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the name of environmental preservation—reached an invigorating plateau in the early Reagan years, when the soft-cover edition of The Monkey Wrench Gang was circulating hip pocket to backpack, briefcase to purse. To many, The Monkey Wrench Gang was both old and new testament. One day in 1983, members of Earth First!—a defiantly radical and joyfully anarchic environmental group—straggled into the Lake Powell area from the Lone Rock campgrounds just across the state line in Utah. Interior Secretary James Watts had accepted an invitation to celebrate the 20^th anniversary of tourist-oriented Lake Powell, a body of water that fills the sandstone Glen Canyon and attracts more than two million tourists a year. Earth First!ers, who looked like they had spent the previous six months in the wilderness and enjoyed every minute of it, had come for a glimpse of the evil incarnate that was James Watt. He did not disappoint them.

      Yet James Watt’s enemies always underestimated him. When he addressed an overflow luncheon of corporate well-wishers and tourism honchos at a lodge owned by the Del Webb Corporation that day, he spoke with symmetry: When his left arm rose outward to the sky, so did his right, giving the impression of a minister in mid-benediction. He turned 45 degrees to the left, then 45 to the right. His body expanded and contracted. He followed gratuitous insults to his detractors and the press with heaping praise for his own accomplishments. His ten fingers touched lightly, as if holding a softball. Even his incisors were uniform. A mock-up of Rainbow Bridge, the popular 290-foot-high symmetrical sandstone formation at Lake Powell, formed a halo behind his head.

      Watt’s philosophy of federal land use? Simple: Any land under his control was wasted unless it produced revenue, whether from mineral rights, grazing fees, or tourism. Land that remains pristine and undeveloped might as well be fallow fields; turn it over to private enterprise, he insisted. And an unalloyed example of Watt’s philosophy? Right there at Lake Powell, where “more people have rafted since the dam was built than rafted it from the day of Adam”—where, he announced, there should be further development of tourist facilities and where “there will never be a ban on motorized rafting on the Colorado River as long as I hold office. If you’re going to be a steward you’ve got to invest in the land.” His audience slurped it up. But while he spoke, a small plane was gassing up at a nearby airfield. Soon it would fly overhead, trailing an Earth First! banner reading “FREE THE COLORADO!”

      Earth First! defined environmental approaches as either deep or shallow ecology. The latter involved compromises, trade-offs, and planned development of wilderness areas; its practitioners ranged widely, from Morris and Stewart Udall to James Watt, from the Sierra Club to the Del Webb Corporation. Deep ecology rejected this approach, arguing that every trade-off and compromise, no matter how well-intentioned, forever reduced the Earth. Privately, some were “two-hatters,” working on acceptable Sierra Club goals while simultaneously pursuing absolutist objectives. “Never again,” said purist Earth First!ers of projects such as the Glen Canyon Dam. They were the Jewish Defense League of the environmental movement.

      To celebrate Lake Powell’s 20th birthday, Watt and the other guests boarded a paddleboat for a short ceremonial ride. At the same time, Earth First! rented a houseboat from a Del Webb fleet and motored within sight of the VIP paddleboat. From my vantage point on the top deck of the latter, I could see the demonstrators on the former, but their anti-Watt chants were unintelligible. A Paradise Valley matron to my side noticed that I was peering out at the friendly rabble. “Earthworms,” she said with a harrumph, “that’s what they are.” She considered that an insult. Others on the VIP float regarded Earth First! more with condescension than contempt, looking on them as they might view trained seals at the San Diego zoo.

      A few minutes later the transmission on our vessel malfunctioned and it refused to budge. We were up Lake Powell without a paddleboat; this wasn’t the Titanic, but it was a potential public-relations disaster. Del Webb publicists, skilled in damage control, immediately sprang into action: they poured glass after glass of champagne for the VIPs until the problem was solved. Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt took part in the public ceremonies, then the future Interior Secretary privately praised Abbey. I wandered over to a fellow wearing a white cowboy hat and a dark bola tie. It was Interior Secretary James Watt. He told me that a few weeks earlier he had been touring national parks in Alaska, and a ranger asked if he could borrow his glasses. Watt, a bit puzzled, handed them over, he related, and the ranger put them on for a few silent seconds, then handed them back. “Thank you, Mr. Secretary. I just wanted a chance to see how you saw the world.”

      I asked: “Mr. Secretary, are you familiar with The Monkey Wrench Gang?”

      “Is that the book about eco- eco- eco…” The cabinet member stammered like a stuck record, his mouth powerless to utter the word in full.

      “Ecotage?” I suggested.

      “Yes, that’s it. No, I’m not really familiar with it.”

      “It’s set in this area.”

      “Really? In Navajoland?”

      “No. Here at Lake Powell. At the dam.”

      “Well!”

      A reporter from the Lake Powell Chronicle joined us. “It’s a novel. A very funny book about blowing up the dam. A fantasy.”

      “No. Obviously I’ve not read it.”

      “I’ll get you a copy,” the local journalist offered.

      “I never promise to read anything,” Watt replied.

      Around the Earth First! campfire that night, a gaggle of good-natured environmental ruffians laughed at how silly they themselves had looked, how the odds were so stacked against them as to be incalculable, how off-key were the ditties they had sung from their “Li’l Green Song Book.” I bought A REDNECKS FOR WILDERNESS T-shirt from them for ten dollars. They spoke of a fall propaganda tour, taking their songs, skits, and message through Midwest and East Coast campuses. They talked of Ludlow, Bisbee, Butte, Silver City, and other Western towns where militant miners had stood up to recalcitrant companies. They warbled rock-and-roll tunes by such environmentalists as Bo Diddley, Ritchie Valens, and the Isley Brothers. They made up songs featuring Watt, Reagan, and Glen Canyon, though they were hard-pressed to find a rhyme for Ruckelshaus. As they tossed the last log on their campfire, the self-anointed Earth First! Tabernacle Choir howled a particularly rousing “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.” The Colorado River continued to flow into Lake Powell with a mind of its own, only to emerge lobotomized at the far end.

      ED ABBEY WAS A FORTUNATE NOVELIST. While he was writing The Monkey Wrench Gang in the early 1970s, he must have taken encouragement and inspiration from events around the country. A Vermont man calling himself Lobo sawed down billboards on highways throughout New England and as far south as the Key Bridge connecting Virginia to Washington, D.C. “The Fox” of Kane County, Illinois, dumped sludge and dead fish at a U.S. Steel executive’s office, so enraged was he at that company’s befouling of the air and water. A man in Montague, Massachusetts, toppled a 500-foot tower to be used in nuclear power-plant construction. Elsewhere in New England, 30 high school students were caught with axes that would have been perfect for chopping down billboards, but the police lacked evidence and had to let them go.

      Along Route 93 in Idaho’s Sun Valley, billboards fell as fast as they could be replaced. Likewise on Highway 50 near Virginia City, Nevada. College students in Prescott, Arizona, acknowledged using saws and axes on billboards lining Highway 89 north of town. These were just some of the episodes that earned one-paragraph wire stories around the country. Never underestimate the power of the Associated Press to spread seditious acts.

      I trace my own antipathy toward unsightly billboards to the mid-1950s, when I was in grade school. My father, a Washington, D.C., lawyer, worked for an attorney whose clients included the Outdoor Advertising Council—a gussied-up euphemism for the billboard lobby. Our family often drove south through the Blue Ridge Mountains, where billboards were already an eyesore.

      “Dad,” I said in exasperation during one trip, “how can you represent the billboard industry?”

      He looked at me with mock seriousness. “Combats highway hypnosis.”

      While

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