In The Monkey Wrench Gang, what are some of the group's strengths and weaknesses?

The main characters in Edward Abbey's The Monkey Wrench Gang are Doc Sarvis and his young assistant/girlfriend Bonnie Abzug; “Seldom Seen” Smith, a polygamist river guide; and George Hayduke, an angry, unstable Vietnam veteran. These characters as a group have banded together to fight the development and environmental destruction of the American West. 

Let’s begin with their weaknesses. These are not necessarily virtuous individuals: Smith has multiple wives, Bonnie switches partners at the end of the book, Doc is against all forms of government, and Hayduke is hard-drinking and seemingly eternally angry. As a group these environmentalists litter the desert with beer cans and personal trash, they drive large automobiles around, they are dismissive of Native Americans and middle-class liberals, and they are all extremely destructive, violent, and have no respect for others' property.  

But the group’s strengths mostly override their weaknesses and we come to root for them as heroes. One aspect of the group’s strength is that they never target humans and there are no human casualties that result from their actions. Their war is with machines, dams, billboards, tract housing, and the ideology that creates them: the need to develop the land, extract its resources, and promote population growth on formerly pristine, unsettled terrain. A quote from the author’s journals highlights this: “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.” Another strength of the group is their emphasis on direct action (cutting down billboards, sabotaging bulldozers and construction equipment, and their ultimate goal: blowing up the Glen Canyon dam). They distrust the legislative and legal processes and feel that any movement that relies on them will eventually end up serving the politicians and developers rather than the Earth. Direct action is a means for the group to critique and criticize what they see as a tradition of liberal escapism in response to environmental issues (escapism meaning ‘environmentalists’ who don’t engage the real ecological world, but rather sit around talking about what should be done without actually doing anything).