Contemporary Poetry

environment and space 135

important volumes of essays such as The Practice of the Wild ( 1990 )
and A Place in Space ( 1995 ), which explore humanity’s complex
relationship to the environment and the need to remain aware of
local communities.^5 Snyder writes that ‘ecology’ as a term ‘derives
etymologically from the Greek oikos, or household. Modern usage
refers both to “the study of biological interrelationships and
the fl ow of energy through organisms and inorganic matter;”’
ecology can expand to other realms, from technology systems to

• ‘the ecology of thinking and composition’.^6 The interconnection
  between ecological thinking and writing is apparent in Snyder’s
  most famous poem ‘Riprap’, where the poet instructs ‘Lay down
  these words / Before your mind like rocks’.^7 Commenting on the
  recent academic interest in ecocriticism, Snyder states:

Nature writing, environmental history, and ecological phi-

losophy have become subjects of study in the humanities.

There are, however, still a few otherwise humane historians

and philosophers who unrefl ectingly assume that the natural

world is primarily a building-supply yard for human projects.

That is what the Occident has said and thought for a couple

of thousand years.^8

Snyder’s cycle of lyrics ‘Little Songs for Gaia’ ( 2005 ) gestures
emphatically to environmental scientist James Lovelock’s pioneer-
ing work on Gaia theory.^9 Gaia theory states that the Earth’s bio-
sphere behaves as if it were a single organism. As Lovelock explains
in his latest book The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
( 2009 ), Gaia theory presents

a view of the earth introduced in the 1980 s that sees it as a

self-regulating system made up from a totality of organisms,

the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as an evolving

system. The theory sees this system as having a goal – the

regulation of surface conditions so as to be as favourable for

contemporary life as possible.^10

Lovelock has been seeking over the decades to dispel the belief
that humans are somehow the ‘owners, managers, commissars or