I have long been at battle with The Practice of the Wild by a fellow named Gary Snyder.

I went to see and hear a poet only three or four times in my life, but one of those times was to see Gary Snyder at Bowdoin. I have been reading and savoring Gary's poems for decades now. But the book I refer to is a book, it tells me, of essays.

My problem, my battle, has been with the first chapter. In my edition of this extraordinary book, it begins halfway down page 3 and continues only until halfway down page 26. Less than 24 pages of text, in other words, which it took me five years to read. Lately I moved beyond it, into the succeeding chapters, which roll right along by comparison. They are dense with ideas but they can be absorbed at a sitting.

First of all, let me recommend it. Wholly and wholeheartedly. You, of all people, should read this chapter.

Why did I take five years? Because it sang. I would get a sentence or a paragraph read, and then shut the book on my index finger, you know the way you do, and consider it. The words rang in my mind, awakening harmonically the resonating thoughts and history in there. And made me stop and think, and then consider, contemplate and remember. And have to come back days or weeks later, when another sentence or paragraph, or even the same one over again, would stop me, make me turn the words in my hand, match the concepts to my own conclusions and experience. And shut the book on my finger again, only to put it down.

It starts innocently enough, with a tale of a meeting with an old man. You can read a whole page and a half before the first stopper comes.

The book still counted as one of my 'current' books, so I'd take it along on trips or camping or visiting friends. But I couldn't just swallow the new words and move on, because one stopper would succeed the next so swiftly. I read the whole first chapter at once, the first time, being a dogged sort of man, but there'd been so much in it, I had to start it afresh the next time. Eventually, a second book would be brought along on these trips, so I'd have something to read.

Gary is concerned with the words wild and free.  To be truly free, Gary says, one must take on the basic conditions as they are-- painful, impermanent, open, imperfect-- and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us. For in a fixed universe there would be no freedom.

Damn.

With that freedom we improve the campsite, teach children, oust tyrants. The world is nature, an in the long run inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence.

Good one.

When we think of wilderness in America today, we think of remote and perhaps designated regions that are commonly alpine, desert, or swamp.  Just a few centuries ago, when virtually all was wild in North America, wilderness was not something exceptionally severe.  Pronghorn and bison trailed through the grasslands, creeks ran full of salmon, there were acres of clams, and grizzlies, cougar, and bighorn sheep were common in the lowlands.  There were human beings, too: North America was all populated.  One might say yes, but thinly -- which raises the question of according to whom.  The fact is, people were everywhere.  When the Spanish foot soldier Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his two companions (one of whom was African) were wrecked on the beach of what is now Galveston, and walked to the Rio Grande valley and then south back into México between 1528 and 1536, there were few times in the whole eight years that they were not staying at a native settlement or camp.  They were always on trails.

It has always been part of the basic human experience to live in a culture of wilderness.  There has been no wilderness without some kind of human presence for several hundred thousand years.  Nature is not a place to visit, it is home-- and within that home territory there are more familiar and less familiar places.

Yeah.

Wilderness can mean "a place of abundance" as in John Milton, "A wildernesse of sweets."

Milton's usage of wilderness catches the very real condition of energy and richness that is so often found in wild systems.  "A wildernesse of sweets" is like the billions of herring or mackerel babies in the ocean, the cubic miles of krill, wild prairie grass seed (leading to the bread of this day, made from the germs of grasses) -- all the incredible fecundity of small animals and plants, feeding the web.  But from another side, wilderness has implied chaos, eros, the unknown, realms of taboo, the habitat of both the ecstatic and the demonic.  In both senses it is a place of archetypal power, teachings, and challenge.

!

So we can say that New York City and Tokyo are "natural" but not "wild."  They do not deviate from the laws of nature, but they are habitat so exclusive in the matter of who and what they give shelter to, and so intolerant of other creatures, as to be truly odd.  Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and nonliving beings flourishing according to their own sorts of order.  In ecology we speak of "wild systems."  When an ecosystem is fully functioning, all the members are present at the assembly.  To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness.  Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive.

I mean, the mother does not let up!  Jung was dense reading, but this chapter has set new records.  Check this one:

It seems that a short time ago in the history of occidental ideas there was a fork in the trail. The line of thought that is signified by the names of Descartes, Newton, and Hobbes, saying that life in a primary society is "nasty, brutish, and short"-- all of them were city dwellers-- was a profound rejection of the organic world.  For a reproductive universe, 'sharp as the edge of a knife,' they substituted a model of sterile mechanism and an economy of production. These thinkers were as hysterical about "chaos" as their predecessors a century before had been about "witches."

Instead of making the world safer for humankind, removing the edge from that knife, which is only nature, the foolish tinkering with the powers of life and death by the occidental scientist-engineer-ruler puts the whole planet on the brink of degradation.

Most of humanity-- foragers, peasants, or artisans-- has always taken the other fork.