Half a century ago, a lyrical and passionate philosopher named Edward Abbey published a novel that would help define a generation. The Monkey Wrench Gang supercharged a secretive movement to preserve the remaining American wilderness from devastating overdevelopment and corporate exploitation through targeted acts of violence against machines. The book, which remains painfully relevant to the ongoing environmental crises facing the planet, has recently been re-released in a commemorative anniversary edition. “A 50th anniversary of The Monkey Wrench Gang couldn’t be timelier,” says Abbey’s friend and colleague Doug Peacock, who inspired the character of George Washington Hayduke in the novel. “Our American wilderness, Ed’s and my favorite shared value, has never been in greater peril, and so the book’s theme of challenging authority at every turn really hits the bullseye. We live in a scorching era of biological extinctions. Climate change by itself could take everything out.” Now 83 years old, Peacock wrote the introduction to the new edition of the novel. A distinguished author, filmmaker, and conservationist, he has dedicated his life to the preservation of grizzly bears and the “trophic cascade” of spiraling ecological benefits the bears provide throughout their constricted range. (Disclosure: Funk worked as communications director for Peacock’s former startup, Save the Yellowstone Grizzly.) A Fictional Character Birthed in Genuine Trauma Peacock met Abbey in 1969, shortly after his discharge from the Green Berets during the Vietnam War. “I saw a lot of Ed Abbey in Tucson back then,” Peacock reflects. “I wasn’t a writer yet, but I was a character.” Such a character, in fact, that Peacock immediately stood out in a crowd. His anarchic instincts, incited by his combat experiences and coupled with his having partially recovered from post-traumatic stress disorder through profound encounters with grizzly bears in the wild, made him a unique persona — one that would fit perfectly into what would become The Monkey Wrench Gang. In the novel, four contrarians band together and suppress their differences for a shared and singular mission: thwarting the unchecked destruction of their beloved desert landscapes. Led by the furious and untiring Green Beret medic George Hayduke, the gang plans a sweeping campaign of industrial sabotage in desert country. Abbey’s novel is largely built around this singular character, who eagerly puts the violent wrench into the gang’s monkey business. Hayduke’s struggles with what later became known as PTSD were mirrored in Peacock. “Looking back,” Peacock reflects now, “Abbey probably did me a favor in creating a caricature of myself whose dim psyche I could penetrate when my own seemed off-limits. Ed painted the ex-Green Beret Hayduke with precise brushstrokes as caught in an emotional backwater, an eddy out of whose currents I wanted to swim. The only thing worse than reading your own press was becoming someone else’s fiction.” The other three members of the gang, says Peacock, were also based on friends of his in the Southwest: Seldom Seen Smith was built around the late activist and river runner Ken Sleight. Doc Sarvis “is mostly as far as I’m concerned Ed Abbey, especially when he spouts out his philosophy and little nuggets of wisdom — that’s really Ed.” Bonnie Abbzug was modeled after Ingrid Eisenstadter, a recent contributor to The Revelator, whom Peacock notes “was a handful, not just in fiction. That was really her.” Peacock later recounted his own story in the harrowing 1990 book Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness. In 2009 The Atlantic released a short documentary about him under the same title: ‘Wilderness Is the Glue’ After returning from Vietnam, Peacock says, he went straight into the wilderness. “I didn’t want to work for anyone or have troubles with the authorities, so I lived in the woods,” Peacock recalls. “I like autonomy and I took it to the extreme when I got back from Vietnam.” He spent most of his time in Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, “and you absolutely could not find me. I lived the life of an outlaw, far from any authority, and took anarchy to the extreme, hidden in the wilderness. I love freedom, and my feelings fit right into Abbey’s rather formal libertarian philosophy that permeates The Monkey Wrench Gang.” They found particular common ground on environmental issues. “Defending the wilderness is really the glue that cemented me with Ed.” Peacock’s insular need for a kind of absolute personal liberty, begun as an aching promise to himself while serving overseas, happened to fit neatly with Abbey’s own philosophical beliefs. Abbey wrote his master’s thesis at the University of New Mexico on anarchy, that ultimate expression of chaotic self-governance, and dedicated The Monkey Wrench Gang to the late 18th-century English reactionary and later Romantic icon Ned Ludd, who launched a populist sabotage campaign against the encroaching Industrial Revolution. In his novel Abbey makes the reader confront and question assumptions about the kinds of people behind the current economy’s ultimate, inevitable toll on our communal natural landscapes. And to bring the fight to them. Radical Rebirth The Monkey Wrench Gang was published in a time of social unrest and political turmoil that somehow seems minor compared to today’s unceasing partisan mayhem. But it struck a chord at the time, and many young people took this novel’s message to heart. Readers have credited the book with sparking the creation of Earth First! and other “radical environmentalist” groups who deflated industrial truck tires to stymy commerce, burned billboards to restore the natural view, spiked trees to prevent logging, and otherwise did what little is possible to take some kind of stand against blind, rampaging overdevelopment. “It was the beginning of radical environmentalism,” Peacock tells me. A Message That Still Resonates Peacock, who has spent a lifetime writing books and making documentaries about his dedication to preserving grizzly bears, sees our present political moment of absolute and almost fanatical obedience to the wishes of ultrarich oil, gas, coal, and timber industries as the tragically perfect time for this reintroduction to an unlikely cabal that refused to let the world die around them. Indeed, the sycophantic corporate atmosphere we’re living in today is different from any other in modern U.S. history. From handing over public lands to private extractive interests to ignoring scientific realities on climate and aggressively seeking to remove vital protections for endangered species, the Trump administration proudly proclaims its unprecedented contempt for what allows the United States to be what it was founded to be — wild and free. The categorically contrasting but equally devoted characters of The Monkey Wrench Gang embody the American belief in pushing past seemingly impenetrable boundaries by working together, by risking it all for common ideals, and by regularly squabbling and then reconciling. Out of a shared sense of duty. This book reminds us today that when all else fails, there’s always the option of rebellious attempts at sabotage to cut through the agitprop and draw attention to an enduring and genuinely apolitical value: preserving what remains of our wilderness. Together. After all, as Peacock says, “The principles and anger behind The Monkey Wrench Gang are still with us, and still with me.” Previously in The Revelator: In Understory, An Ecologist Reflects on the Grief of Losing Nature The post Doug Peacock, the real ‘George Hayduke,’ Looks Back on 50 Years of The Monkey Wrench Gang appeared first on The Revelator.

Now a famed grizzly conservationist, Peacock served as Edward Abbey’s inspiration for the novel’s most pivotal, piercing character. The post Doug Peacock, the real ‘George Hayduke,’ Looks Back on 50 Years of The Monkey Wrench Gang appeared first on The Revelator.