In writing Desert Solitaire, Abbey places his work alongside other major texts of the environmental literature movement. Most important is Henry David Thoreau's Walden, published in 1854, which documents that writer's experience living in voluntary poverty in a small, remote cabin. Like Thoreau, Abbey is both humorous and cantankerous, with a wide-ranging intellect. The stories in Desert Solitaire describe adventures during his time in the canyonlands, and he argues for the fragility of nature, man's requisite humility when approaching wildness, and his affinity for rural life and self-sustainability.
Abbey documents the steady and nefarious creep of civilization into the wilderness, which he lampoons in "Havasu," noting how the local natives have decided against allowing the Department of the Interior to bulldoze a road right up to their spectacular waterfalls. There is value in being remote, in being hard to reach, suggests Abbey. Easy access is not always a good thing.
In his introduction, Abbey writes this:
Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can't see anything from a car; you've got to get out of that goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you'll see something. Maybe. Probably not.
Rather than encouraging readers to live vicariously through Abbey's adventures, he advocates a lifestyle that gets you out of your comfort zone, stripped of pretense and ready to learn, experience, and risk. Central to his book is this appeal. Live richly, fight comfort, learn as much as you can. In this way, his central idea echoes the work of Thoreau (and others). In wildness is your salvation, if you have the guts to face it.
Desert Solitaire by Edward Abbey is not really a book with a singular thesis, but a series of meditations about the Great Basin desert and his experiences as a ranger in Arches National Park outside Moab, Utah. Over the course of the book, Abbey reflects extensively on wilderness and displays several consistent attitudes about it, but does so in an exploratory manner rather than by linear argument.
His first major point is that the wilderness is the spiritual home of people in North America. Notably, he believes that if we destroy our wilderness areas or stop visiting and preserving them, we destroy something at the center of our own spirit, saying:
A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.
He believes that wilderness and the flora and fauna inhabiting it have intrinsic worth to the human spirit.
One of the most well-known and characteristic sections of the book is his description of a trip down Colorado River and his meditations on the Glen Canyon dam, and the vast destruction it wrought on the river ecosystem and the irreplaceable remains of the Anasazi, who created stunning cliff dwellings before Europeans settled the region. He sees the dam as showing the government complicit with the forces of urbanization and corporate greed, stealing a magnificent heritage of natural beauty that should belong to everyone and destroying it to profit a limited number of people, something he considers unambiguously evil.
In his evocation of the beauty of the high desert, Abbey argues that we ourselves are part of nature, and that to destroy our environment or other species within it, we ultimately destroy ourselves, both in terms of our spirit and eventually our survival, as our ranching and dam building degrades our environment.
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