Grassroots: Fierce Urgency of Now

An Advance Copy of My Next Progressive Populist Column, for Paying Subscribers

This is an advanced preview copy of my next column for the Progressive Populist. It is for paying subscribers only.

Edward Abbey has described the American wilderness as our collective home. The radical anarchist/environmentalist erected this metaphor to justify an aggressive program of targeted vandalism, referred to as “monkeywrenching.”

“Monkey-wrenching,” as defined by his fellow anarchist Dave Foreman, is the strategic disruption of commercial systems by individuals gumming up the works, by tossing a “ monkeywrench into the gears of the machine that is destroying natural diversity.”

Abbey and Foreman saw the erosion and destruction of wilderness areas and the natural diversity they contained as an existential threat. Defense of the wild, they would argue, is defense of ecological diversity, of clean air and water, of a livable planet. Corporate interests, Abbey argued, were “bashing their way into our forests, mountains and rangelands and looting them for everything they can get away with,” all for “short-term profits in the corporate sector.”