[D66] The Practice of the Wild

[R.O.]

encrypted-tbn1.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcR...

  *


        restricted access /The Practice of the Wild/ by Gary Snyder
        (review)

  * Jack Turner
    <https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=search&query=author:Jack
    Turner:and&min=1&max=10&t=query_term>
  * Western American Literature <https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418>
  * University of Nebraska Press
    <https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=browse&limit=publisher_id:17>
  * Volume 26, Number 2, Summer 1991 <https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/29104>
  * pp. 139-142
  * 10.1353/wal.1991.0042 <https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.1991.0042>

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Essay Reviews The Practice of the Wild. By Gary Snyder. (San Francisco: 
North Point Press, 1990. 190pages, $22.95.) In 1832, after several 
excursions in the American west, the artist George Catlin called for the 
“preservation and protection” of wilderness and gave us the idea of “A 
nation’s Park, containing man and beast. . . .” Now we enjoy numerous 
public lands devoted to the preservation of wilderness, plants, and 
animals. The Indians are gone, however, and these preserves are islands 
watched over by a few caretakers. Their primary use is for summer 
vacations. We have lost the unity of place, man, and beast that Catlin 
envisioned, and our success at preservation has created a dichotomy 
between civilization and wilderness. Dichotomies are dead ends and we 
need to find a way out of this one. As Gary Snyder argues in his new 
book of essays, “We need a civilization that can live fully and 
creatively together with wildness. We must start growing it right here, 
in the New World.” The Practice of the Wild is an exemplary beginning. 
There is no contradiction between human habitation and wilderness. We 
forget that when North America was wild, when the bison were the Earth’s 
largest herd of mammals, when great flocks of pigeons blackened the 
skies and salmon choked the streams, when grizzlies fed on the carcasses 
of whales along the beaches of California—at this time “North America 
was all populated.” Indeed, for most of human history the wild was not a 
place to visit, but home. “There has been no wilderness without some 
kind of human presence for several hundred thousand years.” Our current 
separation from wilderness is as pathological as it is pervasive and 
begs for re-habitation and a culture grounded in “home place.” But this 
will be difficult and will require work, what Snyder calls the real 
work. A place is always a kind of place, part of a region distinguished 
from other regionsby its distinctive web offlora and fauna, landforms, 
elevation and other natural criteria—what we are learning to call a 
bioregion. To inhabit a bio­ region is to live in balance within a 
larger web of relations. Where others see a world of objects, Snyder 
sees a world of relations, a maze of nets, webs, fields, and 
communities, all interdependent, interrelating, and mirroring each 
other. He is a master at presenting these relations in language that 
recalls the Ameri­ can Indian’s use of biological metaphor. There are 
two sources for this vision:systems theory, best known from the sciences 
of ecology and information flow, and Hua-Yen Buddhism with its 140 
Western American Literature metaphor of the Net of Indra, a net of all 
beings, dependent on and mirroring each other throughout space and time. 
Snyder’s “ecological thinking” focuses on these systems of 
interdependence. They exist at all levels and between all levels, from 
the . . nocturnal, anaerobic, cannibalistic, microscopic, digestive, 
fermentative: cooking away in the warm dark,” to “ecologies of mind,” 
and the ultimate structure of reality. Basic principles and metaphors 
emerge from this vision, all of which are connected to the importance of 
place. Perhaps the most im portant is food, in fact and metaphor. “ 
‘Your ass is somebody else’s meal’— a blunt way of saying 
interdependence, interconnection, ‘ecology,’on the level where it 
counts. . . Snyder has a keen sense for fecundity. Studying ancient 
forests he finds that “The total animal population of the soil and 
litter together probably approaches 10,000 animals per square foot.” In 
the essay “Survival and Sacra­ ment” he notes that, “Whale carcasses 
that sink several miles deep in the ocean feed organisms in the dark for 
fifteen years.” Life feeds life, as Joseph Campbell remarked. There is 
no escape into purity. Another important connection is language, both 
the naming relation that connects mind to object and the etymologies 
that connect our speech with that of our ancestors. In “The Woman Who 
Married A Bear” Snyder plays with origins of the word “bear” and the 
results demonstrate his love of connection. The Greek word for bear is 
arktos. From it comes our “arctic,” the place of bears; Arkadia, a 
plateau in central Greece becomes “arcadia,” our ideal...


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