Happy Birthday, Ed Abbey!

Check out Leah Flores' Ed Abbey stuff on RedBubble. I got my Nalgene sticker here.

It was my favorite author's birthday last week. January 29th, to be exact.

I first found Edward Abbey through my friend Ben, who is an artist incredibly interested in the preservation of natural resources. He's also super adventurous.

We hiked the Grand Canyon four years ago this May (amazing how quickly time flies) and I had forgotten to bring a book. Ben grabbed me and insisted I read The Monkey Wrench Gang, which is one of Abbey's most popular books.

It's about a gang of four activists who wreak total havoc on development and billboards and local law enforcement in the southwest in the name of preservation and keeping nature the way God intended it to be. I think it took me a grand total of three sentences to get hooked on the book.

During the past four years, I've read at least six of his books (The Monkey Wrench Gang, Hayduke Lives, The Brave Cowboy, Good News, Earth Apples and Beyond the Wall are the ones I can remember) and have oogled and drooled and obsessed over the profile and video work my home newspaper, the Arizona Republic, published last year on Abbey's death in Tucson in 1989. I also named my cat after a character from The Monkey Wrench Gang because why not. She wreaks just as much havoc as George Hayduke.

Rain, greenery and a good book.

A photo posted by A M A N D A 🌵 (@mandalyn93) on Jan 29, 2015 at 2:55pm PST

Abbey does what many authors are unable to do--he addresses important topics with humor. I could just as easily have picked up a book about preservation and land ethics (re: Aldo Leopold's Sand County Almanac) and read it, but let me tell you--Sand County Almanac doesn't have the zest or spice of Edward Abbey's books.

His books build dynamic characters who are placed in otherworldly situations (especially Good News which is sort of set in a futuristic Phoenix). The characters are actual characters and do active things in the novels, which is more than I can say about a lot of other books that would be classified as environmental literature, probably because Abbey never set out to be an activist or a world-changer--he just wanted to be a novelist.

And he was a novelist. Abbey achieved that goal. He surpassed that goal. He has exceptional novels which address real issues in the world in a way that makes the reader want to make a change. I highly recommend his books to anyone with a passion for reversing apathy and a desire to see and enact revolution.