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<li class="title">
<h2> <img
src="https://muse.jhu.edu/images/access/no_access.png"
alt="restricted access" class="left_access"> <i>The
Practice of the Wild</i> by Gary Snyder (review) </h2>
</li>
<li class="authors"> <a
href="https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=search&query=author:Jack
Turner:and&min=1&max=10&t=query_term">Jack Turner</a>
</li>
<li class="journal"><a href="https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/418">Western
American Literature</a></li>
<li class="publisher"><a
href="https://muse.jhu.edu/search?action=browse&limit=publisher_id:17">University
of Nebraska Press</a></li>
<li class="designation"> <span> <a
href="https://muse.jhu.edu/issue/29104">Volume 26, Number 2,
Summer 1991</a> </span> </li>
<li class="pg"><span>pp. 139-142</span></li>
<li class="doi"><a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/wal.1991.0042">10.1353/wal.1991.0042</a></li>
</ul>
<div class="abstract"> <span class="abstractheader"><span
class="lieu">In lieu of</span> an abstract, here is a brief
excerpt of the content:</span>
<p>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... </p>
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