An old friend on film

Environmentalist, humanist Edward Abbey was a friend of mine, and a client. I met him in the mid-sixties when I represented his wife, Judith, who'd been arrested in an antiwar protest. (Judy, still in her thirties, died a few years later.)

Ed later moved to Tucson (my realtor brother, Charlie, found his home in the foothills of the Tucson Mountains), and we saw each other often, for legal stuff and social stuff.

Ed's books were reverent celebrations of the American west. Desert Solitaire, an early book, described his summer as a park ranger in Utah, and a later book, The Monkey Wrench Gang, decried the construction of the Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona, a huge project that dammed the Colorado River, flooding the Glen Canyon's fabulous terrain and monumental geological structures.

This video shows Ed in 1981 giving a speech on the top of Glen Canyon to a gathering that is said to have been the genesis of the environmental group, Earth First! It was good to see my old friend, alive and kicking. He died about ten years ago, and as with many things in his life, his death was shrouded in controversy. But that's another story.