One of my favorite authors who perhaps served as the first spark for my environmental passion is Ed Abbey, who I was shocked to recently find out, not
everyone has read! His book
Desert Solitaire will forever be among my favorite, both in content -- our mutual love of the barren deserts of southern Utah -- and in form. There is a simple but alluring rhythm to Abbey, and certainly no lack of passion in his prose.
From
Desert Solitaire:
"May your trails be crooked, winding, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds. May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets' towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottos of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something strange and more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you—beyond that next turning of the canyon walls"--Ed Abbey, 1989 preface
As an ardent anarchist, he's maybe not the best example for that journalistic tone I was looking to emulate, but he serves the purpose well in terms of environmental advocacy, and actually mirrors closely my own stylistic inclinations as a writer. If you're not already familiar with his works and style, you can read inside the first chapter of
Desert Solitaire here.
*(Do take time to read the authors foreword-- it's essentially his stance. And check out the Neruda epigraph! The Chilean in me smiles.)
Though I find it overwhelming to try to narrow the scope of the authors I find influential to my writing, if I had to list a few more in the same general category as Abbey, they would have to include: Ellen Meloy (
Eating Stone, The Anthropology of Turquoise) who is poetic and lyrical with a focus on the Utahn desert, Doug Peacock (
Grizzly Years) who is very similar to Abbey in tone and writes about Montana wilderness, Jared Diamond (
Collapse, Guns, Germs and Steele) who is more removed stylistically from his writing, but clear and opinionated, and Alston Chase (
Playing God in Yellowstone) who writes with a heavily "biased" agenda to expose the National Park System's management but is still effective... I'll need to revisit and analyze where in the text I see this happening.
Side Notes:
This (we can consider it a text) is an interesting video that shows how multifaceted hydropower has become. The footage of the dams coming down is uniquely beautiful in its destruction-- can't help but love it!
http://www.upworthy.com/their-ideas-used-to-be-called-crazy-talk-but-things-are-different-now?c=ufb1
