Himself
Activist/author Edward Abbey's legacy lives on in his best-selling books and now in director ML Lincoln's lively documentary. Lincoln pays tribute to Abbey and the environmental movement he inspired, reenacting his "monkeywrenching," and interviewing notable eco-warriors and present-day activists.
Himself (archive footage)
This powerful film odyssey across America explores the sea change in national attitude from pride in big dams as engineering wonders to the growing awareness that our own future is bound to the life and health of our rivers.
Himself
When Edward Abbey died in 1989 at the age of sixty-two, the American West lost one of its most eloquent and passionate advocates. Through his novels, essays, letters and speeches, Edward Abbey consistently voiced the belief that the West was in danger of being developed to death, and that the only solution lay in the preservation of wilderness. Abbey authored twenty-one books in his lifetime, including Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang, The Brave Cowboy, and The Fool's Progress. His comic novel The Monkey Wrench Gang helped inspire a whole generation of environmental activism. A writer in the mold of Twain and Thoreau, Abbey was a larger-than-life figure as big as the West itself.
Himself
"Earth First! - The Politics of Radical Environmentalism" documents the rise of the controversial eco-activist group, Earth First!, as told by its founders, its admirers and its opponents, including rare interviews with its founders, Dave Foreman, Mike Roselle and Howie Wolke. Earth First! burst onto the environmental scene in the 1980s, engaging not only in civil disobedience to protect America's wilderness from exploitation, but ecotage - the destruction of heavy equipment, roads, and mills involved in deforestation. The movement become heroic to some, infamous to others, by scaling and occupying 200-foot tall old-growth trees to frustrate the plans of timber companies; and for "tree-spiking," hammering iron spikes into standing trees as a threat to the machinery of any mill that dared to process it. Earth First! includes rare footage of ecoteurs engaging in their exploits on camera.
Novel
A young real estate developer returns to his hometown to make a land killing but soon takes up the cause of a crusty old-timer in his struggles with the government which wants his ranch for an Army missile base.
Novel
A fiercely independent cowboy arranges to have himself locked up in jail in order to then escape with an old friend who has been sentenced to the penitentiary.
