The beauty of fiction is that it enables the author and readers to enter a world where anything is possible — where magic is real, elephants can fly, or even more implausibly, a group of activists and vigilantes can actually prevail against the money and power of coal companies and industry and succeed in protecting the environment against those who wish to exploit and degrade it.
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At least, that’s how The Monkey Wrench Gang would have gone if I had been the one writing it. A classic plot arc: from solitary anger, to learning how to work as a team, to articulating and honing their philosophy and message, to a triumphant montage of success. With so much despair and hopelessness in our environmental narratives, occasional victories are desperately needed.
Yet you have to put this novel in an appropriate historical context. Environmentalism was, while growing in popularity, still in its infancy. Popular and scientific understanding of the complex biological, political, and socioeconomic factors contributing to environmental problems was far less developed than it was today. Regulatory enforcement was relatively lax — Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caught on fire just six years prior to the book’s release, and the famous Love Canal disaster in New York wouldn’t take place until three years later.
President Gerald Ford, according to ontheissues.org, seemed to take a lukewarm approach to the environment. He generally neglected the problems he inherited from Nixon, viewed the EPA as just more unnecessary bureaucracy (and failed to recognize its validity as an independent agency), consistently reduced pollution enforcement, and propped up the coal industry. But on the other hand, he did designate the Isle Royale National Park as wilderness area and sponsored the Water Resources Development Act to authorize $409M for public works on rivers and dams.
In this political and cultural context, Abbey’s chaotic tale of destruction and anger makes more sense, and it’s easier to see why The Monkey Wrench Gang had such a profound impact on environmental activists at the time. Decades of polite compromises and moderate regulations had failed to stop corporations from wrecking the American landscape and poisoning communities across the country; the people were simply tired. And whether you agree or not with their methods or justifications, the book forces you to question your own personal philosophy alongside the characters. What actions are acceptable, what are you trying to achieve in the first place, and what ultimately succeeds? For some, the romance of mangling machinery and sabotaging the advance of industrialization seemed like a beautiful fantasy. And for others, maybe it wasn’t a fantasy at all.
