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Letter to High Country News, Lander, Wyoming, October 4, 1986
Dear Editor:
Sorry to intrude upon your columns once again, but I would like to correct a few errors in the account of my remarks at the Telluride “Ideas Festival.”
About growth, I said that “Growth is the enemy of progress.” (Figure that out for yourselves.) I said, furthermore, that “every normal, healthy organism, plant or animal, human or otherwise, grows to a certain optimum size, and then, having reached maturity, stops growing physically.” Anything which grows without ceasing we call a monster – or a tumor.
As to reason and common sense, I believe in both. What I said at Telluride was that, judging from human history, so far, I have little hope or faith that reason and common sense will be applied in our attempts to resolve our ever-growing problems. (One more example of the self-contradicting nature of “healthy growth.”) What will probably happen, I said, is that nature will solve our troubles for us in the traditional manner: through plague, famine, civil war, earthquake, flood and climatic changes. Since we humans choose to breed and multiply like rabbits, mule deer, fruit flies or bacteria in a culture dish, we must expect to enjoy a similar fate – over and over again, as in the past. Nothing to regret here, it’s simply one aspect of the grand pageant of life. I merely wish to insist that we must stop pretending that we are somehow different from, or in some fashion superior to, the other animals on this planet.
Did I really say that “an ice age would be nice”? Actually, I’m in favor of expanding desertification. I’d like to see North America become a dry, sunny, sandy region inhabited mainly by lizards, buzzards and a modest human population – about 25 million would be plenty – of pastoralists and prospectors (prospecting for truth), gathering once a year in the ruins of ancient, mysterious cities for great ceremonies of music, art, dance, poetry, joy, faith and renewal. That’s my dream of the American future. Like most such dreams, it will probably come true. That is why I’m still an optimist.
Sincerely,
Edward Abbey
-- Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast
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