I read that Edward Abbey's book The Monkey Wrench Gang was an inspiration, and furnished a model which you adapted.
Abbey is kind of a cantankerous desert rat, as is pretty well known.
He's kind of anti-human in that he's an outspoken critic of overpopulation. That's something the environmental movement seems to stay away from. Back in the early '70s we used to actually talk about the concept of growth and the threat of overpopulation, but now, that fact that the world population is five billion and still increasing is never mentioned by the Sierra Club or any of those groups. Abbey was willing to throw his opinions out and a lot of the time they made an incredible amount of sense. He's taken a lot of flak, but on the other hand there are those who respect him for being so frank.