Edward Abbey was a southwest author, general rabble rouser, and father of the radical environmental movement (he was actually at the first Earth First! gathering). He wrote works of fiction—including the novel The Brave Cowboy that was made into the movie Lonely are the Brave starring Kirk Douglas—non-fiction essays, and natural history narratives such as Desert Solitaire about his time as a park ranger in Arches National Park.
I attended a small liberal arts environmental radical treehugger college, Northland College, within which many heralded Edward Abbey as an unofficial patron saint. I had the pleasure of living the the beautiful American Southwest, twice in Utah—first for graduate school at the University of Utah in Human Genetics and then as an instructor in the Prison Education Program at Salt Lake Community College—and as a visiting graduate student in the Department of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. Through my multiple residences I have traveled extensively around the American Southwest and Intermountain West. Here I present photographs of my time spent in and around the southwest states of Utah and New Mexico.