Climate is the dominating and definitive issue of our time, a compound of acutely emotional considerations concerning science, politics, society, culture, anthropology, and religion, the breadth and complexity of which has yet to be recognized comprehensively.
In the late ’70s and early ’80s, a fresh movement on behalf of “wilderness” was growing and coalescing, chiefly in the Rocky Mountain West. Its members believed in what they called “biocentrism,” radical activism including threats, physical confrontation, and the destruction of private property such as bulldozers, employed by companies involved in the “rape” of the land. At the center of this movement was the organization Earth First!, headed by an activist from Tucson named Dave Foreman. Other aggressive biocentrist groups founded about the same time include Sea Shepherds, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, Rainforest Action Network, the Animal Liberation Front, and Hunt Saboteurs.
In 1968, Desert Solitaire, by the novelist and essayist Edward Abbey, appeared. It is a literary work on the order of Walden or Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: an intensely personal account celebrating nature through adventure and description, and only secondarily a social and political “statement.” Desert Solitaire is not a book written for policy people but for outdoorsmen, and then not in the sense of sportsmen but of men and women for whom nature is not just their second home but in a very real sense their first one—far more so, indeed, than Walden was for Thoreau.
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