A voice in the wilderness.

The author of fourteen books, Gary Snyder is one of our most respected living writers. Riprap, Myths & Texts, Earth House Hold, and the 1975 Pulitzer Prize-winning Turtle Island have established his stature as an internationally renowned poet and ecological philosopher. At sixty-five, he has a new book of essays coming out, called A Place in Space. "We human beings of the developed societies have once more been expelled from a garden," writes Snyder, "the formal garden of Euro-American humanism and its assumptions of human superiority, priority, uniqueness, and dominance. We have been thrown back into that other garden with all the other animals and fungi and insects, where we can no longer be sure we are so privileged. The walls between 'nature' and 'culture' begin to crumble as we enter a post-human era."

In Snyder's world view, the post-human era begins as humanity awakens to the fact that we have created a self-destructive culture: by destroying the natural world around us, we are destroying ourselves. A Place in Space (due out this fall from Counterpoint Press) offers a new vision for our future by critiquing humanity's stewardship of our endangered planet. Snyder delineates the impact of human behavior that takes the natural world for granted as a hardware store, a lumber yard, to be used and exploited. His dominant theme is that the challenge we are facing is no less than the end of nature as we have traditionally conceived it.

The poet paints a portrait of a natural world half-intact and half-destroyed. In doing so, he raises urgent questions: How can we control the greed and selfishness driving us to exploit nature and foul our own nest? Is there a human ethical obligation to the nonhuman world? What transformation of consciousness is needed for us to end our infantile political conflicts - one-on-one and between nation states - and instead to concentrate on rescuing the ecological health of the only home planet we will ever have?

"Political definitions on the landscape are quite arbitrary and recent," Snyder told me. "In the archaic cultures of the not-too-distant past, regions had a natural coherence because they were ecologically self-defining rather than politically defined." The birthright of all humans was "our knowledge of our local ecosystems."

According to Snyder, modern civilization is living in self-exile, estranged from our primal bond with the natural cosmos. We are alienated from each other - and from ourselves - because we are disconnected from nature. As a counter-measure, A Place in Space proposes implementation of the basics of deep ecology and asks humans to "include the non-human world in our political decision-making. The book is a manual of useful ideas and implicit strategies for how humans might live in the grand scheme. Ultimately, it's an affirmation of values - ecological, community, family, and watershed values. The implication is that we should not cave in to the idea that the only people who have ethics are the fundamentalists or radical right."

The book affirms humanity's relationship with place as a bedrock political and spiritual practice. "We are in a vast universe and the planet itself is just a tiny water hole in the desert of endless space," Snyder says. "Like in the Australian aboriginal outback, nobody fights at a water hole. You may come from different tribes and groups that have a lot of hostility, but water holes are sacred, something you do not squabble over. Everybody is given an opportunity to come in from the desert and get the water. The planet should be seen in that light."

A deep affinity for the natural world - and the rapture of poetry - have been central to Snyder's character since his youth. The grandson of an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World, Snyder grew up during the Depression on a small dairy farm outside of Seattle.

At bedtime, when he was a small boy, his mother read him poetry. As soon as he learned to write, he was composing his own poems.

On the farm, hard physical labor was a daily fact of his life. When he wasn't working, Snyder loved to roam the woods: hiking, swimming, exploring, and studying plants and animals. Intensely curious about experiencing solitude, at age nine or ten he would often camp alone overnight at a secret spot and watch the sun rise. One of his first passions was mountaineering: by his early adolescence, he had climbed all the highest peaks of the snow-capped Cascades. Inspired by these mountaineering experiences - which he says instilled a sense of self-discipline - Snyder wrote poetry regularly. He also delved into the world of literature, immersing himself in the work of Robinson Jeffers and D.H. Lawrence.

Snyder's vocation as a poet began in earnest in the summer of 1955. He was twenty-five years old and working long, grueling days on a trail crew in Yosemite's high country. At night after work, he would meditate on the cliffs. Alone under the serene, starry sky of the High Sierra, he wrote poetry - poetry that was a revelation, that seemed to come out of heretofore untapped inner sources. To Snyder, these poems felt innately different from any poetry he had ever written - far more serious and powerful. In fact, he had recently given up composing poetry because the endeavor did not seem to suit the gravitas of his temperament. That summer in Yosemite changed his mind.

A few months later, Snyder read his poem, "The Berry Feast," at a historic poetry reading at San Francisco's Six Gallery. That night his friend Allen Ginsberg gave a public reading of "Howl" for the first time, and the rebellious fervor and rage of the Beat Generation became part of the national psyche. Jack Kerouac, a close friend to both men, was in the audience. His evocation of the evening and his relationship with Snyder became the foundation of the seminal beat novel, The Dharma Bums. Kerouac's enduring characterization of Snyder as a "great new hero of American culture" made Snyder's lifestyle - proto-Beatnik, mountaineer, poet - a lodestar to many in the burgeoning youth culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s.

However, Snyder was soon living in Japan, pursuing a fascination with Asian culture that had taken root when, as a young boy, he stood awestruck in the presence of the great Asian landscape paintings hanging in the Seattle Art Museum. The groundwork for his journey was three years of Oriental language study at the University of California at Berkeley (following his undergraduate work at Reed College, where, as an anthropology and literature major, he had written his thesis on Native American culture).

A key tenet of Buddhism is that nothing in life is more constant than change, and for ten years in Japan, Snyder devoted his life to an intensive Zen Buddhist practice, living off and on in a monastery. He honed his practice of zazen (sitting in meditation up to ten hours a day), lived as a disciple of a Zen master, and steeped himself in rigorous scholarship, translating and studying Japanese texts.

Snyder wrote no poetry for several years and looks back on that time as a liberating experience. "What can be useful about Buddhism," he says, "is it teaches you to be clear and free in the world and also a person who can work clearly and freely on behalf of others. It encourages you not to be a victim or victimized. Buddhist meditation can teach you how to observe your own mind and your own way of being; it teaches you how to look into your consciousness and become aware of what your thoughts are doing, and what impulses or semi-conscious energies are driving you."

Snyder draws a connection between the Buddhist teaching of respect for all life and his political commitment. "Buddhism is one of the few religious and philosophical systems on a world scale that asserts the ethical value of the nonhuman. What Buddhism contributes to environmental politics is a profound spirit of compassion. In the Buddhist view, everything in the world has value, has authenticity. Ultimately, this goes beyond humans and animals and is an attitude of regard toward rocks, plants, clouds. Do you objectify and commodify the world when you look at it? Or do you see it as worthy, as beautiful, as full of its own intrinsic value?"

Zen Buddhism, radical politics, American Indian philosophy, and a deep love of nature coalesce in Snyder's unique poetic voice. What gives his work such unsurpassed force and depth is a rare ability to convey both the emotional aridity of modern civilization and the spiritual and physical pleasures inherent in the ancient rhythms of day-to-day human life. In The Real Work, a collection of interviews and talks covering the period 1964 to 1979, he describes his writing process: "Writing poetry is delicate and unpredictable and requires a continual openness to inner surprises and a willingness to pay attention to very subtle signs. If you don't notice them, you slide over them and miss the point."

Integral to Snyder's writing is a fierce, relentless determination to speak for "my constituency: the wilderness." His two most recent works are No Nature (a collection of poems from 1947 to 1992) and an exquisite book of essays, The Practice of the Wild, which he describes as a meditation on freedom, wilderness, and the human condition in its full complexity. In the concluding essay of that book, he writes, "Our immediate business, and our quarrel, is with ourselves. 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. We are ignorant of our own nature and confused about what it means to be a human being."

Today, Snyder lives with his wife and two daughters at Kitkitdizze, a 100-acre homestead nestled in the remote foothills of California's Sierra Nevada at an elevation of 3,000 feet. Snyder's home lies in a natural clearing amidst pine and black oak forests, manzanita fields, and wild meadows. Friends and neighbors put in time helping Snyder build his domain, following plans Snyder drew with Mandan Indian and Oriental motifs. Thick, round, spoke-like ceiling beams, supported by four rough-hewn posts, circle a stone fire pit. Electricity is supplied by photovoltaic solar cells.

A tenured professor at the nearby University of California (Davis), Snyder teaches wilderness thought and literature. A mesmerizing teacher, warm and eloquent, he considers one of his most formidable challenges to be the de-education of his students - fundamental objectives are to debunk the myth of a human-centered universe, help students reexamine their cultural conditioning, and illuminate a deep understanding of the forces that shape how societies work.

On the national environmental/political scene, Snyder is one of the foremost proponents of bioregional politics, which he defines as "the empowerment of local people to join in with the natural community and do politics with it."

In A Place in Space, he writes, "Bio-regionalism applies commitment to this continent place by place, in terms of bio-geographical regions and watersheds. It calls us to see our country in terms of its land forms, plant life, weather patterns, and seasonal changes - its whole natural history - before the net of political jurisdictions was cast over it. People are challenged to become 'reinhabitory,' that is to say, people are learning to live and think 'as if' they were totally engaged with their place for the long future."

According to Snyder, "I believe that the most radical action we can take now is to organize locally, watershed by watershed. The people who live in a place must inform themselves and become guardians of their place."

A sophisticated example of this approach is the Yuba Watershed Institute, founded by Snyder and his neighbors on the land surrounding Kitkitdizze, which operates a joint management agreement with the Bureau of Land Management on 3,000 acres of local public timberland. The idea behind the Institute is to create social change by merging the twin concepts of THINK GLOBALLY, ACT LOCALLY and ACT GLOBALLY, THINK LOCALLY - both ways of living that Snyder envisions as absolutely essential.

"Basically, we're a council of local people," says Snyder, "who use our watershed as the definition of the space we want to be engaged with. As a community, we've had the opportunity to do a biological inventory, to study the land and suggest what the long-range future of this forest ought to be."

The Institute seeks to build grassroots activism by encouraging people to become intimately acquainted with the natural world surrounding them. "For five years now, we've run an outstanding educational and community-outreach program. We organize field trips. We bring in experts in mycology, entomology, and forest ecology to talk to people on the ridge here using the old school house. We get a big turnout of old-time locals, young people, ranchers - everybody. This is ground-level knowledge - interesting and fundamental - that most people leave to high-school teachers and Boy Scouts, but in fact it's political, serious, and radical."

In addition, the Institute offers a pragmatic alternative to the currently popular anti-environmentalist rhetoric of the Wise Use movement.

"We understand the genuine fear and anxiety that propels some of our friends locally, who are in the Wise Use movement, because local environmentalists are working people, too," says Snyder. "We're not denying their problems. But we're not whining about logging issues, we're trying to figure out how to go forward rather than look back nostalgically to an era of logging that's over. Of course, the Wise Use movement was created from the top down. The corporations got hip to manipulating their own terminated workers. First they fire their workers, then they inflame them to attack the environmental movement. It's wonderfully clever. But it's not the environmentalists' fault that too many trees got cut down."

In Snyder's view, the federal government is so influenced by powerful lobbyists representing big business that legislation to protect and preserve our environment has been slow in coming and inadequate in scope.

Now, the political powers in Washington, D.C., are rolling back even these very limited regulations. But well-organized and well-educated local activists working to preserve their own watersheds might be able to effectively resist the regressive and self-destructive policies that are originating in corporate boardrooms and that are controlling the legislative agenda via campaign contributions.

Kitkitdizze remains Snyder's elegant and nourishing home base, yet he continues to travel widely and to enjoy a physically vigorous lifestyle: mountaineering, backpacking, and river rafting. Recent trips to Japan, India, Africa, and Europe enabled him to converse with a wide range of the Earth's inhabitants.

"What hits me every time I travel is that the planet is full of great-hearted, intelligent, well-informed people," he says. "In fact, it's shocking how much better informed people outside the United States are, particularly about world events, history, and politics. To me, there's something seriously wrong with American education and intellectual and spiritual life. It's full of ignorance, mean-spiritedness, and a resurgent anti-intellectualism that is so strange, considering our Founding Fathers were rational deists who appreciated learning. My conclusion is the Third World is not to be underestimated; it's not driven by greed to the extent that the capitalist world of multinational corporations is."

In every country he's visited, Snyder has talked to people who are very much aware that the emerging "global environmental crisis is real and ongoing. But I can understand why other people can't see the problems. Understanding the biological condition of the planet isn't necessarily easy. The truth is we don't know at what speed the Earth's ecological infrastructure is unraveling," says Snyder. "But we do know that it is not doing well; it's coming apart. Michael McClure once said, 'The planet is burning or exploding but at a very, very slow speed so you'd have to be in outer space with a speed-up movie of it to see what's actually happening. If you could speed it up, you'd see forests crumbling, species disappearing, water being fouled, air being fouled - you'd see it.'"

But the human time-scale is short. "That's why some people don't understand the environmental crisis taking place," says Snyder. "And, unfortunately, we do our politics in two-year, four-year cycles, that's nothing. Clearly, it's in humanity's long-range self-interest to solve our very serious ecological problems, but trusting government to lead us is highly problematic."

Snyder believes that Western civilization is living in delusion. The idea that humanity is building a sustainable future for coming generations patently conflicts with our culture's behavior as we drain the natural world of raw materials to fuel the engines of capitalist development. Twenty years ago in Turtle Island, Snyder described this shared delusion in a sentence that still resonates today: "Mankind has become a locust-like blight on the planet that will leave a bare cupboard for its own children - all the while in a kind of addict's dream of affluence, comfort, eternal progress."

The hubris that tempts us to try to dominate nature - rather than live in harmony with nature - blinds us to the consequences of our actions. According to Snyder, we are at the beginning of a critical era; our challenge for the near future is that "we have to deal with what becomes of an unchecked capitalist mentality. With the failure of state socialism, there is no credible political or ethical argument to check unrestrained capitalist enterprise."

In this vacuum, fundamentalism has reasserted itself, he says. "We should understand the resurgence of fundamentalist Islam or Christianity as a kind of cultural ghost dance; for some people it seems that making their religion their fortress is the only way to protect their traditions, themselves, and their children from the burning fires of a morally lawless world. The materialism, greed, and over-hyped sexuality they fear is but a small corner of the fabric of international corporate capitalism, an institution which proceeds purely by profit and loss, and is dependent on continuous growth. We need a critique of the world's economic direction that is larger-spirited and better informed than mere fundamentalism."

To Snyder, our culture must change or we will self-destruct. But there is reason for genuine hope. "The green movement, which is truly an amazing worldwide grassroots phenomenon, calls for modern economies to learn environmental self-restraint and social compassion - I mean, without a little cool, a little detachment, an ear for the beat, you got no class."

Bob Blanchard is a writer in Santa Cruz, California.