| The Magazine of the CALIFORNIA ACADEMY OF SCIENCES |
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California Futures Gary Snyder
California Wild: With wilderness areas and natural habitat disappearing at such an alarming rate are we in danger of losing the wild in California? Gary Snyder: Clearly so, particularly because even the protections that are in place now, designated wilderness areas on the public lands for example, are beginning to look increasingly shaky and fragile. I've begun to feel lately that we need to be very alert about the protections provided by public land since even the concept of public land is under attack, and in the long run, say by the year 2020, will probably be a tough political struggle. Just as politics created them, politics can undo them. This is something we have to remember. CW: You've had a long involvement with these kinds of agencies. Have you seen them change over the years? GS: Agency by agency yes, and to some degree in different directions. Everyone I know has been involved in trying to bring about change in the U.S. Forest Service. Twenty years and more of politicking, meetings, letter writing, essays, e-mail, etc., has made a tiny change in Forest Service attitude and policies, but even as I speak there are elements in the Forest Service who are trying to get a larger cut, even while saying, "We believe in sustainability and ecosystem management." I'm happy to say that here in central California we've had a very pleasant experience with the Bureau of Land Management [BLM]. There are people on all levels at work in the public lands agencies whose hearts are in the right place and for whom the basic values of biodiversity and sustainability are meaningful. And they are willing and able to try and combine those with necessary issues of community stability and economics. There is also a large number of people within the public land agencies for whom the mining, logging, and grazing constituency is still their only constituency. CW: We tend to think of the wild as unmanipulated natural habitat. What other senses of wild should we keep in mind? GS: As I say in my book of essays, The Practice of the Wild, I make a distinction between wild and wilderness. What you just mentioned was wilderness--wild spaces, wild habitat as unmanipulated and natural habitat--whereas the word "wild" itself refers to the deep universal process of self-management, self-propagation, self-organization that's characteristic of absolute reality. That's what the wild is. Yes, there is another sense we need to keep in mind. Thinking of wild land as unmanipulated natural habitat drags you toward the trap of pristinity. Wilderness does not have to be pristine. Nothing is ever pristine. Nature, natural habitats, and natural lands have gone through endless changes and disturbances over millions of years. If a little mountain range was clearcut 500 years ago, and has now totally grown back, does that mean it's not wild because at one time it was clearcut? Of course not. It is the presence of the wild process of restoring and going about its ways, bringing back a combination of plant species, being reinhabited by an appropriate wildlife--that is the nature of the wild. We just have to leave it alone and let it come back. Now, as The Wildlands Project (see Habitats) points out, you need large wilderness for certain large vertebrates. Small wilderness will not provide the space for a lot of different creatures. Still, we must appreciate everything on every scale. So a little, tiny, unmanipulated, "let go" wild or maybe managed urban park is much to be appreciated. The birds will stop there and the butterflies will stop there, but mini-parks, mini-wildernesses won't provide the space for the wolf and the grizzly bear to roam and reproduce. So there has to be a scale for a full-size, all-members-present ecosystem which is a kind of ideal that we have to keep in mind. All the members that were there at the time of Columbus should still be there now. At least in a few places. CW: What exactly is "the practice of the wild"? GS: We're here trying to find what "the practice of the wild" is, and one of the practices is to acknowledge the wildness in ourselves, to see the ways in which the imagination is wild. Language is wild. Self-organizing, wonderfully complex, very rich--comes out of where? We never learned how to speak our native tongue in school. School only taught us how to write it. So that deep wild process that uses our bodies and our minds is the first level of some kind of practice. If a person can touch base with that and appreciate it for what it is, then the sympathies can extend to that same wonderful, self-organizing and independent life and spirit that is out there in the ecosystems with the pileated woodpeckers and the gray squirrels living their lives. CW: One term you used in a recent San Francisco Examiner article is "carrying capacity" in reference to watersheds and how that relates to the rapid movement of people. It seems like the sense of limits is rarely part of the dialogue. GS: "Carrying capacity" is not a very popular topic for public discussion, as is any notion of limits. We live in a society with an ideology of "no limits" and of endless growth. This is simply an ideology. It is a contemporary secular religion. David Loy has written an excellent little article called "The Religion of the Market" on the almost unquestioned affirmation that this society gives to such an idea. Yet everything has a limit. Everything isn't permanent. Every one of us is ephemeral, and so are our societies ephemeral, and our nations, and our species. Another thing that is commonly said in our society is that you must be willing to change. Change or die. Well, I'll tell you one of the changes that people need to swing around to is changing their idea that boundless growth and a world without limits is the only possible world. Self-discipline, self-regulation, self-control are family values, are values we speak of in terms of the family, and community, and our children. Why not speak of those in terms of our own society, too? What about better character and better self-discipline on the full-scale social and political level? We would hope to return to the civic consciousness that was present in the early American political mind and try to do more projects that are for the benefit of the society and the environment, rather than sitting back and letting the idea of virtually unregulated individual and corporate greed run away with the show. One of the directions that we're seeing now, which is the very rapid evolution of the grassroots commanding environmental thinking under the name of watershed or bioregional groups, has great promise and has already made a difference in a lot of areas, so that the environmental political game is no longer simply played between eight or ten major national organizations in Washington, but a dialogue is being played out on every level from the county up. CW: Can you speak of your involvement with the Yuba Watershed Institute?
GS: Well, we have a little group around here, it's true, that I was one of the founders of, and although we theoretically take on the whole watershed system, the South Yuba River is our territory of concern. Practically speaking, what we've mainly been able to do is forest and watershed inventory and study on this particular, maybe twenty-by-ten-mile ridge. But even that has been wonderfully instructive for us and for the neighbors, through our educational programs, and has had some small political effect, probably, as we have been able to give good biological information to the county and to our local BLM people. It is a small group that has nonetheless raised the political and ecological awareness of quite a number of people, and in the larger county area it's only one of several groups. And we're all talking to each other. If something like that is happening elsewhere, and I think it is, that's very hopeful. All I ask, so to speak, on a local level is that the Tahoe National Forest actually put into practice sustainable forestry that will guarantee biodiversity. By sustainable, let's say put it in a thousand-year framework. Now that sounds simple. It's actually doable. Scientifically speaking, we know how to do it. We just have to win the assent of the land managers and the voters. CW: Who will teach us about the wild in the next century? GS: Whoever comes up and touches base with it. Might be little kids. Might be some nerdy scientists. Might be a bunch of whitewater rafters. We'll look for it wherever we can find it. And I still hope that there will be people from the old traditional primary cultures--Yupik and Iñupiat eskimos, Paiutes, Western Shoshone, Tlingit and Haida fishermen, Ainu fishermen, backcountry Tibetan yak herders--that will have some of those skills and knowledges to share with us. CW: Is there anything that you fear as we get into the next century, or anything that gives you hope? GS: What we all need to fear is the enormous wealth and political dominance of the global economy and its capacity to destroy small cultures, to destroy small economies, and to destroy environment everywhere by manipulating not only American politics but Russian, Chinese, and Japanese politics. The global economy is a real fear. I feel hopeful about what I hear from all the people I meet. Everywhere I go I meet people, young, middle-aged, and old--all ages. If I were to judge the world by the people I meet when I travel around, I'd say we're in great shape. There are plenty of people out there whose heads are screwed on right and who are trying to lead lives of spiritual, ecological balance and righteousness, and who are not neglecting the political questions. So there's hope in that.
David Lukas is a writer and naturalist. |
Winter 2000
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