In a new book edited by David Peterson, various letters and missives from Edward Abbey have been gathered together in an attempt to give people of a new generation an understanding of just who this complicated, and seemingly contradictory, man was. Postcards From Ed: Dispatches And Salvos From An American Iconoclast, published by Milkweed Editions and distributed by the Publishers Group Canada, contains letters he wrote to various people in his personal and professional life, and a multitude of broadsides directed at publications throughout the United States. (Funny, I just happened to flip open the book to a page containing a letter written in 1974 to Rolling Stone magazine complimenting them for running an interview with Glenn Gould, and pleading with them to publish more of the work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson.)

Abbey was a walking contradiction according to most people's lights and probably had as many enemies on the left as he did on the right because of his strongly held opinions. While on one hand having no problem in saying Nixon and Kissinger's bombing of North Viet Nam after the 1972 elections sank the government to the moral level of Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia, he was also a charter member of the National Rifleman's Association. He advocated each household in America be supplied with a weapon by the government so they could then form a civilian militia to replace the volunteer/draft army.

I'm sure he knew very well that was exactly the situation during the revolutionary war, when the British tried to break the militia by making it illegal for civilians to bear arms. (Hence a certain clause in the constitution of the United States guaranteeing the right to bear arms.) He didn't think it would do anything for the crime rate, but with 150 million people "we've got plenty to spare". Anyway, he was more worried about the army and the police invading his home then any criminal.

What he wrote about in his novel The Monkey Wrench Gang he tried to live as much as possible, finding whatever means he had at his disposal of being the monkey wrench thrown into the works to disrupt projects that he saw as damaging pristine wilderness. He was very much the "preserve it as is" type of person. He argued against projects that would allow more people to have access to various natural wonders.

His theory was if they hadn't wanted to make an effort to see a place than they didn't want to go there badly enough to begin with. What was the point of going to somewhere like "Rainbow Bridge" if you didn't experience the six-mile walk to appreciate its wonder as part of its natural environment? Nature shouldn't be a stop on someone's tourist agenda, where you spend ten minutes posing for photos and then moving on to the next stop. It turns the natural world into a commodity like everything else in the world and depreciates its intrinsic value.