Wordless, it rises and falls in hemidemisemitones of unearthly misery. The dirge of the damned - Edward Abbey

Suppose we were planning to impose a dictatorial regime upon the American people — the following preparations would be essential:

I understand and sympathize with the reasonable needs of a reasonable number of people on a finite continent. All life depends upon other life. But what is happening today, in North America, is not rational use but irrational massacre. Man the Pest, multiplied to the swarming stage, is attacking the remaining forests like a plague of locusts on a field of grain.

I am convinced now that the desert has no heart, that it presents a riddle which has no answer, and that the riddle itself is an illusion created by some limitation or exaggeration of the displaced human consciousness.