Customer Reviews

Practice of the Wild

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

When asked to recommend one book for young people, writer Jim Harrison picked "The Practice of the Wild" for its poetic sanity. I read Snyder's unpretentious collection while commuting on the train every morning one summer into downtown Chicago. The epiphanies came fast and furious as I sped through the city's West Side. The wisdom of Snyder's thinking is that he doesn't blindly differentiate between the "human world" and "wilderness"--people bad, nature good--but helps us see the beauty in everything. Like his poetry, Snyder's prose is funny and illuminating, capturing the rough texture of the world. "The Practice of the Wild" is a treasure.

Snyder's "The Practice of the Wild" is an exciting challenge to all of us to reconnect through myth, song, stories, culture, to the places we live and take for granted. It is accessible, fun, and enlightening. Snyder questions basic assumptions that we have, and examines the idea that listening to the land and its spirits will help us develop a new ethic. "It is appropriate to feel loyalty to a given glacier; it is advisable to investigate the whole water cycle; and it is rare and marvelous to know that glaciers do not always flow and that mountains are always walking." Tying together science, politics, and poetry, Snyder has asked each of us to discover what it is about our self that yearns to be whole, and points out that this wholeness can come through the wild.

In much the same way as other reviewers I found Gary Snyder's book "Practice of the Wild" a very enjoyable read, I was originally pointed to it through the amazing work of Jack Turner's "The Abstract Wild" where he refered to it. Although nowhere near as intense or so purely full of power as Turner's book it is fluid and poetic. One of the first things that strikes you is Snyder's astonishing grasp of just about anything, his knowledge of foreign languages is acute, the width of understanding boggles the mind. It must also be remembered that he spent some years in Japan studying as a Zen monk, this would of course have introduced him to Japanese and through it Chinese characters, poetry etc. Snyder seems a remarkable man, this book as well as illuminating the human condition and its need for true wildness, not in the ordinary sense of the term but as native peoples perceive it or rather live it, is a kind of autobiography, maybe I should say a telling of the story of Snyder himself. You become intimately connected to his life, which is really quite incredible, the sort of life where he could no longer say in old age that "I never did what I wanted to", Snyder has really lived, a lumberjack, a monk, an anthropologist, poet etc etc.

The book is interspersed with scientific detail of the living world and then up comes a very poetic passage somehow interconnected without one feeling it is incoherent as he slips from poetic to hard science. What a life he has lived, what experience that simply cannot be ignored, "The Practice of the Wild" is written by someone who must be heard, whose message is human in every way, an ecologist, conservationist, logger, rancher. Too bad other people : politicians, law makers, company executives etc etc haven't lived like this, maybe their own similar experience could really change the world, maybe through this book they will decide to live at least in more than an abstract way when it comes to the natural world.

In this collection of nine essays, Snyder unfolds a bioregional vision of how people can live in communities in tune with the world around them. He doesn't give us a strong argument, and it would be fairly straightforward to poke holes in the argumentation. But that's not the point. His approach is essayistic, sometimes poetic, and nothing like a formal policy paper.

Snyder's bioregionalism is grounded in natural regions, defined by biomes and by small-scale human communities. Politically he would like us organized well below the level of the state. He'd like each community to share a commons from which it draws natural resources, leaving wild areas on the other side of these commons. It's a reasonable vision, but not one possible with current levels of human population.

It's not clear how large urban centers fit into this vision, or if they should be broken up and scattered about. Such scattering would, to say the least, have a much greater impact on the natural world than the status quo - - dense cities with good public transportation actually have much smaller carbon footprints than dispersed human communities.

Snyder's bioregional vision reflects several strains of thought. One is a critique of civilization, and a deep sympathy with indigenous peoples. Unlike some other writers, he does not romanticize the indigenous, though I would say he remains overly optimistic about their lifestyles as an alternative to industrial civilizations. More distinctively, Snyder's writing reflects a fascination with other religious traditions and a love of language and etymology. He has himself arrived at Buddhism but he sees value in many other lines of religious thinking.

These essays are full of insights about human communities and the natural world, and well worth a read.

I recently reread this collection of essays from Gary Snyder and reaffirmed my view that of all the nature writers out there, Snyder remains among our most lucid and insightful philosophers and, most importantly, practitioners of wilderness thought. I would describe the essays in this collection as "thick and rich," thoughtfully crafted from decades of experience, confidently and clearly asserted, and skillfully argued by a scholar of the world. Snyder is conveying knowledge gained through direct experience. As such the essays are small lessons of instruction and guidance for the age-old question "how should I live?" The how, according to Snyder, is accomplished by becoming native to one's place, seeking out what is good, wild, and free, and paying attention to the mystery that pervades all.

Kyle Gardner, author of Medicine Rock Reflections

This is a wonderful discussion of the concept of nature, delving back into ancient Chinese and Japanese concepts of nature. Snyder defines what nature has meant through history and what it means today to be losing it.

Gary Snyder is an American treasure - a great writer and poet whose thoughtful approach to life and literature will enrich the spirit of anyone who reads him. This collection of essays explores the relation between nature and the spirit in a way that might be thought of as part-Beat and part-Thoreau but is, ultimately, very original and thoughtful. The first few essays in the book seemed a bit difficult and inaccessible compared to the last several, which were clear and brilliant.