The Monkey Wrench Gang

By Edward Abbey

☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎☕︎

"Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit."

Four misfits, a Vietnam vet, a feminist doctor, a polygamist Mormon river guide, and a rich East Coast surgeon, drive around the American Southwest blowing up bulldozers, pulling up survey stakes, and generally making life very difficult for the extractive industries trying to pave their beloved desert. It is chaotic and funny and radical and I love every single page of it.

I live in Utah. I drive I-15 regularly. There are billboards everywhere, enormous, garish, relentless. Every time I pass one, I think about this book. I will not say what I think about specifically. Abbey would know.

The Monkey Wrench Gang is fiction, but it launched a real movement. Earth First! credits it as foundational, and the term 'monkeywrenching' entered the environmental vocabulary directly from these pages. Abbey wrote it as a fantasy, but it reads as something more like a dare. The landscape he is defending, the canyon country of Utah and Arizona, is rendered with the same fierce love as Desert Solitaire, which makes the stakes feel real even when the plot is gleefully absurd.

Five cups: wild, funny, politically incendiary, and absolutely essential reading if you live anywhere near the Colorado Plateau.

Or if you've ever wanted to pull down a billboard on a long highway drive.