Southwest Sound Collage; 1; Interview with Edward Abbey and The Amazing Fast Paso String Band

This is southwest sound collage, and I'm Jack Lafleur. I have a good friend with whom I have shared many campfires over the years. Among other things he's a passionate writer, author of such classics as Desert Solitaire and the Monkey Ranch Gang. He's far more curious as to the nature of living things than he is to the technological mega-wim of modern man. For years he has spearheaded a gallant cadre of individuals whose primary work in life is to defend and preserve the natural environment. A while back my friend and I had gone camping in a remote corner of the Sonoran desert. After a few days I pulled out my tape recorder and interviewed Edward Abbey. From your philosophic point of view try to verbalize what your ideas have led you to so far.

Could you define the way you regard reality in this latter part of the 20th century? The way the United States of America is functioning? Uh-huh, real heavy stuff. I like to think of James Joyce saying that history is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake. Our sole bellow said history is a nightmare in which I'm trying to get a good night's sleep. I think human beings have made somewhat of a nightmare out of their collective history. Seems to me that the last 5,000 years have been pretty awful. Cruelty, slavery, torture, religious fanaticism, ideological fanaticisms, and the new serfdom of industrialism.

I think humankind probably made a big mistake when they gave up hunting and gathering way of life for agriculture. Ever since then most of us have led the lives of slaves and dependents. I rather look forward to the time when the industrial system collapses and we all go back to chasing wild cattle and buffalo on horseback. I think the human race has become a plague upon this earth. There are simply too many of us making too many demands on the one defenseless little planet. I think human beings have much right to be here, any other animal, but we have abused that right by allowing our numbers to grow so great and our appetites become so insatiable that we are plundering the earth and destroying most other forms of life and threatening our own survival by greed and stupidity and this insane mania for quantitative growth for perpetual

expansion, the desire for domination over nature and our fellow humans. If it continues will destroy life on this earth, the wilderness is vanishing, next to go will be the last of the primitive tribes, the traditional cultures that still survive in places like the far north and the African and South American tropics and if the whole planet becomes industrialized, technologized, urbanized I would say that would be almost a worse disaster that can befall not only the planet, but human beings themselves. I think it would lead to the most awful tyranny that some of our better science fiction writers have prophesied. I don't think we have to stay on this course, but I've heard you of reason, common sense,

the evidence of our five good bodily senses by daily living experience, we can imagine a better way to live and there are fairly simple solutions. I would like to see the human race beginning here in America, we should set the example, since we have set the example for pillaging the planet, we should set the example for preserving life, including human life, and the means to do that seem fairly simple and available, reduce human numbers gradually by normal attrition, letting the senile old farts like you and me die off, and after reducing the human population to a reasonable number, a self-sustaining number, maybe for the United States it would be something like 100 million or 50 million should be plenty, and then also simplify our needs and demands so that we're not praying

on other forms of life, plant life and animal life, and developing new attitudes, a reverence for all life, all forms of life. I consider myself almost an absolute egalitarian, and I think that all human beings are essentially in some essential way equal, deserve equal regard or consideration, certainly everyone differs in ability, some people are bigger, stronger, some are smarter, some are more clever with their hands, others more clever with their brains, there is almost an infinite variation in talent, and ability, and intelligence among individual humans, but I think each of us, except perhaps the most depraved, violently, criminally insane, generals and dictators, each of us in some essential way are of equal value, I would say any eyes of God, except

that I'm not a good Christian anymore, I think there's some other basis for this kind of egalitarianism, just by virtue of being alive, living things we deserve to be respected as individuals, and I'm saying that that respect for the value of each human being should be extended to each living thing on the planet, our fellow creatures, beginning with our pet dogs and cats and horses, humans find it easy to love them, and we should learn to love the wild animals, the mountain lions and the rattlesnakes and the coyotes and the buffalo and elephants and so on, and developing that way to extend our ability to love, to plant life, I think a tree, a shrub deserves respect and sympathy is a living thing, I'm not going to go beyond that to the rocks, to the air, to the water, because it's all part

of a whole, each part dependent on most of the other parts, and so we should, if only for own self-respect and survival, learn to love the world around us, go beyond the human and love the non-human, instead of simply trying to dominate it, subjugate it, enslave it as we've been doing for the last 5,000 years, Europeans and most Asiatic's, learn to live in some sort of harmony with it, use what we must use, all living creatures have to feed on other living creatures, but do it at a reasonable level so that other things can survive along with us, I guess Albert Schweitzer was essentially right when he said, we must learn reverence for all forms of life, even those we, out of necessity, have to

perhaps hunt, kill and eat. How do you consider dealing with those who are antagonistic to life? I think in a long run, life will destroy them, the destroyers are destroyed, the dictators and they can save militarists in the meantime though, before they destroy most of human life and planetary life, I suppose it becomes a process of education, trying to instill sympathy for life and other living things in our children, begins as an individual personal responsibility, develop this love for life in ourselves, try to pass it on to our children, and try to spread it beyond the families as far as we can by whatever means are available to us, teachers, writers, artists, scientists, propagandists, performers, politicians, a good politician is one who, with the ability to lead people toward this attitude, would be

it's hard to think of any, Ed, Jack, when it becomes apparent that we're not gaining philosophically fast enough in the wake of big business and political maneuvering, what steps do you think are justifiable in trying to turn the tide that seems to lead to literally a dead end for not just our species but the whole planet? I suppose if the political means fail us, public organization and public pressure, if those don't do what has to be done and will be driven to more extreme defensive measures and defending our mother earth, here in the United States, I can see a lot more acts of civil disobedience beginning to occur as the bulldozers and the drilling rigs attempt

to move into the wilderness and into the backcountry and the farmlands and seashores and other precious places. And if civil disobedience is not enough, I imagine there will be sabotage, violence against machinery, property, those are pretty desperate measures, if that becomes widespread it could be that the battle has already been lost, I don't know what would happen beyond that, that might possibly stimulate some sort of police state reaction, repression, a real military industrial dictatorship in this country. But still, personally, I feel that when all other means fail, as a last resort, we are morally justified and not really justified but morally obligated to defend that which

we love by whatever means are available, just as if my family, my wife or my children were attacked, I wouldn't hesitate to use violence to defend them, by the same principle, if land I love is being violated, raped, plundered, murdered, and all political means to save it have failed, I personally feel that sabotage is morally justifiable, at least if it does any good, if it will help, if it will only help you to feel good. Test for the record, one of the things that's obviously going to occur should sabotage become a necessity on the part of some people reacting to everything that has been perpetrated on our culture, I would hazard that some would call acts of physical sabotage terrorism. Distinction seems quite clear and simple to me, sabotage is an act of force or violence

against property or machinery in which life is not endangered or should not be, terrorism on the other hand is violence against living things, human beings, and other living things, that kind of terrorism generally practiced by governments against their own people, against their own citizens, we have that kind of terrorism going on right now in much of Latin America, Guatemala, El Salvador, and quite recently in Argentina and Chile, and a mild form of it in Poland during the past year, my Soviets are committing terrorism against the people of Afghanistan right now with limited success, I'm happy to hear, our government committed great acts of terrorism against the people of Vietnam quite recently, that's what terrorism means to me, violence and threat of violence against human beings and other forms of life,

which seems quite radically different from sabotage, which is a much more limited tactic. I'd go as far as to say that bulldozer tearing up a hillside, ripping out trees for the purpose of a logging operation or a strip mine is committing a kind of terrorism against life. You're just getting heavier and heavier, everything is something funny to talk about, what are we going to do by sex life? What's the history of your sex life? There will now be a five minute silence. For a long time you've been regarded as a real swine. I get a lot of hate mail, which I'm very proud of, but you've been regarded as a real defender of the West, and I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the different

faces of Jeopardy, which the West is currently experiencing right now, the different faces of Jeopardy? Yes, the different aspects of the enemy, great phrase, great phrase, what the hell does it mean? Well, I've done most of my defending in the West with a typewriter, which is an easy and cowardly way to do it. The more active means of defense, I've occasionally employed, I do not feel free to talk about in these public airwaves, until the statute of limitations runs out. I most respect those people who are activists, at least in this area of human life, people like Dave Brower and Dave Foreman, to name only a couple, there are thousands of people involved in it, thousands, and they should all be named if it were possible, that people who actually carry on the fight who do the difficult work of organizing public resistance,

who do the lobbying and the litigating, the button-holing of congressmen, or in some cases who run for public office, who draw petitions and circulate them, who do all the tedious office work and paperwork that has to be done to save what's left of America. I respect those people very much, and respect them more than people who merely sit behind a desk and write about it. What do you think is the West's greatest enemy right now? The Southwest? Let's put it that way. Oh, in general, the same old thing. Expansion, commercial greed, industrial growth, that kind of growth, which has become a pathological condition in our society, an insatiable demand for more and more to dominate and to consume and destroy, and the range lands overgrazed, and the hills being stripped mind, and the rivers being damned, and the farmlands being eroded away, and the soil

and water being poisoned in various ways, herbicides and pesticides and chemical fertilizers, and all the usual things, and the air obviously polluted, and just the endless speeding up of this process, and the expansion of its scope, and the whole West is being threatened and being gradually destroyed by these things, and the whole country is being gradually destroyed by them, not to mention the rest of the world. Do you think that it's possible to define any kind of a characteristic in that human animal that causes this mindless, blind pillaging? It's possible to see what motivates those without any sense of environmental integrity, who are really motivated more and more by the desire for power and money, but what about the Joe Sixpacks of the world, who operate the bulldozers? What do you think the problem lies there?

I do not think it lies with the Joe Sixpacks. I've been a Joe Sixpack for much of my life, had to work at various jobs, most of them rather tedious, simply to get by, make a living. No, I certainly don't blame working people. They're more victimized, but this process and the rest of us, most of them have their lives and their health threatened more directly and more constantly, simply by the work they do, than we lucky ones who can talk about it all. That's a tough question you raise, and I find it hard to say where this disease began. It really does seem to me like a kind of cancer, a tumor on human society. I would say it began when we gave up the traditional hunting and gathering way of life. It made a terrible mistake of settling down to agriculture. Somebody has said that the plow may have

done more damage to human life and the planet than the sword, not being climbed. I think that might be true. The agriculture was followed by industrialism, which began only about 200 years ago, and the new way of looking at the world invented by a few European philosophers and scientists, which seemed quite thrilling and liberating at first. It still could be, but has had this offshoot. Well, they discovered the means, the ability to achieve mastery over nature. Here we come back to human nature again, don't we? Once we discover we had this ability to push things around or push other people around, most humans do not have the self-controlled refrain from using that power. Power corrupts, as some wise man said, absolute power corrupts absolutely. Science and technology are gradually giving us this absolute power over the rest of life and human life. Power not only corrupts,

but it attracts the worst elements of human life. Power attracts the worst and corrupts the best. Hard to say. Humans have always wanted to achieve some sort of control of their environment. Not only we modern, but the most ancient tribes practice their magic and their rituals in the effort, at least, of bringing things under some control so they'd be able to predict what was going to happen, and for the perfectly honorable purpose of surviving. Somehow in the last 5,000 years this normal, natural, healthy, wholesome desire to survive and continue human life, raise a family, pass your genes on to achieving generations, has been corrupted by the desire not really to live a sane and harmonious and beautiful life, but to dominate, to achieve power. And we mentioned this before. We began by enslaving one

another. The first industrial systems really were those of Egypt, I suppose, in Mesopotamia, maybe ancient China, where hundreds of thousands or millions were conscripted into work gangs at one sort or another to build these huge monuments to the glory of some tyrant, the pyramids of Egypt, the Great Wall of China. Society itself became a kind of machine. As Lewis Mumford pointed out, the original great machines were made of human bodies, flesh and bone. They were slaves, human slavery. That was probably the original evil. So for thousands of years, our society is dependent on the enslavement of most humans, either simple chattel slavery like out of the blacks in America, or the slightly more subtle form of slavery, surfed them in Europe, the peasants and the lords, and the modern form of slavery, we call wage

slavery. Chaining people to routine tasks, whether in a factory or in a store, in an office, forcing them, compelling them to perform tedious, dull, repetitious work in order to eat, and even when they're well paid and living in suburban houses with thousands of dollars worth of gadgets in a car and a pickup truck and a motorboat, and so forth. Most of us are still slaves to the system. We are dependent upon it. We cannot break free from it. We have to support it and work for it, or they'll cut us off and we'll starve. Slavery, a great evil. We enslave some of our fellow beasts, the horse and the burro. We created the mule, made slaves of dogs, and then soon afterwards we learned to enslave human beings.

And now our technological and industrial machine is trying to enslave the whole of nature, put everything to work for human greed and power. That I think is the great evil of human life, modern life. By modern I mean the last 5,000 years when the nightmare of history began. One of my favorite groups of musicians hails from northern New Mexico. They're known as the amazing fast peso string band and they perform on fiddles, banjos, mandolin, and guitars. I think they're one of the best groups in the country. They're going to play two old-time songs. The first is called joke on the puppy, which they got from Tommy Gerald from North Carolina. It's his version of a

19th century tune from Afolacia called Rice Straw. The second song comes from my home state of West Virginia. They got this tune from Fiddler French Carpenter. It's called Uncle Elzick's Farewell. The amazing fast peso string band. Our guests on Southwest Sound Collage have been Edward Abbey and the amazing fast peso string band.

All of the sounds on our series are from original recordings located in the Lefler Sound Archive in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Southwest Sound Collage is made possible by a grant from the New Mexico Arts Division. This is Jack Lefler. Thank you for listening. Adiós.