Meditations on Monkeywrenching

Also: The Data Center boom and the Four Corners Power Plant

When I was a kid, I collected pinback buttons, political and otherwise. Most of you probably know what that is, but for the youngs out there, it’s basically an analog meme you pin to your clothing to let folks know which political candidate or other cause you might support.

I’m pretty sure I had a “John Anderson for President” button. My parents supported the Independent candidate in the 1980 election because he had been a vocal opponent of the Vietnam War. Jimmy Carter, while championing environmental preservation, had supercharged the fossil fuel industries in the West, which ravaged landscapes and economies, losing their support. I had a couple of buttons from the early Snowdown celebrations in Durango, and one from Wolverton Mountain Days, a funky event held at the Durango nordic center whose motto was: “Track, Telly, Twinkie,” or something along those lines. Maybe the little collection included a “Gilbert Slade for County Commissioner,” that I would have picked up at one of Slade’s Democratic Party goat roasts out on the Dryside.

But perhaps the most intriguing one was small, dark blue or black, with a bold white typeface declaring: “Fight Blight / Burn a Billboard Tonight.” I probably had to ask an adult what blight meant, though the second part I understood. It was, perhaps, my first encounter with the concept of monkey-wrenching, or sabotaging equipment or structures or billboards as a form of protest, usually with environmental motivations.

This would have been shortly after Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang was published (50 years ago this month), in which Doc Sarvis and Bonnie Abbzug did some billboard burning of their own before joining up with Seldom Seen and George Hayduke and moving on to bigger acts of sabotage. But the button’s text preceded the novel. The slogan was a favorite of David Brower, according to John McPhee’s “Encounters of the Archdruid,” which ran in the New Yorker in 1971.

Though I wouldn’t find out until much later, it turns out my father lived out the slogan during his younger days in Silverton, Colorado.

***

Up until the 1950s, Silverton was a full-on mining town, with a little bit of tourism on top. Following World War II, however, the last big mine, the Shenandoah-Dives, shut down. The local economy, sputtered and gasped, ushering in what Silvertonians would come to call the “Black Decade.”

Desperate, the townsfolk turned to tourism, capitalizing on a Hollywood-fueled, global fascination with the Wild West of American mythology. The Durango-to-Silverton stretch of railroad switched from hauling ore to carrying sightseers, and almost overnight Silverton morphed from mining town to a facsimile of a Hollywood version of a place that never existed. In order to lure motorists, some local businesses installed billboards along Highway 550 as it dropped into town from Molas Pass.

My parents arrived in Silverton in the 1960s. Mining had come back in force, with Standard Metals’ American Tunnel facilitating the re-opening of the fabled Sunnyside Mine. Yet the tourism industry and its cheesy theatrics persisted, much to the disgust of my parents and their peers, who were members of a sort of rural Western intelligentsia, drawn there by the mountains, the wildness, the culture, the history, and perhaps most of all, the authenticity of the community. They saw the tchotchke-peddling economy as the antithesis of the richer, more real mining culture.

In July 1963, Terry Marshall summed up the sentiment in a Silverton Standard editorial on the surreal scene that unfolded every day at “train time.”

You realize that Silverton, its hardrock mining fortunes dwindling, must rely more and more on the tourist. … But you wonder if the carnival atmosphere must prevail—the loudspeakers, the cheap souvenirs, the cotton candy. … You wonder if there is not something else, something more authentic that will distinguish this small town with its vast mining history, its beautiful scenery, its narrow gauge railroad from the thousands of other small towns in the United States…

Ultimately, the town would pass statutes and rules that reined in the carnival atmosphere. Yet the billboards on 550 remained and fell into disrepair, and efforts to have the highway department take them down apparently went nowhere. One day in the late 1960s — the story goes¹ — my father was telling his cousin about his frustration with the situation, not just at how ugly the billboards were, but at the powerlessness to do anything about it. This relative (who will remain nameless), suggested in his sanguine way: “Let’s just burn it.”

And so, on one dark night, that’s exactly what they did, with my mother possibly driving the get-away car, nearly a decade before the fictional George Hayduke sabotaged the equipment building the road through Comb Ridge. My father and accomplices were never caught. Indeed, the billboard was so damned ugly that maybe nobody cared.

***

People who knew or knew of my father might find it incredible that he would go to this extreme. He was a diplomat and uniter, someone who could bring together disparate factions to benefit the community. He also had a strong moral compass and cared deeply about this land and its communities, and would do what he could to defend it — within reason — even if it may have skirted the law just a little bit.

I know this because when I was maybe 12 or 13, I went camping with my dad and his friend and the friend’s kid. It was way up near Raplee Ridge, in southeastern Utah, looking down into the San Juan River, on a dusty two-track. On the way to the campsite, we noticed some survey flags sticking up from the sparse and rocky earth.

This would have been the early 1980s, when the Carter-era quest for “energy independence” was still in full-force, and miners and drillers were ripping apart the Western landscape for whatever uranium, coal, oil and gas, or oil shale they could find. My young heart ached at the realization that the stakes marked a future extraction site, that soon the bulldozers and the drill rigs would show up and tear the earth apart and suck out whatever minerals dwelled down there.

On the way back, the adults stopped the car near the site, told us kids to stay put, got out, walked over to the stakes, methodically pulled them out of the ground, and threw them over the edge of the cliff. Then they got back in and we drove away, without saying anything else about it. It was a soothing site to witness, even from the remove of the old car.

The site was never developed or drilled or mined, though I’m guessing that had less to do with this little act of sabotage than with the fact that the energy booms all faded shortly thereafter. For them, however, it was a significant act of resistance, and perhaps of love for the Place. Maybe just as importantly, they were defying the powerlessness we feel in the face of the churning gears of progress and greed, apathy and cruelty.

***

The Monkey Wrench Gang is often considered monkey-wrenching’s literary debut. It’s not. Two years before Abbey published his book, there was Jim Harrison’s A Good Day to Die, which followed a trio on a Florida-to-Idaho road trip in a quest to blow up a dam.

Harrison’s protagonist is named Tim, a Hayduke-esque guy just back from a couple tours in Vietnam, scarred in more ways than one and with a hankering for booze and pills to ease the pain. The story’s narrator, a bit of a cad with relationship issues, is on a fishing trip and escapist odyssey in Florida’s Keys when he encounters Tim. During a drinking session, the narrator tells Tim offhandedly that there’s a dam in the Grand Canyon, or at least they are planning one, pushing Tim into a melancholic slump. “Jesus Christ,” he says, “it will fill up with water.”

Tim is immediately fixated by the idea, noting that he has never seen the Grand Canyon. The narrator “had seen Glen Canyon years ago before it was literally drowned and liked it better but any comparison was absurd with such splendors.” After a little more thought, he notes, casually: “We probably ought to blow up the goddamn thing.”

Tim takes the idea and runs with it, though it isn’t entirely clear what his motives are. Is he truly looking to defend the environment and free the Colorado River? Is he seeking to punish those who deigned dam up something as sacred as the Grand Canyon? Or is he merely lashing out at the general injustice of the world, hoping to be heard among all the cruel noise?

Whatever it is, the narrator gets caught up in it, too, maybe just to have a bit of purpose beyond baking in the sun and waiting for the fish to bite. When Tim suggests a trip West, the narrator hesitates and says only if they return quickly. But as the story progresses he becomes more invested in the act, even if it is only a means for pursuing the alluring Sylvia, Tim’s on-again-off-again girlfriend.

When they discover there is no dam in the Grand Canyon, the narrator refuses to abandon the mission, and suggests they instead decommission an earthen dam on a tributary of the Clearwater in Idaho, “where a wealthy rancher ruined a good steelhead stream … out of greed and contempt for the natural world.” Once the new target is picked, the narrator feels “strong and clean and very moral. Heroic, in fact.”²

***

A Good Day to Die may have preceded and even inspired the Monkey Wrench Gang, but the latter was far more widely read and influential. Abbey’s classic was published 50 years ago this month, inspiring many acts of low- and high-level eco-sabotage in the decades that followed. And in 1985, Bill Haywood and Dave Foreman published a manual for Abbey’s acolytes called Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching.

Monkeywrenchers pulled up survey stakes by the dozen, spiked trees to halt logging projects, cut commercial fishing drift nets, dumped sand and corn syrup into bulldozers’ gas tanks and crankcases, vandalized ski-lift supports, cut power to uranium mines, and plotted to topple transmission towers carrying electricity from nuclear plants. Some were caught. Others were not.

In the late 1990s, factions of the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front took it up a notch by torching a Bureau of Land Management wild horse captivity facility in Burns, Oregon. Then, in 1998, they burned down several structures at the Vail Ski Resort in an effort to block the ski area expansion and its deleterious effects on lynx habitat.

The ski area recovered and expanded, despite an estimated $24 million worth of damage. Direct environmental action, however, took a hit as federal law enforcement (and corporate interests) began throwing around the term “eco-terrorist,” the connotations of which became far more grim after 9/11³. The FBI then declared monkeywrenching to be one of the nation’s leading domestic terror threats, surpassing even right-wing militia groups, despite the fact that the saboteurs only damage property and make a point of not harming humans or other living beings.

This put quite a damper on environmental direct action, since even pulling up a few survey stakes might get you labeled a terrorist and tossed in the clink — or even Guantanamo Bay — for years. Monkeywrenching, however, did not die. In 2016, for example, a crew of “Valve Turners” managed to shut down several major oil pipelines in an attempt to slow fossil fuel burning and bring attention to the climate crisis (Michelle Nijhuis wrote a terrific piece on this in 2018). Otherwise there have been very few high-profile direct-action eco-sabotage cases, at least from what I can gather.

***

Monkeywrenching is on my mind not because it’s MWG’s half-century birthday or even because the White House, Congress, and the courts have been occupied by authoritarians, oligarchs, and their enablers, who value profit over everything else, especially the environment. I’ve actually been pondering it for several months, since long before Trump was elected.

A couple of things sparked this line of thought. First, it seems as if there’s a bit of a literary revival of monkeywrenching. It’s one of the methods employed by climate activists in Stephen Markey’s excellent novel The Deluge. And it is the main theme of the film, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, which is a fictional rendering of Andreas Malm’s non-fiction treatise of the same name.

I began to write that these books and films are Monkey Wrench Gangs for the global warming age. But I don’t think that’s quite right. The tone of the newer book and film is far different — more urgent and somber — than MWG or a Good Day to Die. And the motives of the protagonists are also more serious and deep, if you will. Pipeline’s characters, for example, mostly were direct victims of the fossil fuel industry, making their sabotage a form of self-defense, while the Deluge’s eco-saboteurs see themselves as warriors fighting for the planet’s very survival.

It’s not surprising that eco-sabotage is experiencing a revival, even if it’s only fictional. The urgency of a warming climate is becoming acute, and yet the powers that be are diddling their thumbs. More and more people are frustrated and fed up with the lugubrious process of fighting climate change and environmental destruction in legal and legitimate ways. Even when the Democrats control the executive and legislative branches of the federal government, they rarely are able to take more than a half-step forward policy-wise, only to see their incremental progress obliterated by Trump, the MAGA-dominated Congress, and a runaway Supreme Court within weeks after taking power.

Now the Trump administration is even precluding public input for major mines, oil and gas drilling, and other developments on public lands, all in the name of a bogus “energy emergency.” They are literally blocking the public’s legal avenues for making a difference, leaving concerned citizens with little choice but to take more direct action.

What is surprising to me is that a new wave of eco-sabotage has not made it from the screen and page to real life.⁴ Instead, climate activists are throwing soup, paint, and other stuff at prominent artworks, hoping to bring attention to their cause. They are gluing themselves to the road and disrupting bicycle races, from the World Championships in Scotland to the Tour de France, and Just Stop Oil even defaced Charles Darwin’s graves.

The activists and their supporters claim that these actions raise public awareness. That may be so, but awareness of what, exactly? How does disrupting a bike race, of all things, reduce fossil fuel combustion? How does defacing a painting — even if only “symbolically” — relate to environmental destruction? And what’s with targeting Darwin’s grave? While I appreciate the zeal, I can’t help but wonder: If you’re going to vandalize something and risk jail time, why not do something that makes a direct and immediate difference — even if only temporarily?

When the narrator in a Good Day to Die decides to get rid of the dam in Idaho, he is hit with a moment of moral clarity. I suspect it has to do with the directness of his planned action. He sees a problem, a fish-harming dam, and sets about to solve it in the most logical and direct way possible: blowing it up — preferably without harming anybody. He’s not looking to send a message, to make a symbolic gesture, or raise awareness. He’s just trying to fix something that’s wrong, not unlike burning an atrocious billboard or surreptitiously removing some survey stakes from a remote area or destroying a pipeline that defiles the land and carries planet-killing fossil fuels.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that anyone go out and do anything illegal. I’m just saying that when a person’s home — whether that’s a house, a community, a Place, or the entire planet — comes under attack, it shouldn’t be surprising that they would go to extreme lengths to defend it.

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📈 Data Center Watch 📊

Four Corners Power Plant. Jonathan P. Thompson photo.

For the last several years, the coal industry in the Western U.S. has been suffering from what I call the Big Breakdown — as opposed to the Big Buildup of the 1960s and 1970s, when coal power plants and mines popped up all over the Colorado Plateau and beyond. Now, it appears that the proliferation of energy-intensive data centers is stalling the Breakdown, maybe even reversing it. Last week, Arizona Public Service announced it would keep the Four Corners coal plant in northwestern New Mexico running — and polluting — for another seven years beyond its scheduled 2031 retirement.

The coal-burning extension is part of the state’s largest utility’s plan to shift its climate goal from becoming zero carbon by 2050 to carbon neutral. While that sounds like a mere semantic switch, its on-the-ground effects will be significant. Along with the coal plant news, APS and the state’s other largest utilities are going in on a new natural gas pipeline from the Permian Basin so it can increase fossil fuel generation rather than pivoting entirely to solar, wind, battery energy storage, and other carbon-free sources.

APS officials say the shift is necessary to meet growing power demand. While population growth and increasingly hot temperatures play a role in the ever-larger load on the grid, the crop of new energy-intensive data centers sprouting in the Phoenix area is a principle driver. The utility is also likely reacting to the Trump administration’s fondness for fossil fuels and disdain for renewables.

The Four Corners plant and its accompanying Navajo Mine were constructed about 15 miles west of Farmington in the early 1960s by a consortium of utilities led by APS and Utah Construction & Mining Co, a subsidiary of Kennecott, a global mining firm. It was the flagship of a much larger fleet that would include the San Juan, Navajo, Mojave, Cholla, Coronado, and Escalante plants. Mojave was shuttered in 2005, with the other big plants closing down more recently (Coronado will be converted to natural gas). That leaves just Four Corners, which was supposed to be shuttered in 2031, or even sooner, if Public Service Company of New Mexico were able to get out of its 13% stake before then.

But over the last few years, utilities have been second-guessing plans to decommission the aging behemoths as data centers have sprouted across the region, significantly increasing demand on the power grid. Over the last week, both Salt River Project and APS have set new peak power demand records as both residents and data centers crank up the coolers to offset extreme heat. Demand is projected to grow significantly over the next decade, mostly due to new data centers. It’s the Big Buildup all over again, only this time it’s high-tech server farms sprouting all over the place, with power generating sources struggling to keep up.

1. *I didn’t hear this story until after my father died, so this is all second-hand and the details may be a bit off.

2. I won’t tell you what happens. If you read the book, you should be warned that reviewers of the time sneered at it for being too macho, too crude, having too much drug and alcohol use, “adolescent,” and so forth. Maybe that’s all true, but I liked it the first time I read it decades ago, and I still liked it when I read it again recently.

3. * The term was apparently coined in the 1980s by Ron Arnold, the founder of the anti-environment Wise Use Movement.

4. ** Right-wing nationalist attacks on the power grid are not, in my mind, a form of monkeywrenching. Their goal is to disrupt and harm society, including humans, not to stop environmental damage or even make a political protest.