Edward Abbey's View Of Nature

Edward Abbey uses his non-fiction Desert Solitaire as a sort-of sounding board for his “philosophical pretensions” (Abbey, 51). He shoehorns all manner of (sometimes divergent) ideas into his prose about the landscape and history of the southwest. It’s a wonderful thing, really, to be wrapped up into some story of his then, in a single paragraph, he reveals something about his soul before continuing on with the story as if nothing happened at all. Occasionally though, the seemingly tangental is in fact the critically important for understanding what he is actually saying in his work. Indeed, Abbey’s understanding of Man’s relationship to Nature is incredibly complex, but it is most easily elucidated, at least in part, by pressing on his understanding of the pitfalls of anthropomorphisation. Abbey is lost in his own train of thought while watching what is ostensibly the mating ritual of two snakes. He quickly catches himself though, indeed scolds himself: “How can I descend into such anthropomorphism?” (Abbey, 24). For Abbey, there is no point in going out into the wilderness alone if he is only going to obfuscate the truth the that natural world holds by placing over it a veil of human-centered
It is hubris, he seems to say, to go into the wilderness and believe that it was all put their for your pleasure. It is equally misguided though, to take the opposite approach of “simple-minded rationalism” which says that because we can’t understand them, animals are simply automatons, incapable of approaching the complex emotions of humans (Abbey, 24) . This distinction allows him to continue to self-consciously use what might at first seem like deeply human-centered terms, but on reflection, are truly terms for the shared emotions between