Edward Abbey must be turning over in his grave following the newest announcement regarding national parks — even if almost nobody knows where he is buried.
Abbey was an old-school naturalist whose book, “Desert Solitaire,” ranks as a contemporary “Walden.” In its pages, he extols the beauty of the natural world and argues passionately for its preservation.
He likely would be unhappy with last week’s announcement by the National Park Service, expanding the use of electric bicycles in the country’s 419 national parks. The bikes, some of which can travel at speeds of 28 mph, will now be allowed along any trails where regular, foot-powered bicycles are used.
The decision was lauded by advocates for the elderly, the disabled and the physically unfit, who say the bikes will allow visitors in these groups better access to taxpayer-funded parks. The bikes are also better for the environment than cars and motorcycles.
But many other groups are crying foul, advocating for e-bikes to remain only on designated trails for reasons of safety and aesthetics.
Without a doubt, slower-moving hikers coming into contact with e-cyclists moving at three times their speed could result in injuries to both parties. And the bikes, which emit a low, humming sound, will be a source of noise pollution for people attempting to escape the modern world.
Yet the inexorable forces of “industrial tourism” appear poised to win out.
Abbey, who died in 1989 and who was buried secretly by friends in a desert west of Tucson, loathed such “progress.” To him, industrial tourism referred to all the little — and big — amenities that encroach on man’s attempt to get back in touch with nature. These include paved roads, hotels, restaurants and convenience stores in and around national parks to cater to visitors in their “back-breaking upholstered mechanized wheelchairs,” Abbey-speak for automobiles.
He claimed that industrial tourism threatened the nation’s national park system by changing the fundamental nature of ... well, nature. But he also thought industrial tourism robbed tourists themselves by making it impossible for them to actually escape their “urban-suburban complexes.”
He was also critical of marathon visitors whose goal is to cram visits to as many parks as possible into a two-week vacation, believing they would be better served to slow down and savor one or two locations, exploring them by foot and, yes, by bicycle.
But he didn’t envision the advent and quick proliferation of the e-bicycle industry, which has fought hard for the recent rule change for reasons of shareholder self-interest.
Abbey was no ingenue, at peace among the trees and unaware of market forces. He recognized the inevitability of big money corrupting our parks system and applying the same pressures there as it has in all other facets of local, state and national legislation. Advocates of industrial tourism, he wrote, “look into red canyons and see only green, stand among flowers snorting out the smell of money, and hear, while thunderstorms rumble over mountains, the fall of a dollar bill on motel carpeting.”
Abbey argued for no more cars and no new roads in national parks, and for allowing park rangers to get back to the serious work of policing and educating the public about our natural heritage. Recent rollbacks in environmental policies, of which this recent e-bicycle decision is but one small reminder, would have appalled him.
Appalled, but not surprised.
All the way back in 1967, in the introduction to “Desert Solitaire,” he noted that the book should not inspire readers to seek out the scenes of natural beauty that he described so lovingly, because they were already gone or going away. The book, he wrote, was “not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot — throw it at something big and glassy.”
Today, that observation seems more prophetic than ever, as we whizz along trails on our electric bikes and bring more and more of what we seek to leave behind with us when we commune with nature.
Nowhere, it seems, is immune to the clarion call of cash.
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