“there are paths that can be followed, and there is a path that cannot – it is not a path, it is the wilderness”

(Gary Snyder [1990], The Practice of the Wild)

Taken by U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Oh, where to start. Exploring the writings of deep ecologist Gary Snyder in The Practice of the Wild was a soulful journey. His words were laced with such deep meaning and resonated with so much tenor that I found myself poring over his book at length.

Why did I react this way? Perhaps it is Snyder’s love of storytelling. Maybe it is the way he skillfully meanders though history. Or possibly it is his enticingly poetic way of writing about matters of great, but often ignored, importance.

A Story for Illustration

For whatever reason why Snyder so captured my attention, his message was definitely not lost. As to how it can perhaps best be conveyed, it may be worth considering a short tale. It is a story he retells of a girl who fell in love with a grizzly bear.

In the story, a girl runs off with a grizzly bear, gradually becoming wilder and wilder, to the point where she even starts growing fur-like hair. While she becomes bear-like, he becomes shamanistic, shifting shapes and chanting songs. Eventually she becomes pregnant and gives birth to their offspring.

The story ends in tragedy, with the girl’s family killing the bear. She in vengeance wipes out almost all of her family. In the end, she entirely transforms into a bear like her belated husband and disappears with her offspring into the woods.

For this reason, the natives of North America do not eat grizzly. But now, we are told, that the Europeans have come, “The bears are being killed, [and] the humans are everywhere…”

The Moral

The moral of this story? The line between the “wild” and “humans” is a thin one. To explain further, I will paraphrase Snyder’s thoughts somewhat by saying that nature brings forth form.

Consequently, he says, “Huckleberries and salmon call for bears, the clouds of plankton of the North Pacific call for salmon, and salmon call for seals and thus orcas.” As for what brings our lineage into form, “It is surely the ‘mountains and rivers without end’-the whole of this earth on which we find ourselves more or less competently at home.”

What I take away from his thoughts on “form” is that we are just one of the many expressions of life on this planet. While we are unique, we must recognize and respect the environment that called us into being, just as it brought the many other species into existence.

However, as indicated by today’s destruction of the grizzly and other bears, we are in danger of destroying the very earth that gave rise to us. For illustration, Snyder comments on how deforestation is causing life-destroying flooding, extinction of millions of species, and global warming.

Regaining a Balance

If we are ravaging the earth so much, a logical question would be what is the alternative? According to Snyder, a balance needs to be restored between humankind and nature. We need, he says, “a civilization that wildness can endure.”

The benefits of such action are both practical and profound. For by doing this, we could 1) save the precious creatures that inhabit this earth with us, an important endeavor given that “[h]undreds of millions of years might elapse before the equivalent of a whale or an elephant is seen again, if ever”, and 2) perhaps surprisingly for many, enrich our societies in countless ways. The occurrence of the latter is possible because creating a civilization/wildness balance  requires reestablishing a sense of place. And, as Snyder intriguingly claims, culture, language, and a sense of the sacred all emerge from having a grounding in one’s locale.

Wishing to make absolutely clear the point of how we can achieve such a balance, he writes, “It is not enough just to ‘love nature’ or to want to ‘be in harmony with Gaia.’ Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place, and it must be grounded in information and experience.”

A healthy dose of humility to our predecessors is provided along with this advice. For he later goes on to say, if we are to reconnect, we have much to learn from the ‘primitives’ that came before us. Their knowledge enabled them to use their natural surroundings as a “rich supply of fibers, poisons, medicines, intoxicants, detoxicants, containers, waterproofing, food, dyes, glues, incense, amusement, companionship, inspiration.”

Looking Beyond the Physical Realm

Reestablishing a sense of place has more than simply practical purposes, however. It can help us recapture our sense of the sacred. And so when reiterating the words of Geoffrey Blainey, Snyder recalls, “The land itself was their chapel and their shrines were hills and creeks and their religious relics were animals, plants, and birds. Thus the migrations of aboriginals, though spurred by economic need, were always pilgrimages.”

For this reason, Snyder says, “Human beings themselves are at risk  - not just on some survival-of-civilization level, but more basically on the level of heart and soul. We are in danger of losing our souls.”

One cannot help but wish, when reading Synder, that we will one day reconnect with the land just like our ancestors. On this matter, Snyder appears to be eternally hopeful, but warns: “For the non-Native American to become at home on this continent, he or she must be born again in this hemisphere, on this continent, properly called Turtle Island.” In other words, he asserts, “we must consciously fully accept and recognize that this is where we live and grasp the fact that our descendants will be here for millennia to come.”

Can We Succeed?

Do we have it in us to do what Snyder calls for? I believe so, and think he would agree. Given that for him, the natural world is only temporarily in hiding. “Nature is ultimately in no way endangered…The wild is indestructible,” he claims. But before it is too late for us humans, we must look within ourselves, and go off the beaten path both figuratively and literally, to find the wildness within ourselves.

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