The Green Bible is Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel “The Monkey Wrench Gang.”
It is a fictional novel about an environmental terrorist group which destroys coal trains, bulldozers, power plants, and their crowning accomplishment is blowing up Glen Canyon Dam.
Of course, the MSM loves it. In 1976, the New York Times thought terrorism was fun.
- From the National Observer, “A sad, hilarious, exuberant, vulgar fairy tale… It’ll make you want to go out and blow up a dam.”
- From the New York Times, “Since the publication of The Monkey Wrench Gang, Mr. Abbey has become an underground cult hero.”
- From the Washington Post, “One of the best writers to deal with the American West.”
- From the Houston Chronicle, “What a thing of beauty is Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang.”
Steven,
You bring me down memory lane. I remember reading “The Monkey Wrench Gang” when it came out. There were a lot of silly books that came out in the ’70s that got a lot of traction – it was just a weird time. I spent a good chunk of the ’70s out of the country in the military and remember thinking that everyone back home had lost their minds.
What about “The Secret Life of Plants”? Or “The Population Bomb”?
I read these kooky books because they were on sale at the PX and they looked interesting. Also read “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich” and it was so thick it also made for an excellent pillow when in the field and had to sleep on the floor of a guard shack or on the ground or in the back of a truck.
That was a great book for me as a kid, around age 12. I imagined helping to save the world as a big powerful adult who could finally drive to where the big bad logging companies who were shown to be wantonly destroying the very last of the rain forests and the forests in the USA too! By age 14 I was reading all about windmills and alternative farming methods, some of it actually pretty good stuff to this day, the later that is. Funny to look back on that stage in my life and note that many adults are still stuck in that stage!
“The Turner Diaries” for enviro-whackos.