Online Interviews With Gary Snyder Essay, Research Paper
Juliet Harding
Q: You pointed out that the word ecology, with its root
meaning "household science," is not far from the word economics, with its
meaning of "household management." Is there a close relationship between ecology
and economics?
A: The word ecology describes the workings of energy
exchange between living and non-living systems. The entire biosphere is largely a solar
energy driven economy in which the photosynthesis of plants makes available almost all of
the food and fuel. Plants are, so to speak, the working class, and as energy is passed up
the food chain, we have a small number of predators at the top fed by a huge number of
mice down below. The image of food-chains is not a model you would want to use as a guide
for human society, but a way of understanding how things in the biosphere work.
Human economies are based on utilizing whatever nature
makes available, and it would be very prudent and healthy for all complex societies to be
informed about ecological and economic systems at the same time. A lot of what happens in
the economic realm runs counter to the health of ecological systems.
Q: Do you see the "green vision" as being in
opposition to capitalism?
A: It’s in opposition to the gross sort of global
capitalism, and to the monocultural scale of 150,000 hens in your shed or thousands and
thousands of acres of nothing but walnut trees. The green vision certainly informs the
more refined and ecologically modeled modern enterprises.
Q: In an address you gave at Reed College in 1991, you
suggested that with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, students
would need to ‘forge a new philosophy and practice of power.’ Who are the
conflicting power brokers today?
A: The main contesting players are… I suppose first, the
proponents of the global economy model of global free markets with great trust in
technological progress and assumptions that fossil fuel and other critical resources will
continue to be available to run some sort of industrial model society even as population
continues to grow. This also assumes that there will be food enough to feed everyone even
as populations are still growing. This is what one could call technological utopianism. It
is narrowly self-serving in that a very small number of people will grow enormously rich
while the rest of the world becomes impoverished.
Another scenario is the idea of a sustainable economy in a
carefully husbanded ecological world. With our scientific and technological knowledge, and
a will to hold ourselves in check, this approach would encourage us to practice some
self-restraint in matters of growth, in matters of materialistic consumption, and a
willingness to take a lower cut of profit off everything. We would have sustainable
forestry, might be able to put the brakes on population growth, show some genuine respect
for indigenous cultures, come to enjoy riding a bicycle to work, and just slow it all
down. This could still be a very comfortable, well-educated, highly cultured society.
There is nothing simple-minded about such a model. It requires more from us, and it
happens to serve a larger number of people, even though it doesn’t create huge
profits at the top.
Q: You wrote, "It is my own sort of crankiness to
believe there is hope. I would like to think the technological society, as diverse, smart,
and complicated as it is, can also get ‘nature literate’ and be fully at home
with the wild, both within and without." Do you envision a world in which technology
and other human inventions could live in harmony with nature and the wild?
A: It is definitely one possible future, but I
wouldn’t bet money on it. The biological and earth sciences show us that we are all
very much interconnected, and that we share bodies and minds throughout the organic world,
right down to our genetic makeup. We are kin to the rest of nature. But, to talk about
technology, one would need clear criteria to distinguish between useful and sustainable
technologies, and those which cost the world too much.
‘Nature literate’ here means knowing the wild
(and tame) plant, the annual rainfall, knowing what the maximum lows and the highs are
through the year, knowing what your annual solar input is at your latitude, and being
aware of where your water comes from and where your garbage goes, so to speak. These are
things that everybody should know. It’s partly a matter of just paying attention.
What is the biotic diversity here? These are the neighbors! We should know the neighbors.
Nature literacy starts with information.
Q: You urge folks to dig in, settle in, become inhabitants
rather than visitors or residents of any given place . . .
A: I’m not fanatic about that. This is a society
where many people never think about a place to settle down. Lots of people don’t even
know how to tell you where they’re from. If you ask, they say, ‘Do you mean
where I was born, or where I went to college, or where my parents live now?’ There is
a lot of vagueness about where we are from.
There are some real benefits that come to the human
community when people become more place settled and responsible for a place. But we
can’t force that on others. It’s an option you can opt for when the time comes,
especially if you feel chosen by a place, and settle into it. Being a member of a place is
to be in a relationship. It takes time to deepen, and you have to nourish it. There are
some simple advantages that come from staying in one place. You can have long-term
friends, you can learn that it’s okay to be on the school board, you can find out
about getting angry at somebody and not speaking to them for 15 years and then, to
everyone’s surprise that you forgive each other and become friends again!
I’ll tell you one simple case where it would make a
big difference: If fewer people were mobile and more people were settled in the United
States, you would have much much more voter participation. People are interested in voting
on local issues. Even if they think that the national election is hopelessly rigged,
they’ll still go to the polls because they care about local issues, about who gets
elected county supervisor. While they’re there, they’ll also vote for their
choice of president.
Q: You have been writing about bioregions for some time.
Here on the South Shore of Lake Superior, we are aware of our bioregion, yet some of the
dangers to the Big Lake are not regional dangers, but larger issues like airborne
particulates. Why do you encourage regional divisions, and is there a place for smaller,
or larger, fields of reference?
A: I don’t suggest that these bioregional divisions
should be seen as some new sort of administrative jurisdictions, although that might come
about some day as political boundaries are readjusted to fit ecological zones. This is an
ecological and educational exercise. The Environmental Protection Agency, and the public
lands agencies, the water quality agencies, are also thinking in terms of bioregions, not
just states and counties. This is because the natural world moves by its own rules, not by
human decrees. Water quality is monitored locally, but is might be affected by acid rain
that has national or international source points. Bio-regional problems are always linked
to the larger biological world. But paying attention to the immediate region gives us a
quicker way to monitor and understand what’s happening and thus to be able to apprise
our citizens more swiftly.
Q: You wrote "If I were recommending anybody to study
anything in the university over anything else, I would either recommend biology or
anthropology." Do you still feel that is true?
A: I said that some years ago, I’m not sure I would
say that today. I was reading an account in the Detroit
Free Press the other day, and it said that there were
only 95 professional anthropologists in the entire state of Michigan. But
non-professionally, as training in cultural and social thinking, it is very valuable.
Field, conservation, and evolutionary biology (and ecological science) are of utmost
importance.
I think small liberal arts colleges are really valuable.
I’m on the faculty of a big research university myself, and it’s good for
graduate students, but not so good for undergraduates. I travel around to colleges in all
size ranges and I think the students at liberal arts colleges are doing better and
thinking more boldly.
I think environmental sciences or environmental studies is
an excellent introductory education, partly because it raises the challenge of
environmental ethics and environmental philosophy, a challenge that is not raised by many
other disciplines. But for most students there is still a need to get some practical
professional or vocational training after you get your basic bachelor’s.
Q: How important do you think writing is?
A: That’s a subtle question. It’s important to
learn to be comfortable with your own language &endash; which is, oddly, not as easy
as it sounds. It means learning to listen to yourself speaking and to pay attention and
hear how other people hear you.
Theoretically we always speak "correctly." The
problem then is learning how to master any particular local or class code for your home
tongue. So a college student has to learn the code for writing papers. That’s an
exercise in the language.
One’s capacity to use one’s language skillfully
and gracefully is very important. This is not the same as being a good writer; this is
just the barebones necessity. If one is a good debater, talker, storyteller, counselor,
and raconteur, that’s great. There is yet another step for a really good writer.
Being a good writer calls for an acquaintance with the literature, historical usages,
styles and voices from the past and other places, and aesthetically being willing to
experiment. You have to look at things that other people aren’t looking at.
That’s what we get from our writers. It’s exciting, but very few people make a
success of it.
Q: But you’re one who has.
A: It’s a lot of perseverance, but also luck. And I
haven’t quit my day job.
from Northern Light (Winter-Spring 2000). Online
Source
Freewheeling the Details:
A Conversation with Gary Snyder & Peter Coyote
This article appeared in the November/December 1999 issue of Poetry Flash.
Gary Snyder, poet, environmental activist, Zen Buddhist, and UC Davis professor, recently
celebrated the publication of The Gary Snyder Reader, (617 pages, Counterpoint,
$35.00 cloth), the major selected volume of his essays, travel journals, letters, poems,
and translations. The collection gathers poems from his first book, Riprap, to the
Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island (1975), through No Nature (finalist for
the National Book Award, 1992) and the epic poem cycle Mountains and Rivers Without End
(1996). That year, Gary Snyder, author of sixteen books, and longtime resident of the
South Yuba River watershed in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in Northern California,
was honored with the Bollingen Poetry Prize and the Robert Kirsch Lifetime Achievement
Award/Los Angeles Times. (The Bay Area Book Reviewers Awards had presented him with its
equivalent years ago.) This year, his old friend Peter Coyote, actor, conservationist,
activist, and Zen practitioner, also celebrated the paperback publication of his personal
memoir of the sixties, Sleeping Where I Fall (367 pages, Counterpoint, $14.00
paper). Peter Coyote has performed in more than fifty films, including E.T., Jagged
Edge, Bitter Moon, Outrageous Fortune, and Patch Adams, and has narrated scores
of documentaries. His political street theater work with the San Francisco Mime Troupe was
honored with a special OBIE; he won a Pushcart Prize in non-fiction (for a piece
originally published in ZYZZYVA) in 1994. Peter Coyote’s counterculture journey
with the Mime Troupe, the Diggers, and the Free Family taught him the value of strategy
and political/communal effort, from the radical commune he became chairman of the
California Arts Council, from street theater he became a film star. The two, author/poet
and author/actor, met in an unusual onstage conversation presented by A Clean Well-Lighted
Place for Books, the San Francisco independent bookstore, at Fort Mason’s Cowell Theater,
June 2, 1999. The following is a transcript of what took place.
PETER COYOTE: So by way of introducing Gary Snyder–not to plug my own
book–I thought I would read the story, it’s very short, about how I first met Gary, which
was thirty some odd years ago, when his friend and my roommate Lew Welch–another one of
the Beat poets who had filled my head with Snyder lore for at least the better part of a
year–actually arranged an introduction. And, just to give you the setting, this was a
dirt poor hippie commune, thirty to thirty-five souls, all eating road kill, and
long-haired and bedraggled and occasionally sober. And into this setting, Gary came.
"It’s embarrassing to remember my first impression as I watched Gary’s pristine
Volkswagen camper pick its careful way over the rutted road to our ranch house. "How
could Gary Snyder be driving a new camper?" I thought. "So
bourgeois!" It came to a stop under the willow tree at the edge of the yard, Lew
hopped out with his customary manic enthusiasm, and I ambled over, lord of the manor.
Salutations were exchanged, and Gary threw open the side door and invited me inside.
Before I had climbed on board, he had already opened some peanut butter and a box of
crackers.
"He was wearing an old straw hat that shaded his eyes, and I remember him cocking his
head to one side to look at me. His look was so clearly appraising, so without social
camouflage as to be startling. The visit was uneventful. We ate crackers and talked. Gary
was not overweening, and he made interesting conversation&emdash;in the parlance of
the time, he was "together." His body was muscular and lithe. His eyes crinkled
pleasantly when he smiled. His voice was cultivated, and his speech was very precise and
peppered with geological terms like schist, upthrusts, and substrate.
"I was a little crestfallen by this initial encounter. He had not congratulated me
for carrying the banner of Beat liberation struggles onto new battlefields, nor
acknowledged me as a peer, nor questioned me in any way about my revolutionary lifestyle
and politics. All he had done was look me over as if asking himself, "What’s this guy
about?" He did not find it necessary to locate me philosophically or politically. In
fact, he did not seem to find it necessary to define himself in relationship to me at all!
I had shared some peanut butter and crackers and a pleasant time with him, and that was
that. After he had driven off, little remained in my memory except that initial
penetrating visual query. It made me squirm mentally and I did not know why."
Well, thirty years later I no longer squirm, but I’ve become increasingly fond of that
penetrating gaze, and I’ve never been disappointed by the intelligence that’s behind it
and supports it, and as well as being a close friend and a great comrade, Gary has been a
spiritual companion. Somebody, an older student, kind of on the path of practice, who has
guided me and nurtured me and been helpful beyond comparison, beyond measure. And so it’s
my great honor to be asked to introduce him tonight and ask you to join me in welcoming
Gary Snyder.
GARY SNYDER: I don’t know if Peter remembers this, but the first time we
met was shortly after I got back from Japan in 1969 after a long residence there and some
big crazy party at a house perched on the side of the slope over Muir Beach. Peter Berg
and Lew and Joanne Kyger. Peter was this beautiful human being. He had hair down to his
waist and more earrings than you can count and lovely tight fringed leather pants. I
thought, now there is quite a guy! Turned out to be true. So, yeah, we’ve been learning
about each other through the years.
Earlier this evening we were talking about how in our cultural, political and literary
life here in Northern California, friendships have been so important to our community of
like souls &emdash; and have carried us all through the decades. This book, The