ABSTRACT
Beginning with recent climatological accounts documenting the increasing aridity of the American West, this chapter investigates the themes of desertification and nihilism as their defining geographical and philosophical attributes. By retrieving Reiner Schürmann’s magnum opus, Broken Hegemonies which traces the history of Western philosophy as series of epochal and anarchic displacements, the chapter examines salient parallels with Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire through the geographical tropes of aridity, desertification, and the fissure. The chapter examines the extreme climatological conditions hastening desertification as a condition calling for both civil and political disobedience premised on Abbey’s avowal of anarchism to preserve the biotic and geographical integrity of the American West.
