The Practice of the Wild by Gary Snyder

Author:Gary Snyder
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781582439358
Publisher: Counterpoint Press
Published: 2018-05-16T00:00:00+00:00

To return to my own situation: the land my family and I live on in the Sierra Nevada of California is “barely good” from an economic standpoint. With soil amendments, much labor, and the development of ponds for holding water through the dry season, it is producing a few vegetables and some good apples. It is better as forest: through the millennia it has excelled at growing oak and pine. I guess I should admit that it’s better left wild. Most of it is being “managed for wild” right now — the pines are getting large and some of the oaks were growing here before a Euro-American set foot anywhere in California. The deer and all the other animals move through with the exception of Grizzly Bear and wolf; they are temporarily not in residence in California. We will someday bring them back.

These foothill ridges are not striking in any special way, no postcard scenery, but the deer are so at home here I think it might be a “deer field.” And the fact that my neighbors and I and all of our children have learned so much by taking our place in these Sierra foothills — logged-over land now come back, burned-over land recovering, considered worthless for decades — begins to make this land a teacher to us. It is the place on earth we work with, struggle with, and where we stick out the summers and winters. It has shown us a little of its beauty.

And sacred? One could indulge in a bit of woo-woo and say, yes, there are newly discovered sacred places in our reinhabited landscape. I know my children (like kids everywhere) have some secret spots in the woods. There is a local hill where many people walk for the view, the broad night sky, moon-viewing, and to blow a conch at dawn on Bodhi Day. There are miles of mined-over gravels where we have held ceremonies to apologize for the stripping of trees and soil and to help speed the plant-succession recovery. There are some deep groves where people got married.

Even this much connection with the place is enough to inspire the local community to hold on: renewed gold mining and stepped-up logging press in on us. People volunteer to be on committees to study the mining proposals, critique the environmental impact reports, challenge the sloppy assumptions of the corporations, and stand up to certain county officials who would sell out the inhabitants and hand over the whole area to any glamorous project. It is hard, unpaid, frustrating work for people who already have to work full time to support their families. The same work goes on with forestry issues — exposing the scandalous favoritism shown the timber industry by our nearby national forest, as its managers try to pacify the public with sweet words and frivolous statistics. Any lightly populated area with “resources” is exploited like a Third World country, even within the United States. We are defending our own space, and we are trying to protect the commons.

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