Matt ZepelinAmerican West Final Paper

11/19/12

William Cronon, Raymond Williams, Gary Snyder, and theSearch for an Historically and Epistemologically Informed

Yet Positive Vision of Nature

Introduction

In his seminal 1893 paper, “The Significance of the

Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner

wrote that the defining dynamic of American history up to

that point had been “the existence of an area of free land,

its continuous recession, and the advance of American

settlement westward.”1 Known as the “frontier hypothesis,”

Turner’s essay has been an urtext for historians of the

American West. The work of Turner and subsequent historians

who have supported, qualified, or rejected the frontier

hypothesis has helped increase the importance of three,

intertwining topics in American historiography: the West as

1 Turner, Frederick Jackson, British Library, Adam Matthew Digital (Firm), and American Historical Association. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Empire Online. Section V, Race, Class, Imperialism and Colonialism, 1607-2007. Marlborough, England: Adam Matthew Digital, 2007. Pg. 199.

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a region, the history of Native Americans, and environmental

history.

One of the historians who has engaged most deeply with

Turner’s work is William Cronon. Cronon’s writing deals with

all three of the aforementioned topics, but this essay will

focus primarily on his contributions to environmental

history. Examining the process of Euro-American expansion in

North America from an environmental perspective, he has

shown that the inclusion of ecology makes for a much richer

historical understanding of frontiers and can also inform

contemporary environmental ethics. Central to Cronon’s

thinking is the notion that humans, including Native

Americans, have never existed in isolation from natural

processes or in static relation to them. Whether a

Narragansett Indian burning underbrush in seventeenth-

century New England or an American futures trader in

nineteenth-century Chicago, the people in Cronon’s histories

are always in mutually dynamic relationships with nature.

Cronon thus takes the Turnerian idea that patterned

processes compelled Euro-Americans across the continent and

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expands it to include the natural world as a living and

active component of that history.

This essay shall examine Cronon’s books as a means of

understanding environmental history as a discipline, then

look at some of his essays to see the ways in which he has

tried to define the “nature” under consideration in his

work. Whether Western historians like it or not, this

definitional task, which in the last few decades has become

a preoccupation of their field, has brought them squarely

into the territory of epistemology and philosophy of

language.

An examination of Cronon’s work makes clear that those

who write environmental history (or academic environmental

writing of any sort) ought to be especially concerned about

depicting nature as just another textually free-floating,

culturally constructed, postmodern concept. The subtitle of

a 1995 book of essays which Cronon edited, Uncommon Ground:

Toward Reinventing Nature, gives indication of this issue. To

“invent” has an archaic usage meaning “to come upon” or “to

find,” but in common parlance it means to originate, create,

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or design. The book is full of thoughtful essays on various

topics concerning environmental history and

environmentalism, but already with its title it moves

perilously close to conveying the idea that “nature” is

fundamentally in our heads. A fuller exploration of the

epistemology of language is called for here in order for

historians to stand on solid ground when they show the

relativity and changeability of historical or contemporary

ideas of “nature.”

A subtler but perhaps more damaging aspect of

deconstructing “nature” is that even writers who believe

nature is not just a cultural idea—that it is also something

beyond human construction—commonly neglect to create a

positive and proactive program for how we should envision

nature. If nature is something partially constructed by

language and culture, then those who would deconstruct it

should also take on the responsibility to suggest

possibilities for beneficial and compassionate ways to re-

envision it.

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The conclusion of this essay looks at the work of the

poet, writer, and environmentalist Gary Snyder for examples

of both a coherent epistemology and positive suggestions for

relating to nature. Snyder’s environmental writing is deeply

informed by his Buddhist training, including a number of

years living at Zen monasteries in Japan in the 1960s. His

work is shot-through with the 2,500-year tradition of

Buddhist epistemology, which emphasizes “knowing” the

natural world, human and non-human, through insightful,

compassionate use of language and through experiential

grounding in the body and in perception. Buddhist

epistemology has long asserted the constructedness of all

cultural and linguistic forms, but it situates that

constructedness within the greater constructedness or

growingness of our experiential world. Humans enact ideas

and behaviors which seem to have greater or lesser accord

with reality, but the world, reality—whatever you call

“this”—is also perpetually trying out new forms, new

amalgamations. The issue is not fabrication—that is how we

live and, Buddhism suggests, how all of life moves forward—

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the issue is how to incorporate wisdom in our artifice, how

to be skillful in our gardening of the mind.

Snyder also occupies a place in a sort of “wide west”

tradition of nature writing, stretching back to the

premodern Chinese poets who, well aware of the changeability

of nature and the contingency of their own language, chose

to celebrate nature in its unpredictability and evanescence.

The joyful self-disclosure of Snyder’s writings on the

American West is a great model for environmental historians

who want to promote a positive vision of nature.

William Cronon’s Environmental History

In Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New

England (1983), Cronon developed an interdisciplinary

approach, combining economic history with botanical field

observation, ecology, anthropology, and Marxian analysis of

capitalism to rethink history in such a way that the natural

world becomes a subject in its own right. Unlike traditional

histories in which human beings tend to be the central, and

often only, actors, Changes in the Land moves gracefully

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between the activities of the Indian and English communities

in New England and the characteristics of and changes in the

fauna, flora, and greater ecology of the region.

Looking, for instance, at the transmission of Old World

epidemic diseases to the New World, Cronon shows how the

microbes ravaged Indian communities, but he does not stop

with the human story. He goes on to detail how the mass

death of Indians disrupted their communities’ seasonal

rhythms of interaction with the land, which in turn effected

changes in their environment. For instance, New England

Indians practiced annual burnings to encourage the growth of

flora that would attract their preferred game. When the

fires were discontinued due to the effects of epidemic

disease, a host of ecological changes followed: the spread

of forests, alterations in floral species composition, and

loss of the woodland “edge” habitats in which game animals

such as beaver and bear thrived.2

2 Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England. 1st rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003 (1983). Pgs. 88-91.

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Cronon takes pains in his work to show that nature is

not just a subject but an historical subject—that is, a

subject in dynamic, dialectical relationship with human

beings. “Environment may initially shape the range of

choices available to a people at a given moment,” he writes,

“but then culture reshapes environment in responding to

those choices. The reshaped environment presents a new set

of possibilities for cultural reproduction, thus setting up

a new cycle of mutual determination.”3 Writing with this in

mind allows Cronon to show the intimate connectedness

between humans and the environment. People are natural;

nature is historical.

The history of English use of domesticated animals in

New England provides a case in point of the dialectic Cronon

describes. The settlers brought domesticates with them

because that was their cultural and economic way of life.

They held the Old Testament view that domestication is the

proper relationship between man and animals, and they had

come to depend on the creatures for sustenance.

3 Cronon, 1983, 13.

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Domestication was a way to think and a way to eat. Although

they expected to recreate the relationships to domesticated

animals familiar from England, the differing conditions in

New England initially hampered their ability to do so. These

differences were both cultural and ecological. Indians had

not developed the social and legal norms necessary for

people to manage privately owned animals, and the land did

not naturally produce the quantities of hay necessary to

feed their animals year-round.4 The settlers adjusted to

these differences by allowing many of the animals to forage

freely and by cultivating the land to produce more pasture

for them (the latter step relying heavily on the use of some

of the domesticates, oxen and horses, to till the soil).

Cronon thus establishes the ways in which the English,

through their animal husbandry, acted upon the New England

environment.

Again, however, he goes on to show that the human

actions were not the end of the story. Allowing cattle,

horses, and especially pigs to wander freely caused

4 Cronon, 1983, 134.

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significant alterations in New England ecology—soil

compaction, alterations in plant and tree composition,

changes in water cycles—that the settlers did not anticipate

and in many cases were not even aware of.5 Over time,

farmers tilled ever more ground for pasture and cut down

more trees to fence in their animals. The English farmers

were already committed to an economic system requiring farm

animals, and their further commitment to making the

landscape habitable for these creatures intensified their

involvement in market economics. Cronon notes that

“ecological pressures brought on by overgrazing and

inadequate forage reinforced economic incentives flowing

more directly from market demand: together, the two impelled

colonial movement onto new lands.”6

In a remarkable piece of synthetic analysis, Cronon

shows how the increase in intensive agriculture and

husbandry resulted in lands that were “sunnier, windier,

hotter, colder, and drier than they had been in their former

5 Cronon, 1983, 144-148.6 Cronon, 1983, 162.

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[forested or wooded] state.”7 Over time these conditions

made for diminished productivity on New England farms. That

diminishment was one reason why many farmers in the region

eventually gave up their farms, allowing both forests and

cities to take over large swaths of farmland.8 Cronon’s

history thus presents New England ecology as continuously

evolving: from Indian land-use revolving around forests,

intentional fires, edge habitats, and temporary cornfields;

to the unruly, expansive colonial regime of domesticated

animals and permanent agricultural fields; and then the

nineteenth century urbanization and reforestation of the

region (but with forests of markedly different tree

composition and ecology than those of the seventeenth

century).

In his second book, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great

West (1991), Cronon took on the yet-more-daunting task of

writing the history of a major metropolis as environmental

history. His primary mechanism in doing so was to show that

Chicago as a city cannot be understood apart from the vast 7 Cronon, 1983, 123.8 Cronon, 1983, 156.

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hinterlands with which it reciprocally evolved. The city’s

appearance as a relatively small geographic area of

extraordinarily dense human habitation belies its dependence

on and stimulation of commodity flows stretching hundreds of

miles in all directions. In the language of analogy, the

city is not like a conglomeration of boxes set down on the

land, but rather like a human-conceived outgrowth of the

land, a material garden directed by the mind, with roots

extending as deeply and broadly as necessary to support the

height of the skyscrapers and fill the stomachs of its busy

millions.

As he did with colonial New England, Cronon sought to

show that the ecosystems from which Chicago drew its

resources reacted to that activity in unforeseen ways,

becoming altered systems which in turn went through new

forms of cultural use. Looking at grain, for instance,

Cronon examines how Chicago’s expansion created massive

markets for corn, wheat, and other crops. The enormous

prairies to the west of the city thus came under intensive

agricultural cultivation in the latter half of the

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nineteenth century. Using industrial plows manufactured in

cities, farmers undertook such a thorough reworking of the

land that “the dozens of species that together defined the

prairie ecosystem gave way to the handful of plants that

defined the farm.”9

The establishment of permanent agriculture entailed

further ecological changes both on the prairies and in other

regions. Whereas the Indians who lived on the plains had set

fires to keep trees from moving into the grassland, American

farmers could not afford to risk losing the permanent,

wooden structures that were integral to their farm

operations, so they employed means to prevent and fight

fires. Without the fires, woods began to appear in those

areas not under cultivation.10 Although farmers used the new

woodlots for lumber, the supply was insufficient, and they

turned to Chicago lumber merchants for the rest of what they

needed to build their houses, barns, and other buildings.

Combined with its own enormous use of wooden building

materials, Chicago’s role as a market in conveying lumber 9 Cronon, 1991, 99.10 Cronon, 1991, 101.

13

further west resulted in dramatic ecological changes in the

forests of Wisconsin and Michigan. The forests around Lake

Michigan were harvested so heavily that, by century’s end,

they could no longer supply most of Chicago’s lumber needs,

so the city’s merchants began buying and selling more and

more wood via railway connections.11 By this point in the

book, we know without Cronon having to say so that this

surely set in motion ecological changes in yet other

regions.

Cronon’s attention to the role of markets in the

ecological changes caused by the lumber business indicates

yet another aspect of his environmental history: the

fundamental interconnectedness of economics and ecology.

Through its careful examination of grain, lumber, and meat,

Nature’s Metropolis shows that the ecological history of Chicago

and its hinterlands is tightly interwoven with the dynamics

of market capitalism. Farmers in the prairies west of

Chicago grew grains because they knew they could sell them

in the city’s market, where they existed as both edible

11 Cronon, 1991, 198.

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commodities and, in the form of futures, as “monetary

abstractions.”12 Flows of capital orchestrated relationships

between “city, town, and country” that, taken as a system,

became “the single most powerful environmental force

reshaping the American landscape since the glaciers began

their long retreat to the north.”13 The intersection of

capitalist economics and ecological change which Cronon

found in a more incipient state in colonial New England thus

appears full-blown in his treatment of nineteenth century

Chicago.14 Having brought capitalism into the picture, we

now turn to Raymond Williams, a British Marxian writer and

culture critic whose analysis of some of the key concepts in

environmentalism helped lay the groundwork for Cronon’s

environmental history.

Conceptual Issues Raised by Raymond Williams

Since, in looking at Chicago, Cronon found that changes

in the natural world take place as much due to the

supermarket and the stock market as to events in the forest 12 Cronon, 1991, 126.13 Cronon, 1991, 265.14 Cronon, 1991, 79.

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and field, we are compelled to ask: what does he mean by

“nature?”

In the early 1970s, Raymond Williams began to think

about just such conceptual problems. As a Marxian, Williams

was particularly sensitive to the alienation of human labor.

Where Marx had focused on alienated labor stemming from

capitalist class systems, Williams noticed that many people

thought about labor in a way that alienated it from the

concept of nature. That is, places where people mix their

work with the land or with natural resources—mines,

factories, shops, farms—are no longer considered fully

“natural,” thus stripping human beings of their

connectedness to and origination in the natural world. To

Williams, the separation of labor from nature was

inaccurate. “We have mixed our labour with the earth,” he

wrote, “our forces with its forces too deeply to be able to

draw back and separate either out.”15 Williams also

contended that the belief in such a separation allowed for

15 Williams, Raymond. Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays. Radical Thinkers no. 11. London ; New York: Verso, 2005. Pg. 83.

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people to shirk responsibility for the ecological

consequences of their lives and livelihoods, a move which he

noted had been formalized through the disciplinary

separation between economics and ecology.16

Having explored these themes in a 1972 essay, “Ideas of

Nature,” Williams expanded them in his book The Country and the

City (1973). In it he analyzed changes in the way people

thought about nature, country, and city at different periods

in history. Surveying centuries of English writing on

nature, pastoralism, urbanization, and so forth, Williams

noted that these were not objective realities but concepts

that underwent change over time. Indeed, in his chapter “A

Problem of Perspective,” he shows that generation after

generation of English writers, stretching back to the Middle

Ages, decried the loss of an earlier way of life associated

with “Old England, settlement, the rural virtues.”17 In each

case, the older, more natural way of life had existed during

the writers’ childhoods but been compromised or lost since.

16 Williams, 2005, 84.17 Williams, Raymond. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University

Press, 1973. Pg. 12.

17

Writing as he was during the energetic emergence of the

modern environmental movement, Williams was signaling other

thinkers that they should not take for granted the meanings

of their stock concepts—nature, the environment, country,

city. In addition, he wanted to show that such concepts can

have pernicious effects through their ability to hide or

obscure human power relationships (both between classes of

people and between humans and non-humans).

Williams was clearly aware that his writing had

political implications, and as a Marxian, he no doubt wanted

it to be that way. All the same, his writing demonstrates a

subtlety and multi-sidedness that bespeaks a healthy caution

on his part. As he writes in The Country and the City, “The

relation of country and city is not only an objective

problem and history, but has been and still is for many

millions of people a direct and intense preoccupation and

experience.”18 One senses Williams’ empathy for the

experience of the “many millions of people” and his humility

18 Williams, 1973, 3.

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in acknowledging subjectivity as a legitimate part of the

issue.

In a 1995 essay, “Militant Particularism and Global

Ambition: The Conceptual Politics of Place, Space, and

Environment in the Work of Raymond Williams,” the Marxian

geographer David Harvey applauded Williams’ efforts to use

necessary abstractions (i.e. “city” and “country”) without

becoming convinced by his own articulation of them.19 As

Harvey notes, Williams achieved this in part by writing

fiction as well as non-fiction. In his novels, he was able

to have his characters present different and even opposing

viewpoints on the conceptual issues in which he was

interested. Even in his non-fiction work, however, Williams

worked to see dialectical processes rather than static

entities, and he sought to avoid fixed conclusions:

“Whenever I consider the relations between country and city,

and between birth and learning, I find this history active

and continuous: the relations are not only of ideas and

19 Harvey, David. Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge, 2001. Pg. 165.

19

experiences, but of rent and interest, of situation and

power; a wider system.”20 Williams, who along with his

colleagues at the New Left Review were appalled by the violence

of Stalinism, was able to retain Marxism’s search for

dialectic without succumbing to the Enlightenment idea that

“active and continuous” history would ever reach a

conclusion. And so he had room in his thinking for actual

people and unexpected natures.

Williams attempted to make strong interventions in

people’s understandings of the key concepts concerning

nature and humanity, but he wanted to avoid simply creating

his own brand of conceptual reductionism. Having been

influenced by Williams’ thinking on nature, William Cronon

has also tried and largely succeeded in holding a middle

ground—in his case, between uncritical acceptance of the

concepts of environmentalism and the kind of pure idealism

that would deny the existence of nature outside of human

cultural-linguistic construction.

Complexity and Ambivalence in Cronon’s Criticism20 Williams, 1973, 7.

20

Like Williams, Cronon has not shied away from making

strong statements in his analysis of the key concepts of

environmentalism. Probably his most prominent essay in this

regard is “The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to

the Wrong Nature” (1996). Mirroring Williams’ methodology in

The City and the Country, Cronon illustrates how the concept of

“wilderness” has changed through history, citing sources as

various as the bible, European romanticism, early American

nature writers like Henry David Thoreau and John Muir, and

contemporary environmentalists. Having established how

changeable “wilderness” as an idea has been, he asserts

strongly that “there is nothing natural about the concept of

wilderness. It is entirely a creation of the culture that

holds it dear, a product of the very history it seeks to

deny. . . . In virtually all of its manifestations,

wilderness represents a flight from history.”21

Cronon is similarly critical of the erasure of human

habitation from areas now considered “wilderness.” He

21 Cronon, William. "The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," in Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. Cronon, William editor. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1995. Pg. 79.

21

accuses American environmentalists of fetishizing tropical

rain forests to the extent of disempowering and risking the

displacement of their indigenous inhabitants. He also writes

that notions of wilderness which do not include people tend

to exonerate human beings from their ecological

responsibilities closer to home—as if, so long as we

frequent national parks and support the conservation of far-

off wildernesses, we don’t have to think critically about

the ecological webs in which our own homes, cars, and jobs

are embedded. Such a criticism is apparent in the following

statement, which also takes up the labor issue articulated

by Williams: “The dream of an unworked natural landscape is

very much the fantasy of people who have never themselves

had to work the land to make a living—urban folk for whom

food comes from a supermarket or a restaurant instead of a

field, and for whom the wooden houses in which they live and

work apparently have no meaningful connection to the forests

in which trees grow and die.”22

22 Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness,” 80.

22

Critics of Cronon have suggested that he is denying the

existence of wilderness altogether, or that he is providing

rhetorical ammunition for corporate interests who are more

than happy to cite an environmental historian in their

efforts to continue exploiting natural resources with as

little restraint as possible. Anyone who takes the time to

read Cronon’s work as a whole—even the entirety of any given

essay—will see, however, that he qualifies and situates his

opinions in the hope of preventing such misunderstandings.

In “The Trouble with Wilderness,” Cronon confesses his

own “deep ambivalence” about the concept of wilderness in

contemporary environmentalism. Having taken the position

that wilderness thought too often excludes human beings from

nature, he goes on to state that it should nonetheless be

appreciated for its placement of value on the nonhuman: “Any

way of looking at nature that encourages us to believe we

are separate from nature—as wilderness tends to do—is likely

to reinforce environmentally irresponsible behavior. On the

other hand, I also think it no less crucial for us to

recognize and honor nonhuman nature as a world we did not

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create, a world with its own independent, nonhuman reasons

for being as it is.”23 Having shown the relativity of

wilderness as a concept, he also gives reason to be cautious

about discarding the idea altogether: “To the extent that

wilderness has served as an important vehicle for

articulating deep moral values regarding our obligations and

responsibilities to the nonhuman world, I would not want to

jettison the contributions it has made to our culture’s ways

of thinking about nature.”24

In an earlier article "A Place for Stories: Nature,

History, and Narrative” (1992a), Cronon grapples with the

challenges that postmodern literary criticism has posed for

narrative history. He is, in a sense, outflanking his own

critics. Those who argue that Cronon denies the existence of

nature can see in this essay that he is willing to stand

against the postmodernist position that denies the existence

of any direct connection between textual representation and

non-linguistic reality. Although Cronon confesses his own

uncertainty on the matter, he writes that environmental 23 Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness,” 87.24 Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness,” 87.

24

history operates with at least three constraints that help

keep it true to its subject: verifiable factuality,

ecological accountability, and peer review.25 In pointing

out the criteria by which environmental historians measure

the quality of their narratives, he insinuates that the

narratives correspond to greater and lesser degrees to

something outside of themselves. It’s a bit of a roundabout

way to tackle post-structural epistemology, but it shows

that Cronon cares to establish the existence of a

correspondence between what we write and a nature that is

outside of our writing.

In another of his essays, “The Uses of Environmental

History,” Cronon writes that “historical wisdom usually

comes in the form of parables, not policy recommendations or

certainties.”26 In historical parable, he sees a form

wherein the richness of the past can speak to the present

without reducing to static description or over-confident 25 Cronon, William. "A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative,” Journal of American History 78:4 (March, 1992), p.1347-1376. Pg. 1371-1373.

26 Cronon, William. “The Uses of Environmental History" (Presidential Address, American Society for Environmental History), Environmental History Review, 17:3 (Fall 1993), p.1-22. Pg. 16.

25

prescription. Cronon argues that the complexity of

environmental history should “make us more critical of our

own certainty and self-righteousness, and deepen our respect

for the subtlety and mystery of the lives we lead on this

planet, entangled as we are in the warp and woof of linear

and cyclical, secular and sacred time.”27 Cronon has also

shown an unusual willingness, in the world of academic

history, to include his personal experiences in his writing.

“I celebrate with others who love wilderness the beauty and

power of the things it contains,” he writes in “The Trouble

with Wilderness.” “Remember this? The torrents of mist shoot

out from the base of a great waterfall in the depths of a

Sierra canyon, the tiny droplets cooling your face . . .

Remember the feelings of such moments, and you will know as

well as I do that you were in the presence of something

irreducibly nonhuman, something profoundly Other than

yourself. Wilderness is made of that too.”28

To conclude this essay, I suggest that these kinds of

nuanced, personal, and positive prescriptions for ways to 27 Cronon, William. “Uses of Environmental History,” 19.28 Cronon, “Trouble with Wilderness,” 70.

26

think about and relate to the environment represent the best

way for historians to write critically and constructively

about nature.

Positive Language, Joyful Practice

Like Cronon, the Buddhist writer Gary Snyder has long

been concerned with issues of the American West—the survival

of Native cultures, the destruction of western ecosystems,

and the harmony (or lack thereof) between labor, culture,

and nature. Snyder’s willingness to examine his own

experience, and his lifelong training in Buddhism, seem to

have helped him steer clear of the issues of language-traps

and negativity discussed in this essay. Quite to the

contrary, his work exudes a fresh confidence about our human

ability to relate to nature both with and without language,

both critically and joyfully.

In his essay “Writers and the War Against Nature,”

Snyder tells the story of coming to know the birds of the

ocean as a young man working on an oil tanker in the 1950s.

“I loved watching the albatross,” he writes. “A few of those

27

huge graceful birds would always be cruising along behind

our ship, trailing the wake for bits of food. I learned that

a Wandering Albatross (of the southern hemisphere) might fly

a million miles in one lifetime, and that it takes a pair of

them almost a year to raise one chick.”29

In 2005 Snyder was saddened to read about a sharp

decline in the albatross population, attributable largely to

the birds getting caught in industrial fishing nets and

drowning. Snyder is quick to show that he does not mourn the

albatross as representative of a pristine, humanless nature:

“Human beings have interacted with nature for millennia, and

sometimes destructively so.” But, taking an analogy from the

title of the book Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests, he

goes on to write that human destructiveness of the natural

world “was never quite like ‘war’” in previous ages.30

Snyder’s concern is for both the species which are under

threat of extinction and for the impoverishment of the human29 Snyder, Gary. Back on the Fire: Essays. Emeryville, CA : [Berkeley, Calif.]:

Shoemaker & Hoard ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2007. Pg. 61.

30 Snyder, 2007, 62. Jensen, Derrick. Strangely Like War: The Global Assault on Forests. Politics of the

Living. White River Junction, Vt: Chelsea Green Pub. Co, 2003.

28

mind which accompanies their loss.31 “There is a tame, and

also a wild, side to the human mind,” he writes. “The wild

side is larger, deeper, more complex, and though it cannot

be fully known, it can be explored.”32

Snyder’s use of “wild” here needs to be understood in

the context of definitions of the words “nature,” “wild,”

and “wilderness” he set out in his 1990 book The Practice of the

Wild. “Nature” he takes to mean “the physical universe and

all its properties.” He thereby includes humans and all of

their activities and byproducts: “By these lights there is

nothing unnatural about New York City, or toxic wastes, or

atomic energy, and nothing—by definition—that we do or

experience in life is ‘unnatural.’” By “wild” he intends a

different set of meanings: “eluding analysis, beyond

categories, self-organizing, self-informing, playful,

surprising, impermanent, insubstantial, independent,

complete, orderly, unmediated, freely manifesting, self-

31 For more on the impoverishment of the human mind through loss of contact with nature, see Paul Shepard’s Encounters with Nature: Essays. Washington, D.C. : Covelo, Calif: Island Press ; Shearwater Books, 1999.

32 Snyder, 2007, 62.

29

authenticating, self-willed, complex, quite simple.”

Finally, he takes “wilderness” to mean places “where the

wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and

nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of

order.”33 Snyder’s refined articulation of these key words

allows him to make the kinds of constructive statements

about our world that even Cronon at times struggles to

achieve. With these definitions he writes, for instance,

that New York City is natural but not wild.34 Human beings

are always natural, but human societies have the power to

reduce wildness and, at least temporarily, to virtually

eliminate wilderness.

Snyder’s recommendation for addressing the problem of

vanishing wilderness is to cultivate our empathy for

wildness everywhere by finding it first in ourselves.

Drawing from Buddhist teachings about the non-duality of

mind and body, he asserts that “Language is a mind-body

system that coevolved with our needs and nerves. Like

33 Snyder, Gary. The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations,1952-1998. Washington, D.C: Counterpoint, 1999. Pgs. 171-173.

34 Snyder, 1999, 173.

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imagination and the body, language rises unbidden. It is of

a complexity that eludes our rational intellectual

capacities.”35 Establishing language’s origins in embodiment

offers a powerful counterpoint to the recursiveness and

constructedness of language emphasized by post-

structuralism. And indeed, the Buddhist tradition from which

Snyder draws has found it possible and beneficial to

construct a meaningful ethics in the midst of acknowledging

that everything is “constructed” in interdependence and

impermanence. “Heraclitus, the Stoics, the Buddhists,

scientists, and you average alert older person all know that

everything in this world is ephemeral and unpredictable,”

writes Snyder.36 For this reason, “Sustainability cannot

mean some kind of permanence. . . . We must live with

change, like a bird on the wing, and doing so—let all other

beings live on too.”37

And how do we live “like a bird on the wing”? The

suggestion isn’t much good without a program for action, and

35 Snyder, 1999, 177.36 Snyder, 1999, 388.37 Snyder, 2007, 70.

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that is why Buddhist epistemology is a practice-able set of

ideas. When Snyder writes, for instance, that our bodies are

wild, he is not speculating but rather speaking from his

experience of his own body.

To make this more concrete: Buddhist epistemology

argues that the way we breathe is also a form of knowing. We

don’t have to understand it—and certainly don’t have to

control it—for it to function. At the same time, we can

become aware of our breathing in meditation—its steadiness,

variety, sensitivity—and learn from it over time. Ideally,

when we reflect on the oxygen-carbon dioxide cycle through

which trees live, or the pulse of leafy expansion and

denuded contraction which marks an aspen’s seasonal cycle,

these processes can have physical resonance in our whole

selves rather than just mental resonance in our thinking. We

can “know” something about trees through practices like

awareness of breathing that we simply cannot know through

our thoughts and language alone.

This type of practice has the virtue of empiricism;

it’s a way to test ideas. Perhaps even more importantly

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though, it has the capacity to open the door to joyfully

embodied connection with wildnesses both human and non-

human. Snyder’s authority as an environmental writer has

accrued to him easily as much through the love for life he

conveys in his writing as for the clarity of his ideas about

that life.

Snyder is in some sense also a “western” writer. His

West includes the places he has lived on the American West

Coast—his birthplace on a farm north of Seattle; San

Francisco, where he was part of the Beat Movement in the

1950s; and his home in the Sierra Nevadas, Kitkitdizze,

where he has lived in a log cabin without electricity since

1970. But Snyder’s West is also a wide West, stretching

across the Pacific to Japan and its westerly cultural

forebears, China and India. He has written about living,

working, traveling, and seeking wildernesses in all of these

areas and many more—ultimately the West connects everywhere.

Snyder has demonstrated in his life and his writing that a

commitment to nature doesn’t have to mean naivety, nor does

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a commitment to place and sustainability mean stasis or ill-

humor.

Eating the living germs of grassesEating the ova of large birdsthe fleshy sweetness packed

around the sperm of swaying trees . . .Eating each other’s seed

eatingah, each other.38

“To know the spirit of a place is to realize that you

are a part of a part and that the whole is made of parts,

each of which is whole,” he writes. “You start with the part

you are whole in.”39

Here’s hoping that the “nature” we find in the West and

its history is a part in which can learn to be increasingly

whole.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cronon, William. Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England.1st rev. ed. New York: Hill and Wang, 2003 (1983).

——. Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.

——, ed. Uncommon Ground: Toward Reinventing Nature. 1st ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1995.

38 “Song of the Taste,” Snyder, 1999, 451.39Snyder, 1999, 193.

34

——"A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative” (1992), Journal of American History 78:4 (March, 1992), p.1347-1376.

——"The Trouble with Wilderness, or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature," Environmental History, 1:1 (January 1996), 7-55

——"The Uses of Environmental History" (Presidential Address, American Society for Environmental History), Environmental History Review, 17:3 (Fall 1993), p.1-22.

Turner, Frederick Jackson, British Library, Adam Matthew Digital (Firm),and American Historical Association. The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Empire Online. Section V, Race, Class, Imperialism and Colonialism, 1607-2007. Marlborough, England: Adam Matthew Digital, 2007.

Harvey, David. "Militant particularism and global ambition: the conceptual politics of place, space, and environment in the work of Raymond Williams," in Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge, 2001.

Snyder, Gary. The Gary Snyder Reader: Prose, Poetry, and Translations,1952-1998. Washington, D.C: Counterpoint, 1999.

—— Back on the Fire: Essays. Emeryville, CA : [Berkeley, Calif.]: Shoemaker & Hoard ; Distributed by Publishers Group West, 2007.

Williams, Raymond. Culture and Materialism: Selected Essays. Radical Thinkers no.11. London ; New York: Verso, 2005.

——. The Country and the City. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973.

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