Gary Snyder The Practice of the Wild

GARY SNYDER: THE PRACTICE OF THE WILD:

ASSIGNMENT #1: In one paragraph, describe where you live without using artificial, governmental, human-made boundaries or markers.

ASSIGNMENT #2: Trace a boundary to your bioregion by following the outermost limits of the range of flora or fauna in your bioregion.

THE ETIQUETTE OF FREEDOM:

"In a state of nature, man has the reciprocal obligation to protect the life, liberty, and property of others." -John Locke 1690

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the sustainability of the biotic community; it is wrong when it tends otherwise."--Aldo Leopold 1940

-The Etiquette of Freedom stems from the lessons of the wilderness experience:

• 1. Do no unnecessary harm (4)

  2. Accept conditions as they are (5):

  3. Moral obligation to the unborn humans, flora and fauna (4, 16, 44)

  4. Know that the world is wild. (5-6, 16) Know that humans are wild: wilderness develops a natural self. (7, 15, 17, 31):

  5. Celebrate gift exchange of our give and take from nature: Be humble, grateful, mindful. (20, 22, 23) :

  6. Know that wilderness places have all original flora and fauna intact. (10,12)

  7. Learn self-effacement and self-renewal through “practices” in wilderness. (21, 24-25 )

  8. Think bioregionally: embrace an ecocentric perspective. (12, 40-41)

  9. Recognize the interconnection and interdependence within the ecosystem. (19, 26, 39, 40-41)

  10. Practice Ecocentrism: know that the natural world is watching. (19, 22, 47-48, 101):

GROUP 1. How does one resolve the false dichotomy between the wild and the civilized?

-develop practices in the wild and know that you are never not in nature.

Be whole by completing the journey toward the natural self and home with the

"etiquette of freedom" to the known / societal self with. (24-25) and (101):

"The point is to make intimate contact with the real world, real self. Sacred refers

to that which helps take us (not only human beings) out of our little selves into the

whole mountains rivers mandala universe. One should not dwell on the specialness

of the extraordinary experience nor hope to leave the political quagg behind to enter a

perpetual state of heightened insight….

The best purpose of such studies and hikes is to be able to come back to the lowlands

and see all the land about us, agricultural, suburban, urban, as part of the same territory-

never totally ruined, never completely unnatural. It can be restored, and humans could

live in considerable numbers on much of it. Great Brown Bear is walking with us, Salmon

swimming upstream with us, as we stroll a city street."

AND REVIEW:

• 1. Know that the world is wild. (5-6, 16) Know that humans are wild: wilderness develops a natural self. (7, 15, 17, 31):

  2. Celebrate gift exchange of our give and take from nature: Be humble, grateful, mindful. (20, 22, 23) :

  3. Know that wilderness places have all original flora and fauna intact. (9-10,12) : definition of wild

  4. -Dissolve the dichotomy between the wild and the civilized: 110

NO NATURE: "To resolve the dichotomy of the civilized and the wild, we must first resolve to be

whole by directly intuiting our condition in the actually existing world we realize that we

have had nothing from the beginning... The experience of emptiness engenders compassion."

GROUP 2: How do the practices of the wilderness experience expand your anthropocentric view toward an ecocentric view?

• 1. Think bioregionally: embrace an ecocentric perspective. (12, 40-41)

  2. Recognize the interconnection and interdependence within the ecosystem. (39, 40-41)

  3. Practice Ecocentrism: know that the natural world is watching. (19, 22, 47-48, 101):

AND REVIEW:

GOOD, WILD, SACRED:

Reject anthropocentrism of the Great Chain of Being: 98

-Wilderness is order: 100

-Wilderness experience returns one to the natural self, ecocentrism, and bioregionalism 101

-Goal: a selfless love of the land: 102-3

BLUE MOUNTAINS CONSTANTLY WALKING:

-Develop a panoptic perspective of earth: 117-118

and review:

"...at the camp we had around us the elemental world of water and light and earth

and air. We felt the presences of the wild creatures,… the river, the trees, the stars.

Though we had our troubles, we had them in a true perspective."

"The wilderness pilgrim's step by step breath by breath walk up a trail into those

snowfields, carrying all on the back, is so ancient a set of gestures as to bring a

profound sense of body-mind joy."

Burning the Small Dead

Burning the small dead

branches

broke from beneath

thick spreading whitebark pine.

a hundred summers

snowmelt rock and air

hiss in a twisted bough. sierra granite;

Mt. Ritter-

black rock twice as old.

Deneb, Altair

windy fire

--Gary Snyder No Nature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Pine Tree Tops

in the blue night

frost haze, the sky glows

with the moon

pine tree tops

bend snow-blue, fade

into sky, frost, starlight.

the creak of boots.

rabbit tracks, deer tracks.

what do we know。

-Gary Snyder No Nature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

Piute Creek

One granite ridge

A tree would be enough

Or even a rock, a small creek,

A bark shred in a pool.

Hill beyond hill, folded and twisted

Tough trees crammed

In thin stone fractures

A huge moon on it all, is too much.

The mind wanders. A million

Summers, night air still and the rocks

Warm. Sky over endless mountains.

All the junk that goes with being human

Drops away, hard rock wavers

Even the heavy present seems to fail

This bubble of a heart

Cold proud eyes

Words and books

Like a small creek of a small ledge

Gone in the dry air.

A clear, attentive mind

Has no meaning but that

Which sees is truly seen.

No one loves rock yet we are here.

Night chills. A flick

In the moonlight

Slips into shadow:

Back there unseen

Of Cougar or Coyote

Watch me rise and go.

-Gary Snyder No Nature. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.

GROUP 3: What is etiquette? What is an "etiquette of freedom"?

Why do we have a moral, reciprocal obligation to respect freedom life and liberty of original flora and fauna?

Why do we have a moral obligation to the unborn?

"The lessons we learn from the wild become the etiquette of freedom. We learn to

take ourselves as no more or no less than another being in the Big Watershed…

We can accept each other as barefooted equals sleeping on the same ground. We can

give up hoping to be eternal and quit fighting dirt. We can chase off mosquitoes and

fence out varmints without hating them."

What is the MORAL OBLIGATION TO THE UNBORN (HUMAN AND ANIMAL):

Nature is a gift we bear in trust and bequeath to the next generation of flora and fauna and humans:

Now it has become urgent that the sense of community should include the world, that it

should come to be a realization that all men ultimately share the same place, the same

nature, and the same destiny...

But the ideal community would include not just the living; it would include the unborn. It

would be aware with a clarity and concern which the best of us have hardly imagined,

that the living cannot think or speak or act without changing the lives of those who live

after them...And it would include the place, the land, itself. For man is not merely 'in' the

world. He is, he must realize and learn to say or be doomed, part of it. The earth he is

made of he bears in trust.

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THE PLACE, THE REGION, AND THE COMMONS:

-LAND ETHIC 1: a natural contract that local people make with their local natural system. Organization of human society that includes the nonhuman. It extends ethical obligations to include human and nature. (39)

-LAND ETHIC 2: Extend natural contract to include the “unborn” flora, fauna, and humans(44)

PAIR 1: 27-29: What does it mean to be acculturated to a place in nature? (accultration: "'process of learning and incorporating the values, beliefs, language, customs and mannerisms of the new place")

PAIR 2: (29-31) What is "the region" you came to know through the CS outdoor program? On 31, develop how the region you came to know produced you?

PAIR 3: (35-39) Define the commons and develop why Snyder thinks granting control of the commons to the US Forest Service is wrong (37)?

PAIR 4: Define a bioregional perspective and explain why the WhiteCloud Wildernesses with bissecting motorized trials violates the command that "you are a part of a part and the whole is made od parts, each of which is whole." (41)?

PAIR 5: Explain the quote on 47-48: "We are natives and we are restless. We have no country; we live in the country. The Region is against the Regime. Regions are anarchic" in connection to the Northern Rockies Ecosystem Ptotection Act:

-Know and act like you live in a bioregeion (40-41)

-Become born again as a native American on Turtle Island (43)

-Eliminate artificial boundaries (48).

SURVIVAL AND SACRAMENT:

-Avoid human-centered resource management: 194