Sage: Susan,
As one who has lived a chunk of my adult life in the American West and a fan of
Edward Abbey’s writings, I enjoyed reading your book, Coyotes and Town Dogs. Thank you for taking me back into a
time when I (and perhaps the nation) was more idealistic. Your book
brought back a lot of memories such as the time I helped organize a protest of
James Watt, when he was speaking in North Carolina. I was just a few
years out of college at the time. A lot has happened since then.
I was amazed at the organizers of the Earth First!
movement. They appear to have been libertarian in their political
philosophy who valued freedom and at the same time were “good old boys” who
enjoyed a good time. You referred to Abbey’s writing as being “fun”
and I agree. It’s a treat to read him just as it would be fun to hang out
with these guys. I found myself envious of being there and wondered if,
in your research, you get to spend time in their element, in a bar or around
the campfire, swapping stories? If so, are they as fun as they
seemed?
Susan: I
didn’t hang out in the Zona Rosa whorehouses.
I’m a journalist, so I kept some
distance, particularly from the main characters. But I did become friends with a few of the
minor characters, including environmentalists and at least one of the guys who
prosecuted them. In the case of the
prosecutor, though, he resigned from the U.S. Department of Justice after Dave
Foreman’s trial in a crisis of conscience.
But not before he wrote a killer indictment.
Sage: Earth
First! had its beginning five years or so after the publication of Abbey’s Monkey Wrench Gang. Although Abbey
had based his characters on real people, the novel inspired a movement instead
of a movement giving inspiration to a novel. As an author, do you find
this odd?
Susan: I don’t
find it odd in the least. In America, we
tend not to value art or intellect. This
isn’t only a problem with right-wingers who want to stop funding subversives. Environmentalists are rarely voracious
consumers of culture, and, as a result, they’ve lost the initiative and are
stuck in a reactive mode.
I wrote my undergraduate thesis on Oscar Wilde, who
trumpeted the idea that art was more real than life, so bringing The Monkey Wrench Gang to life made
perfect sense. Major historical changes
always have been accompanied by revolutions in art. Artists and revolutionaries inspire each
other. It’s a call and response, like
Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell.
Sage: I read
Pat Conroy’s Prince of Tide after
having read most of Abbey’s writings. I found myself wondering if Luke
Wingo in Conroy’s novel was inspired by Abbey’s “Hayduke” in The Monkey Wrench Gang. Have you
read Conroy’s novel and if so, what are your thoughts about these two
characters?
Susan: I
haven’t read Pat Conroy. But I did read books by William Eastlake and Jim
Harrison about monkey wrenchers. Bill
Eastlake was a friend of Abbey’s. He
lived near Bisbee, Arizona, and I was fortunate to meet him shortly before he
died. I had a young, strapping
boyfriend. Eastlake gave him the once
over and cracked wise. “Are you her
bodyguard?”
Yeah, my boyfriend said.
“Do you have a gun?” Eastlake asked him.
“I don’t need one,” my boyfriend said.
They just kind of smiled at each other.
Sage: The
book was published just a few years the Prescott trial. Do you know what
has happened to the members of Earth First! since that time?
Susan: Dave
Foreman went on to co-found several environmental groups, all devoted to the
principles that were at the core of Earth First! What many people don’t realize is that the
men and women who started the group were among the first non-scientists to pick
up on conservation biology, a new branch of ecology made possible by computers
that was just starting to gain traction in the early 80s. Research by E.O. Wilson and others gave us
the bad news that national parks were not large enough to ensure the
continuation of natural processes. So
this was a big deal, and not many conservation organizations were paying
attention. If they were, they weren’t quite sure how to incorporate this
startling news into their way of doing business.
Sage: There
are many who considered Earth First! a terrorist group. However, since
their popularity in the 1980s, the United States have seen both domestic
(Oklahoma City) and foreign terrorist attacks (911) that make Earth First! look
as if they were kindergarteners. In your book, you tell that Dave Foreman
was upset when some people spiked trees without letting anyone know, making it
dangerous for the loggers. How would you respond to someone who
refers to Earth First! as a terrorist group?
Susan: I
always say that the FBI took Earth First! more seriously than Earth First! took
itself. Earth First! had more in common
with the guerrilla theater of Abbie Hoffman and the Yippies than any terrorist
group.
But I do think Earth First’s popularity surprised
the hell out of the founders. They had
this idea and went for it, but they were what the organizational psychologists
called “goalless planners.” One thing
led to another, and suddenly several thousand people were running around calling
themselves Earth First! There wasn’t
much accountability because they were all supposedly anarchists. It’s possible that one of those people would
have been nutty enough to do something really bad. That was the only risk, in my opinion.
But nothing like that happened. I think it would be more dangerous to promote
some of Earth First’s ideas now. But
come on, guys. These are environmentalists. Nerds, basically. Dave Foreman lasted about a month in the
Marines.
Sage: Although
I do not consider Earth First! to be in the same camp as Al Qaida, I found
myself pondering on the idea that they both had a decentralized structure that
allowed lots of activities to occur without top-down control. It is also
interesting how our government seems to have hard times engaging in such
movements. Any thoughts?
Susan: I
completely agree. When I covered Redwood
Summer in 1990, it wasn’t just the FBI agents who were stymied. The reporters were going nuts. They couldn’t figure out where to go, and the
protests were miles apart. Marc Cooper,
who teaches at USC now, was reporting on it for The Nation. He kept shaking
his head, and saying: “We didn’t do it this way in the SDS.”
As I understand it, Occupy adopted that model,
too. It’s a good idea, when you look at
the history o f the FBI destabilizing political movements. When I was researching the book, I looked
into COINTELPRO, the counterintelligence program started by the FBI to fight
domestic Communism in the 1940s. In the
1960s, there’s compelling evidence, based on a court case, that COINTELPRO
agents provocateurs infiltrated the antiwar movement in the 60s, as well as the
Black Panthers.
Sage: After
twenty years, what new insights would you provide if you were to republish the
book?
Susan: I
think of Earth First! as a delightfully eccentric expression of America’s
soul. Every day we get more evidence
that America has abandoned the values that really did make us exceptional. Our landscape was the embodiment of freedom,
democracy with a small d, a chance for the common man to stake a claim.
I love the film The
Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, because it’s so much about the wild man of
the West, as Bernard DeVoto described the Westerner, and the civilizing,
emasculating influence of the East, but really about civilization and its
discontents, the conflict within all of us.
John Ford knew it all in 1960.
The sense of loss...
So, history.
I would have a broader historical context. I used to see the environment as the
overarching issue and human concerns as relatively petty. But globalization is a steamroller.
Coyotes and
Town Dogs
had a second wind as a textbook, but it’s finally gone out of print. I’m going to come out with a new edition,
both as an ebook and a print-on-demand, with the book cover I always wanted.
Sage: Which
one is that?
Susan: It’s a
photograph by a guy named Len Irish that was in Outside magazine. The guys
are standing on the Great Salt Lake, looking tough, but there’s a reflection at
their feet that I want him to Photoshop so they’re wearing suits. It’s kind of
literal, I guess. But I’ve always wanted
to do it.
This goes back to your first question. Earth First! was incredibly fun, even if you
were just a reporter hanging around.
After Earth First!, the environmental movement turned into exactly what
the group’s founders were reacting against: an army of careerists whose
passions had been reduced to the art of the possible.
Was that the right direction? Maybe, maybe not. I tend to think that you have to win people’s
hearts, not just their minds. That’s
where art comes in. Ed Abbey knew
that. If you look at the last thirty
years of so-called pragmatism, the possible got very narrow indeed.
Sage: Susan,
Thank you for this opportunity to interview you for my blog. I enjoyed
how you brought in additional research from a variety of fields as you explored
this story, such as providing an insight into anarchist and populist movements
to the study on organizations and how they change as they mature. Where
did you receive the background to write this book? Had you studied
political and organizational theory?
Susan: I had
an old-fashioned liberal arts education.
At my girls’ school on the east coast, we studied Aristotle and
Plato in ninth grade. In eleventh grade,
we read John Locke, Adam Smith, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Montesquieu, the
Enlightenment political philosophers who influenced the founding fathers.
At Columbia University, I studied with the historian
Eric McKittrick. His specialty was the
Federalist Era. Everybody talks about
Thomas Jefferson and the agrarian ideal - and most environmentalists still
embrace that vision - but Hamilton’s financial policies laid the groundwork for
the American empire. So the Coyotes and Town Dogs debate started
early. I snagged the title from Mark
Twain, by the way, from Roughing It.
Sage: Susan,
you are primarily a journalist, right? This was your first book and it
certainly involved an extensive amount of investigative and journalistic
work. Recently, however, you’ve published a novel set in Africa and the
United States. Would you comment on the differences in writing a novel
verses a historical study and on your new interests that seem a long ways from
the American West?
Susan: I’m
just editing the novel now, actually.
It’s about a young West African army lieutenant who gets caught up in a
coup d’etat, and a white Kenyan reporter.
They’re about the same age, and psychologically speaking, there are
similarities in their backgrounds, so they feel an affinity. But it gets complicated, because they’re not
always on the same side.
About halfway through writing it, I realized the
story had some similarities to Coyotes
and Town Dogs. It’s about young men
struggling to find their places in a world that’s changing very fast, and in
ways they don’t necessarily like.
The writing technique is very different in
fiction. But I used my journalism
experience. After working as a reporter
in the U.S. and in Africa, I finally understood how power worked, how the
trajectory of a life plays out in the context of historical change. We’re not divorced from history. That’s a peculiarly American delusion that’s
fading along with our affluence. We are history.
But I needed to get out of journalism for a while so
I went back to school to write the book.
What a luxury! I think MFA programs
are a national treasure. The only
problem is that fewer writers are bumping their heads against the world. Graham Greene was a reporter and a spy before
he wrote novels. It was a different kind
of apprenticeship. I’ve been lucky to
have both kinds.
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