DNF
Eloquent and powerful writing in places. I can see why he has such a following. Snyder slips into an overreaching nostalgia in some of his writing and I feel that lessens the power of his arguments.

A perpetual evil has been at work destroying the nurturing, life-endowing planet, stripping it of its resources since the fifth century with the rise of small cities. Humans began to detach themselves from nature, associating the wild with a negative connotation. The idea that nature as sacred shortly existed during the Romantic period and throughout the ten years after this book was written humanity once again sees nature as something worth protecting, preserving, and connecting with.
This current evil has been molded to represent the greedy, self-centered capitalist desires of the Industrial power figures running the economic trade. Writing a compellation of essays Gary Snyder forces the read to consider “how the whole human race can regain self-determination in place (nature) after centuries of having been disenfranchised by hierarchy and/or centralized power” (Snyder 1990). This book reveals that we are living in a contradictory time, where as “culture and nature” the actual and living has become a “shadow” in the daunting presence of the insubstantial “political jurisdictions and rarefied economies”(Snyder 1990).

Using a combination of Zen philosophies, and Native American mythology, expressed through personal experiences and travels--Snyder creates his own insightful methodology allowing the read to navigate, and become “on the path, off the trail”. As explained within the book, paths come from the days when walking was used to travel, and signified the inter-weaving connective web of relationships between Humans, Animals, Nature, and the Wild. Snyder draws content from his own path, from researching local aboriginal tribes of northwest Alaska, to his eight year period of studying Zen as a monk in Japan.
Translating a line from Dao Dejing, Snyder interprets the subtle meaning of the “way”; ” ‘a path that can be followed is not a spiritual path’”(Snyder 1990). Paradoxically one must first walk and maintain the path and can then achieve access “off the trail”, as an end result a return to the wild is accomplished. It is established within the path there is a going, but no destination only the wild, and entirety of nature.
To be free is to be able to accept the conditions that come with nature as explained in The practice of the Wild, embracing the open, imperfect, painful, and impermanent. Thus from nature we can infer wilderness, and to speak of wilderness is “to speak of wholeness”(Snyder 1990). How then could this wholeness be achieved when severe deforestation, water and air pollution, extinction, and desolate ecosystems continually arise and remain as unimportant issues for the Occidental civilizations? Snyder aims to provoke enlightenment and encourage the read to become the vocalization that can unite and creatively live in harmony with nature.

In today’s day and age the argument focuses on those valuing the human-centered resource management verses those who value the integrity of the entire nature system. Understanding the difference is key, explicitly in this book where as nature can be seen as a scientific subject studied and analyzed. To understand the wild it must be deciphered from within as “as a quality intrinsic to who we are”(Snyder 1990). In order to connect to the instinctive human nature we first must connect to the “place” or the wild. This land we live on was e wildest and most in tuned to nature prior to white colonization, while the aboriginals shared, fed and lived not from nature but with nature. To call this land “America” is to identify it with the passing political entities that control it. The name commonly found within Native American myth agrees on the name “Turtle Island” for this continent. Snyder wrote, continuing to abuse the land with result in these powers losing their mandate; but observing the events from the time this book was written to the present, I would have to agree that the entities in power now hold a position strong enough to evade penalties and justice and continue to strip the earth to nothing. It is just as the Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki had reversed the line “The State is destroyed, but the mountains and rivers survive” to give it a contemporary reading:
“The mountains and rivers are destroyed, but the State survives.”(Snyder 1990)
Now more than ever does the civilization that can live in harmony with nature needs to rise and gain power to direct and save the existence of nature, creatures, and our world. This book serves as an excellent introduction to enhancing philosophies and perspectives, and offers an efficient amount of other literarily text which Snyder built from to this text. I was heavily intrigued and influenced to inquire further about writing from the heavily quoted Zen Master, Dogen (the philosopher and founder of the Soto school of Japanese Zen) and continue for the defense and preservation of the wild.

from http://www.darkmatteressay.org/the-pr...

Critique of Gary Snyder’s writing feels like a sacrilege against the beauty of letters, nature and the elders. Not knowing if he deems me worthy of such relationship, he makes himself a point to assume the position of the grandfather I never had: My own grandparents certainly didn’t tell us stories around the campfire before we went to sleep. Their house had an oil furnace instead, and a small library. So the people of civilization read books. For some centuries the “library” and the “university” have been our repository of lore. In this huge old occidental culture our teaching elders are books. Books are our grandparents!

This book should get praise only. Like Wes Jackson, a geneticist friend of Synder writes: I have always found it difficult to imagine this century without the life and work of Gary Snyder. After reading this collection of essays, I now find it impossible. I could not agree more and would say that The Practice of the Wild is even more a mandatory read in the 21st century than it was in the 20th. Although an entire generation has been influenced by Snyder, I am surprised that he is not more widely known or at least added to the recent discussion around a Western education canon.

This collection of nine substantial essays is summarized by Snyder in his own words: Our immediate business, and our quarrel, is with ourselves. It would be presumptuous to think that Gaia much needs our prayers or healing vibes. Human beings themselves are at risk – not just on some survival-of-civilization level but more basically on the level of heart and soul. We are in danger of losing our souls. We are ignorant of our own nature and confused about what it means to be a human being. Much of this book has been the reimagining of what we have been and done, and the robust wisdom of our earlier ways. Like Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home – a genuine teaching text – this book has been a meditation on what it means to be human.

But reading them I am left with a decisive uneasiness. If such a widely travelled and learned man like Synder writes in all this erudition quite gloomily about our relationship with ourselves, others and the planet, is there any hope left? Snyder does not give an explanation why all these local cultures and many species are under threat or already extinct. He wails in beautiful prose and some poetry over the lost diversity and richness of wilderness. But he does not explain why cultures undergo these breakneck transformations. Quite on the contrary, Snyder argues that the only meaningful explanation for all the environmental devastation, murdering of fellow human beings and extermination of other species is “spiritual Darwinism.”

He refers to Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit who claims a special evolutionary destiny under the name of higher consciousness and misinterprets his 20th century writing as a form of transhumanism: man is on a path to leave the rest of earth-bound animal and plant life behind to enter an off-the-planet realm transcending biology. He calls Chardin an anthropocentrist new age thinker and counters his teachings with the radical critique of the Deep Ecology movement.

It is probably not a coincidence that I read almost parallel to Gary Snyder, recommended by a dear American friend, Sadhguru’s Inner Engineering, recommended by a dear French friend. Both writers are sages. Snyder is a cosmopolite anthropologist who excels in describing how nature, sacredness and wildness interact and what it is that we have lost. Sadhguru is a yogi who has reached a special state of consciousness and shares many insights which proof his human engineering competence. But there is a qualitative difference between these two books: Snyder is modest and humble while Sadhguru appears to be patronizing and proselytizing.

It is though Sadhguru how reconciles Snyder and Teilhard de Chardin when he explains that there are two basic forces within you. Most people see them as being in conflict. One is the instinct of self-preservation, which compels you to build walls around yourself to protect yourself. The other is the constant desire to expand, to become boundless. These two longings – are not opposing forces, though they may seem to be. They are related to two different aspects of your life. One force helps you root yourself well on this planet; the other takes you beyond. Self-preservation needs to be limited to the physical body. If you have the necessary awareness to separate the two, there is no conflict. But if you are identified with the physical, tehn instead of working in collaboration, these two fundamental forces become a source of tension. All of the “material-versus-spiritual” struggle of humanity spring from this ignorance. When you say “spirituality,” you are talking about a dimension beyond the physical. The human desire to transcend the limitations of the physical is a completely natural one. To journey from the boundary-based individual body to the boundless source of creation – this is the very basis of the spiritual process.

In as such, Snyder and Teilhard de Chardin describe the same thing but from two different perspectives. One describes the journey from the physical towards the spiritual and emphasizes that there is no spirituality, no soul, without respect for the own, the other and the body of mother Earth. The other describes the omega point as a final destination of consciousness evolution and explains the turmoil in the physical world thereby. Both man are deeply rooted in the phenomenal world, one as keen observer of human culture and custom, the other as geologist and paleontologist. Both men go beyond the phenomenal world and try to understand the noumenal world; one through the multitude of native rituals, the other through the singularity of Christianity. Both got a point, but I can’t help to be reminded of Heinz von Förster’s anectode in Understanding Systems about the 15th century mathematician Nicolas of Cusa who proofed that an infinite circle is identical with a line.



Both seem to recognize that it is culture which requires a transformation. One shows us what our ancestors have done right, the other explains what we still need to learn in order to progress and evolve. Snyder writes that greed exposes the foolish person or the foolish chicken alike to the ever-watchful hawk of the food-web and to early impermanence. Preliterate hunting and gathering cultures were highly trained and lived well by virtue of keen observation and good manners; as noted earlier, stinginess was the worst of vices. Teilhard de Chardin emphasizes the force of love to drive giving instead of taking.

Snyder teachers us that the term culture goes back to Latin meanings, via colere, such as “worship, attend to, cultivate, respect, till, take care of.” The root kwel basically means to revolve around a center – cognate with wheel and Greek telos, “completion of a cycle,” hence teleology. In Sanskrit this is chakra, “wheel,” or “great wheel of the universe.” The modern Hindi word is charkha, “spinning wheel” – with which Gandhi meditated the freedom of India while in prison. He shows that a culture is like a giant trap, a huge flywheel. Once put in place or motion it is difficult for the individual to escape.

Teilhard de Chardin interprets increasing complexity as the axis of evolution (a concept which is the central pillar of modern big history) of matter into a geosphere, a biosphere, and finally into consciousness and then to supreme consciousness (the Omega Point). He explains – and that’s probably the part in his writing which Snyder dislikes – that evolution shifted from the realm of physics into chemistry from chemistry into biology, and from biology into culture. And it is in this last realm that man dominates over all other elements in this universe.

Synder does though agree with Chardin between the lines, because this passage shows that he has already in the late 1980s if not earlier anticipated the dawn of the Anthropocene: A culture of wilderness starts somewhere in this terrain. Civilization is part of nature – our egos play in the fields of the unconscious – history takes place in the Holocene – human culture is rooted in the primitive and the Paleolithic – our body is a vertebrate mammal being – and our souls are out in the wilderness.

I warmly recommend to read this book and watch in the course of doing so films like The Revenant (about nature, wildness and the sacred) and Wild (about the healing force of the wild), Into the Wild (about the deadly force of the wild and the necessity for man to be part of some sort of civilization), 127 Hours (about the attraction of the wild), Captain Fantastic (about wildness and parenting) or The Deer Hunter (about the conflation of sacred wildness and social sickness).

Gary Snyder has long been one of my favorite poets. His calls to incorporate neolithic wisdom in our modern lives are important. Snyder has long fostered a deep sense of place in his works. It's a delight for me to read Snyder's prose, which is colored by the fact that he is primarily a poet. He has an amazingly extensive body of work, from his Rip Rap and Cold Mountain Poems in 1956 to his Pulitzer Prize winning Turtle Island (1975) to this book, which is a literary culmination of the world views that have driven his poetry through the decades. I dig Snyder.

I lack the necessary words to describe the beauty of this book so here's a quote that stuck with me: "You first must be ob the path, before you can turn and walk into the wild"

An inspiring melange of memoir, politics, buddhism, and nature writing, Snyder offers us some concrete first steps in reclaiming a life more meaningfully lived and more closely connected with all that surrounds us.

I read practice of the wild and now I’m growing my own herbs and trying to grow an avocado tree!

I liked this novel a lot. At times it was a bit to technical and I’m not a big fan of Gary Snyder his prose, BUT this book made me think about our relationship with nature and it motivated to learn more about the fauna and flora of my own area.

Gary Snyder is one of my all-time favorite writers. He is concise and personable. His point of view is pragmatic without being overt. His love for the wild and for people and our personal responsibility to both comes through.

"Essays consider nature, wilderness, and man's place in the natural world."

I was surprised -- I'd been looking forward to reading Gary Snyder. And when I started, I found his language turgid, and stilted -- not appealing enough to read. I hope this is the exception, rather than the rule.

This compilation of essays by Snyder is possibly just as spiritual as it is ecological in scope. His musings mix in a dose of Zen sense with Native American views. Insights regarding the nature of the self with anecdotes and experiences from his life.

A recurring theme you may find through this book is on the moral failings of stinginess and the converse give-take relationships that exist in nature. His writings have left a strong impression on me, but I believe the most mark left most indelibly will be on this theme. Nature viewed as a ‘survival of the fittest’ may only be a limited conception and seems to miss the reality of nature being a system of individual parts mutually giving or sacrificing themselves. Snyder calls the ‘worst of all moral failings or flaws of character’ to be stinginess. It’s not to say he’s right, but I had never considered this as profound as he describes.

There are good reasons that this collection of essays by Gary Snyder is viewed as a classic more than 30 years after publication. Each essay is worth re-reading several times. A thought provoking mix of Buddhist thought, deep ecology, indigenous culture, and Snyder's own astute observations. One of the things that I appreciated in reading these essays is Snyder's refusal to separate civilization and urban areas from the broader category of "nature."

Captivating essays that range as wide as the man who wrote them. Gary Snyder's seminal impact on the new school of American letters beginning in the mid twentieth century is here on full display. Drawing on poetry, anthropology, typography, ecology, and myth; Snyder carefully makes the case for the importance of wildness in all aspects of life. Clear sighted, eloquent, studious, at times riotously funny, Snyder condemns the sedate and assumed logic of civilization simply by pulling back the curtain and showing us what is there. This is powerful 'nature writing' (before the term became popularized and lost its blood) in the vein of Abbey; unpretentious and to the point, telling us what in our heart of hearts we know to be true. Real wisdom comes not from an excess of cleverness, but from attending to the natural rhythms of a world most of us have turned away from. This is writing that is poignant and timeless and needed now more than ever.