Even in mid-September you cannot go comfortably by day into the deserts of southeastern Utah. Together the late Edward Abbey and I rented horses and rode into the La Sal mountains, following what began as a dirt road and ended as a trail at an elevation of approximately 10,500 feet. From the mountain pass, we looked northwest between triangled peaks of pinkish-gray talus across the fantastically elaborate redness of the Colorado Plateau, at whose red heart the Green and Colorado Rivers achieve conflux. Twenty miles to the northwest, the old uranium town of Moab, now a mecca for river rats and mountain bikers, glittered like a tin-can dump in the haze below the purple sandstone tumuli of Arches National Monument. This is—will always be—to the literate (as well as the not-so-literate) Abbey’s Country: locus of his experience and of his work, geological embodiment of his life’s concern.

The cow lay on her back in the road, her belly grossly distended between the boundary stakes of her rigid upturned legs, the hind ones spread away from a porridge of writhing maggots. Ed worked his horse with difficulty around the carcass while my own, a well-grained mare called Beefy, tried to bolt away up the cutbank where she would be splendidly positioned to lose her footing and roll her twelve or thirteen hundred pounds over me. I got her safely past finally and rode up beside Ed, whose face expressed a disgust incommensurate with the stench we had just ridden through. We were in timber now; fool-hens rocketed under the chins of the horses, making them start and crowhop. I had my field glasses out, looking for elk. At the sound of bodies crashing among the trees I was off the horse and on one knee, glassing the shadows for flashes of tan; then Ed laughed. “Slow elk,” he said, as a herd of white-faced cattle trotted heavily into the grassy park ahead. “Dirty, stinking, bawling, s–t-smeared brutes. Four-legged lawnmowers. . . . “

After supper that evening Ed reverted to the subject of the presence of livestock—sheep and beef cattle—on the public range. He had had a letter on the subject published earlier that summer in the Moab Times-Independent, that had not been well-received by the town fathers, who accused him of “pissing on the town of Moab.” Ed had accepted their reaction with equanimity. Two years before he had flown from his home in Tucson to Missoula, Montana, where he had delivered a lecture entitled “Free Speech: The Cowboy and His Cow” to an audience of what he later described as “five or six hundred students, ranchers, and instant rednecks [transplanted Easterners]” who also had failed to respond like ladies and gentlemen to his remarks. These began, “When I first came West in 1948 . . . I thought, like most simple-minded Easterners, that a cowboy was a kind of mythic hero. I idolized those scrawny little red-nosed hired hands in their tight jeans, funny boots, and comical hats,” and ended with jeers, “a sitting ovation,” and “gunfire in the parking lot.” Ed’s thesis, briefly stated, was that the public-lands beef industry is a public scandal and an ecological disaster, resulting in overgrazing and other forms of environmental mayhem; that “Western cattle-men are nothing more than welfare parasites” who have been “getting a free ride on the public lands for over a century”; and that these nuisances deserve to be put out of business through the elimination of federal subsidies, including especially grazing leases acquired at token cost.

Edward Abbey was, of course, a maverick. Still, on this particular subject, he was something more comfortable than vox clamantis in deserta; “Cattle-Free by Ninety-three” is a cry nearly as ubiquitous in the deserts of the West and Southwest today as the peculiar wind-down call of the canyon wren, though no one I have talked with seems to know its origin. Steve Johnson, of Defenders of Wildlife, had it from Earth First!, a militant organization directly inspired by the publication of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Ed’s comic novel of lust and ecotage on the Colorado Plateau; while Lynn Jacobs, who lives in Tucson and is writing a book about the cattle problem, has no idea where the slogan comes from. The movement generated by it, he explained, is a decentralized one, like Earth First! itself: people hand out bumper stickers, have demonstrations, write books and articles. Johnson, who believes that under the present (century-old) system of public land management, “Two percent of the nation’s beef is being paid for by our wildlife species,” would like—personally—to see that the political influence of the public-lands rancher is reduced to something commensurate with his economic contribution. He believes that, though more has been written on the subject in the past four or five years than in all the previous ones, “Cattle-Free by Ninety-three” is an issue generally avoided by environmentalists, who have concluded that here is a battle they cannot hope to win. Nevertheless, the excellent environmentalist paper High Country News, published biweekly in Paonia, Colorado, regularly documents the controversy between often hard-scrabble ranchers throughout the Rocky Mountain West and their critics, who accuse them of every misdeed from shooting supposedly predatory eagles and certainly predatory grizzly bears to starving and strangling migratory antelope by means of their countless miles of “bob-war” fencing. If only it were not for those greedy and, insensitive sheep and cattle men (the argument goes), the elk herds would have pasture to winter them safely, allowing them to increase and multiply; congressional delegations could not be intimidated from agreeing to the reintroduction of wolves into Yellowstone; the Indian tribes (and everyone else) would have plenty of water; and backpackers in transit to wilderness areas would not get their scientifically-sophisticated hiking shoes mired in soft surprises. Throughout the American West, the rancher today is perceived to be the single greatest threat to the environment since the oil companies all went bust together at the start of the 1980’s.

When I moved West a decade ago and began reading Edward Abbey’s books, I thought his attitude toward ranchers and ranching distinctly unromantic and not a little unfair; ten years later, I am not so sure. Though I spend my life away from the typewriter roaming the territories con trolled by the National Forest Service and the Bureau of Land Management and am thus able to testify that the exploitation of the range is an undeniable fact and a cause for serious concern, I have not—yet—succumbed to Cattle-Free Fever. On the other hand, I have definitely lost, in whatever degree I ever possessed it, the romantic attitude I once had toward ranching as a way of life and ranchers themselves as human beings. Ranchers have indeed, as Abbey claimed, been on the receiving end of the federal pipeline for too long. They are accustomed to getting something for almost nothing, their justification for this largess being that their lives are harder than anyone else’s and their economic condition more precarious, while their traditional existence remains worthy of perpetuation at whatever cost to the taxpayer and society in large. The truth is that, taken as a class, they have become something of a collective prig. Mention horseback riding to a rancher and he will explain to you how he despises being on a horse and would never set foot in the stirrup were it not for the demands of his calling. Mention hunting (except for coyote) and he will remark that he has no time for such frivolity. In whatever interchange with too many ranchers, you will find yourself cast in the role of the amateur being condescended to by the professional. As between the two of you, he and he alone has felt the hard hand of an implacable fate: he is the man, you are the boy. . . . I don’t buy it, but the government does. And has, for something over a century now.

Perhaps that is merely a personal reaction on my part. What is definitely not personal, however, is the feeling that the relationship between the agriculturalist, whether Eastern farmer or Western rancher, and the land upon which he depends for his livelihood is no longer what it once was—or was perceived to be—and that the myth of the American husbandman has hardened in consequence into a brittle solidity, and finally crumbled away altogether. This development is partly the result of the farm support structure that has been welded into place since World War I, partly that of the progressive mechanization and depersonalization of the highly scientific industry that is modern agriculture. More fundamental, I think, is the sea change that has occurred in Western assumptions regarding man’s proper relationship to the earth and to the natural world.

For millennia that relationship was considered to be symbiotic—in other words, a working one. To be in harmony with nature meant to husband nature; to develop the potential within it towards its own greater fruition and the needs of man. We read this idea clearly in the literature of the ancients, particularly the Latin poets. In the early days of the American Republic, the classical ideal of man maintaining harmonic equipoise between himself and nature was reiterated by General Washington who, echoing the sentiments of Cincinnatus, spoke lovingly of retiring to Mt. Vernon to repose once again beneath his “vine and fig tree.” The harmonic theme was elaborated upon by the apologists for the Southern tradition for at least two decades before the outbreak of the Civil War, and received its final restatement in American culture from the Southern Agrarians in the 1930’s, whose point was further understood by that unaligned literary comet, William Faulkner. Since then, however, a revolution has occurred, through which the Bierstadt Mentality has prevailed over the bucolic ideal. Albert Bierstadt was a German-born American painter who traveled widely in the American West in the 1860’s and 70’s and produced the most excruciatingly ethereal paintings of the Rocky Mountains, in which Nature is a cathedral flooded by exalting unearthly light on the threshold of which Man stands, staring in awe through an invisible portal. Today, the Bierstadt Mentality is a staple of every Pilgrim’s gear, along with his inner-frame backpack, his Sun Shower, and his Water Purifier kit, as he trudges away on his annual Wilderness Experience, By that word, “wilderness,” he means a place in which, while there may be men, there is no sign of man, his works, or his chattels: for the true Pilgrim, the sight of a fire ring or a circle grazed around a pine tree by a snubbed pack horse is an attack upon the authenticity of his quest. (For your Enlightened Backpacker, in fact, the Appalachian Mountains of the 18th century, which our forefathers regarded as a howling wilderness, would be no wilderness at all, overrun as it was in those days by Indians living in villages and equipped with the latest Formative technology.) Today, the socially approved way in which to get close to nature is not to husband it, to wrestle with it as hunters and farmers have always been required to do, and still must, mingling blood and sweat with snow, rain, and mud, but rather to disengage from it in a fundamental way, the presumption being that man in his contact and engagement with nature can only defile it. Leave only footprints, take only pictures, as the Pilgrims from New York, Denver, and Los Angeles like to say. But—can anyone really imagine a backpacker ranching?

As late as the 1930’s, novelists, critics, and academics—many of them semi-urbanized, though raised in a rural setting and among rural values; Richard Weaver is a good example of the type—still worried in a more-than-abstract way about the future of the family farm and the superstructure of values and traditions erected upon an agricultural existence. Today, most artists and intellectuals are thoroughgoing cosmopolites whose idea of “the country” is a room with a view at Yaddo: when we hear someone refer to “the plight of the farmer,” the speaker is much more than likely to be a) himself a farmer or rancher; b) a New Class technocrat looking for a Social Problem to solve; or c) an urban journalist in search of a Pulitzer-Prize-winning subject of Significance. While the conversation is going on, the Nature Boys are backpacking through the Bridger-Teton Wilderness in Wyoming: yuppies in sneakers and short pants laying claim to territories won over a century and a half ago by strong men on horseback, bearing for weapons the latest technology available to them, wresting a precarious living from what the land had to offer, and enduring the rages and inauspices of nature throughout four seasons—the nearest equivalent we have, in other words, to our modern ranchers, never mind their bellyaching, their philosophical narrowness, and all their checks and supports from a prodigal government in Washington.