams between here and the Rockies, they can only retard, they cannot stop, the irresistible processes of erosion and renewal. The mountains and plateaus will continue to be uplifted, the

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rains and snows will fall, the waters will plunge downward back to their source, again and again and again. All very well, you say, but we prefer not to wait. We want immediate results. We want to see Glen Canyon alive and beautiful, the river free and flowing, in our own lifetimes. To thosethe impatient among you, I say, sign our petition to Congress demanding the prompt dismantling of Glen Canyon Dam. Orwe're reasonable folks, we're willing to compromise, we too believe in balancethey can keep their goddam dam, for the time being, if they open the gates and drain Lake Foul. Drain it, to the dregs, to the bitter dregs. Never mind the sunken cabin cruisers, the skeletons of drowned water skiers, the fifty million jars of fishbait and the five hundred million empty beercanstime and the winds and the sun and the floods will scour clean this dreary, muck-coated spectacle of ruin, and restore it, in due course, to the green and living wilderness paradise that Glen Canyon once wasonly nineteen years agoand will be again, someday soon. All the garbage will be carried into Lake Merde,3 where it belongs. Yes, in 1962, only nineteen years ago, they closed the bypass tunnels of Glen Canyon Dam and began the inundation of Glen Canyonthe place that only a few ever knew. Perhaps a few hundred, a few thousand, were privileged to make that enchanted journey down the Colorado from Hite to Lee's Ferry, through this canyon that Major Powell named Glen. What those few saw was first of all the living flowing river, with its riffles and minor rapidsnothing serious or difficult. It was in fact a trip that any could make, on their own, with almost any kind of equipmentno need there for professional guides or commercial outfittersfrom Cub Scouts to little ole ladies in inner tubes, with or without life jackets, anybody could do it. In and along the river were sandbars, beaches, willow groves and glades of cottonwood, and the innumerable grottoes, caves, arches, amphitheaters, coves, [and] side canyons along the way so aptly named by Powell and his men: Cathedral in the Desert, Music Temple, Hidden Passage, Dungeon Canyon, Forbidden Canyon, to name but a few. Up these side canyons were great natural bridges, like Gregory, now submerged, and countless pools, streams, waterfalls, springs, and seeps. Everything was full of lifenot only deer and lion but also fox, beaver, coyote, bighorn, bullfrogs and gopher snakes, great horned owls and great blue herons, wood ibis, killdeer, sandpipers and redtail hawks. Plus the ancient human history of the canyon: the hundreds of ruins, granaries, shelters, and villages left by the Anasazi, the priceless rock art of pictograph and petroglyph. All this you could've known in Glen Canyon, plus a scenic grandeur equal to though quite different from Grand Canyon, or Desolation, or Hells

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Canyon, or Big Bend. All this plus the sweetness and adventure and wonder of unspoiled wilderness. All this and much, much more. And they took it away from us. The politicians of Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado, in cahoots with the land developers, city developers, industrial developers of the Southwest, stole this treasure from us in order to pursue and promote their crackpot ideology of Growth, Profit, and Powergrowth for the sake of power, power for the sake of growth. We can see now that Glen Canyon Dam was merely a step toward the urbanizing, industrializing, andprobablymilitarizing of the American West. But Glen Canyon Dam remains particularly painful and obnoxiousnot only symbol but ongoing exemplification of what greed and stupidity can do to the American land. Surely no man-made structure in modern American history has been hated so much, by so many, for so long, with such good reason, as Glen Canyon Dam. The industrialization, urbanization, [and] militarization of the American West continues. More dams are proposed, more coal-burning and nuclear power plants projected, an MX system that would devastate much of Nevada and western Utah, more river diversion projects, more strip-mining of our mountains and clearcutting of our forests, the misuse of water and the abuse of the landall for the sake of short-term profit, all to keep the industrial-military Empire going and growing until it finally reaches the point where it must self-destruct, destroy itself. I predict that the military-industrial state will eventually collapse, both here and abroad, whether capitalist, socialist, or communist, either by war or by internal contradictions (the waste of power to produce more power) or by both. This may happen in our lifetimes. There will be much suffering and hardship, but enough humans will survive to carry on in a new and better way. Humanity will learn a bitter lesson: that this earth was not created for human use alone, that all creatures great and small, animal and plant, have the inherent, basic, self-evident right to exist, to be, to live out their lives in their own manner, to produce posterity and pursue happiness in their own individual way. Humans must learn this lesson before we can change: that human life is a part and only a part of the great web of life; and that all life depends, first and foremost, upon the preservation of a livable earth. "What is the use of building a great city if you haven't got a tolerable planet to build it on?"4 Earth first. How can we create a civilization fit for the dignity of free men and women if the globe itself is ravaged, polluted, defiled, and insulted? Ah yes, earth first. The domination of Nature leads to the domination of human beings. Meanwhile, what to do? Here I can offer nothing but more of the same. Oppose. Oppose the destruction of our homeland by these alien

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forces from Houston, Tokyo, Manhattan, D.C., and the Pentagon. And if opposition is not enough, we must resist. And if resistance is not enough, then subvert. After ten years of modest environmental progress, the powers of industrialism and militarism have become alarmed. The Empire Strikes Back.5 We must continue to strike back at the Empire, by whatever means and every means available to us. Win or lose, it's a matter of honor. Lend a hand, grab a holt.6 Oppose, resist, subvert, delay, until the Empire begins to fall apart. And until that happens: enjoy! Enjoy our great American West climb those mountains, run those rivers, hike those canyons, explore those forests, and share in the bounty of wilderness, friendship, love, and the common effort to save what we love. Do this and we will be strong, and bold, and happy, we will outlive our enemies, we will live to piss on their graves. Joy, shipmates, joy. Earth First, life first, freedom first. God bless America, let's save some of it. Love the Landor Leave it alone.

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NOTES

1. Abbey alludes to the moment in The Monkey Wrench Gang when Seldom Seen Smith gets down on his knees and prays for "a little pre-cision earthquake" under the dam. 2. "Lake Foul" is, of course, Lake Powell, which was formed by the creation of Glen Canyon Dam. 3. "Lake Merde" (merde is French for "shit") is Lake Mead, which was formed by the creation of Hoover Dam, downstream from Glen Canyon on the Colorado River. 4. Abbey offers a version of the question Thoreau put to H. G. O. Blake in a May 20,1860, letter: "What is the use of a house if you haven't got a tolerable planet to put it on?" 5. Abbey's reference was timely; George Lucas's sequel to Star Wars was released the previous year. 6. A holt (Middle English) is a woodland or grove of trees.