A voice in the wilderness - writer Gary Snyder

Progressive, The, Nov, 1995 by Bob Blanchard

The author of fourteen books, Gary Snyder is one of our most respected living writers. Riprap, Myths & Texts, Earth House Hold, and the 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island have established his stature as an internationally renowned poet and ecological philosopher. At sixty-five, he has a new book of essays coming out, called A Place in Space. "We human beings of the developed societies have once more been expelled from a garden," writes Snyder, "the formal garden of Euro-American humanism and its assumptions of human superiority, priority, uniqueness, and dominance. We have been thrown back into that other garden with all the other animals and fungi and insects, where we can no longer be sure we are so privileged. The walls between 'nature' and 'culture' begin to crumble as we enter a post-human era."

In Snyder's world view, the post-human era begins as humanity awakens to the fact that we have created a self-destructive culture: by destroying the natural world around us, we are destroying ourselves. A Place in Space (due out this fall from Counterpoint Press) offers a new vision for our future by critiquing humanity's stewardship of our endangered planet. Snyder delineates the impact of human behavior that takes the natural world for granted as a hardware store, a lumber yard, to be used and exploited. His dominant theme is that the challenge we are facing is no less than the end of nature as we have traditionally conceived it.

The poet paints a portrait of a natural world half-intact and half-destroyed. In doing so, he raises urgent questions: How can we control the greed and selfishness driving us to exploit nature and foul our own nest? Is there a human ethical obligation to the nonhuman world? What transformation of consciousness is needed for us to end our infantile political conflicts - one-on-one and between nation states - and instead to concentrate on rescuing the ecological health of the only home planet we will ever have?

"Political definitions on the landscape are quite arbitrary and recent," Snyder told me. "In the archaic cultures of the not-too-distant past, regions had a natural coherence because they were ecologically self-defining rather than politically defined." The birthright of all humans was "our knowledge of our local ecosystems."

According to Snyder, modern civilization is living in self-exile, estranged from our primal bond with the natural cosmos. We are alienated from each other - and from ourselves - because we are disconnected from nature. As a counter-measure, A Place in Space proposes implementation of the basics of deep ecology and asks humans to "include the non-human world in our political decision-making. The book is a manual of useful ideas and implicit strategies for how humans might live in the grand scheme. Ultimately, it's an affirmation of values - ecological, community, family, and watershed values. The implication is that we should not cave in to the idea that the only people who have ethics are the fundamentalists or radical right."

The book affirms humanity's relationship with place as a bedrock political and spiritual practice. "We are in a vast universe and the planet itself is just a tiny water hole in the desert of endless space," Snyder says. "Like in the Australian aboriginal outback, nobody fights at a water hole. You may come from different tribes and groups that have a lot of hostility, but water holes are sacred, something you do not squabble over. Everybody is given an opportunity to come in from the desert and get the water. The planet should be seen in that light."

A deep affinity for the natural world - and the rapture of poetry - have been central to Snyder's character since his youth. The grandson of an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, Snyder grew up during the Depression on a small dairy farm outside of Seattle.

At bedtime, when he was a small boy, his mother read him poetry. As soon as he learned to write, he was composing his own poems.

On the farm, hard physical labor was a daily fact of his life. When he wasn't working, Snyder loved to roam the woods: hiking, swimming, exploring, and studying plants and animals. Intensely curious about experiencing solitude, at age nine or ten he would often camp alone overnight at a secret spot and watch the sun rise. One of his first passions was mountaineering: by his early adolescence, he had climbed all the highest peaks of the snow-capped Cascades. Inspired by these mountaineering experiences - which he says instilled a sense of self-discipline - Snyder wrote poetry regularly. He also delved into the world of literature, immersing himself in the work of Robinson Jeffers and D.H. Lawrence.

Snyder's vocation as a poet began in earnest in the summer of 1955. He was twenty-five years old and working long, grueling days on a trail crew in Yosemite's high country. At night after work, he would meditate on the cliffs. Alone under the serene, starry sky of the High Sierra, he wrote poetry - poetry that was a revelation, that seemed to come out of heretofore untapped inner sources. To Snyder, these poems felt innately different from any poetry he had ever written - far more serious and powerful. In fact, he had recently given up composing poetry because the endeavor did not seem to suit the gravitas of his temperament. That summer in Yosemite changed his mind.