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What Others Say

As Bill McKibben reflects upon this issue in "Wandering Home": "The debate usually turns on questions of fact: Do ATV tires turn trails into muddy wallows? But for me the answer is much more basic, having to do with want it means to be civil, a good neighbor, a part of the community. There might be a hundred of us out on this trail today (there isn't, but there could be), and we would barely disrupt one another's experience. Just as Thirteenth Lake can easily absorb a hundred canoes and each of them hardly notices the others. But put one Jet Ski turning doughnuts on the lake, or one four-wheeler careening along the trail, and everyone else's blood pressure starts to rise.

I have an economist friend, Charlie Komanoff, who wrote a long paper proving this point by demonstrating how, say, housing values declined along noisy shores. But in fact it hardly needs proving; only in relatively recent times have people decided that "because I want to" is sufficient reason for annoying others. Only in a culture of hyperindividualism would it occur to you to do what you wanted without reference to anyone else - an Iroquois would have been unlikely to decide that standing in the middle of camp singing at all hours was a good idea, and if he'd made the mistake, the rest of his tribe would have put him straight. But stand on shore someday and listen to the selfish grating whine, hour after hour, of an inboard Jet Ski engine. That's the sound of a culture spinning out of control."

Reprinted with permission of the author

Novelist, poet, diarist, saboteur and political philosopher Edward Abbey worked seasonally as a park ranger and fire lookout for more than 20 years in the 50s through the 70s. 230 of Abbey's letters were recently published in Postcards from Ed. While the following letter was written more than 30 years ago, it remains both poignant and current.

To Esquire Magazine,
New York City
(September 11, 1976)

Dear Sirs:

I read with interest your two stories in the September issue promoting "Traction"; ORVs or "escape machines" as your writers call them. Let me tell you what a lot of us who live out here in the American West think about your goddamned Off-Road Vehicles. We think they are a goddamned plague. Like the snowmobile in New England, the dune buggy on the seashore, the ORV out here in the desert and mesa country is a public nuisance, a destroyer if plant life and wildlife, a gross polluter of fresh air, stillness, peace and solitude.

The fat pink soft slobs who go roaring over the landscape in these over-sized over-priced over-advertised mechanical mastodons are people too lazy to walk, too ignorant to saddle a horse, too cheap and clumsy to paddle a canoe. Like cattle or sheep, they travel in herds, scared to death of going anywhere alone, and they leave their sign and spoor all over the back country. Coors beer cans, Styrofoam cups, plastic spoons, balls of Kleenex, wads of toilet paper, spent cartridge shells, crushed gopher snakes, smashed sagebrush, broken trees, dead chipmunks, wounded deer, eroded trails, bullet-riddled petroglyphs, spray-painted signatures, vandalized Indian ruins, fouled up water holes, polluted springs and smoldering campfires piled with incombustible tinfoil, filter tips, broken bottles. Etc.

It's not the bureaucrats back in Washington who are trying to stop this motorized invasion of what little wild country still remains in America, on the contrary, the bureaucrats are doing far too little. What feeble resistance has so far appeared comes from concerned citizens here and there who are trying to do their duty: namely, to save the public lands for their primary purpose, which is wildlife, habitat, livestock forage, watershed protection and non-motorized human recreation.

Thank God for the coming and inevitable day of gasoline rationing, which will retire all these goddamned ORVs and "escape machines" to the junkyards where they belong.

Ed Abbey - Moab

Esquire Magazine, New York City (11 September 1976" from Postcards from Ed (Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2006). Copyright © 2006 by Clarke Cartwright Abbey. Reprinted with permission from Milkweed Editions. (www.milkweed.org)