Gary Snyder’s Path of the Deep Ecology Movement

OJAI —  Gary Snyder knows how to sit still. The young poet from West Los Angeles doesn’t.

A mountaineer, scholar, hunter, gatherer, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and Buddhist monk, Snyder came to the Ojai Foundation’s hillside site in rural Ventura County last weekend to talk about something he terms “wild wisdom.”

As a bonus, he threw in a bit of Sunday morning instruction in zazen , the Zen Buddhist practice of silent meditation. Seated in full lotus position, on the floor of a round canvas yurt tent, Snyder was as poised and still as the bronze Buddha behind him.

But 10 minutes into the session, the young guy from Los Angeles started squirming. Shifting. Fidgeting and flopping about and grunting. Finally, as other meditators became hard-pressed to repress snickers, he got up and left.

That man’s behavior might be construed as a metaphor for what Snyder came to discuss.

Although he used “excessively polysyllabic” terms such as bioregionalism, and reinhabitation, the crux of the Snyder’s message is simply that it’s time for Americans to settle down.

Stop moving once every three years. Sink some roots and really get to know the place you decide to call home, admonished Snyder, who has been called the most influential voice in the budding and controversial “deep ecology movement”--which rejects the “human centered” view of nature and urges a sweeping reevaluation of our political, economic, and cultural values.

To convey this message and its link to “wild wisdom,” Snyder led 34 people--among them a Beverly Hills attorney, two Santa Barbara psychotherapists, a Los Angeles producer of television commercials, several teachers, a construction worker, a physician, a potter, a journalist, and a handful of poets--on a circuitous journey through intellectual, poetic, and actual wild lands.

A good place to join these pilgrims might be on the pathways of your own childhood.

“If you look in your mind, you have a vivid landscape that you lived in between the ages of 7 and 11,” Snyder said, paraphrasing an essay by writer Edith Cobb.

‘They All Come Back’

“You can, with a very minor effort of imagination, walk completely through that landscape and recall everything in it: the paths, the houses, the mean dogs, the mean old lady, the kids you don’t like, the stores, the trees, the forts, the hideouts. They all come back to you. And no other landscape in your life will ever be as vivid.”

Seated in the opaque light of the canvas and wood-lattice yurt, as if inside a paper lantern, everyone seemed to be taking pleasant mental strolls past the yapping dogs and tree houses of their childhood.

But Snyder recalled that when he shared this idea with a friend who grew up in the San Diego County town of Escondido, the friend replied that images of his boyhood landscape invariably enraged him. Developers were constantly bulldozing the chaparral-covered hillsides and avocado orchards he roamed as a boy, he said. “I saw my childhood world disappear in front of me.”

“There are a lot of angry children out there right now,” a psychiatrist chimed in.

Snyder nodded. But he told the group what he told his friend: “Look, you can’t save your childhood landscape, but there’s a landscape out there right now you can work on.”

Snyder’s childhood landscape was his “atheist, working-class, Irish, Scotch, Marxist” family’s small Depression-era dairy and egg farm north of Seattle, Wash., and the surrounding wilds.

Few Neighbors or Playmates

“With very few neighbors and very few playmates, one of the pleasures I found was just getting into the woods . . . a fascinating and healing place,” he said.

At 5 or 6 years old, he would crawl through the farm’s barbed-wire fence to hike into the second-growth Douglas fir and Western red cedar, where he encountered black-tailed hares, squirrels, foxes, bobcats and deer.

“I was totally at home . . . It was the most comfortable sort of thing for me,” he said. . . . I came back feeling good.”

He also returned with kernels of “wild wisdom”--integral, “physical” understanding of how plants and animals and earth and air interact as an ecology.

At 15, he climbed the snow-covered peak of Mt. St. Helens, and discovered that the Pacific Northwest is really two worlds--the drizzling, gray world of Seattle, Tacoma and Portland, and the sunlit realm of peaks: Mt. Hood, Mt. Rainier, Mt. Adams, Glacier Peak, Mt. Olympus.

“Discovering the world above the clouds was like discovering mythology,” Snyder said. “I got into mountaineering as a form of mysticism.”

Snyder’s passion for the wild led him to distrust “Occidental thought and its evidently self-destructive behavior,” he said. “My interest in Buddhism proceeded from that.”

Snyder studied literature and anthropology at Oregon’s Reed College, focusing on American Indian languages and literature. He dabbled in linguistics as a graduate student, then entered University of California, Berkeley’s graduate program in Oriental languages--studying classical Chinese and Japanese.

During the academic year Snyder worked as a carpenter and in print shops, and he spent his summers logging in Washington and Oregon or working with the U.S. Forest Service, fighting fires, cutting trails or manning a fire lookout.

Studied Zen

In 1956, he left the San Francisco beat scene for Japan. Over the next dozen years, he studied Zen in Buddhist monasteries, vowing “to make an effort at the healing of everything,” and learning to meditate silently for 10 hours at a stretch.

Taking breaks from his official spiritual training, he worked in the engine room of an oil tanker, and made a four-month “passage through India” with poet Allen Ginsberg.

In 1968, he and his wife, Masa, and son, Kai, moved to San Juan Ridge, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada. (Gen, a second son, was born later.) The family has lived there “carrying on more mischief” ever since, Snyder said. His life and mischief are reflected in 11 volumes of poetry and essays. In 1975, his book “Turtle Island” won the Pulitzer Prize.

At one point in the meandering two-day dialogue, Snyder recited his tribute to the late Zen popularizer Alan Watts:

. . . Many guides would have us

travel

Single file, like mules in a

pack-train;

And never leave the trail.

Alan taught us to move forward

like the breeze;

Tasting the berries--greeting the

bluejays--

Learning and loving the whole

terrain.

Some of those present at the Ojai Foundation--a 40-acre, multicultural education center east of Ventura--might have said the same about Snyder.

“The overwhelming fact of being in North America is wild nature,” he said, as the wailing Santa Anas beat against the canvas yurt, and oak branches lashed back and forth across a circle of blue visible through a skylight.

By the early 16th Century, “both Asia and Europe had finally lost touch with wildness,” Snyder said. “The bear became extinct in England in the 12th Century . . . Chinese and Japanese people have not lived in a situation where deer, foxes or coyotes would walk in your backyard for at least half a millennium.”

The values and lessons, spiritual and practical, which come from living in close contact with the wild: “the more refined plant knowledges . . . the intimate, day-to-day vernacular knowledge of animal behavior,” were almost forgotten, Snyder said.

But the discovery of the New World rekindled those smoldering memories, and the wildness of North America became--and remains--”the most potent and striking image in modern history. It is the image of the rediscovery of the primitive, the rediscovery of nature, the rediscovery of space . . .”

But contrary to some modern conceptions, North America’s wild nature included man as well as other animal species, Snyder stressed.

“We’re wild!” he said. “We’re part of the ecosystem.”

As the cricket’s soft autumn hum

is to us,

so are we to the trees

as are they

to the rocks and the hills.

----from “Little Poems for Gaia,”

in the book, “Axe Handles.”

In Snyder’s view, man--like the bear and the killer whale, and the salmon who feeds both creatures by swimming from the ocean up mountain streams--is intrinsically valuable.

The humans living closest to the ecological cycles are hunters and gatherers, followed by subsistance farmers. These people, often labeled savages, develop a highly refined intuitive understanding of nature, sensory alertness, and a remarkable intelligence, with which they survive the complexity of life in a seasonally changing ecosystem.

Shared Knowledge

And they share their knowledge through storytelling, poetry and song. Snyder calls these people inhabitory.

But “large-scale, centralized, industrial capitalism and large-scale, centralized socialist Marxism,” have compelled cultures to forsake the wild, Snyder believes.

And he’s willing to say so to whoever’s willing to listen.

A few years ago, while touring the People’s Republic of China with a group of American writers, Snyder addressed an assembly of intellectuals and party functionaries.

“Comrades,” he said, “Perhaps we have not extended our understanding of the nature of exploitation far enough . . . Your rivers are muddy, your air is foul, you’ve run out of firewood and your soil is going fast.

” . . . There is human chauvinism and human exploitation on all levels. The real working class ultimately is green plants and photosynthesis. Consequently, we have to form workers’ committees of plants and rivers and watersheds, to join in our meetings, and give us input on what needs to be done.”

The Red Chinese laughed, he said.

A Practical Foundation

Strikingly, though, Snyder’s mysticism is usually grounded in pragmatism. When people at Ojai introduced themselves, for instance, he reserved his most gleeful questioning for an employee of a small water district. “What type of tank do you have? What’s its capacity?”

Later Snyder conducted a “bioregional quiz” with equally concrete questions: “Where does the water you drink come from? What is the soil series where you live? Name five edible plants in your region and their seasons. Where does your garbage go?”

Sunday morning, Snyder and a friend who teaches wilderness classes to college students led the group out trekking through the local bioregion--the chaparral-covered hills on which the Ojai foundation sets.

They talked about the geography, pointing to the spectacular sedimentary ridge line of Mt. Topatopa (from the Chumash Indian word for “many gophers”) and they talked about the California Condor, which seems to have made its last stand in the Sespe wilderness beyond that ridge.

They pointed out a tall, tangled-twig nest of a bushy-tailed rat family--structures that, in some areas, have been inhabited by hundreds of thousands of generations, for as long as 14,000 years.

Relationships in Ecology

They also discussed the relationships between the area’s various species of drought-resistant plants and the local fauna, and explained that because of development, chaparral is “the second most threatened plant community” in the state.

“If you want to get a feel for what the chaparral is about, pick a piece of this sage, crush it and smell it,” Snyder said. Those who did, got a whiff of the wild worthy of a thousand poems.

The aroma of the wild is something Snyder and his family and their neighbors have lived with for 18 years.

“The vow of bioregionalism is to say to yourself that you won’t move anymore and see what happens,” Snyder said. “You might be surprised.”

Among the things that might happen (and have happened to the inhabitants of San Juan Ridge): you might vote, since even political cynics have an interest in local elections if they plan to live in a place and plant future generations there, Snyder said.

You might also get involved with school boards and zoning commissions and garden clubs in your efforts to preserve the local landscape.

“And it doesn’t take much imagination to see that there would be major changes in American life if people did that,” Snyder said.

He added that the term inhabitory can apply to city dwellers, too. “It has to do with how often you move, and how closely tied you are to a place. “

City dwellers can find ways “to encourage wildlife and wild birds within the city, to invite back the raccoons and coyotes and let people know it’s pleasant to have them in the city.”

Corporations can end policies that penalize employees who are unwilling to relocate, he said.

“There’s nothing Utopian about this,” Snyder continued. “There can be depth and quality in urban life, as well as rural life. But it won’t happen until you have enough people who are willing to stay put somewhere.”

On a hillside near the yurt, a striped cat stalked moths in the dry grass. The West Los Angeles poet, his hair flying in the Santa Anas sweeping over the ridge ( Ojai means “wind bath” in Chumash) explained that most of his poems are about “chaos--internal and external.”

“Human chaos is a subjective part of the natural order,” Snyder would concede later. But then paradoxes are integral to Buddhism.

Which may explain why Snyder remains confident that the reinhabitation of North America is already happening and that the wild will be saved.

Remember the fourth vow of Buddhism: “The way of the Buddha is beyond accomplishment; I vow to accomplish it.”