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What Would Ed Say?

“I’m against passive nonresistance.”

Toby McLeod – December 6, 2025

I’ve been living with Edward Abbey (1927-1989) for the past six months. It all started back in July when a French documentary filmmaker asked to use some of our 1981 interview with the reclusive author in a new documentary for ARTE—Edward Abbey, naturellement subversif !—which was broadcast in Europe on December 4. We dug out boxes containing the 16mm film and quarter-inch audio tape we recorded 44 years ago, had everything digitized, listened to the sound quality (so much wind noise!), and upon watching and listening we realized, Hey, this is more than interesting, it is historically important—it’s a gold mine!

I’m working on a memoir about Indigenous sacred site guardians and the chapter I wrote about Ed Abbey and the birth of Earth First! at Glen Canyon Dam didn’t really fit, so I had “an outtake,” a good story to share, and that orphaned chapter became the first draft of a podcast script (and also the basis for our 2025 Annual Report.) So, I’ve been thinking a lot about Cactus Ed.

With Trump opening public lands in the West to oil, gas and coal leasing, and his underlings devastating the already weakened Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management, National Park Service, and Environmental Protection Agency, I began asking myself, “What would Ed Abbey do today, with Trump and his corporate cronies in power?” What form of resistance would he encourage in his writing? In his actions? What would Ed say if I could interview him today?

We had already used some of the best footage in my 1983 short film, The Cracking of Glen Canyon Damn—with Edward Abbey and Earth First! But as we have found with so many of the interviews we’ve done over the years—with Vine Deloria Jr., Oren Lyons, Winona LaDuke, Barry Lopez and others—the Abbey/Earth First! story we recorded had more than enough great material for an hour-long Sacred Land Speaks podcast—and so it became our fourteenth episode!

Week after week, as we worked on the Abbey interview material, Trump threatened to go after progressive nonprofits, and ranted about “eco-terrorism.” Meanwhile, I listened to Abbey advocate monkeywrenching “only as a last resort, when political means fail,” and my thoughts (and fears) turned to the risks of telling this delicate story. Surely, Trump will keep labeling environmentalists “extremists” and will continue his campaign to suppress freedom of expression. Let’s all remember Timothy Snyder’s warning that “a betrayal by internal enemies” was the founding myth of the Nazis. But we have an obligation to tell these disruptive stories, to continue raising ethical questions, to stimulate debate, and to encourage critical thinking.

As we worked on the podcast, I thought the most important theme was resistance. What is appropriate? What is effective? What’s the distinction between sabotage of machinery and terrorism? As I listened to Abbey talk about the moral obligation to defend our home, I realized that the basis of all environmentalist resistance lies in respect—or, actually, reverence—for animals, plants and their habitat. Ed Abbey articulated love for Mother Earth. His clarion call defined our responsibility, no, our obligation, to defend the defenseless—which echoes the worldview of Native leaders. Abbey articulated a healthy anger at those who defile and pollute and break (even the weak) laws our government has enacted.

As always happens with film editing, we worked the material over, and lived with it for months. I must have heard the audio 50 times as we refined the narration, edited Abbey’s answers and tightened his cadence, and worked to contextualize his comments. Only after we released the podcast and listened to the finished version did I fully understand the historic nature of what Abbey was saying in March of 1981. He was a very early proponent of the rights of nature, and I don’t think anyone has credited him for his efforts to articulate this concept, decades before it took hold in the 1990s and early 2000s.

Christopher Stone’s classic 1972 essay, Should Trees Have Standing? TOWARD LEGAL RIGHTS FOR NATURAL OBJECTS, laid it all out well before our interview with Abbey. Stone proposed that humans should give legal rights to “natural objects” and to the environment as a whole. A river should have legal standing, and a guardian should be able to represent the river’s rights in a courtroom to, for example, sue a polluter. Stone made a legal argument. Ed Abbey wanted to articulate a philosophy. Here are the four relevant quotes that unfold in the podcast.

Inside our van, the first (audio-only) interview:

Edward Abbey (EA): “Everything on this planet has a right to exist for its own sake, and to continue to exist, even inanimate objects, rocks and rivers, and certainly all forms of life plant and animal, I think have some inherent right to exist and go on existing. I don’t know how to defend that attitude philosophically, that’s all it is, an attitude, but that’s what I feel, rather deeply…Somehow we’ve got to transcend our human limitations and achieve a—what should we call it—a transhuman point of view. A recognition, acknowledgment of the existence of other things and their right to existence. There are people who are working on this problem. It’s a philosophical problem. I don’t know how to defend it in a logical or coherent way at this point.”

At the end of this session Abbey said, “The energy crisis is a moral crisis—it was almost a throwaway line, but we all agreed it sounded great and was a good time to call it a night. Then, a few days later, on the rim of Glen Canyon, overlooking the hated dam, filming now, I started by asking him to elaborate on why the energy crisis is a moral crisis:

EA: “I think the energy crisis is a moral crisis because it reveals a lack of sensitivity to the rights of other living creatures. The birds and the animals and the plants. It reveals a greediness on the part of human beings to exploit everything for their own immediate use even when it endangers our own existence in the long run. That’s why I would call it a moral crisis. I think it’s a failure of moral sensitivity, a failure to recognize the rights of other living things and non-living things.”

Then there’s this, from his speech delivered from the back of a pick-up truck in the visitor center parking lot, after the crack was dropped on the dam:

EA: “This earth was not created for human use alone, 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 ways. 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 liveable earth. What is the use of building a great city if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to build it on? Earth first!”

Finally, in an interview four years later with Jessica Abbe, after she asked if Abbey advocated “extreme measures,” i.e., monkeywrenching:

EA: “Only as a last resort when all other means have failed. I regard defending the wilderness as something like defending your own home. I regard the wilderness as my home, my true ancestral home, and when it’s being invaded by clearcutters and strip miners I feel not only the right but the duty, the moral obligation to defend it by any means I can. And if writing letters to congressmen doesn’t do it, then I am perfectly willing myself to go out and perform illegal actions, civil disobedience if that will help, and if that also fails, why then even more direct action. As long as no life is put in danger. I would distinguish between terrorism and sabotage. Terrorism is violence against living things, people and other animals. Sabotage is violence against machinery, property, which I’m saying in certain extreme situations may be morally justified. It’s not an easy argument to make. It’s awfully difficult and complicated. I would not urge anyone else to mess around with it unless their conscience impels them to do so. We’re proposing a return to basic principles of human life living in harmony with other forms of life on this planet.”

So where does Abbey fit in the history of resistance theory?

From Sam Adams and the property-destroying Boston Tea Party, through Henry David Thoreau’s reflections on injustice in Civil Disobedience, to Mahatma Gandhi’s nonviolent satyagraha political resistance grounded in truth and love for the oppressor, to Martin Luther King Jr.’s lunch counter sit-ins, fiery sermons and marches for civil rights, Ed Abbey continued the call for citizens to resist injustice.

Abbey inherited Adams’s revolutionary fire, Thoreau’s suspicion of government, Gandhi’s insistence on moral responsibility, and King’s belief in principled resistance, and transformed their calls to action into a more confrontational, ecological and anarchistic philosophy. He radicalized protest for the age of industrial expansion, environmental destruction, and corporate power in the American West. While traditional civil disobedience centered on human rights, Abbey expanded “the oppressed” to include ecosystems and species, rivers and rocks.

But none of these heroes had much knowledge of Indigenous American history.

Abbey was the evolving voice of well-intentioned settlers who felt urgency—act now! But there was no ceremony, no ancestral connection. He created a story where many stories already existed. He inspired small groups who tried to protect “wilderness” in a region where age-old Indigenous communities with hereditary leadership and cultural protocols held sovereign rights and traditional responsibilities. Land and waters aren’t “persons” with rights in a legal system—they’re relatives, kin with whom humans maintain ongoing relations and obligations.

Since Edward Abbey left us, fossil fuel induced climate chaos on the Colorado Plateau has resulted in a 25-year megadrought—less snow in the mountains, less rain in the desert. As a result, the water level in Lake Powell behind Glen Canyon Dam (seen “full” in this early Project LightHawk photo) has dropped below one third of reservoir capacity (photo below). If the drought continues, as scientists predict it will, the dam will soon be unable to generate electricity, its primary reason for existence. It is time to remove Glen Canyon Dam, free the Colorado River, and restore Glen Canyon.

A FINAL THOUGHT:

So many of us are now asking, what is the value of AI? As I worked on the podcast, and our year-end mailing, I asked ChatGPT a few questions about the history of the rights of nature movement, and where Ed Abbey fit into it. Maybe the AI overlords knew who I was because the machine brain then asked if I would like a comparison of Abbey’s environmental worldview to Indigenous Peoples’ general philosophy in relationship to land. I said yes. Here’s the comparison generated by ChatGPT:

Key differences: Abbey’s wilderness ethic vs. Indigenous land relations

1. Ontology—what the land is
   • Abbey: Treats wilderness as sacred, sublime, and (often) empty of meaningful human habitation—a place for individual communion, refuge, and moral clarity.
   • Indigenous relations: Land is kin, ancestor, and community; it’s inhabited, storied, lived in, and entangled with people, law, and ceremony across generations.
2. Moral frame—rights vs. reciprocity
   • Abbey: Prioritizes defense of wild places from industrialization; moral claims are often framed in terms of intrinsic value and individual conscience.
   • Indigenous: Ethics are built on reciprocity, responsibility, and obligations—humans care for land and land-care returns to humans; rights are embedded in relationships and treaty/sacred commitments.
3. Authority and decision-making
   • Abbey: Romantic individualism and small autonomous groups (outsider insurgency) decide to act often on personal conviction.
   • Indigenous: Decisions about land rest with communities, elders, hereditary leadership, and legal/political institutions; action is collective and accountable to cultural protocols.
4. Tactics and goals
   • Abbey: Celebrates sabotage/“monkeywrenching” aimed at disabling destructive machinery; tactics may be clandestine, small-cell, and confrontational.
   • Indigenous movements: Use ceremony, legal claims, blockades, and political negotiation centered on sovereignty and cultural survival; non-Indigenous allies ideally act in support, not leadership.
5. Temporal perspective
   • Abbey: Often imagines wilderness in present-tense urgency—save this place now.
   • Indigenous: Long temporal horizon—stewardship that honors past obligations and future generations (intergenerational accountability).
6. Relationship to settler colonialism
   • Abbey: Critiques industrial society but sometimes uses rhetoric (wilderness as “empty land”) that replicates settler erasure of Indigenous presence.
   • Indigenous: Land defense is inseparable from struggles against colonial dispossession, treaty violation, and the assertion of sovereignty.