Edward Abbey's nickname might just as well have been "the Monkey Wrench" instead of "Cactus Ed." Abbey breathed new life into the Luddites' notorious sabotage of technology--their tossing wrenches into new machinery; however, he aimed his sabotage at those who were threatening the land and water of the Southwestern states. Abbey's was a guerrilla-style environmentalism, which inspired the radical Earth First, a Tucson-based underground that made news for wrecking such things as logging trucks, ski lodges, and power lines.

This "monkey wrenching" was already a fully developed theme in Abbey's first best-seller, a fast-paced piece of exposition called Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness (1968). Then, in a novel that Abbey actually titled The Monkey Wrench Gang (1975), his theme assumes its largest and perhaps most enduring form as Abbey's unlikely collection of characters load houseboats with explosives and try to float their armada against the 792,000-ton, $750,000,000 Glen Canyon...