Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, September 10, 1995                   TAG: 9509080138
SECTION: BOOKS                    PAGE: G-4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: REVIEWED BY JUSTIN ASKINS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

ENVIRONMENTAL MESSAGE LIVES ON IN ED ABBEY'S `SERPENTS'< XXXX.|

Reading "The Serpents of Paradise" was a sad and sobering journey, watching as the young and not very controversial Ed Abbey discovers river and canyon, mesa and mountain only to later see many dammed and developed, logged and mined.

Ever since I read Abbey's "The Monkey Wrench Gang," I have been an admirer of his political vision, one of a deep concern about the Earth and the willingness to physically fight to stop its destruction. True, Abbey's sexism is bothersome at points, but his magnificent individual devotion to the Earth is a needful balance to behemoth and increasingly ineffective environmental organizations like the Audubon Society or the Sierra Club.

This well edited reader, set up in a chronological order that follows Abbey's life rather than publication dates, offers a wonderful selection of his work. There are several extensive selections based on his childhood experiences, and many other long sections from works like "The Fool's Progress," "The Brave Cowboy," "Desert Solitaire" and "Monkey Wrench Gang."

One of the most striking is the telling retrospective "How It Was." Written in 1971, Abbey recalls an incident decades earlier when, "also unbeknownst to us, the pavement had been surreptitiously extended from Monticello down to Blanding while we weren't looking, some twenty miles of irrelevant tar and gravel. A trifling matter? Perhaps. But I felt even then ... a shudder of alarm. Something alien was moving in, something queer and out of place in the desert."

That awareness, and the need to do something about the queer and alien presence, fills Abbey's pages.

The core of this book may be the parts devoted to Abbey's 1968 classic "Desert Solitaire." The author's introduction and four chapters are included, and one, "Polemic: Industrial Tourism and the National Parks," remains a compelling and still relevant indictment of how the National Parks are being destroyed. Abbey points out that, "Without expending a single dollar from the United States Treasury we could, if we wanted, multiply the area of our national parks tenfold or a hundredfold - simply by banning the private automobile." While in 1968, automobiles had become a problem in parks like Glacier, Yellowstone and Yosemite, the present situation is much, much worse.

Toward the end of "Serpents," in an essay called "A Writer's Credo" published a year before his death, Abbey tells us what a writer must do: "But the moral duty of the free writer is to begin his work at home: to be a critic of his own community, his own country, his own government, his own culture. The more freedom the writer possesses the greater the moral obligation to play the role of critic."

Bravo. Today, with the Endangered Species Act in danger, with talk of selling some of the national parks rolling off the slick tongues of politicians, with the bogus Contract with America turning people away from healthy and renewing Contact with the Earth, Abbey's voice is sorely missed. Abbey believed "that words count, that writing matters, that poems, essays and novels - in the long run - make a difference."

I think that is still true, and "The Serpents of Paradise" keeps that message very much alive.

Justin Askins teaches at Radford University.