Humanity, the Environment, and Arrogance Theme Analysis

Many nature memoirs—especially of the 1960s activism era—show a deep affection for animals. This is no different in Desert Solitaire, Edward Abbey’s memoir of a summer spent in Utah’s deserts. As he mediates on Moab’s many creatures, Abbey condemns humans for arrogantly thinking they’re at the top of the food chain. But Abbey goes one step further, illustrating his belief that humans are not only kin to animals—they are, in fact, equal in importance to plants and the landscape. This leads to two conclusions: first, that people should see themselves as merely one part of a greater environmental whole and, as a result, that their attitude toward both fellow human beings and non-human beings should be humbler.

Abbey begins by portraying animals as his equals, suggesting that humans are not the pinnacle of creation as they often arrogantly assume. When he arrives in the desert, he starts wearing a live gopher snake around his waist and lets it scare away the mice that annoy him. Abbey’s cooperation and physical closeness with the snake suggest humans and animals are not incompatible and can, in fact, share common goals. Later, when trying to rescue a runaway horse named Moon-Eye, Abbey reasons with the rogue animal as if it were human. Containing some of the book’s longest (one-sided) dialogue, this scene implicitly argues that even animals deserve the dignity of logic. Abbey also imagines animals’ emotional lives: though reluctant to personify nature, since words can distort reality, he sees an owl poach a rabbit, listens to a chorus of frogs, and watches two snakes mate. He imagines the animals’ “gratitude,” “joy,” and “love.” These experiences lead Abbey to conclude that it’s “a foolish, simple-minded rationalism which denies any form of emotion to animals,” solidifying his argument that animals are just as nuanced and complex as human beings.

Abbey then moves on to plants and the inanimate landscape, creating an even deeper sense that human beings are equal to the natural world. Trees, especially, draw his attention on an almost human level: he and his favorite juniper are “Two living things on the same earth, respiring in a common medium.” By cohabitating, they contact each other even “without direct communication.” The endangered pinion pine, also, becomes a “victim”—a term of dignity usually reserved for suffering human beings. Furthermore, inanimate natural features—not just living plants—gain the same humanlike respect. The sound of Havasu Creek, for instance, contains “many voices, vague, distant, but astonishingly human.” The Escalante River, too, prompts Abbey to think “river thoughts”—a figure of speech that suggests rivers have their own unique consciousness. Through this sense of reverence and respect for the landscape, Abbey argues that human beings are by no means the most superior beings in the natural order. Abbey feels so connected to the environment that he tries, in a “hard and brutal mysticism,” to merge mentally with it. Beneath the night sky, he feels “nothing between me and the universe but my thoughts.” Similarly, falling asleep outdoors, he “join[s] the night and the stars.” For Abbey, only conscious thought separates human bodies from the planets and stars. When contemplating his rancher friend Roy Scobie’s fearfulness or the dead photographer Abbey finds in a canyon, Abbey hopes he himself will die “in the open, under the sky,” rather than in a sterile hospital. Once “transfigured” into food for a buzzard, maybe he will achieve his sought-after environmental unity. By the end, Abbey has of course failed to become literally one with the earth. But his repeated attempts prepare readers for his conviction that human beings, undeniably a piece of the environment, ought to regard themselves differently.

Because of his mystic unity with nature, Abbey concludes that human-centeredness is misguided. He invokes a famous literary view to support his case. Robinson Jeffers, inventor of “inhumanism” (the theory that human beings are not the center of the animal world), appears as a “clear-eyed” prophet in Desert Solitaire. Aside from quoting “Shine, Perishing Republic” (Jeffers’s famous environmentalist attack on human arrogance) several times, Abbey builds on his idea of inhumanism by calling out “man-centeredness,” or “anthropocentricity.” Abbey’s strongest statement against “anthropocentricity” comes in a disagreement with a man named J. Prometheus Birdsong whom he meets at Arches National Monument. His opponent’s pseudonym—evoking the Greek hero who stole fire from heaven and was punished for his belief that human beings deserved it more than the gods—suggests Abbey’s contrasting view, that human beings are not supreme in the natural order.

Finally, Abbey hints that human superiority is not only an illogical belief but a harmful one, often leading to social inequality. To deny “any form of emotions” to animals is the same as how Muslims (in Abbey’s view) deny “souls to women.” Whether or not readers agree, Abbey clearly thinks looking down on animals is similar to looking down on fellow human beings. Abbey’s political thoughts also echo his fear of human arrogance. Abbey laments America’s intervention in North Vietnam, where “we kill our buddies instead of our real enemies back home in the capital, the foul, diseased and hideous cities and towns we live in.” By calling the North Vietnamese “our buddies” rather than conceiving of them as enemies, Abbey argues that all human beings are equal, even political rivals. The real enemy, he insists, is capitalist government, a force that ignores the equal importance of the environment, overdevelops the earth, and locks people in artificial “towns and cities.” With political animosities like this, Abbey hints that when separated from the environment of which they are a natural part, people can fall into the mistaken belief that they are superior—not just to the natural world, but also to one another.