Our modern industrial economy takes a mountain covered with trees, lakes, running streams and transforms it into a mountain of junk, garbage, slime pits, and debris.

Edward Abbey (1927–1989) was an American novelist and essayist closely associated with the postwar environmental movement in the U.S. Southwest. Across works such as his desert memoirs and political essays, he attacked what he saw as the destructive logic of industrial capitalism—especially mining, road-building, mass tourism, and consumer waste—on public lands. This quotation reflects Abbey’s recurring contrast between intact wild landscapes (forests, lakes, streams) and the degraded byproducts of extraction and consumption (garbage, toxic pits, debris). It fits the polemical, aphoristic style he often used when arguing that “progress” frequently means ecological loss and uglification.

Abbey compresses a whole critique of modernity into a single before-and-after image. Nature is presented as complex, living, and self-renewing; the industrial economy is portrayed as an engine that converts that richness into waste. The “mountain” parallelism is deliberate: industry does not merely remove resources, it replaces one kind of abundance with another—junk and pollution—suggesting a perverse form of production. The line also implies moral inversion: what is counted as economic success is, in ecological terms, a net transformation of value into refuse. Abbey’s blunt diction (“slime pits”) aims to shock readers out of abstract talk of growth and into confronting physical consequences.