Desert Cabal Quotes

“Our most precious resource now is wonder. What we wonder ignites our imagination, unleashes our empathy, fuels our ferocity.”
― Amy Irvine, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

“These good white liberals want monuments and wilderness to protect the places they recreate, to keep out companies that want to suck the fossil fuels out from under the sandstone. But the oil and gas will be burned by and large by them, to travel to Utah’s public lands. And it’s used by us - you in your big red Cadillac and me in my Toyota truck - although I’ve recently downgraded to a more fuel-efficient Subaru, the preferred method of transport that’s most often frosted with bike, ski, and boat racks for outdoor enthusiasts across the nation.

The land and those who live off it know this arrangement breeds no symbiosis. We all want to get to, and get off on, a body corralled and commodified. Our orgasmic need for release and relief eclipses the fact this is the living, breathing body of the Beloved - the naked desert that has demarcated and delineated - ribbed, we believe, for our pleasure.”
― Amy Irvine, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

“Sure, I've worried that this will be yet another year in which I'll somehow convince myself, as in every other year, every other relationship, that whatever I see in him must be a mirage - a projection of my own thirst. I worry that this will be as bad as selling off land to oil companies, and offering up land to recreationists who think they are in love with the idea of wilderness, of preservation, but really have the worst carbon footprint of all. I worry there will be toxic waste. I worry that the prehistory - the way I was before these casualties - will be erased, and I'll never claim the whole human I once was.

This is the grand illusion. That we were once whole. That our ecosystems were intact, self-sustaining. That everything we need is within - and to need others is as vampiric as drilling for every last drop of oil.

If this is why we seek solitude, we are in danger of extinction.”
― Amy Irvine, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

“If we objectify, we can enjoy. To love any more deeply is to love in a way that devastates.”
― Amy Irvine, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness

“By nature, we are a cabal.”
― Amy Irvine, Desert Cabal: A New Season in the Wilderness