A Paragon of Nature Writing: On Doug Peacock’s ‘Was It Worth It?’

In his 1975 novel The Monkey Wrench Gang, Edward Abbey famously based the character of George Washington Hayduke, a Vietnam veteran turned ecoterrorist, on the real-life environmentalist Doug Peacock. Hayduke was a hero for increasingly excessive and exploitative times. Peacock’s own entry in the canon of environmental literature, the 1996 book Grizzly Years: In Search of the American Wilderness, was an earnest if rather quiet paean to living more respectfully, even reverently, in relation to animals and the planet. Since then, the environmental movement has spiraled out of the wilderness and finds itself far beyond Abbey’s and Peacock’s American West—it matters everywhere, in all regions and at all levels. So what is the role of such traditional environmental literature these days?

Reading jacket copy of Peacock’s latest book, , one might expect more of  a polar bear charges him during an expedition in the far north—an incident that he really, really hopes will  happen. (Spoiler: It doesn’t.)