THE INTENTIONS OF WRENCHING

Reading Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, throughout the course of the tale I definitely struggled with how to take the actions of this Gang of eco-saboteurs fighting against the faceless industrial powers they saw raping and pillaging the natural landscape they loved so very much. The characters that Abbey created who commit these acts (Doc, Bonnie, Smith, and most prominently Hayduke) considered the work that they were doing to be definitively righteous; in that they were righting the wrongs that humans have enacted against their natural habitat. It is interesting to note also however, that the characters that oppose them (Bishop Love and his cohorts) share the same self-righteous sentiments themselves. For these characters the greatest good is serving the corporations, and ultimately themselves, willfully ignorant of the negative repercussions their actions will have on the nature they are exploiting. It seems to me personally that both camp’s viewpoints however are far too totalitarian, as I believe Abbey was attempting to illustrate within the novel the extremes on both sides for ecological preservation as well as industrial and human expansion. It cannot be so one-sided as Abbey has presented these polar opposites in his tale.

By the end of the novel we also understand that this course of action cannot be sustained. Both sides falter, as one by one each member of the Gang surrenders to the fate of retribution and Bishop Love even falls to his own failing health and aspirations that may have been literally too much for him to handle. Also, although to the public it may have seemed that Hayduke was ultimately destroyed by his own cause (by being cut down by gunfire in the landscape he was fighting for), we know that in actuality he survived to fight another day. In this way Hayduke became an eco-martyr, willing to sacrifice his body to the extreme (his perceived death) for his Mother Earth, even if he wasn’t really willing to do so in reality. Obviously, the forces at play in this novel are larger than the lives of the actors; they surpass human terms in relation to scale and duration. The planet Earth and these large corporations respectively are an amalgamation of many interdependent and individual elements. Exploiting some element or taking a jab at one portion of the whole may not do much damage but this is definitive of the struggle; this is a battle for the future of both entities, whose very existence is poised in opposition to one another.

Personally, I do feel that the Monkey Wrench Gang did “work” that was justified because I do not agree with the way that humans as a whole have come to maliciously exploit not only our environment but also one another for monetary gain, snubbing the destructive consequences of their actions in the process. With all of the recent focus on climate change, exacerbated by new studies from NASA scientists claiming essentially that “End is Nigh,” it would seem that if we do not do something as a whole to change our current caustic practices our human race very well may be doomed for destruction. The Earth is a much larger entity than we are and we know it. In terms of its history, we only represent a blip on the radar and this is a very sobering thought. Therefore, obviously I believe, property destruction simply is not enough. These large corporate entities need to realize that the way they are doing business is not sustainable and only increasing our velocity toward the apparently impending doom that our environment has in store for use. Karma’s a bitch, but that’s just the way it is.