Great Books: The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey - Illustrated by Robert Crumb - The Classic Novel That Inspired People to Form the Earth First! Ecology Group...

Read it and be inspired too. 

http://www.earthfirst.org/

Here is an Excerpt from the Book... as they look at the Peabody Open Pit Coal Mine in Utah.

"Parking in the shade and concealment of a group of pinyon pines, the gang took a walk up the nearest knoll, armed with field glasses.

Their view from the knoll would be difficult to describe in any known terrestrial language. Bonnie thought of something like a Martian invasion, the War of the Worlds. Captain Smith was reminded of Kennecott's open-pit mine ("world's largest") near Magma, Utah. Dr. Sarvis thought of the plain of fire and of the oligarchs and oligopoly beyond: Peabody Coal only one arm of Anaconda Copper; Anaconda only a limb of United States Steel; U.S. Steel intertwined in incestuous embrace with the Pentagon, TVA, Standard Oil, General Dynamics, Dutch Shell, I. G. Farben-industrie; the whole conglomerated cartel spread out upon half the planet Earth like a global kraken, pan-tentacled, wall eyed and parrot beaked, its brain a bank of computer data centers, its blood the flow of money, its heart a radioactive dynamo, its language the technetronic monologue of numbers printed on magnetic tape.

But George Washington Hayduke, his thought was the clearest and simplest: Hayduke thought of Vietnam.

Peering thru the dust, the uproar, the movement, they could make out a pit two hundred feet deep, four hundred feet wide, a mile long, walled on one side by a seam of coal, where power shovels, ten stories high, as Smith had said, gouged at the earth, ripped the fossil rock from its matrix of soil and sandstone, dumped it in ten ton bites into the beds of haulers. Beyond the first machine, in a farther pit, they saw the top of a boom, the cables and pulley wheel of another alien invader at work, digging itself in deep, almost out of view. To the south they saw a third machine, bigger yet: it did not roll on wheels like a truck, or on endless treads like a tractor, but "walked" one foot at a time, towards its goal. The feet were a pair of steel base plates resembling pontoons, each as big as a boat, lifted first one, then the other, on eccentric gears, rotated forward, placed down and the cycle repeated. Waddling forward, ducklike, the enormous structure of powerhouse, control chassis, superstructure, crane, cables and ore bucket yawed from side to side. Like a factory walking. The machine was electrically powered; as it proceeded a seperate crew of men handled its umbilicus the power line, an "extension cord" thick as a man's thigh through which throbbed the voltage driving the engines in the powerhouse - enough juice, its builders liked to boast, to light a city of 90,000 humans. The cable crew, four men with truck, kept the line clear and also towed the transformer unit, mounted on an iron sledge, keeping pace with the dragline machine. Giant Earth Mover: the GEM of Arizona.

We are so small thought Bonnie. They are so huge. "

http://www.abbeyweb.net/

http://www.abbeyweb.net/bookstore/index.html

The Kennecott Copper Mine Seldom Seen Smith speaks of

as viewed from space... easily twice as big as the Salt Lake City Airport.

Landslides have closed the mine for tourists but you may take a virtual tour at their website: http://www.kennecott.com/visitors-center and print the ever popular coloring book... of giant earth moving machines... 

Link to a Google Image Search for all the illustrations by Robert Crumb:
http://tinyurl.com/k9ahu2e

Dr Sarvis and Bonnie Abzug torch a billboard

Links to Earth First! http://www.earthfirst.org/ and http://efhumboldt.org/

Rock Sculptures on Mount Shasta

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