Arches National Park, Utah

Delicate Arch. Arches NP, Utah, 2013

In my humble opinion, the above famous icon of Arches National Park should actually be called “Cowboy Arch” as it doesn’t look particularly “delicate” to me…and that other famous Arches icon–the skinny one that you’ll see on the current Park flyer (and pictured below) should be called “Delicate Arch” instead of the rather boring moniker of “Landscape Arch.” The term “Landscape Arch” should be tossed altogether as it is meaningless and unimaginative–after all, aren’t all arches landscapes by definition?

So, I propose we request an immediate renaming of said landmarks.

Landscape Arch Panorama. Arches NP, Utah, 2013

The cantankerous author and anarchist, Edward Abbey, in his time as a United States Park Service employee, lived out of a small, Park Service-supplied house trailer in the then relatively unvisited outback of Arches National Park, greeting visitors, restocking the toilet paper in the outhouse, recovering the ocassional bloated and dehydrated body of a lost and deceased tourist, and contemplating the otherworldly landscape and its myriad critters, rock formations and plants.

It was here that Abbey put together his notes which would eventually become his first important literary work, Desert Solitaire. Here is his warning to us about the danger of losing our intimacy with the natural world and the resultant loss of that world through destruction and neglect:

“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. If industrial man continues to multiply its numbers and expand his operations he will succeed in his apparent intention, to seal himself off from the natural and isolate himself within a synthetic prison of his own making. He will make himself an exile from the earth.”

–Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

That is, if humankind is even able to survive such a prison.