SOURCE: "Of Wildness and Wilderness in Plain Language: The Practice of the Wild," in Understanding Gary Snyder, University of South Carolina Press, 1992, pp. 154-66.

Since the publication of Axe Handles Snyder has continued to address the central problem of civilization but in a more diversified way. He has written poetry, given poetry readings, written prose, and begun teaching as a permanent member of a university faculty. His latest published volume is a work qualitatively superior and more significant than any other prose volume he has published. The Practice of the Wild is a sophisticated yet clear, complex yet uncomplicated, unified book about knowing how to be in this world. In one of the early reviews of this book, Ray Olson claims that Snyder's essays "constitute the finest wisdom (and also ecological) literature of our time" [Booklist, September 15, 1990].

Earth House Hold has been his only prose volume treated critically in its own right and remains the prose most often quoted, with perhaps the exception of the essay "Four Changes" at the end of Turtle Island. Yet Earth House Hold is not a unified work but a selection of discrete pieces that work together because of the life and mind behind them; a full appreciation of this collection is to some extent dependent on the reader's knowledge of Snyder's poetry. The Practice of the Wild functions on a different level of organization, being thematically unified by a discussion of the interrelationships of the meanings of freedom and responsibility, wilderness and wildness, humanity and nature, mind and body, conscious and unconscious, and knowledge and action.

It has been inaccurately defined as "nature writing," compared time and again with Thoreau's Walden, and discussed in terms of primitivism and nostalgia. But the Anglo-American tradition of nature writing has tended to be based on a sense of the author's alienation and distance from the natural world and a male desire to be reunited with something felt to be missing or lost. Thoreau had to leave Concord and go to the woods to try his two-year experiment of simple living by Walden Pond and in so doing embodied the romantic notions of human alienation from nature and nostalgic yearning to return to some Edenic ideal.

Snyder is concerned instead with people conducting practice in place. As he remarked in an interview with David Robertson conducted while Snyder was completing The Practice of the Wild, "I hope that the book I am now writing will be stimulating to a broad range of people and provide them with historical, ecological, and personal visions all at the same time. I would like to see the book be political in the sense of helping people shape the way they want to live and act in the world" ["Practicing the Wild," Critical Essays on Gary Snyder, 1990].

The Practice of the Wild leaps beyond the traditional limitations of the genre of nature writing. This is ecological writing in its fullest sense and treats in detail ideas that Snyder could only present in outline in his poems. And while the volume is optimistic, it is not idealistic in the sense of being Utopian or naive. Robertson's comment to Snyder is pertinent here: "One of the things I like so much about your prose writing is your ability to lay out a vision of life as it ought to be, at the same time recognizing very hardheadedly that actual life is rooted in ambiguity and frustration over uncompleted goals." Robertson may in part be responding to Snyder's recognition reiterated since the early 1970s, first to Ekbert Faas and then to numerous other interviewers including Robertson, that "we are entering into a really critical age. Things are bad and they are going to get worse." But, as Snyder maintains throughout The Practice of the Wild, he also knows that they can get better.

The first section of The Practice of the Wild, "The Etiquette of Freedom," begins with the notion of a "compact" as one of the forms of proper relationships among all entities who inhabit this earth. Snyder realistically recognizes that these arrangements include predatory as well as symbiotic, mutually beneficial ones. In what humans consider the wild reaches of the world, nonhuman creatures work out their lives in relationships that are conditioned first and foremost by the various food chains of their bioregions. To date, as Snyder points out, contemporary humans are the worst example of creatures disrupting their own and other creatures' food chains. To counter this process Snyder emphasizes the need to educate people so that they will work to cease "causing unnecessary harm" to other beings as well as to themselves.

From the notion of "compact," Snyder moves to an investigation of the popular American dream of "wild and free" and describes that dream in terms of a freedom that is achieved only when people recognize the real conditions of existence in which they participate. A crucial component of those conditions is "impermanence," which Americans in particular seem to fear, given their attitudes toward aging and dying. To realize freedom, Snyder argues, people are going to have to begin to build a civilization that can come to terms with and sustain "wildness." Suspecting that his readers do not have a very good sense of such terms as "Nature, Wild, and Wilderness," Snyder elaborates the derivations and definitional developments of these three words.

What people have for centuries termed the "wild" is that which has an ecosystem sufficiently flexible that humans who have not previously participated in it may enter it and survive. In contrast, contemporary cities are so inflexible and closed that wild vegetation and animals haven't a chance and generally rarely venture in. It is important to remember, however, that human beings at various historical moments developed within and as functioning parts of wild ecosystems.

Snyder then relates language to body, swerving around the popular Western tendency to separate mind and body or to perceive them as in contradiction with one another. He points out that "language is a mind-body system that coevolved with our needs and nerves," i.e., it is psychic and physical, since the psyche is part of the body. And poetry enters the picture as one of the ways in which language can serve the re-education of human beings to their own wild origins.

Having developed the idea of wild ecosystems and the wildness that must be reasserted along with recovering wilderness, Snyder turns his attention to conceptions of place. He emphasizes here the ways in which peoples relate to the land by means of an understanding of locale, region, and community. He begins with a position shared by Wendell Berry and numerous Native Americans: non-Native Americans are a set of rootless, un-placed and displaced peoples, and this condition is fundamentally unhealthy; it produces dis-ease. Snyder starts with a concept of home as hearth and moves to an understanding of region based on local specifics and on one's apprehension of that region as a living, interactive place, not a national or governmental abstraction composed of dotted lines on a distorted map.

The "commons" is a European practice of setting aside land for communal activities, and Snyder applies this idea to the sharing of "natural areas." Various forms of commons can be found around the world, including in Japanese farming villages. In the United States, commons were a rare feature of the East but did turn up in the West, due to climate and topography, and have been developed perhaps most fully in relationship to equitable access to water. Snyder believes that it is absolutely necessary to return to a system of commons and that this system needs to be used worldwide and should be extended to include such aspects of the biosphere as the air and the oceans. On the land, Snyder thinks that the greatest hope for recovering the commons lies in instituting localized bioregional governments and community practices. Fundamentally, "bioregionalism is the entry of place into the dialectic of history. Also we might say that there are 'classes' which have so far been overlooked—the animals, rivers, rocks, and grasses—now entering history." Snyder renders these claims concrete by relating the way he and others who inhabit San Juan Ridge are learning their place and their role in that place.

In this section of The Practice of the Wild Snyder turns his attention to manifestations of bioregional practice in terms of the cultural specifics of peoples and what the healthier cultures have in common. He draws on his experiences in Asia as well as North America to develop his points. In Alaska, Snyder finds significant parallels between the means by which the Inupiaq are attempting to raise their children and the practices of the San Juan Ridge school back home. One of the issues that Snyder discusses here is the relationship between oral transmissions and written transmissions of cultures. In a literate society, he notes, "books are our grandparents," because in oral cultures it is the elders who transmit the cultural lore and values by means of stories.

Such considerations lead Snyder into meditations on nature writing, nature as a book, and an ecology of language. Snyder claims that grammars, like metaphors, are ways of interpreting reality, and that "tawny grammars" come from nature itself in its myriad manifestations. Snyder's point is not so much to argue for the organic and evolutionary character of language as to deflate the homocentric egotism of those who like to imagine "language as a uniquely human gift."

Tom Clark, writing about The Practice of the Wild as a whole, claims that "the essays are deployed poetically, less like steps in an argument than as spokes radiating around a single, urgent, central theme: the need for reestablishing those traditional practices of wilderness that once linked humanity in a single, harmonic chord with the animals, plants, lands and water" ["Essays that Echo Thoreau," San Francisco Chronicle, September 16, 1990]. "Good, Wild, Sacred" can be seen as being structured in the same way. Snyder begins with this triad of key concepts, centered on "wild," and works through a series of reflections on historical and present-day experience. He speaks of the contradiction within an "agrarian theology" that holds that humans render themselves more holy by "weeding out" the wild from their own nature, at the same time that their having done the same to cattle and pigs has altered those animals from "intelligent and alert in the wild into sluggish meat-making machines." In the process of attempting to elevate themselves, humans have degraded nature and reduced natural intelligence. Snyder necessarily rejects any theology based on a separation of the physical and the spiritual and speaks approvingly here of Native American beliefs that connect land and spirit.

From the spiritual practices of North America's inhabitory peoples, Snyder then turns to what he has learned about spirit and place from the aboriginal people of Australia. In particular, he focuses on the ways in which their stories about themselves as people are intimately tied to the land in which they live. In that land exist certain sacred places, some of which he was privileged to visit. He was told that some of those places were defined as "teaching spots" and some as "dreaming spots." This experience prompts him to mediate on "dreamtime," which he believes "is the mode of the eternal moment of creating, of being, as contrasted with the mode of cause and effect in time." Differentiating between the linear time frame that dominates Western thought and the dream time of aboriginal peoples leads Snyder to think of Buddhism, particularly the Avatamsaka Sutra, and the practices of Japan's aboriginal people, the Ainu. Snyder reflects sadly on the fact that in presentday Japan so little of the Ainu and Shinto practices in relation to the sacredness of land remain.

Toward the end of the essay, Snyder circles back to the North American present and eventually to the land in which he lives, where the essay started. He makes an extremely important point that runs counter to much of European and American thinking that has been current for centuries: "It is not nature-as-chaos which threatens us, but the State's presumption that it has created order"; and, further, "Nature is orderly. That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order."

The essay "Blue Mountains Constantly Walking" is heavily dependent for its meaning on Snyder's deep and abiding philosophical, spiritual, and aesthetic debts to Japan and Buddhism. Snyder begins the essay by talking about Dogen, the thirteenth-century Buddhist monk, and his "Mountains and Waters Sutra," delivered in 1240. He then links Dogen's attention to mountains to the practices of Buddhist pilgrimages and attitudes about sacred mountains, such as Mt. Hiei.

Snyder not only provides historical information about such pilgrimages but also includes personal experience. It is useful to remember that while Snyder was in Japan he took vows with the Yamabushi monks, as he describes some of that initiation here. The Yamabushi are a sect of mountain ascetic monks, and Snyder reminds his reader that "in East Asia 'mountains' are often synonymous with wilderness," particularly since they are the terrain impervious to wilderness-destroying agriculture. But mountains cannot be understood properly in a vacuum, since they enter into relationship with the rest of nature. Dogen's sutra is, after all, about "mountains and waters," because, as Snyder observes: "mountains and rivers indeed form each other: waters are precipitated by heights, carve or deposit landforms in their flowing descent, and weight the offshore continental shelves with sediment to ultimately tilt more uplifts." Poems in Regarding Wave are informed by this attitude as can be noted when Snyder remarks here that a mountain range is sometimes referred to "as a network of veins on the back of a hand," an image which also appears in Regarding Wave. What is most important, however, is not the ability to make associations among the different aspects of nature—mountains like veins, bodies like streams; it is being able to realize that there is no nature as an entity but only naturing, a process of interaction and mutual transformation. Solidity consists of energy transformations in an apparent, but only apparent, period of stasis.

According to Clark, "Ancient Forests of the Far West" comprises "the crowning component of this stirring, thoughtful field report on the tenuous state of the wild in our time." Interestingly enough, Snyder uses as epigraph for this essay the same lines from Exodus that he quotes in "Logging 2" of Myths & Texts. Thus he explicitly loops back to poetry written nearly forty years earlier. In the opening section of the essay he loops back even farther to youthful experiences growing up and working in those Far West forests. This essay provides one of the clearest pictures Snyder has presented of the events behind the poetry of the "Logging" section of Myths & Texts as well as early poems, such as "The Late Snow & Lumber Strike of the Summer of Fifty-four" in Riprap.

Snyder uses these personal memories as a way of detailing an appropriate type of logging, selective and sensitive to the bioregion and to the individual trees that are dying. From this lesson of the right way to do things, Snyder switches to the history of U.S. forest management, as well as to an analysis of the ecological specifics of the ancient western forests. Snyder notes that "the forests of the maritime Pacific Northwest are the last remaining forests of any size left in the temperate zone" worldwide. And he details the history of the loss of corresponding forests in the Mediterranean and East Asia before returning to the threats that the surviving forests face from the U.S. government and its various agencies. Snyder speaks lovingly and respectfully of the forests of his own region and the need and ways to protect them. This essay ends with a determined anger in which the tasks of Snyder and reader alike are delineated: "We must make the hard-boiled point that the world's trees are virtually worth more standing than they would be as lumber, because of such diverse results of deforestation as life-destroying flooding in Bangladesh and Thailand, the extinction of millions of species of animals and plants, and global warming…. We are all endangered yokels."

Paths and trails have served writers as metaphors for an entire series of human activities, both spiritual and physical, for centuries. In this essay Snyder participates in this tradition by developing his own literal and metaphoric senses of these terms. He also introduces the concept of "networks" to distinguish between two aspects of an individual's life. As Snyder sees it, community is grounded in place, while work is often grounded in associations that take one beyond place into a network of people engaged in the same or related tasks. As a result "networks cut across communities with their own kind of territoriality." The problem for Snyder is that in the present day people often relate only to their network and fail to establish themselves in their community as well.

Snyder turns to Asia to develop a notion related to path and trail—that of "way," which includes the idea of path but extends it to an entire perception of being, to the realms of philosophies, religions, and ideologies. One of the ways that people travel is that of art, which Snyder discusses in terms of the relationship between tradition and creativity. This in turn brings him back to a relationship addressed at the beginning of The Practice of the Wild, which is that of freedom and responsibility. Manifestations of this relationship can be thought of in terms of discipline and spontaneity, as well as models and innovation. Snyder here resorts again to Buddhism and the various means by which its masters have tried to teach the relationship of the tradition, discipline, and path of Buddhist practice and individual experience—the last marked by the distinction between prescribed forms of meditation and the individual experiencing of enlightenment. Snyder concludes that "there are paths that can be followed, and there is a path that cannot—it is not a path, it is the wilderness. There is a 'going' but no goer, no destination, only the whole field." And, then, he immediately departs the realm of metaphor to talk about his own experience, which led him to study Zen in Japan, as well as to return to the United States as the place to practice what he had learned. Snyder ends with a warning about the relationships of freedom and responsibility, discipline and spontaneity, tradition and innovation: "But we need paths and trails and will always be maintaining them. You must first be on the path, before you can turn and walk into the wild."

In "The Woman Who Married a Bear" Snyder brings together tradition and innovation, myth and experience, with a popular Native American tale of intersexuality between humans and other animals. He begins with the mythical story. Then, rather than explaining the tale, he begins to relate the history of bears in North America. This too becomes a story as Snyder retells with more realistic details rather than mythic ones the bear-human marriage myth. Like any good myth, Snyder's story educates readers about the world, specifically about the lives of bears and their relationship to their environment. Then, with his version of the story ended, Snyder relates the source of the tale and a little information about the Native American woman who told it, followed by a suggestion of the ubiquity of bear-human stories through references to Greek mythology.

The reader may keep waiting for Snyder to analyze the story, but he never does. Instead, he ends with another story, about a Native American bear dance he witnessed in 1977. What is revealed here, rather than claimed or explained, is the power that myth can carry in the present day and the ways by which it can help bridge the gap between animal and human that, as the story of the woman who married a bear suggests, once did not exist.

"Survival and Sacrament" serves as Snyder's conclusion to The Practice of the Wild. It begins on an ominous note by warning of the terrifying difference between death and the "end to birth," that is, between an individual's death and the end of the coming into being of an entire species. Since their arrival in North America white human beings have been not only witnesses but also the cause of the "end to birth" of countless species at an ever-increasing rate with no conception of the suffering involved or the long range effects on the ecosystems of this continent and the entire planetary biosphere. Snyder points out that excessive human reproduction, particularly in the past three hundred years, is a crucial dimension of this problem.

Snyder opens his conclusion with a warning, but he ends it with a promise of covenant. That promise begins with the argument that a true human quest "requires embracing the other as oneself and that a movement in the world is growing that recognizes just such a necessity. This necessity does not take the form of developing a more advanced civilization, as one might expect, but of developing a wilder culture, a "culture of the wilderness." This phrase encapsulates a dual recognition. One, nature is always a social construct in terms of the limits of human understanding and interaction with the rest of the world; two, society is always a natural construct arising in relation to and on the basis of natural conditions of existence. Snyder closes his book with a discussion of "Grace," both as prayer and behavior, as a socially constructed natural act which recognizes that "eating is a sacrament." To approach eating with respect is to recognize human integration with the rest of the world in which people live and die, and in which people cause other beings to live and die as well, either necessarily or capriciously. By this emphasis on grace Snyder has returned to the beginning of The Practice of the Wild, teaching his readers about a particular form of the "etiquette of freedom," one which recognizes and gratefully affirms human responsibility.