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La práctica de lo salvaje
Se publica por primera vez en castellano «La práctica de lo salvaje», una recopilación de los ensayos completos de Gary Snyder. Snyder (San Francisco, 1930), poeta esencial de la generación beatnik, ha sido peón forestal, novicio budista en Japón, activista, académico e íntimo conocedor del entorno natural de la Sierra Nevada californiana, donde vive desde hace años, o de fronteras remotas como Alaska. En estas 260 páginas el autor propone la recuperación de una condición esencial que nos vincule verdaderamente con el territorio, la comunidad natural y con nuestro propio ser salvaje.
La editorial Varasek se hace cargo de esta edición de ensayos inéditos en nuestro país. Bajo el lema «Viajes, poesía y rock´n ´roll» la editorial acoge, entre otros, un buen puñado de traducciones beatnik como el mítico diario de Gary Snyder «Viaje a la India» junto a Ginsberg o al poeta Whalen, una de las voces más interesantes de esta generación, al que pocos conocen.
«La práctica de lo salvaje propone que nos ocupemos de algo más que de la ética medioambiental, la acción política o un activismo útil e ineludible. Debemos enraizarnos en la oscuridad de nuestro ser más profundo». Dice Snyder que «Lo salvaje, tantas veces despachado como caótico y brutal por los pensadores civilizados, responde en realidad a un orden imparcial, implacable y hermoso, a la vez que libre».
Gary Synder, que inspiró «Los vagabundos del Dharma» de Kerouac, ha ganado premios como el Pulitzer (1975) o el Ruth Lilly Poetry Price (2008). Ferlinghetti habló de él como el Thoreau de la generación beatnik.
La editorial Varasek se hace cargo de esta edición de ensayos inéditos en nuestro país. Bajo el lema «Viajes, poesía y rock´n ´roll» la editorial acoge, entre otros, un buen puñado de traducciones beatnik como el mítico diario de Gary Snyder «Viaje a la India» junto a Ginsberg o al poeta Whalen, una de las voces más interesantes de esta generación, al que pocos conocen.
«La práctica de lo salvaje propone que nos ocupemos de algo más que de la ética medioambiental, la acción política o un activismo útil e ineludible. Debemos enraizarnos en la oscuridad de nuestro ser más profundo». Dice Snyder que «Lo salvaje, tantas veces despachado como caótico y brutal por los pensadores civilizados, responde en realidad a un orden imparcial, implacable y hermoso, a la vez que libre».
Gary Synder, que inspiró «Los vagabundos del Dharma» de Kerouac, ha ganado premios como el Pulitzer (1975) o el Ruth Lilly Poetry Price (2008). Ferlinghetti habló de él como el Thoreau de la generación beatnik.
261 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1990
264 people are currently reading
6641 people want to read
About the author
Gary Snyder
323 books643 followersGary Snyder is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry has been associated with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance and he has been described as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology". Snyder is a winner of a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in his various roles, reflects an immersion in both Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated literature into English from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese. For many years, Snyder was an academic at the University of California, Davis, and for a time served as a member of the California Arts Council.
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May 5, 2020
Mmmmm, Gary Snyder. I was first gifted this book by my best friend (since we were three years old!) as I was leaving a long vacation stay with her in Yosemite, where she had a cabin in the Valley because she was essential personnel and at that time they were housed there. You could hear The Falls and see the meadow from different sides of the cabin. Yosemite is the most gorgeous place I've ever been. With her or with friends of hers or at times alone I hiked, scrambled and ambled over every inch of it day and night, and it was the most wondrous journey of my life. Every one of the Falls was at peak and there were an unusual number of ephemerals. It felt as if it was all for me though this visit was planned well before we could know when the snow would melt. It was so hard to leave and my bestie made it a bit easier because at the airport she gifted me this book and a book of Gary Snyder's poetry.
I've read it and pieces of it many times over the years, and yearned for it in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic as a reminder that "Nature is orderly," as he writes. "That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order." Yosemite is the most beautiful natural beauty I've ever looked upon and so this book is personal to me and not. I'm not sure he even mentions it, though I know he mentions some peaks. It's probably self-indulgent to even discuss this here: my favorite experience of wild nature -- mountain lion, mother bear not long out of hiberation, with cubs, and so much more -- but returning to the book was a needed reminder that covid-19 too is part of wild nature.
A nature writer with scientific knowledge, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, an environmentalist before that term became a cliche, a writing professor (now Emeritus) at UC Davis, devoted family man and in general a gifted and pure soul, Gary Snyder too is one of nature's beautiful creations. He grew up on a farm, lived in Japan to study Zen and upon arriving back chose to make his permanent home in the Sierras, not far from Yosemite, with which he's had a history of personal pleasure and advocacy. His gentle prose (and poetry, but there's none in here) is comforting as is Snyder's celebration of and love for every part of nature, expressed in often breathtakingly beautiful language. Tucked into naturally and not in any way forcefully is his Zen.
I'm not a Buddhist but have found awesome parts in the Dao that have much to say to people of all religions and none. The quotes Snyder chooses most often to make his points are those of Dogen, the man who brought Zen to Japan, and these are organic in Snyder's writing the way the trees are and soil. They help express his reverence for and the joy he takes from mountains, streams, the female form, and forests, and the orderly wildness he recognizes is everywhere, including in cities, including New York. In this book, one of my Favorites, are some of his greatest essays and it has been a balm and a joy to read it again, and at this time.
The essay "At Work in the Woods" is interesting and stands out in a different way. Some people are surprised to come upon Snyder describing his stint as a logger. He needed the money. He was not yet the very soft and very strong voice of nature nor the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and beloved teacher he became. And he speaks of those felling the trees with reverence too. He understands they're part of a system and not The System. His descriptions are of the processes, the stages, the equipment and what excites me, what exactly happened to the trees at every step along the way. He had and has a seriousness about this job I find fascinating. I include this information because some who probably weren't born yet don't like the essay. Well, this was 1954 and he writes: "Those were, in hindsight, the last years of righteous forest management in the United States."
Like every living thing and dead ones too, as he reminds us, each essay brings something different. His wild naturally includes humans, ones he loves and those whose systems, policies and behaviors he reviles, though they are not the focus. In the section of essays on "The Woman Who Married a Bear" he focuses on human wild cultural lore, presenting this old indigenous American story and its mutations and migrations.
The twentieth anniversary edition (from 2010) has a new preface, which is a gem. Gary Snyder is blessed with wisdom, knowledge and humility to not just teach but constantly allow himself to be taught, why is why to many he's an icon. The natural place to end this review for me lies in the new preface. Since my inartful words could never do these essays, his poetry, the eyes with which he looks at the world, do Gary Snyder himself justice, I hope they lead those to whom they speak to his remarkable body of work which was in full bloom when he wrote "The Practice of the Wild":
"Nothing said here is to take away from the elegance, the refinement, the beauty, and the intriguing complexity of what we call civilization, especially the sort of civilization that respects quality over quantity and is not simply an excuse for multinational global piracy. I am intrigued by the sense that culture itself has a wild edge. As Claude Levi-Strauss remarked years ago, the arts are the wilderness areas of the imagination surviving, like national parks, in the midst of civilized minds. The abandon and delight of love-making is, as often sung, part of the delightful wild in us. Both sex and art! But we knew that all along. What we didn't perhaps see so clearly was that self-realization, even enlightenment, is another aspect of our wildness -- a bonding of the wild in ourselves to the (wild) process of the universe."
I've read it and pieces of it many times over the years, and yearned for it in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic as a reminder that "Nature is orderly," as he writes. "That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order." Yosemite is the most beautiful natural beauty I've ever looked upon and so this book is personal to me and not. I'm not sure he even mentions it, though I know he mentions some peaks. It's probably self-indulgent to even discuss this here: my favorite experience of wild nature -- mountain lion, mother bear not long out of hiberation, with cubs, and so much more -- but returning to the book was a needed reminder that covid-19 too is part of wild nature.
A nature writer with scientific knowledge, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, an environmentalist before that term became a cliche, a writing professor (now Emeritus) at UC Davis, devoted family man and in general a gifted and pure soul, Gary Snyder too is one of nature's beautiful creations. He grew up on a farm, lived in Japan to study Zen and upon arriving back chose to make his permanent home in the Sierras, not far from Yosemite, with which he's had a history of personal pleasure and advocacy. His gentle prose (and poetry, but there's none in here) is comforting as is Snyder's celebration of and love for every part of nature, expressed in often breathtakingly beautiful language. Tucked into naturally and not in any way forcefully is his Zen.
I'm not a Buddhist but have found awesome parts in the Dao that have much to say to people of all religions and none. The quotes Snyder chooses most often to make his points are those of Dogen, the man who brought Zen to Japan, and these are organic in Snyder's writing the way the trees are and soil. They help express his reverence for and the joy he takes from mountains, streams, the female form, and forests, and the orderly wildness he recognizes is everywhere, including in cities, including New York. In this book, one of my Favorites, are some of his greatest essays and it has been a balm and a joy to read it again, and at this time.
The essay "At Work in the Woods" is interesting and stands out in a different way. Some people are surprised to come upon Snyder describing his stint as a logger. He needed the money. He was not yet the very soft and very strong voice of nature nor the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and beloved teacher he became. And he speaks of those felling the trees with reverence too. He understands they're part of a system and not The System. His descriptions are of the processes, the stages, the equipment and what excites me, what exactly happened to the trees at every step along the way. He had and has a seriousness about this job I find fascinating. I include this information because some who probably weren't born yet don't like the essay. Well, this was 1954 and he writes: "Those were, in hindsight, the last years of righteous forest management in the United States."
Like every living thing and dead ones too, as he reminds us, each essay brings something different. His wild naturally includes humans, ones he loves and those whose systems, policies and behaviors he reviles, though they are not the focus. In the section of essays on "The Woman Who Married a Bear" he focuses on human wild cultural lore, presenting this old indigenous American story and its mutations and migrations.
The twentieth anniversary edition (from 2010) has a new preface, which is a gem. Gary Snyder is blessed with wisdom, knowledge and humility to not just teach but constantly allow himself to be taught, why is why to many he's an icon. The natural place to end this review for me lies in the new preface. Since my inartful words could never do these essays, his poetry, the eyes with which he looks at the world, do Gary Snyder himself justice, I hope they lead those to whom they speak to his remarkable body of work which was in full bloom when he wrote "The Practice of the Wild":
"Nothing said here is to take away from the elegance, the refinement, the beauty, and the intriguing complexity of what we call civilization, especially the sort of civilization that respects quality over quantity and is not simply an excuse for multinational global piracy. I am intrigued by the sense that culture itself has a wild edge. As Claude Levi-Strauss remarked years ago, the arts are the wilderness areas of the imagination surviving, like national parks, in the midst of civilized minds. The abandon and delight of love-making is, as often sung, part of the delightful wild in us. Both sex and art! But we knew that all along. What we didn't perhaps see so clearly was that self-realization, even enlightenment, is another aspect of our wildness -- a bonding of the wild in ourselves to the (wild) process of the universe."
September 2, 2016
Gary is not an armchair ecologist. He earned his title, Poet Laureate of Deep Ecology, by cutting line on wildfires, losing himself in wilderness, reading science and the great poets of Japan and China, and winnowing the wheat from the chaff by diving into Void.
In this seminal, important collection he writes of the etiquette of freedom, and how that relates to wildness. He has learned Nature's great lesson: that wilderness, and wild mind, are not chaotic and out of control, but self-governing. In everything they do, they follow the grain of one of Nature's most deeply interfused laws: minimal action.
From the book:
Coyote and Ground Squirrel do not break the compact they have with each other that one must play predator and the other play game. In the wild a baby Black-tailed Hare gets maybe one free chance to run across a meadow without looking up. There won’t be a second. The sharper the knife, the cleaner the line of the carving. We can appreciate the elegance of the forces that shape life and the world, that have shaped every line of our bodies—teeth and nails, nipples and eyebrows. We also see that we must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others. There will be enough pain in the world as it is.
Such are the lessons of the wild. The school where these lessons can be learned, the realms of caribou and elk, elephant and rhinoceros, orca and walrus, are shrinking day by day. Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat—and the old, old habitat of humans—falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies. If the lad or lass is among us who knows where the secret heart of this Growth-Monster is hidden, let them please tell us where to shoot the arrow that will slow it down. And if the secret heart stays secret and our work is made no easier, I for one will keep working for wildness day by day.
"Wild and free." An American dream-phrase loosing images: a long-maned stallion racing across the grasslands, a V of Canada Geese high and honking, a squirrel chattering and leaping limb to limb overhead in an oak. It also sounds like an ad for a Harley-Davidson. Both words, profoundly political and sensitive as they are, have become consumer baubles. I hope to investigate the meaning of wild and how it connects with free and what one would want to do with these meanings. To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are—painful, impermanent, open, imperfect—and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us. For in a fixed universe there would be no freedom. With that freedom we improve the campsite, teach children, oust tyrants. The world is nature, and in the long run inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence.
In this seminal, important collection he writes of the etiquette of freedom, and how that relates to wildness. He has learned Nature's great lesson: that wilderness, and wild mind, are not chaotic and out of control, but self-governing. In everything they do, they follow the grain of one of Nature's most deeply interfused laws: minimal action.
From the book:
Coyote and Ground Squirrel do not break the compact they have with each other that one must play predator and the other play game. In the wild a baby Black-tailed Hare gets maybe one free chance to run across a meadow without looking up. There won’t be a second. The sharper the knife, the cleaner the line of the carving. We can appreciate the elegance of the forces that shape life and the world, that have shaped every line of our bodies—teeth and nails, nipples and eyebrows. We also see that we must try to live without causing unnecessary harm, not just to fellow humans but to all beings. We must try not to be stingy, or to exploit others. There will be enough pain in the world as it is.
Such are the lessons of the wild. The school where these lessons can be learned, the realms of caribou and elk, elephant and rhinoceros, orca and walrus, are shrinking day by day. Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat—and the old, old habitat of humans—falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies. If the lad or lass is among us who knows where the secret heart of this Growth-Monster is hidden, let them please tell us where to shoot the arrow that will slow it down. And if the secret heart stays secret and our work is made no easier, I for one will keep working for wildness day by day.
"Wild and free." An American dream-phrase loosing images: a long-maned stallion racing across the grasslands, a V of Canada Geese high and honking, a squirrel chattering and leaping limb to limb overhead in an oak. It also sounds like an ad for a Harley-Davidson. Both words, profoundly political and sensitive as they are, have become consumer baubles. I hope to investigate the meaning of wild and how it connects with free and what one would want to do with these meanings. To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are—painful, impermanent, open, imperfect—and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us. For in a fixed universe there would be no freedom. With that freedom we improve the campsite, teach children, oust tyrants. The world is nature, and in the long run inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence.
May 3, 2019
We absolutely live in a society
October 3, 2011
A perpetual evil has been at work destroying the nurturing, life-endowing planet, stripping it of its resources since the fifth century with the rise of small cities. Humans began to detach themselves from nature, associating the wild with a negative connotation. The idea that nature as sacred shortly existed during the Romantic period and throughout the ten years after this book was written humanity once again sees nature as something worth protecting, preserving, and connecting with.
This current evil has been molded to represent the greedy, self-centered capitalist desires of the Industrial power figures running the economic trade. Writing a compellation of essays Gary Snyder forces the read to consider “how the whole human race can regain self-determination in place (nature) after centuries of having been disenfranchised by hierarchy and/or centralized power” (Snyder 1990). This book reveals that we are living in a contradictory time, where as “culture and nature” the actual and living has become a “shadow” in the daunting presence of the insubstantial “political jurisdictions and rarefied economies”(Snyder 1990).
Using a combination of Zen philosophies, and Native American mythology, expressed through personal experiences and travels--Snyder creates his own insightful methodology allowing the read to navigate, and become “on the path, off the trail”. As explained within the book, paths come from the days when walking was used to travel, and signified the inter-weaving connective web of relationships between Humans, Animals, Nature, and the Wild. Snyder draws content from his own path, from researching local aboriginal tribes of northwest Alaska, to his eight year period of studying Zen as a monk in Japan.
Translating a line from Dao Dejing, Snyder interprets the subtle meaning of the “way”; ” ‘a path that can be followed is not a spiritual path’”(Snyder 1990). Paradoxically one must first walk and maintain the path and can then achieve access “off the trail”, as an end result a return to the wild is accomplished. It is established within the path there is a going, but no destination only the wild, and entirety of nature.
To be free is to be able to accept the conditions that come with nature as explained in The practice of the Wild, embracing the open, imperfect, painful, and impermanent. Thus from nature we can infer wilderness, and to speak of wilderness is “to speak of wholeness”(Snyder 1990). How then could this wholeness be achieved when severe deforestation, water and air pollution, extinction, and desolate ecosystems continually arise and remain as unimportant issues for the Occidental civilizations? Snyder aims to provoke enlightenment and encourage the read to become the vocalization that can unite and creatively live in harmony with nature.
In today’s day and age the argument focuses on those valuing the human-centered resource management verses those who value the integrity of the entire nature system. Understanding the difference is key, explicitly in this book where as nature can be seen as a scientific subject studied and analyzed. To understand the wild it must be deciphered from within as “as a quality intrinsic to who we are”(Snyder 1990). In order to connect to the instinctive human nature we first must connect to the “place” or the wild. This land we live on was e wildest and most in tuned to nature prior to white colonization, while the aboriginals shared, fed and lived not from nature but with nature. To call this land “America” is to identify it with the passing political entities that control it. The name commonly found within Native American myth agrees on the name “Turtle Island” for this continent. Snyder wrote, continuing to abuse the land with result in these powers losing their mandate; but observing the events from the time this book was written to the present, I would have to agree that the entities in power now hold a position strong enough to evade penalties and justice and continue to strip the earth to nothing. It is just as the Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki had reversed the line “The State is destroyed, but the mountains and rivers survive” to give it a contemporary reading:
“The mountains and rivers are destroyed, but the State survives.”(Snyder 1990)
Now more than ever does the civilization that can live in harmony with nature needs to rise and gain power to direct and save the existence of nature, creatures, and our world. This book serves as an excellent introduction to enhancing philosophies and perspectives, and offers an efficient amount of other literarily text which Snyder built from to this text. I was heavily intrigued and influenced to inquire further about writing from the heavily quoted Zen Master, Dogen (the philosopher and founder of the Soto school of Japanese Zen) and continue for the defense and preservation of the wild.
This current evil has been molded to represent the greedy, self-centered capitalist desires of the Industrial power figures running the economic trade. Writing a compellation of essays Gary Snyder forces the read to consider “how the whole human race can regain self-determination in place (nature) after centuries of having been disenfranchised by hierarchy and/or centralized power” (Snyder 1990). This book reveals that we are living in a contradictory time, where as “culture and nature” the actual and living has become a “shadow” in the daunting presence of the insubstantial “political jurisdictions and rarefied economies”(Snyder 1990).
Using a combination of Zen philosophies, and Native American mythology, expressed through personal experiences and travels--Snyder creates his own insightful methodology allowing the read to navigate, and become “on the path, off the trail”. As explained within the book, paths come from the days when walking was used to travel, and signified the inter-weaving connective web of relationships between Humans, Animals, Nature, and the Wild. Snyder draws content from his own path, from researching local aboriginal tribes of northwest Alaska, to his eight year period of studying Zen as a monk in Japan.
Translating a line from Dao Dejing, Snyder interprets the subtle meaning of the “way”; ” ‘a path that can be followed is not a spiritual path’”(Snyder 1990). Paradoxically one must first walk and maintain the path and can then achieve access “off the trail”, as an end result a return to the wild is accomplished. It is established within the path there is a going, but no destination only the wild, and entirety of nature.
To be free is to be able to accept the conditions that come with nature as explained in The practice of the Wild, embracing the open, imperfect, painful, and impermanent. Thus from nature we can infer wilderness, and to speak of wilderness is “to speak of wholeness”(Snyder 1990). How then could this wholeness be achieved when severe deforestation, water and air pollution, extinction, and desolate ecosystems continually arise and remain as unimportant issues for the Occidental civilizations? Snyder aims to provoke enlightenment and encourage the read to become the vocalization that can unite and creatively live in harmony with nature.
In today’s day and age the argument focuses on those valuing the human-centered resource management verses those who value the integrity of the entire nature system. Understanding the difference is key, explicitly in this book where as nature can be seen as a scientific subject studied and analyzed. To understand the wild it must be deciphered from within as “as a quality intrinsic to who we are”(Snyder 1990). In order to connect to the instinctive human nature we first must connect to the “place” or the wild. This land we live on was e wildest and most in tuned to nature prior to white colonization, while the aboriginals shared, fed and lived not from nature but with nature. To call this land “America” is to identify it with the passing political entities that control it. The name commonly found within Native American myth agrees on the name “Turtle Island” for this continent. Snyder wrote, continuing to abuse the land with result in these powers losing their mandate; but observing the events from the time this book was written to the present, I would have to agree that the entities in power now hold a position strong enough to evade penalties and justice and continue to strip the earth to nothing. It is just as the Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki had reversed the line “The State is destroyed, but the mountains and rivers survive” to give it a contemporary reading:
“The mountains and rivers are destroyed, but the State survives.”(Snyder 1990)
Now more than ever does the civilization that can live in harmony with nature needs to rise and gain power to direct and save the existence of nature, creatures, and our world. This book serves as an excellent introduction to enhancing philosophies and perspectives, and offers an efficient amount of other literarily text which Snyder built from to this text. I was heavily intrigued and influenced to inquire further about writing from the heavily quoted Zen Master, Dogen (the philosopher and founder of the Soto school of Japanese Zen) and continue for the defense and preservation of the wild.
November 19, 2020
There are some gems here which are examples of exceptional writing. But as a whole Snyder is a better poet (read Turtle Island) than an expository writer.
The sections on logging and forestry during his youth in Washington state were the best written and most enlightening. Logging is very personal to him. He also returned to this theme, several times, of how Europeans over a millennia destroyed the Mediterranean ecosystem. A precursor to what Americans were doing.
Snyder spent many years (in the 1960’s) living and traveling in the Far East including Japan. There are many pages on Zen Buddhism. I did not find these chapters resonated with me.
4 stars.
The sections on logging and forestry during his youth in Washington state were the best written and most enlightening. Logging is very personal to him. He also returned to this theme, several times, of how Europeans over a millennia destroyed the Mediterranean ecosystem. A precursor to what Americans were doing.
Snyder spent many years (in the 1960’s) living and traveling in the Far East including Japan. There are many pages on Zen Buddhism. I did not find these chapters resonated with me.
4 stars.
November 9, 2015
West Coast zen + Eastern philosophy + PNW nature writing + hard ecology idealism + esoteric Japanese poetry + personal anecdotes + beat phrasing + Native American mythology + advocacy + moral outrage + regionalism = Gary Snyder.
Not that he's a formula, but, you know.
He's his own genre, folks.
Not that he's a formula, but, you know.
He's his own genre, folks.
Read
August 30, 2025Gary Snyder has done it again. This is yet another excellent collection of thought-provoking essays, perhaps his most important book of prose, urging us all to rethink and recalibrate our relationship with the Earth. This is why Snyder is one of my heroes. The Practice of the Wild is a book brimming with intelligence and good sense that everyone should read at least once in their lifetime.
June 17, 2014
Snyder has, in this collection of essays, written from the heart and the soul about his passion for the wild places. I am not a wilderness type, but reading this book makes plain his passion and spiritual commitment. I placed this book on my Buddhist shelf as well because of the author's repeated touching on those principles with regards to the wild. It has a real sense of thusness about it.
September 1, 2016
Gary Snyder is one of my all-time favorite writers. He is concise and personable. His point of view is pragmatic without being overt. His love for the wild and for people and our personal responsibility to both comes through.
June 13, 2020
Gary Snyder has profound things to say about the wild, about recognizing our wildness, and a fair amount about Buddhist teachings.
February 18, 2021
When I first read this essay collection decades ago I found it revelatory. Re-reading it, I can see why I thought that. It really was a formative book for me and, more broadly speaking, I like to think it may be one of the most important books of the 20th century. It did feel less revelatory on this read-through, which I take as an indication that I've internalized whatever it was that hit me so hard all those years ago. If so, that's good news.
If you haven't read these essays, you really must! Whether or not you find it as revelatory as I did back then, there is deep and timeless wisdom here.
If you haven't read these essays, you really must! Whether or not you find it as revelatory as I did back then, there is deep and timeless wisdom here.
September 3, 2011
Possibly the best book I've ever read.
November 26, 2022
Always say grace
September 30, 2025
adored the first essay. unfortunately didn’t connect as much with the rest!
September 26, 2021
I am ashamed to admit that I did not know of Gary Snyder before I stumbled onto this book. Then I learned that he is famous not just as an environmentalist, but also as a Buddhist, a Beat poet, a friend of Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg and as one of the characters in The Dharma Bums. How did I miss him until now?
This book is good and if I had read it when it first came out, I might have fallen in love with it. Now the ideas in it are all things that we have seen in a hundred different places. They are timeless ideas and good ones, so that's not such a bad thing, but Mr. Snyder's way of expressing himself is not so outstanding as to make it all seem fresh and new. In contrast, The Sand County Almanac and Silent Spring both remain just as powerful today as when they were written.
One of the things that I really liked was Mr. Snyder's refutation of The Tragedy of the Commons. In Mr. Snyder's telling the only tragedy was the taking of the commons by enclosure and other methods of private appropriation so that the old ways of respect for the commonly held resources were lost. I'm not sure that Mr. Snyder's version of the story is completely accurate, but it has at least enough truth in it so that Chicago Schoolers should pause before jumping to the conclusion that the free market and private property always create the best results for everyone.
This book is good and if I had read it when it first came out, I might have fallen in love with it. Now the ideas in it are all things that we have seen in a hundred different places. They are timeless ideas and good ones, so that's not such a bad thing, but Mr. Snyder's way of expressing himself is not so outstanding as to make it all seem fresh and new. In contrast, The Sand County Almanac and Silent Spring both remain just as powerful today as when they were written.
One of the things that I really liked was Mr. Snyder's refutation of The Tragedy of the Commons. In Mr. Snyder's telling the only tragedy was the taking of the commons by enclosure and other methods of private appropriation so that the old ways of respect for the commonly held resources were lost. I'm not sure that Mr. Snyder's version of the story is completely accurate, but it has at least enough truth in it so that Chicago Schoolers should pause before jumping to the conclusion that the free market and private property always create the best results for everyone.
October 6, 2014
Gary Snyder has long been one of my favorite poets. His calls to incorporate neolithic wisdom in our modern lives are important. Snyder has long fostered a deep sense of place in his works. It's a delight for me to read Snyder's prose, which is colored by the fact that he is primarily a poet. He has an amazingly extensive body of work, from his Rip Rap and Cold Mountain Poems in 1956 to his Pulitzer Prize winning Turtle Island (1975) to this book, which is a literary culmination of the world views that have driven his poetry through the decades. I dig Snyder.
May 12, 2020
This was so hard to read, but so necessary. I read it slowly because the book invites you to reflect, and I had to let the words sink in and let my mind go all the places Snyder takes us. The long view of humans' relationship with the Earth made me even sadder than I already was about the state of our planet. That's a warning for those suffering environmental depression, but I don't regret it. Very thought provoking and fresh -- every sentence was something new to me. Wish I could make everyone stripping our beautiful gem of a planet of all its resources read this ...
December 27, 2023
¿Cuáles son los límites que pone la política a nuestra relación intrínseca con la naturaleza? ¿De qué forma es el lenguaje una herramienta más de conexión con la tierra que pisamos? ¿Cómo ser conscientes de la fusión que representa la naturaleza y el ser humano? Gary Snyder ha conseguido que me lleve estas y otras muchas reflexiones a mi día a día. Uno de los libros más reveladores que he leído. 💜 Deseando leer su poesía.
December 26, 2017
Loved hearing the voice of a naturalist and Buddhist who also worked as a logger. This was the first Gary Snyder work I’ve read and will definitely pick up another.
July 12, 2021
Brilliant. Swimming through the mind of a great like Snyder is a true delight.
September 28, 2018
from http://www.darkmatteressay.org/the-pr...
Critique of Gary Snyder’s writing feels like a sacrilege against the beauty of letters, nature and the elders. Not knowing if he deems me worthy of such relationship, he makes himself a point to assume the position of the grandfather I never had: My own grandparents certainly didn’t tell us stories around the campfire before we went to sleep. Their house had an oil furnace instead, and a small library. So the people of civilization read books. For some centuries the “library” and the “university” have been our repository of lore. In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!
This book should get praise only. Like Wes Jackson, a geneticist friend of Synder writes: I have always found it difficult to imagine this century without the life and work of Gary Snyder. After reading this collection of essays, I now find it impossible. I could not agree more and would say that The Practice of the Wild is even more a mandatory read in the 21st century than it was in the 20th. Although an entire generation has been influenced by Snyder, I am surprised that he is not more widely known or at least added to the recent discussion around a Western education canon.
This collection of nine substantial essays is summarized by Snyder in his own words: Our immediate business, and our quarrel, is with ourselves. It would be presumptuous to think that Gaia much needs our prayers or healing vibes. Human beings themselves are at risk – not just on some survival-of-civilization level but more basically on the level of heart and soul. We are in danger of losing our souls. We are ignorant of our own nature and confused about what it means to be a human being. Much of this book has been the reimagining of what we have been and done, and the robust wisdom of our earlier ways. Like Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home – a genuine teaching text – this book has been a meditation on what it means to be human.
But reading them I am left with a decisive uneasiness. If such a widely travelled and learned man like Synder writes in all this erudition quite gloomily about our relationship with ourselves, others and the planet, is there any hope left? Snyder does not give an explanation why all these local cultures and many species are under threat or already extinct. He wails in beautiful prose and some poetry over the lost diversity and richness of wilderness. But he does not explain why cultures undergo these breakneck transformations. Quite on the contrary, Snyder argues that the only meaningful explanation for all the environmental devastation, murdering of fellow human beings and extermination of other species is “spiritual Darwinism.”
He refers to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit who claims a special evolutionary destiny under the name of higher consciousness and misinterprets his 20th century writing as a form of transhumanism: man is on a path to leave the rest of earth-bound animal and plant life behind to enter an off-the-planet realm transcending biology. He calls Chardin an anthropocentrist new age thinker and counters his teachings with the radical critique of the Deep Ecology movement.
It is probably not a coincidence that I read almost parallel to Gary Snyder, recommended by a dear American friend, Sadhguru’s Inner Engineering, recommended by a dear French friend. Both writers are sages. Snyder is a cosmopolite anthropologist who excels in describing how nature, sacredness and wildness interact and what it is that we have lost. Sadhguru is a yogi who has reached a special state of consciousness and shares many insights which proof his human engineering competence. But there is a qualitative difference between these two books: Snyder is modest and humble while Sadhguru appears to be patronizing and proselytizing.
It is though Sadhguru how reconciles Snyder and Teilhard de Chardin when he explains that there are two basic forces within you. Most people see them as being in conflict. One is the instinct of self-preservation, which compels you to build walls around yourself to protect yourself. The other is the constant desire to expand, to become boundless. These two longings – are not opposing forces, though they may seem to be. They are related to two different aspects of your life. One force helps you root yourself well on this planet; the other takes you beyond. Self-preservation needs to be limited to the physical body. If you have the necessary awareness to separate the two, there is no conflict. But if you are identified with the physical, tehn instead of working in collaboration, these two fundamental forces become a source of tension. All of the “material-versus-spiritual” struggle of humanity spring from this ignorance. When you say “spirituality,” you are talking about a dimension beyond the physical. The human desire to transcend the limitations of the physical is a completely natural one. To journey from the boundary-based individual body to the boundless source of creation – this is the very basis of the spiritual process.
In as such, Snyder and Teilhard de Chardin describe the same thing but from two different perspectives. One describes the journey from the physical towards the spiritual and emphasizes that there is no spirituality, no soul, without respect for the own, the other and the body of mother Earth. The other describes the omega point as a final destination of consciousness evolution and explains the turmoil in the physical world thereby. Both man are deeply rooted in the phenomenal world, one as keen observer of human culture and custom, the other as geologist and paleontologist. Both men go beyond the phenomenal world and try to understand the noumenal world; one through the multitude of native rituals, the other through the singularity of Christianity. Both got a point, but I can’t help to be reminded of Heinz von Förster’s anectode in Understanding Systems about the 15th century mathematician Nicolas of Cusa who proofed that an infinite circle is identical with a line.
Both seem to recognize that it is culture which requires a transformation. One shows us what our ancestors have done right, the other explains what we still need to learn in order to progress and evolve. Snyder writes that greed exposes the foolish person or the foolish chicken alike to the ever-watchful hawk of the food-web and to early impermanence. Preliterate hunting and gathering cultures were highly trained and lived well by virtue of keen observation and good manners; as noted earlier, stinginess was the worst of vices. Teilhard de Chardin emphasizes the force of love to drive giving instead of taking.
Snyder teachers us that the term culture goes back to Latin meanings, via colere, such as “worship, attend to, cultivate, respect, till, take care of.” The root kwel basically means to revolve around a center – cognate with wheel and Greek telos, “completion of a cycle,” hence teleology. In Sanskrit this is chakra, “wheel,” or “great wheel of the universe.” The modern Hindi word is charkha, “spinning wheel” – with which Gandhi meditated the freedom of India while in prison. He shows that a culture is like a giant trap, a huge flywheel. Once put in place or motion it is difficult for the individual to escape.
Teilhard de Chardin interprets increasing complexity as the axis of evolution (a concept which is the central pillar of modern big history) of matter into a geosphere, a biosphere, and finally into consciousness and then to supreme consciousness (the Omega Point). He explains – and that’s probably the part in his writing which Snyder dislikes – that evolution shifted from the realm of physics into chemistry from chemistry into biology, and from biology into culture. And it is in this last realm that man dominates over all other elements in this universe.
Synder does though agree with Chardin between the lines, because this passage shows that he has already in the late 1980s if not earlier anticipated the dawn of the Anthropocene: A culture of wilderness starts somewhere in this terrain. Civilization is part of nature – our egos play in the fields of the unconscious – history takes place in the Holocene – human culture is rooted in the primitive and the Paleolithic – our body is a vertebrate mammal being – and our souls are out in the wilderness.
I warmly recommend to read this book and watch in the course of doing so films like The Revenant (about nature, wildness and the sacred) and Wild (about the healing force of the wild), Into the Wild (about the deadly force of the wild and the necessity for man to be part of some sort of civilization), 127 Hours (about the attraction of the wild), Captain Fantastic (about wildness and parenting) or The Deer Hunter (about the conflation of sacred wildness and social sickness).
Critique of Gary Snyder’s writing feels like a sacrilege against the beauty of letters, nature and the elders. Not knowing if he deems me worthy of such relationship, he makes himself a point to assume the position of the grandfather I never had: My own grandparents certainly didn’t tell us stories around the campfire before we went to sleep. Their house had an oil furnace instead, and a small library. So the people of civilization read books. For some centuries the “library” and the “university” have been our repository of lore. In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!
This book should get praise only. Like Wes Jackson, a geneticist friend of Synder writes: I have always found it difficult to imagine this century without the life and work of Gary Snyder. After reading this collection of essays, I now find it impossible. I could not agree more and would say that The Practice of the Wild is even more a mandatory read in the 21st century than it was in the 20th. Although an entire generation has been influenced by Snyder, I am surprised that he is not more widely known or at least added to the recent discussion around a Western education canon.
This collection of nine substantial essays is summarized by Snyder in his own words: Our immediate business, and our quarrel, is with ourselves. It would be presumptuous to think that Gaia much needs our prayers or healing vibes. Human beings themselves are at risk – not just on some survival-of-civilization level but more basically on the level of heart and soul. We are in danger of losing our souls. We are ignorant of our own nature and confused about what it means to be a human being. Much of this book has been the reimagining of what we have been and done, and the robust wisdom of our earlier ways. Like Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home – a genuine teaching text – this book has been a meditation on what it means to be human.
But reading them I am left with a decisive uneasiness. If such a widely travelled and learned man like Synder writes in all this erudition quite gloomily about our relationship with ourselves, others and the planet, is there any hope left? Snyder does not give an explanation why all these local cultures and many species are under threat or already extinct. He wails in beautiful prose and some poetry over the lost diversity and richness of wilderness. But he does not explain why cultures undergo these breakneck transformations. Quite on the contrary, Snyder argues that the only meaningful explanation for all the environmental devastation, murdering of fellow human beings and extermination of other species is “spiritual Darwinism.”
He refers to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit who claims a special evolutionary destiny under the name of higher consciousness and misinterprets his 20th century writing as a form of transhumanism: man is on a path to leave the rest of earth-bound animal and plant life behind to enter an off-the-planet realm transcending biology. He calls Chardin an anthropocentrist new age thinker and counters his teachings with the radical critique of the Deep Ecology movement.
It is probably not a coincidence that I read almost parallel to Gary Snyder, recommended by a dear American friend, Sadhguru’s Inner Engineering, recommended by a dear French friend. Both writers are sages. Snyder is a cosmopolite anthropologist who excels in describing how nature, sacredness and wildness interact and what it is that we have lost. Sadhguru is a yogi who has reached a special state of consciousness and shares many insights which proof his human engineering competence. But there is a qualitative difference between these two books: Snyder is modest and humble while Sadhguru appears to be patronizing and proselytizing.
It is though Sadhguru how reconciles Snyder and Teilhard de Chardin when he explains that there are two basic forces within you. Most people see them as being in conflict. One is the instinct of self-preservation, which compels you to build walls around yourself to protect yourself. The other is the constant desire to expand, to become boundless. These two longings – are not opposing forces, though they may seem to be. They are related to two different aspects of your life. One force helps you root yourself well on this planet; the other takes you beyond. Self-preservation needs to be limited to the physical body. If you have the necessary awareness to separate the two, there is no conflict. But if you are identified with the physical, tehn instead of working in collaboration, these two fundamental forces become a source of tension. All of the “material-versus-spiritual” struggle of humanity spring from this ignorance. When you say “spirituality,” you are talking about a dimension beyond the physical. The human desire to transcend the limitations of the physical is a completely natural one. To journey from the boundary-based individual body to the boundless source of creation – this is the very basis of the spiritual process.
In as such, Snyder and Teilhard de Chardin describe the same thing but from two different perspectives. One describes the journey from the physical towards the spiritual and emphasizes that there is no spirituality, no soul, without respect for the own, the other and the body of mother Earth. The other describes the omega point as a final destination of consciousness evolution and explains the turmoil in the physical world thereby. Both man are deeply rooted in the phenomenal world, one as keen observer of human culture and custom, the other as geologist and paleontologist. Both men go beyond the phenomenal world and try to understand the noumenal world; one through the multitude of native rituals, the other through the singularity of Christianity. Both got a point, but I can’t help to be reminded of Heinz von Förster’s anectode in Understanding Systems about the 15th century mathematician Nicolas of Cusa who proofed that an infinite circle is identical with a line.
Both seem to recognize that it is culture which requires a transformation. One shows us what our ancestors have done right, the other explains what we still need to learn in order to progress and evolve. Snyder writes that greed exposes the foolish person or the foolish chicken alike to the ever-watchful hawk of the food-web and to early impermanence. Preliterate hunting and gathering cultures were highly trained and lived well by virtue of keen observation and good manners; as noted earlier, stinginess was the worst of vices. Teilhard de Chardin emphasizes the force of love to drive giving instead of taking.
Snyder teachers us that the term culture goes back to Latin meanings, via colere, such as “worship, attend to, cultivate, respect, till, take care of.” The root kwel basically means to revolve around a center – cognate with wheel and Greek telos, “completion of a cycle,” hence teleology. In Sanskrit this is chakra, “wheel,” or “great wheel of the universe.” The modern Hindi word is charkha, “spinning wheel” – with which Gandhi meditated the freedom of India while in prison. He shows that a culture is like a giant trap, a huge flywheel. Once put in place or motion it is difficult for the individual to escape.
Teilhard de Chardin interprets increasing complexity as the axis of evolution (a concept which is the central pillar of modern big history) of matter into a geosphere, a biosphere, and finally into consciousness and then to supreme consciousness (the Omega Point). He explains – and that’s probably the part in his writing which Snyder dislikes – that evolution shifted from the realm of physics into chemistry from chemistry into biology, and from biology into culture. And it is in this last realm that man dominates over all other elements in this universe.
Synder does though agree with Chardin between the lines, because this passage shows that he has already in the late 1980s if not earlier anticipated the dawn of the Anthropocene: A culture of wilderness starts somewhere in this terrain. Civilization is part of nature – our egos play in the fields of the unconscious – history takes place in the Holocene – human culture is rooted in the primitive and the Paleolithic – our body is a vertebrate mammal being – and our souls are out in the wilderness.
I warmly recommend to read this book and watch in the course of doing so films like The Revenant (about nature, wildness and the sacred) and Wild (about the healing force of the wild), Into the Wild (about the deadly force of the wild and the necessity for man to be part of some sort of civilization), 127 Hours (about the attraction of the wild), Captain Fantastic (about wildness and parenting) or The Deer Hunter (about the conflation of sacred wildness and social sickness).
June 24, 2025
Incredible. I enjoyed discussion of linguistic roots and rise of rational thinking in Occidental movement so cool && also his constant and conscious dismantling of misanthropic framing of shit. definitely will be reading a lot more Gary in the future.
“Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat— and the old, old habitat of humans— falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies. If the lad or lass is among us who knows where the secret heart of this Growth-Monster is hidden, let them please tell us where to shoot the arrow that will slow it down. And if the secret heart stays secret and our work is made no easier, I for one will keep working for wildness day by day.”
“Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat— and the old, old habitat of humans— falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies. If the lad or lass is among us who knows where the secret heart of this Growth-Monster is hidden, let them please tell us where to shoot the arrow that will slow it down. And if the secret heart stays secret and our work is made no easier, I for one will keep working for wildness day by day.”
March 29, 2022
honestly, this was a bit difficult for me to read. zen buddhism can be a little too 'hippy dippy' for my tastes.
regardless, a totally necessary read for me.
"all of us at the table will eventually become part of the meal"
regardless, a totally necessary read for me.
"all of us at the table will eventually become part of the meal"
June 27, 2022
I lack the necessary words to describe the beauty of this book so here's a quote that stuck with me: "You first must be ob the path, before you can turn and walk into the wild"
July 23, 2022
Lots of insightful, provocative, and helpful ideas to be found on the relationship between humanity, nature, and wilderness, told through Buddhist, Daoist, and indigenous frameworks as interpreted by a white American who has worked both in the logging industry and as a conservation advocate. Through this series of essays, Snyder works out the borders of a definition of "the wild" as a state of being, both internal and external to individuals, in which uncertainty and risk are allowed to exist and in which play and surprise are possible. This stands in contrast to culture/cultivated/ordered states of land/mind/organization which don't tolerate risk/uncertainty but may still be valid. We live our ordinary lives in such neat spaces, but we venture into the wild for inspiration/rejuvenation/self-growth. Snyder also spends a great deal of time/space developing notions of practice as enlightenment itself - how we achieve peace/enlightenment/connectivity by spending time in wild spaces (both internal and external). And that enlightenment takes the form of appreciating the interconnectivity of individuals, species, and systems, which we can promote through conscientious engagement with a particular landscape we live in. This idea of bioregionalism is prominent in Jenny Odell's more modern "How to Do Nothing" (a good accompaniment to this book), and strikes me as a practicable way to engage more people with their local contexts and get them to care about all lands.
Notes:
Ch 2. The place, the region, and the commons
p.44 "Bioregionalism is the entrance of a place into the dialectic of history."
Raises the possibility of environmental/ecological history as perspective/sub-discipline as valid and accepted as Marxism or Feminism etc. Looks like considering interactions between the landscape/ecoregion and how humans adapted to it / how it informed their culture, and what the results of disruption of traditional stewardship relations to land has affected the landscape. In such a perspective, extractive Western cultures can ONLY be villains. But as Snyder notes, if people stay in a place long enough, they will develop a relationship with the land. Quotes a Native American at a conference saying that Whites can become Native Americans if they live in a place long enough for the spirits to rise up from the Earth and speak to them (p. 42).
A place-based identity and cultural adaption to local contexts historically led to sustainable land use. Only the rise of State-ism, monotheism, extractive market orient economies, did it become profitable/desirable to exploit the Commons. Ir's capitalism that swept aside long standing cultural self-regulation and CREATED the tragedy of the commons.
Also argues that people adapted to their bioregion didn't historically invade other bioregions b/c they couldn't live there, that raiding cultures only arose around wealthy sedentary extractive civilizations. Implication is that native peoples were historically quite peaceful (quite dubious, this).
Highlights the tension between centralizing/nationalist political structures and diffuse regionalist structures. Posits that decentralized power structures allow for more sustainable economies based on places rather than resource extraction for profit maximization.
Ch 4. Good, Wild, Sacred
Relationship between good (measured by biological/economic productivity), wild, and sacred lands. For indigenous peoples, all 3 are tiged together in a landscape. For modern Japana, sacred spaces have remained wild, but non-sacred spaces were obliterated by development. In America, no spaces are sacred and few remain wild; those few that do remain wild are mostly areas that aren't very "good". Snyder posits that wildness is what makes a land "good" (productive) - nature balances productivity and system stability optimally for an area when left alone. Occidental culture's need to extract economic productive (though not exclusive to West, also gives examples of China and Japan) ultimately destroys the good, wild and sacred in a land. This arises from the intrinsic vices of ego-greed, hatred, ignorance - though we can overcome ego by training ourselves to self-realization. This delusional ego manifests ultimately as the State, which sees itself as imposing order on a chaotic nature, when in actuality it is simplifying (dangerously so) an already complexly ordered system (just on a temporal and spatial scale that isn't apparent / appreciated by many humans). Then asserts that this "self-seeking ego" in humans doesn't reflect wild nature (i.e. is a product of a particular culture/philosophy and not a thing found in the wild). I think behavioral studies on our primate relatives and other high-intelligence animals strongly suggests otherwise.
P. 101 - We have some wild spaces left in the Americas. And hiking in them allows us to touch the sacred, to get outside of our own heads/leave ego behind in the wake of our physical exertions and our traveling through a landscape much larger than ourselves, producing a feeling of being part of a greater interconnected natural world. We shouldn't see this as an exalted state of consciousness to be pursued only in sacred spaces or to be occupied perpetually, without disturbance by temporal troubles. Rather, it is an awareness of interconnectivity - mountains, forests, agriculture, suburbs, cities, all within the mandala nature of the universe, "never totally ruined never completely unnatural. It can be restored, and humans could live in considerable numbers on much of it. And the best use of that awareness is to bring it back down to the cities, not seeking to escape the quag of politics by entering an enlightened state of mind, but using that enlightened state to see all lands as worth fighting for, interconnected and full of potential. We can live on those lands without destroying them if we make our alterations to the wild with the grain of nature, instead of against the grain (Snyder uses examples of indigenous peoples using fire to cultivate fruit trees and deer habitat for so long that it is difficult to differentiate "natural" from human modified when looking at the paleoecological record). Ultimately Snyder proposes that we can, as a society and as individuals, come to value wild and sacred land, we can become Native Americans in our appreocation/ways, if we live long enough on the land to cultivate a connection to it. And that spaces on the land will become sacred to us by that long connection and imbuement of value.
Ch 5. Blue Mountains Constantly Walking
p. 117 - Snyder, in chapter about zen, non-duality of nature, and the naturalness of our collective being (7-11's and slurpees and all), thinks of empty niche spaces calling species forth into being. Sediment run offs into seas brings forth krill brings forth whales. This is just a slightly different perspective on existing theory in ecology. Then he asks what brings forth humans. Humans are at home in all environments on Earth and are able to manipulate almost everything around us. Snyder suggests that we are a natural result of our environment, our modifications to the globe are in keeping with our evolution and our niche space. All our cement and cultural institutions are no more artificial than a beaver dam or whale song.
Extending this thinking, is there a niche space for civilization? There appears to be ample space, on Earth and beyond, for intelligent species capable of manipulating their environment to expand and alter things as they are. IF we accept evolution as inevitably filling empty niche space, given enough time, then can we consider humanity as the fulfillment of the empty niche space in our solar system and beyond? This bords on a naturalistic justification for human exceptionalism. But there's no reason that humans as formed needed to fill that niche space, just as there's no reason for the whale niche to be filled by a mammal that originated on land - it's just historical chance/ contingency. Thus there's no reason for self-righteousness or thinking ours is a unique destiny, but maybe we could think of expanding our civilization as fulfilling the universe's purpose for us. This is a good way of explaining / accepting the existence/persistence of our civilizations, but not a sufficient justification for any damage we have done or may do to others (species, ecosystems, other extant civilizations). An explanation of origin doesn't necessarily suggest/create values or guidance for HOW to exist/persist. Nor does it justify displacing alternative uses for that niche space b/c it differs from our own use or b/c we could use a larger portion of it (e.g. driving Native Americans off the land b/c they're not developing it sufficiently).
Ch 6 Ancient Forests of the Far West
Discusses respect he has for work in logging industry, historicall amongst his family in the Pacific Northwest and among people he knew during his own time working in forestry. Snyder decries the loss of the greatest trees in the PNW, clear cutting, and the industry capture of USFS that led to its flop from an actual practice of sustainable yield to selling off ecologically devastating and unsustainable clear-cut permits at a financial loss to the public they are supposed to be serving. Most interestingly though, "It is a tragic dilemma that much of the best work men do together is no longer quite right." (p. 127). Humans derive much satisfaction from cooperative physical labor, which feels real ("primary, productive, and needed") in a way modern work doesn't. Who can be proud of farming with massive subsidies and pesticide application, or constructing ugly subdivisions that won't last 100 years b/c they're built with speed and cheapness foremost. I feel this in my own work coding and have always felt an attraction to forestry work and felling trees, but would I would feel guilty about doing such work. During his time in logging, Snyder kept a tiny shrine of tree bark, bird feathers, stone, and bits of egg shell, not as an offering to the forest but instead a reminder of what the forests have to offer us. This is evocative of the home shrines in Asia, a daily presence of nature in the home and a physical focus for/reminder to meditate. He then draws on daoist tale of a forests who passes by a tree he calls "useless" b/c it is gnarled and warped, only to be later haunted by the spirit of that tree saying that its "uselesness" was what had saved it from being turned into lumber like straighter, "stronger" trees the forester had felled. What is viewed as useful depends on the framework which is used to evaluate. "Usefulness" in a productivity/extractionist perspective is often really a diverse set of adaptations to varied environmental circumstances that allow a species/individuals to persist at long time scales. "Useful" in this context is often monoculture good for only one end use by humans, not resilient to change nor adaptive. Then draws parallels between how Americans treat "embarassingly old" citizens, indigenous cultures, and useless marginal forests that weren't sold for timber or were given to Native Americans or are called "overripe" when really they are old wild hugely bio-productive forests. Says that we're clear cutting away the wisdom of the useless to build shopping malls for people who look at indigenous lifestyles and say "I couldn't live like that" when those people barely know how to live at all (I expect Snyder has quite a lot to say about modern obsessions with smart phones and the exportation of our attention/lives to the internet). We're on a path to convert all of the world to a single mode of living/thinking/being by destroying all of the myriad older ways. We need to save forests b/c they are our "sun-dappled underworld", our "source" [of cognitive wilderness].
Ch. 7 On the Path Off the Trail
Japanese artisans became masters of their craft through very long, difficult, repetitive apprenticeships. At the start, they spent multiple years doing a single menial task just to demonstrate that they had the discipline to learn the craft. However this also served to ingrain the motions and movements of the task into their muscle memory seamlessly. Zen monks did the same with their minds/consciousness through long, rigorous meditative training (connection between craft and spiritual development similarly elaborated in a German context in Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund). Snyder connects Zen Buddhism to Daoism, saying that excessive discipline and self abnegation can actually get in the way of the Dao (the way which cannot be followed), and gets in the way of the dissolution of the ego (or really the diminishment of ego and the cultivation of a perspective that experientially situates the ego in the context of an interconnected nature [the 10,000 things i.e. the phenomenological world]). The way can be pursued in everyday life too, not separating spiritual enlightenment from the rest of life/reality via seclusion in an abbey, but rather merging them together. It's only by stepping off the path (cultivated order of human towns/planned lives) and into the wild (natural wilderness, traveling to foreign places/lands, speaking with new people) that we find surprises/surprise ourselves. Static discipline and rigor assumes that all answers can be found sitting in meditation, perhaps with the advice of a senior meditator. Instead, master your time, the 24 hours of the day and the work that comes with it, with rigor and self discipline such that you can find joy and play in carrying out the routine tasks of everyday. To truly master something is not to become so accomplished as to find the task simple, dull, and repetitive. Instead it is to acknowledge, find, and celebrate the unique nuances in every situation and each repetition (this strikes me as a good explanation of why modern assembly line jobs or similar office work is so soul crushing - it attempts to suppress all diversity and maximize uniformity, such that there really ISN'T any difference between repetitions). "Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our 'practice' which will put us on a 'path' - it IS our path. It can be its own fulfillment, too, for who would want to set enlightenment against non-enlightenment when each is its own full reality, its own complete delusion. Dogen was fond of saying that 'practice IS the path'. It's easier to understand this when we see that the 'perfect way' is not a path that leads somewhere easily defined, to some goal that is at the end of a progression. ... The truly experienced person will find the tedious work around the house or office as full of challenge and play as any metaphor of mountaineering might suggest."
And then once you've achieved that mastery of your 24 hours (not just work but physical health, social interactions, balanced sleep), you can step off the path into the wild - not to seek novelty or a difference from the mundane (b/c the mundane and the novel are both part of the Dao and the 10,000 things), but instead to seek surprise and unlooked for growth and different manifestations/perspectives of the Dao. All the world proceeds along natural principles, all of nature is the Dao ("life and matter at play" p. 165), a larger order than the tidy little enclaves of provisional orderliness that we call ways (paths, towns, life plans). To step off the path is to be reminded of this and to be reminded that the 10,000 things and the Dao encompasses our tidy towns within the larger, looser order of the wild world.
Ch. 9 Survival and Sacrament
In the final chapter, Snyder addresses the global ecological crisis directly, spelling out the reasons to be worried about the future: a human population growing unchecked, vanishing forests, and unprecedented rates of extinction. "The mountains and rivers are destroyed, but the State survives." Channeling various indigenous belief systems, Snyder posits that humans' purpose on the planet, to the extent that we have one, is to entertain the rest of nature with our songs and language. I do appreciate the valuation of language and culture which, though not unique to humans, are most articulately developed in our species and which do seem to me to have great value. I'm not sure I would go so far as to say they grant us purpose in the universe, but there's a similarity to Carl Sagan's quote about humanity being the universe's way of appreciating itself that I do enjoy.
Snyder goes on to discuss the difference between cultured and wild ("Culture is an orchard apple, Nature is a crab" p. 191). There are two ways of knowing, one derived from culture and concerning the practical/technical and the other derived from experiencing the wild (with all of its incumbent hardships and uncertainties) concerning understanding of the self and the world (related to ideas in Ch 7). Discusses the fractious efforts to create a culture of wilderness in contemporary society by different movements w/ different perspectives (ecofeminism, deep ecology, Earth First! [Snyder clearly identifies w/ deep ecology movement]) and the broadening of the conservation movement away from wildlife conservation to "environmentalism" that's considers widely enough to include animals, ecosystem health, and urban human health under the same umbrella. Distinguishes between "nature", which exists all across the world, can be studied via scientific inquiry, and "the wild, which is not to be made subject or object...; to be approached it must be admitted from within, as a quality intrinsic to who we are. Nature is ultimately in no way endangered; wilderness is. The wild is indestructible, but we might not see the wild." (p. 194). Snyder ends with some hopeful discussion of what he describes as the "first and last practice of the wild" older than all of the world religions: Grace (p. 196) - an awareness of and appreciation for our place and the interconnected interdependence of the food web. Saying grace and practicing that awareness and appreciation is a good way to integrate the practice of the wild in our everyday lives.
Notes:
Ch 2. The place, the region, and the commons
p.44 "Bioregionalism is the entrance of a place into the dialectic of history."
Raises the possibility of environmental/ecological history as perspective/sub-discipline as valid and accepted as Marxism or Feminism etc. Looks like considering interactions between the landscape/ecoregion and how humans adapted to it / how it informed their culture, and what the results of disruption of traditional stewardship relations to land has affected the landscape. In such a perspective, extractive Western cultures can ONLY be villains. But as Snyder notes, if people stay in a place long enough, they will develop a relationship with the land. Quotes a Native American at a conference saying that Whites can become Native Americans if they live in a place long enough for the spirits to rise up from the Earth and speak to them (p. 42).
A place-based identity and cultural adaption to local contexts historically led to sustainable land use. Only the rise of State-ism, monotheism, extractive market orient economies, did it become profitable/desirable to exploit the Commons. Ir's capitalism that swept aside long standing cultural self-regulation and CREATED the tragedy of the commons.
Also argues that people adapted to their bioregion didn't historically invade other bioregions b/c they couldn't live there, that raiding cultures only arose around wealthy sedentary extractive civilizations. Implication is that native peoples were historically quite peaceful (quite dubious, this).
Highlights the tension between centralizing/nationalist political structures and diffuse regionalist structures. Posits that decentralized power structures allow for more sustainable economies based on places rather than resource extraction for profit maximization.
Ch 4. Good, Wild, Sacred
Relationship between good (measured by biological/economic productivity), wild, and sacred lands. For indigenous peoples, all 3 are tiged together in a landscape. For modern Japana, sacred spaces have remained wild, but non-sacred spaces were obliterated by development. In America, no spaces are sacred and few remain wild; those few that do remain wild are mostly areas that aren't very "good". Snyder posits that wildness is what makes a land "good" (productive) - nature balances productivity and system stability optimally for an area when left alone. Occidental culture's need to extract economic productive (though not exclusive to West, also gives examples of China and Japan) ultimately destroys the good, wild and sacred in a land. This arises from the intrinsic vices of ego-greed, hatred, ignorance - though we can overcome ego by training ourselves to self-realization. This delusional ego manifests ultimately as the State, which sees itself as imposing order on a chaotic nature, when in actuality it is simplifying (dangerously so) an already complexly ordered system (just on a temporal and spatial scale that isn't apparent / appreciated by many humans). Then asserts that this "self-seeking ego" in humans doesn't reflect wild nature (i.e. is a product of a particular culture/philosophy and not a thing found in the wild). I think behavioral studies on our primate relatives and other high-intelligence animals strongly suggests otherwise.
P. 101 - We have some wild spaces left in the Americas. And hiking in them allows us to touch the sacred, to get outside of our own heads/leave ego behind in the wake of our physical exertions and our traveling through a landscape much larger than ourselves, producing a feeling of being part of a greater interconnected natural world. We shouldn't see this as an exalted state of consciousness to be pursued only in sacred spaces or to be occupied perpetually, without disturbance by temporal troubles. Rather, it is an awareness of interconnectivity - mountains, forests, agriculture, suburbs, cities, all within the mandala nature of the universe, "never totally ruined never completely unnatural. It can be restored, and humans could live in considerable numbers on much of it. And the best use of that awareness is to bring it back down to the cities, not seeking to escape the quag of politics by entering an enlightened state of mind, but using that enlightened state to see all lands as worth fighting for, interconnected and full of potential. We can live on those lands without destroying them if we make our alterations to the wild with the grain of nature, instead of against the grain (Snyder uses examples of indigenous peoples using fire to cultivate fruit trees and deer habitat for so long that it is difficult to differentiate "natural" from human modified when looking at the paleoecological record). Ultimately Snyder proposes that we can, as a society and as individuals, come to value wild and sacred land, we can become Native Americans in our appreocation/ways, if we live long enough on the land to cultivate a connection to it. And that spaces on the land will become sacred to us by that long connection and imbuement of value.
Ch 5. Blue Mountains Constantly Walking
p. 117 - Snyder, in chapter about zen, non-duality of nature, and the naturalness of our collective being (7-11's and slurpees and all), thinks of empty niche spaces calling species forth into being. Sediment run offs into seas brings forth krill brings forth whales. This is just a slightly different perspective on existing theory in ecology. Then he asks what brings forth humans. Humans are at home in all environments on Earth and are able to manipulate almost everything around us. Snyder suggests that we are a natural result of our environment, our modifications to the globe are in keeping with our evolution and our niche space. All our cement and cultural institutions are no more artificial than a beaver dam or whale song.
Extending this thinking, is there a niche space for civilization? There appears to be ample space, on Earth and beyond, for intelligent species capable of manipulating their environment to expand and alter things as they are. IF we accept evolution as inevitably filling empty niche space, given enough time, then can we consider humanity as the fulfillment of the empty niche space in our solar system and beyond? This bords on a naturalistic justification for human exceptionalism. But there's no reason that humans as formed needed to fill that niche space, just as there's no reason for the whale niche to be filled by a mammal that originated on land - it's just historical chance/ contingency. Thus there's no reason for self-righteousness or thinking ours is a unique destiny, but maybe we could think of expanding our civilization as fulfilling the universe's purpose for us. This is a good way of explaining / accepting the existence/persistence of our civilizations, but not a sufficient justification for any damage we have done or may do to others (species, ecosystems, other extant civilizations). An explanation of origin doesn't necessarily suggest/create values or guidance for HOW to exist/persist. Nor does it justify displacing alternative uses for that niche space b/c it differs from our own use or b/c we could use a larger portion of it (e.g. driving Native Americans off the land b/c they're not developing it sufficiently).
Ch 6 Ancient Forests of the Far West
Discusses respect he has for work in logging industry, historicall amongst his family in the Pacific Northwest and among people he knew during his own time working in forestry. Snyder decries the loss of the greatest trees in the PNW, clear cutting, and the industry capture of USFS that led to its flop from an actual practice of sustainable yield to selling off ecologically devastating and unsustainable clear-cut permits at a financial loss to the public they are supposed to be serving. Most interestingly though, "It is a tragic dilemma that much of the best work men do together is no longer quite right." (p. 127). Humans derive much satisfaction from cooperative physical labor, which feels real ("primary, productive, and needed") in a way modern work doesn't. Who can be proud of farming with massive subsidies and pesticide application, or constructing ugly subdivisions that won't last 100 years b/c they're built with speed and cheapness foremost. I feel this in my own work coding and have always felt an attraction to forestry work and felling trees, but would I would feel guilty about doing such work. During his time in logging, Snyder kept a tiny shrine of tree bark, bird feathers, stone, and bits of egg shell, not as an offering to the forest but instead a reminder of what the forests have to offer us. This is evocative of the home shrines in Asia, a daily presence of nature in the home and a physical focus for/reminder to meditate. He then draws on daoist tale of a forests who passes by a tree he calls "useless" b/c it is gnarled and warped, only to be later haunted by the spirit of that tree saying that its "uselesness" was what had saved it from being turned into lumber like straighter, "stronger" trees the forester had felled. What is viewed as useful depends on the framework which is used to evaluate. "Usefulness" in a productivity/extractionist perspective is often really a diverse set of adaptations to varied environmental circumstances that allow a species/individuals to persist at long time scales. "Useful" in this context is often monoculture good for only one end use by humans, not resilient to change nor adaptive. Then draws parallels between how Americans treat "embarassingly old" citizens, indigenous cultures, and useless marginal forests that weren't sold for timber or were given to Native Americans or are called "overripe" when really they are old wild hugely bio-productive forests. Says that we're clear cutting away the wisdom of the useless to build shopping malls for people who look at indigenous lifestyles and say "I couldn't live like that" when those people barely know how to live at all (I expect Snyder has quite a lot to say about modern obsessions with smart phones and the exportation of our attention/lives to the internet). We're on a path to convert all of the world to a single mode of living/thinking/being by destroying all of the myriad older ways. We need to save forests b/c they are our "sun-dappled underworld", our "source" [of cognitive wilderness].
Ch. 7 On the Path Off the Trail
Japanese artisans became masters of their craft through very long, difficult, repetitive apprenticeships. At the start, they spent multiple years doing a single menial task just to demonstrate that they had the discipline to learn the craft. However this also served to ingrain the motions and movements of the task into their muscle memory seamlessly. Zen monks did the same with their minds/consciousness through long, rigorous meditative training (connection between craft and spiritual development similarly elaborated in a German context in Hesse's Narcissus and Goldmund). Snyder connects Zen Buddhism to Daoism, saying that excessive discipline and self abnegation can actually get in the way of the Dao (the way which cannot be followed), and gets in the way of the dissolution of the ego (or really the diminishment of ego and the cultivation of a perspective that experientially situates the ego in the context of an interconnected nature [the 10,000 things i.e. the phenomenological world]). The way can be pursued in everyday life too, not separating spiritual enlightenment from the rest of life/reality via seclusion in an abbey, but rather merging them together. It's only by stepping off the path (cultivated order of human towns/planned lives) and into the wild (natural wilderness, traveling to foreign places/lands, speaking with new people) that we find surprises/surprise ourselves. Static discipline and rigor assumes that all answers can be found sitting in meditation, perhaps with the advice of a senior meditator. Instead, master your time, the 24 hours of the day and the work that comes with it, with rigor and self discipline such that you can find joy and play in carrying out the routine tasks of everyday. To truly master something is not to become so accomplished as to find the task simple, dull, and repetitive. Instead it is to acknowledge, find, and celebrate the unique nuances in every situation and each repetition (this strikes me as a good explanation of why modern assembly line jobs or similar office work is so soul crushing - it attempts to suppress all diversity and maximize uniformity, such that there really ISN'T any difference between repetitions). "Such a round of chores is not a set of difficulties we hope to escape from so that we may do our 'practice' which will put us on a 'path' - it IS our path. It can be its own fulfillment, too, for who would want to set enlightenment against non-enlightenment when each is its own full reality, its own complete delusion. Dogen was fond of saying that 'practice IS the path'. It's easier to understand this when we see that the 'perfect way' is not a path that leads somewhere easily defined, to some goal that is at the end of a progression. ... The truly experienced person will find the tedious work around the house or office as full of challenge and play as any metaphor of mountaineering might suggest."
And then once you've achieved that mastery of your 24 hours (not just work but physical health, social interactions, balanced sleep), you can step off the path into the wild - not to seek novelty or a difference from the mundane (b/c the mundane and the novel are both part of the Dao and the 10,000 things), but instead to seek surprise and unlooked for growth and different manifestations/perspectives of the Dao. All the world proceeds along natural principles, all of nature is the Dao ("life and matter at play" p. 165), a larger order than the tidy little enclaves of provisional orderliness that we call ways (paths, towns, life plans). To step off the path is to be reminded of this and to be reminded that the 10,000 things and the Dao encompasses our tidy towns within the larger, looser order of the wild world.
Ch. 9 Survival and Sacrament
In the final chapter, Snyder addresses the global ecological crisis directly, spelling out the reasons to be worried about the future: a human population growing unchecked, vanishing forests, and unprecedented rates of extinction. "The mountains and rivers are destroyed, but the State survives." Channeling various indigenous belief systems, Snyder posits that humans' purpose on the planet, to the extent that we have one, is to entertain the rest of nature with our songs and language. I do appreciate the valuation of language and culture which, though not unique to humans, are most articulately developed in our species and which do seem to me to have great value. I'm not sure I would go so far as to say they grant us purpose in the universe, but there's a similarity to Carl Sagan's quote about humanity being the universe's way of appreciating itself that I do enjoy.
Snyder goes on to discuss the difference between cultured and wild ("Culture is an orchard apple, Nature is a crab" p. 191). There are two ways of knowing, one derived from culture and concerning the practical/technical and the other derived from experiencing the wild (with all of its incumbent hardships and uncertainties) concerning understanding of the self and the world (related to ideas in Ch 7). Discusses the fractious efforts to create a culture of wilderness in contemporary society by different movements w/ different perspectives (ecofeminism, deep ecology, Earth First! [Snyder clearly identifies w/ deep ecology movement]) and the broadening of the conservation movement away from wildlife conservation to "environmentalism" that's considers widely enough to include animals, ecosystem health, and urban human health under the same umbrella. Distinguishes between "nature", which exists all across the world, can be studied via scientific inquiry, and "the wild, which is not to be made subject or object...; to be approached it must be admitted from within, as a quality intrinsic to who we are. Nature is ultimately in no way endangered; wilderness is. The wild is indestructible, but we might not see the wild." (p. 194). Snyder ends with some hopeful discussion of what he describes as the "first and last practice of the wild" older than all of the world religions: Grace (p. 196) - an awareness of and appreciation for our place and the interconnected interdependence of the food web. Saying grace and practicing that awareness and appreciation is a good way to integrate the practice of the wild in our everyday lives.
June 6, 2024
More than thirty years old these essays are still relevant. I won’t pretend to understand half of what he’s saying, but poet Gary Snyder’s thoughts on the wild, wilderness, nature, culture, language systems, and ultimately what it means to be human are worth contemplating.
February 19, 2022
To go back to the wild is to become sour, astringent, crabbed. Unfertilized, un-pruned, tough, resilient, and every spring //shockingly// beautiful in bloom.
Survival and Sacrament
179
Survival and Sacrament
179
October 12, 2018
Snyder's "Practice of the Wild" is an important book, similar to the kind of which you initiate a teen into adulthood, and in Snyder's thesis, he works to initiate the mind to freedom, wilderness, and what it means to be human. Snyder interweaves Buddhist texts, Asian poems and koans, American publications on nature, scholar texts on human psyche and psychology, bioregionality, anthropology, and tribal myths into a singular tour de force on how we humans, indeed, should practice, and so practice in the wild, only when we ourselves become a real person.
One gem in the book is on how Snyder captured the ancient and yet persisting thought and reason behind the intention to kill god and eat him, or her. The intention comes not from disrespect, but from the primal fear of the food-chain, that there is no death that is not somebody's food, no life that is not somebody's death. Unable to reason one's way out, he or she will conclude that the universe is fundamentally flawed, leading thus to a disgust with self, with humanity and with nature. To kill god and eat him is to terminate the notion of such irreconcilability. We are "so removed from the critical problem of life and death in our daily taking of food, that such distance enables us to be superficially comfortable yet distinctly more ignorant".
To practice in the wild is to realize that we too are offerings. To be human in modern days is to able to transcend beyond the increasingly narrower interpretation of life and death and our conditions.
Snyder reflected on this his whole life, and reminded us that because we have no more experiences of the wild, we thus possess no more ticket back to the spirit realm of the harmony of violence and impermanence in wilderness -- effectively forgetting that we are part of the system too, not out of it.
One gem in the book is on how Snyder captured the ancient and yet persisting thought and reason behind the intention to kill god and eat him, or her. The intention comes not from disrespect, but from the primal fear of the food-chain, that there is no death that is not somebody's food, no life that is not somebody's death. Unable to reason one's way out, he or she will conclude that the universe is fundamentally flawed, leading thus to a disgust with self, with humanity and with nature. To kill god and eat him is to terminate the notion of such irreconcilability. We are "so removed from the critical problem of life and death in our daily taking of food, that such distance enables us to be superficially comfortable yet distinctly more ignorant".
To practice in the wild is to realize that we too are offerings. To be human in modern days is to able to transcend beyond the increasingly narrower interpretation of life and death and our conditions.
Snyder reflected on this his whole life, and reminded us that because we have no more experiences of the wild, we thus possess no more ticket back to the spirit realm of the harmony of violence and impermanence in wilderness -- effectively forgetting that we are part of the system too, not out of it.
November 4, 2017
The same week I was reading this book I was trekking the St. Mary's riverbank daily and watching the progress of a huge tunnel sewer project that's supposed to stop our city from pouring untreated sewage into the river. Two of the three huge bald cypress trees that were brilliantly planted by the parks dept. in a low lying spring flood area were gone, bulldozed into oblivion. I could still smell them even though all that was left was a raw gaping maw where they'd been. My immediate response was OMG! they cut down my trees! I loved those trees, they made entering the park seem like going through the back of the wardrobe into Narnia. I walked away, almost crying and muttering, clean river, clean river. I wonder what will be planted in the area above the tunnel? I can't imagine they'll want trees with their bothersome roots anywhere in the vicinity. I hope all the carnage pays off with radically improved water quality.
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