Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang is a classic of politically aware American environmentalist fiction. While a literary descendant of Henry David Thoreau and a rough contemporary of figures such as Rachel Carson, Abbey’s politics are not entirely one with earlier nature writers and environmentalists. His novel is perhaps best known for bringing ecotage to the consciousness of a broad audience and inspiring such real-world actions as the political theater of groups such as Earth First. Some of the book’s success is certainly due to the degree to which it provokes critical reflection on problematic tensions in several areas central to environmentally conscious writing. One such tension is that which arises between, on the one hand, representations of environmental politics and, on the other, the politics of representations of nature. A second pertains to the question of the degree and manner in which issues of social justice intersect with environmentalist agendas. Along the way, the novel tests different models of ecological awareness, dramatizes the virtues and challenges of politically engaged grassroots environmentalism, and, perhaps especially due to its setting in the desert southwest, anticipates the increasingly urgent and globally relevant cluster of issues related to water rights, damming, and irrigation.

This essay links the environmental resistance embodied by Edward Abbey’s Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang after the Vietnam War and the speculatively fictional future of Octavia Butler’s Olamina’s ecofeminist resistance (The Parable of the Talents) to a war that seems all too imminent in the contemporary US, a place where climate change denial is political policy and the interests of fossil fuel magnates matter more than the lives of individual citizens. This essay explores how American ecocriticism interrogates and informs our conceptions of war, whom we are fighting, and the ways that war generates environmental exigency.

“The Ecological Alternative” examines the intersection of appeals to ecology and authenticity among the American New Left and its environmentalist affiliates. The chapter also considers how literary representations of this alliance dramatize its contradictions. Many student radicals, especially those receptive to Murray Bookchin’s philosophy of social ecology, sought to structure alternative social arrangements that would liberate the individual psyche, the institutions that repressed it, and the environment itself. However, Bookchin’s writing, like that of the New Left’s primary theoretical influences, drew substantially on a psychoanalytic narrative that, when grafted to ecology, framed the self prized so highly by student radicals as yet another repression – one that obscured the reality of ecological interconnection. Edward Abbey, especially, documented this subjective confusion in Desert Solitaire (1968). Far from uncritically celebrating nature’s purity, Abbey and other nature writers of the decade established a representational tension between self and ecosystem that would characterize postwar literary treatment of ecology.

This chapter offers an overview of the conceptual framework of queer ecology – which interrogates the relationship between the categories of “queerness” and “nature.” In the first section, Seymour traces this framework’s history and deployment by academics, artists, and activists, and also attends to its oversights. She argues that queer ecology has made foundational, though sometimes underrecognized, contributions to the larger nonhuman turn in the humanities. The second section turns to primary sources, using queer ecology and the related framework of trans ecology to read two works of contemporary US literature, Edward Abbey’s novel The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975) and Oliver Baez Bendorf’s poetry collection The Spectral Wilderness (2015). Seymour shows how Abbey’s novel tries, unsuccessfully, to oppose the transformativity of nature to the transformativity of sex and gender; meanwhile, Bendorf’s poetry offers an alternative to this line of thought by drawing innovative parallels between the category of the vegetal and the transgender human body.