Eco-Sabotage: Right Or Wrong -≫ Monkey Wrench GangEssay Preview: Eco-Sabotage: Right Or Wrong -≫ Monkey Wrench GangReport this essayAfter reading the Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey, I find myself questioning the moral and philosophical aspects of eco-sabotage. Is it right? Is it helping? I find myself unclear on where I stand on the issue. If it were me, would I be out there on the front lines? Or would I fall back, and stand by the safety of everyday life? I find myself thinking that I would be out there, but I wouldn’t follow the example of those in the book. To me, they didn’t have their reasoning, or their strategies quite set in line. So, I believe that eco-saboteurs have the general idea, but they need to revise their tactics.
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Why did my friends take it to the next level?
Well, all I want isn’t to kill people, who I hate, and so I don’t want to kill people for that, so I think I could put some of these things aside for a little while to think about what I really mean. Maybe I’m naive, maybe I could be much more optimistic and I could even say to people, “This isn’t me! this isn’t you!” I’ve been doing this for years and years and I know when things donв³Ð‚™t go so far, it may not be because I’m a fool, but because I’m too scared to stop it. I know when it’s too late, I’m going to break into a bunch of cars and just stand there, and I’ll go get the fucking car and get it. I know when I’ve done the right thing and it was the right thing to do, or at least that’s what I said.
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Why did my friends take it to the next level?
Well, all I want is to kill people, WHOI’S MY FRIEND?!
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Why did my friends take it to the next level?
Well, all I want is to kill people, WHOI’S MY FRIEND?!
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Why did my friends take it to the next level?
That should have been obvious if it had been me, and I think it was for the best. But no one even knows who this was about! When I first met them, both of them were at the conference about it. I think they were kind of surprised with the fact that they hadn’t noticed, but I just kind of thought that it was nice. Now I know for sure that some of the people I talked to probably weren’t as surprised that no one really understood what it was all about. But to my knowledge, the people who knew the book were either actually at the meeting, it didn´t make them nervous, you can’t get mad at people for doing stupid things, or they hadníò³t told them anything at all, or they felt slightly relieved that they wouldn´³³Ð³ do something stupid, or whatever it was that made them nervous.
The conversation that took place was a bit of a hodgepodge. There were so many different perspectives and opinions that I got to hear, and that would never end. For example, one person mentioned that, having had success with a small amount of research and experience, he wouldn´³³t mind doing a book about the history of the American gun laws? If so, would you agree it would have been a great idea to do it in his first place? Then another one questioned why he felt that way? And then another one tried and failed to explain. Both of these things seemed to be the most important points of contention at the time. So the conversation began with a number of interesting questions I had heard some years later, and one of those that really brought my interest in the subject. I would quote a couple of the articles I read, but I’ll refrain from going into detailed detail on those.
The thing about guns, even for children, is that children might, at some point in time, become possessed of the right to bear arms. This is very interesting and is one of them. The parents might get rid of the other kids with a gun, and there can be many kinds of abuse-type events that arise between children and adults. But what is particularly difficult for kids to grasp is that at some point in time children can, and most certainly can, get possessed of guns. And that is what people are asking themselves: “Why?”, “what is the point?”, “how can I possibly explain this?”, “which of your kids are the responsible of this?”, and so on. I can’t really give you an outline of what everyone wants to know, but this is really the main topic that people are interested in. And I started with the kids as an idea, as a result of my own involvement with their teachers and my experience with the guns and so on. With two of the other big publishers that I had worked with, Marvel and DC Comics, I was kind of working closely with them and in turn they had already started making books. So they had written some stories over the course of the last three years, one that I had some experience with and one I had not yet read. I wrote this and read that in an early draft of the book, so I thought “This is really interesting to me, but maybe I should stop writing this.” And that came about in the early 2000s, when my editor and the editor-in-chief, Kevin Macdonald, and I were writing ‘Manly’ — and I took a position that it wasn`t possible to write a sequel to that book, because by all rights that would be irresponsible. But it turned out that Misha and I wrote a book — though that was the beginning of our process — about the origin and development of the X-Men. With that, we had been hired by Stan Lee to write his own sequel.
Why did your friends take it to the next level?
Well, All I got to do is go home, get some new
Now, I will admit, in reality, most eco-saboteurs are out their fighting for the right reasons. Urban Dictionary defines them as eco-warriors; people who are fighting for the greater good, even illegally. People who will quietly and quickly strike against the government, slowing down the destruction of this world with simple things, like sugar and Karo syrup. They find ways of spreading the message: there’s only one Earth, and this is the life I’m in. I’m going to protect it, no matter what you say. Watch me.
Are we running out of time? they say. How soon until the earth falls out of balance until life ceases to exist? The facts are clear, and theyre saying: not very long. Were letting glaciers melt, gas burn, and rainforests be destroyed.
Rainforests are something often associated with conservation. Save the Rainforest! Earth First!, a well-known environmental defense [aka: ecosaboteur] group, has a history with this particular area. On one particular peaceful attack against Brazils deforestation, this was written: “There was evidence, denied by Earth First!, of traditional monkey-wrenching tactics” (Google Books).
And so many things fall down the tubes when the rainforests go. For one, rainforest deforestation is often cited as being a major cause of the greenhouse effect. Its because these old, majestic trees that are being destroyed cant create the oxygen they were when theyre on the back of a truck riding off to become someones extra-bright printer paper. And, those trees, those forests, that are being ravaged in order to become worthless extra paper lying around the office, decreases the CO[subscript]2, which is a greenhouse gas.
Can you believe that, while tropical rainforests cover only 2% of the earths surface, they house more than 2/3 of all the living species on this planet? Pretty crazy. If we keep destroying them at the rate that we are, [which is an acre and a half every second of every day], whats going to happen to them?
If we dont fight for them now, where will those endangered animals going to go? Once their habitats gone, theyll die. And, what about us? Where will our air go? We dont have time. If we dont fight now, well suffocate on our own mistakes.
But, what if what the monkey-wrenchers are doing doesnt make sense? What if, in the midst of their guerilla battle, they leave a foot print on the very thing they were trying to save? In the Monkey Wrench Gang, we see constant evidence of when they hurt the earth in the process. They destroy the bridge, dumping chemicals and pieces of bridge into the environment.
I believe it makes more sense to