"Un entorno salvaje es un lugar en el cual el potencial salvaje se expresa de lleno, como en la diversidad de seres vivos y no vivos que florecen de acuerdo a su propio sentido del orden. En ecología hablamos de “sistemas salvajes”. Cuando un ecosistema funciona plenamente, todos sus miembros están presentes en la asamblea. Hablar de naturaleza salvaje es hablar de totalidad. Los seres humanos surgieron de ella, y considerar la posibilidad de reactivar nuestra pertenencia a la asamblea de todos los seres no es en absoluto retrógrado. […]”

Maybe it's because of too high expectations (built on the dozens of appreciative mentions by other environmental thinkers), but this book somehow didn't resonate with me. I couldn't help comparing it to David Abram's writings which always stir my blood. Whereas reading Synder's essays didn't move me at all and sometimes I even had to force myself to read further.

But maybe the expectations weren't too high, just misplaced. I probably expected more rigorous academic philosophy type of writing (and was reading it as a literature for my dissertation which revolves around the ideas of Nature and Wilderness) and not finding it I didn't tune in to it right. It's true that when I ceased trying to read it in this manner and dropped the pencil (last two essays) I found it quite interesting and enjoyable. I will probably return to it once more someday and try to read it whole in this way.

Loved hearing the voice of a naturalist and Buddhist who also worked as a logger. This was the first Gary Snyder work I’ve read and will definitely pick up another.

https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2...

When I first read this essay collection decades ago I found it revelatory. Re-reading it, I can see why I thought that. It really was a formative book for me and, more broadly speaking, I like to think it may be one of the most important books of the 20th century. It did feel less revelatory on this read-through, which I take as an indication that I've internalized whatever it was that hit me so hard all those years ago. If so, that's good news.

If you haven't read these essays, you really must! Whether or not you find it as revelatory as I did back then, there is deep and timeless wisdom here.

Six stars.

I am ashamed to admit that I did not know of Gary Snyder before I stumbled onto this book. Then I learned that he is famous not just as an environmentalist, but also as a Buddhist, a Beat poet, a friend of Jack Kerouac and Alan Ginsberg and as one of the characters in The Dharma Bums. How did I miss him until now?

This book is good and if I had read it when it first came out, I might have fallen in love with it. Now the ideas in it are all things that we have seen in a hundred different places. They are timeless ideas and good ones, so that's not such a bad thing, but Mr. Snyder's way of expressing himself is not so outstanding as to make it all seem fresh and new. In contrast, The Sand County Almanac and Silent Spring both remain just as powerful today as when they were written.

One of the things that I really liked was Mr. Snyder's refutation of The Tragedy of the Commons. In Mr. Snyder's telling the only tragedy was the taking of the commons by enclosure and other methods of private appropriation so that the old ways of respect for the commonly held resources were lost. I'm not sure that Mr. Snyder's version of the story is completely accurate, but it has at least enough truth in it so that Chicago Schoolers should pause before jumping to the conclusion that the free market and private property always create the best results for everyone.

perfect intersection of language, ecology, society, etc. best book i’ve read this year!

still true, but after 20 years crushingly hopeless.

Many powerful and beautiful essays here.

If Jared Diamond was a beatnik

Mmmmm, Gary Snyder. I was first gifted this book by my best friend (since we were three years old!) as I was leaving a long vacation stay with her in Yosemite, where she had a cabin in the Valley because she was essential personnel and at that time they were housed there. You could hear The Falls and see the meadow from different sides of the cabin. Yosemite is the most gorgeous place I've ever been. With her or with friends of hers or at times alone I hiked, scrambled and ambled over every inch of it day and night, and it was the most wondrous journey of my life. Every one of the Falls was at peak and there were an unusual number of ephemerals. It felt as if it was all for me though this visit was planned well before we could know when the snow would melt. It was so hard to leave and my bestie made it a bit easier because at the airport she gifted me this book and a book of Gary Snyder's poetry.

I've read it and pieces of it many times over the years, and yearned for it in the midst of the covid-19 pandemic as a reminder that "Nature is orderly," as he writes. "That which appears to be chaotic in nature is only a more complex kind of order." Yosemite is the most beautiful natural beauty I've ever looked upon and so this book is personal to me and not. I'm not sure he even mentions it, though I know he mentions some peaks. It's probably self-indulgent to even discuss this here: my favorite experience of wild nature -- mountain lion, mother bear not long out of hiberation, with cubs, and so much more -- but returning to the book was a needed reminder that covid-19 too is part of wild nature.

A nature writer with scientific knowledge, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, an environmentalist before that term became a cliche, a writing professor (now Emeritus) at UC Davis, devoted family man and in general a gifted and pure soul, Gary Snyder too is one of nature's beautiful creations. He grew up on a farm, lived in Japan to study Zen and upon arriving back chose to make his permanent home in the Sierras, not far from Yosemite, with which he's had a history of personal pleasure and advocacy. His gentle prose (and poetry, but there's none in here) is comforting as is Snyder's celebration of and love for every part of nature, expressed in often breathtakingly beautiful language. Tucked into naturally and not in any way forcefully is his Zen.

I'm not a Buddhist but have found awesome parts in the Dao that have much to say to people of all religions and none. The quotes Snyder chooses most often to make his points are those of Dogen, the man who brought Zen to Japan, and these are organic in Snyder's writing the way the trees are and soil. They help express his reverence for and the joy he takes from mountains, streams, the female form, and forests, and the orderly wildness he recognizes is everywhere, including in cities, including New York. In this book, one of my Favorites, are some of his greatest essays and it has been a balm and a joy to read it again, and at this time.

The essay "At Work in the Woods" is interesting and stands out in a different way. Some people are surprised to come upon Snyder describing his stint as a logger. He needed the money. He was not yet the very soft and very strong voice of nature nor the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and beloved teacher he became. And he speaks of those felling the trees with reverence too. He understands they're part of a system and not The System. His descriptions are of the processes, the stages, the equipment and what excites me, what exactly happened to the trees at every step along the way. He had and has a seriousness about this job I find fascinating. I include this information because some who probably weren't born yet don't like the essay. Well, this was 1954 and he writes: "Those were, in hindsight, the last years of righteous forest management in the United States."

Like every living thing and dead ones too, as he reminds us, each essay brings something different. His wild naturally includes humans, ones he loves and those whose systems, policies and behaviors he reviles, though they are not the focus. In the section of essays on "The Woman Who Married a Bear" he focuses on human wild cultural lore, presenting this old indigenous American story and its mutations and migrations.

The twentieth anniversary edition (from 2010) has a new preface, which is a gem. Gary Snyder is blessed with wisdom, knowledge and humility to not just teach but constantly allow himself to be taught, why is why to many he's an icon. The natural place to end this review for me lies in the new preface. Since my inartful words could never do these essays, his poetry, the eyes with which he looks at the world, do Gary Snyder himself justice, I hope they lead those to whom they speak to his remarkable body of work which was in full bloom when he wrote "The Practice of the Wild":

"Nothing said here is to take away from the elegance, the refinement, the beauty, and the intriguing complexity of what we call civilization, especially the sort of civilization that respects quality over quantity and is not simply an excuse for multinational global piracy. I am intrigued by the sense that culture itself has a wild edge. As Claude Levi-Strauss remarked years ago, the arts are the wilderness areas of the imagination surviving, like national parks, in the midst of civilized minds. The abandon and delight of love-making is, as often sung, part of the delightful wild in us. Both sex and art! But we knew that all along. What we didn't perhaps see so clearly was that self-realization, even enlightenment, is another aspect of our wildness -- a bonding of the wild in ourselves to the (wild) process of the universe."