And that’s part of it—the wild can be a wood lot. Even the vacant lot in the city can be wild.
GS: The word “wilderness” is commonly interpreted nowadays by the media and by a lot of environmentalists in terms of the language of the Wilderness Act, which made a particular kind of definition of wilderness that was equable to its use on American public lands. And we realize in hindsight that they went a little too far in declaring that wilderness was totally pristine, showing no sign of the hands of man. It’s just language, is all.
When I was younger, working for the Forest Service, we were called on to take out an old sheepherder’s structure, dating back to the nineteenth century when the Basques actually drove the sheep into the high country meadows. But, well, you know, this has to be pristine now; we’ve got to take that shelter down. This is supposed to be pristine and this old shelter looks inappropriate.
But now that whole mentality has been reversed, too—now you have to have some different vocabulary, so it’s declared of “historical value,” and they leave it be. This is an ongoing thing. There are people who say that there have always been human beings around, so therefore nothing is wilderness. But the presence of human beings does not negate wilderness. It’s a matter of how much wildness as process is left intact.
WILL HEARST: The Mississippi of the environmental movement, as I understand it, was the Blue Planet movement—here’s this whole fragile planet . . . Whereas when I hear you talk, you don’t talk so much in these cosmic terms. You talk about nature outside my door, ten feet from where I’m sitting, a mile from my house, and that nature ought to be approached first in this region that is smaller and more local and more human-scaled.
GS: The Blue Planet image came from satellite photography. Stewart Brand picked it up and put it on the cover of the first Whole Earth Catalog and said, “Our whole sense of the planet has changed because we now have this picture of the planet Earth from outer space; this is one Earth; this is where we live.” And I said to Stewart, “Sure, that’s good, but people still don’t know or learn much, if that’s all you say.” People say they love nature. What they mean is they love what they see with their eyes and smell with their senses: the plant or animal life in their back-yard or the nearby creek or down by the park. For exactly those reasons, we might start getting to know our nonhuman neighbors, and it would be a help to understand which direction the water is running and where it might have come from. In other words, what are the lineaments of the place we’re in? It’s hands-on, ground-based nature learning that you can start teaching in grade school. Why is it that the salmon stocks are declining? You can know this.
The point is, “nature” always happens in a place, and generally, whatever you see and learn, you do so in a small place. You learn the mushroom, you learn the flower, you learn a bird, a slope, a canyon, a gulch, a grove of trees—as place. And we all live in a place.
JH: We live in particular.
GS: Even if you’re only there for a few months, you’re in a place. So why not look around and see where you are?
The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom.
Gary Snyder, The Practice of the Wild, “The Etiquette of Freedom”
GS: I don’t know if this is true or not—that a hen’s nest egg nearing the age at which a chick can peck its way out—that if a hawk’s shadow moves over the egg, the little chick inside will tremble.
JH: Ah, the intelligence is there.
GS: It’s the sort of intelligence that human beings aren’t always willing to acknowledge.
I had always sort of stupidly, ideologically excluded domestic animals from my curiosity, thinking, Oh, that’s too bad, they’ve been taken over by human beings, they’ve been colonized.
JH: But the colonization was very incomplete.
GS: And an animal is an animal. It’s another kind of organism, and it’s been fascinating to be with her [Emi] and really be forced to live in a world of nonverbal communication, and then to get better at it—both of us.
JH: I’ve been around Mexican ravens for seventeen years, and I finally passed muster with them last spring. For a long time they’d hide in the bushes and, you know, ambush my dog—but last spring, they started taking the walk with me. I was now accepted by this clan of ravens. Look how long it took to get there.
GS: So you know what we’re talking about again is that human/ nonhuman interaction. I have a falconer friend who catches and releases different kinds of raptors. He released a young male goshawk about three years ago, and after a little bit of training the hawk settled into the territory, which is a pine forest. And every morning, when he goes for a walk, the goshawk comes out and flies around above him.
JH: Yeah, paying a leisurely visit. You know, any creature that has an easy time making a living and getting their food, like porpoises or otters—they really spend a great deal of time just screwing around. I remember once after a snowstorm, I went out and tracked the haphazard paths of animals, which were going this way and that for no observable reason.
GS: So fooling around has great survival value, really. Evolution’s fueled by fooling around. So don’t call all of it intelligent design—some of it’s goofy design.
JH: Measured chaos, goofy design—marvelous. Is that why our perceptions are so adventurous? In the springtime where I live, on the U.S.-Mexico border, I might see thirty-four varieties of birds all at once. So how do I look to each of those species of birds?
GS: Okay—
JH: And then you can sense the craziness of the genome, or that each cell of that willow tree has nineteen thousand determinates. In each cell of what that willow tree is, everything becomes vivid, you know? The birds, my brain, the birds looking at me, me looking at the birds. Nature becomes totally holographic that way.
GS: Now you can write haiku.
JH: It just enlarges the conception of life. If you know that a teaspoon of soil has a billion bacteria in it, for example—
GS: So how do we put that into a poem?
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