one of my lodestars

Everyone should read this beautiful beautiful beautiful book

A great little book on nineties environmentalism, though the ideas here are timeless. I almost hate reading books about nature, because they inevitably get to the fact that yeah, humans are definitely screwing up the planet for everything else and unchecked capitalism and corporatism will basically destroy us all in another century or two and it makes it hard to focus on anything else, but that's my problem. The book itself was several slow meditating pieces on the state of the earth, environmental history, religious and cultural practices in Alaska and Japan, and Snyder philosophizing on the beauty of the world and the animals that live in it.

To me, Practice of the Wild is a book difficult to describe. There's a lot of deep thought put onto it. The kind of thought that years of meditation, work and experience can only yield. It's not a book that talks about nature or wilderness from a scientific or conservationist point of view, but from a spiritual perspective. The main conclusion I drew from the essays was that we should protect nature so we can be inspired by it, by going to mountains and woods and living it. As every human being has an inner "hunter/gatherer" waiting to be released and share with the outer, ordinary being, its secrets.

Published in 1990, this book is still very much current, the issues discussed are still a problem (i.e. deforestation). More than 20 years have gone past since, and no global serious action seems to be ever taken to solve this.

Thoroughly recommended.