Sometime in the mid-1950s, Edward Abbey–a young social radical and aspiring author from Pennsylvania–took a seasonal job as a park ranger at Arches National Monument (now Arches National Park) in Moab, Utah. A decade later in 1967, he compiled his notes from that season and published them as Desert Solitaire, now considered a classic of 20th-century nature writing. His goal in writing the book, however, was not merely to extol the beauty of rural Utah, but to protest its exploitation and destruction.

“Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages,” he writes at the end of the book’s introduction, “In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbrush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe. Probably not. In the second place most of what I write about in this book is already gone or going under fast. This is not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial. You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot–throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?”^[1]He fit right in with the late-60s.

When he said that many of the places he describes here are “already gone or going under fast,” he meant that literally: in the book’s longest and most spectacular chapter, “Down the River,” he describes canoeing down Glen Canyon–retracing the route that Major John Wesley Powell took when he explored the region after the Civil War–shortly before it was all damned and flooded to form what we now know as Lake Powell.

Indeed, the looming disappearance of this patch of canyon haunts the chapter like a specter, and Abbey can’t help but note the irony of naming this massive man-made reservoir for an explorer who would likely have been outraged and heart-broken to see all this stunning canyon country lost. But Abbey’s objection to the dam in 1967 isn’t just an aesthetic one, but also an ecological one; the desert simply isn’t intended to hold this many human beings, he argued, and all of these massive engineering projects to try and “develop” the desert are not only hubristic, but portend something sinister–as born of the same apocalyptic impulse that pollutes the air and built the atomic bomb.

For a stretch of the late-20th century, it was easy to dismiss Abbey’s doom-and-glooming as just so much Luddite nostalgia for some mythical premodern Eden, that he was failing to appreciate how much Lake Powell (and its companion Lake Mead) have helped the “desert to blossom as a rose,” making possible the great urban centers of Phoenix, Las Vegas, and so much of Utah itself.

Nevertheless, from the perspective of the 2020s, as Lakes Mead and Powell hit record-low levels amidst a steady, two-decades-and-counting decline in annual snowpack and Colorado River water yields—as the old canyons and caverns begin to stubbornly re-emerge after less than a century of submersion all while those same desert cities are now the ones threatened with extinction—it is increasingly hard to disagree with Abbey’s warnings. All those carbon-monoxide spewing cars that Abbey so distrusted weren’t just cutting us off from nature, but actively destroying it–and us with it. Nature is already having its revenge.^[2]And on a side-note: it’s interesting that although Abbey nowhere uses the term “global warming”–which wouldn’t enter the common vernacular till the 1970s–nevertheless … Continue reading

Almost inadvertently, Abbey was participating in the storied old tradition of prophets crying out from—and for—the wilderness; like Enoch, Elijah, and John the Baptist, “a wild man hath come among us!”^[3]Moses 6:38 And he’s not the only modern prophet to do so: “I have the feeling that the good earth can hardly bear our presence upon it,” warned President Kimball in his 1976 bicentennial address, recalling how the earth itself complained to Enoch, “Wo, wo is me, the mother of men; I am pained, I am weary, because of the wickedness of my children. When shall I rest, and be cleansed from the filthiness which is gone forth out of me?” (Moses 7:48). Note that there is no difference in this passage between literal and figurative filthiness, because there is no difference between the spiritual and the material generally (D&C 29:34; 131:7); the pollution of the earth is not only a metaphor for sin, but is literally a sin itself. Edward Abbey was right.

Naturally, one might wonder what a social radical like Edward Abbey, writing from the heart of Mormon country, had to say about the Saints directly. For the majority of Desert Solitaire he doesn’t say anything about us at all, other than to note in passing why the beer in Utah is so much lower proof. There is, however, a passage late in the book where he finally comments on the faith directly, and he is surprisingly (if still cautiously) laudatory–and it’s worth examining what he found in the Saints that, like the desert itself, he thought worth preserving. Here’s some excerpts from the relevant chapter, “Episodes and Visions”:

“Among the visitors [to Arches] on this last big weekend are many Moabites and other native Utahns: the Mormons, the Latter-Day Saints. Some of my liberalized friends regard the LDS with disdain; they see in the Church only a bastion of sectarian foolishness and political reaction and in its adherents a voting bloc of Know-Nothings, racially prejudiced [this is still over a decade before 1978, remember], religiously bigoted, opposed alike to the graduated income tax, the United Nations, urban renewal, foreign aid, legislative reapportionment, public welfare, Medicare and even free lunches for school children–actually or potentially a rabble of John Birchers.”

Which, OK, so far fair; I guess it’s nice to know that some things never change. Nevertheless, a page later, he drops his flippancy and gets a little more serious:

“…one can argue that the Mormons in practice achieved a way of life in which there is much to admire, much worth saving. In addition to their pioneering migrations, full of unusual heroism and examples of fortitude […], the Mormons deserve enormous respect for settling the most rugged, difficult as well as spectacular, terrain in the West. What was unusual, however, was their communitarian approach” (236; emphasis added)—and it is precisely this Zion-driven, United Order, Law of Consecration approach to settlement that Edward Abbey finds the most genuinely admirable, and which we should as well.

He notes for example how “in settling a given area they did not scatter themselves abroad over the landscape in isolated farms and ranches, each man for himself and the devil take the hindmost, but rather built small, rational, beautiful and durable towns in which all could live together” (pg. 237), as well as how “Irrigation systems were then built with the cooperative labor of all, the irrigable land divided fairly among member families, and the back country–canyon and mesa–left open to all who might wish to engage in cattle raising, as well as farming. And nearly all did” (pg. 237). This egalitarian approach, for Abbey, is what made the Mormon settlements so sustainable and well-adapted to the desert.

It is with high praise that Abbey declares, “In sum, the Mormons built coherent, self-sustaining communities with vigorous common life in which all could participate, free of any great disparities in wealth, small enough to make each member important.” (pg. 237)^[4]He also adds, “There was even room for the dissenter and noncomformist–every town had a few jack-Mormons, those who smoked tobacco, drank tea or coffee or hard liquor, and perhaps even joined … Continue reading However, just as Glen Canyon was already disappearing beneath the damned waters of the Colorado, so too was the best of Mormon country already vanishing mid-century, according to Abbey: “Subsequently swamped by the new American mode, by industrialism, commercialism, urbanism, rugged and ragged individualism, the old Mormon communities are now disappearing” (pg. 237), and it is specifically that mode of rural communitarianism that he laments losing the most.

For it sadly does not bear repeating how we have not practiced the United Order or the Law of Consecration in Utah for a very long time now. Ordersville and Brigham City–once set up as showcases for the United Order by none other than Brigham Young himself–are now just unremarkable pitstops in rural Utah; the old ZCMI in Salt Lake–the intended center for communitarian exchange in this new American Zion–devolved into just another mall, before being replaced by City Creek Mall in 2012. We have both rich and poor among us, just like everyone else.

Yet just as the old canyons and caverns once explored by both Major Powell and Edward Abbey are beginning to emerge again from the falling Colorado River–despite all our sternest efforts to deny what this portends, even when Salt Lake and Provo are plagued with perma-drought and choked with record wildfire smoke–so too do I suspect that the necessity for the United Order will begin to re-emerge as the only sustainable path forward^[5]especially in our strange new era when Bernie Sanders is winning the Utah Democratic primaries at BYU, of all places–or perhaps not so strange, since Brother Brigham preached all of the exact … Continue reading.

It’s unavoidable, really; we have it as our 10th Article of Faith that “Zion […] will be built upon the American continent,” and there’s really no other way to live in Zion without the United Order–nor for the earth to “be renewed and receive its paradisiacal glory” unless we live in a manner that doesn’t exploit its resources anymore. For that matter, we all covenant to keep the Law of Consecration in the Temple, and I suspect the Lord can only be mocked for so long before we will have to start keeping it again–for reals this time.

Truman G. Madsen once opined that because the early-Saints wouldn’t keep the United Order in Missouri, the Lord forced them to keep it during the Extermination Order; the Book of Mormon is also filled with accounts of various Nephite communities forced to keep the Order (e.g. Mosiah 21:17; 3 Nephi 3-4; etc.) because they would not keep it voluntarily–and those declining water levels at Lake Powell may force us sooner than later.

Such may be our only opportunity to survive, but also to thrive—especially as a church. Last summer this site posted “Keep Mormonism Weird,” arguing that what’s most attractive about our faith–especially to our generation so despairing, so frightened, so bereft of meaning yet yearning desperately for something more–are exactly those strangest doctrines that we foolishly shy away from far too often; and in our current fallen world, there is no doctrine stranger than the United Order. Since we’ll be living it during the Millennium anyways, we might as well get started now—because just as it is better to choose to be humble than to be forced to (Alma 32:14-16), so too is it better to start living the Law of Consecration before we’re compelled to.

Besides, wasn’t the smashing of the creeds the whole point of the Restoration, for the salvation of a ruined world? Remember also that the Book of Mormon, like Desert Solitaire, is “not a travel guide but an elegy. A memorial”—not a map of pre-Colombian civilizations, but the record of a lost and fallen American people who, like us, let their love of riches get the best of them—“You’re holding a tombstone in your hands. A bloody rock. Don’t drop it on your foot–throw it at something big and glassy. What do you have to lose?” We should be throwing the Book of Mormon at big and glassy things as well. What do you have to lose? Indeed, you may have everything to lose if you don’t.