GARY SNYDER’S EYE FOR THE REAL WORLD 353Snyder began shaping a life by those values—not trapping and hunting for
his food, like John Haines in Alaska, but building a home among like-minded
neighbors, treating the forest sustainably, working locally for good governmen-
tal practices. That year he spoke out: “I wish to bring a voice from the wilder-
ness, my constituency. I wish to be a spokesman for a realm that is not usually
represented either in intellectual chambers or in the chambers of government.”
To be an “ecological conscience.”
“To speak of wilderness is to speak of wholeness,” for Snyder, thinking of
deep ecology. “Human beings came out of that wholeness.” More so than not,
the continent ’s early peoples lived in that spirit. Snyder also speaks for places
set apart, groves and waterholes held sacred. These began as “optimal habitat,”
such that reckless mining, digging, drilling, logging, damming, draining, and
grazing risk the wildland we call “resources.” We see through that risk in grow-
ing alert to our dwelling place—ecology stems from Greek oikos, “house.”
Turtle Island sites one poem near his new home. “By Frazier Creek Falls”
finds room for dimming vistas, as in the scrolls, as well as glittering, rustling
detail and now, a generation after Sourdough lookout, a heartening human
presence.
Standing up on lifted, folded rock
looking out and down—
The creek falls to a far valley.
hills beyond that
facing, half-forested, dry
—clear sky
strong wind in the
stiff glittering needle clusters
of the pine—their brown
round trunk bodies
straight, still;
rustling trembling limbs and twigs
listen.This living flowing land
is all there is, forever
We areit
it sings through us—In a breathtaking moment those “limbs and twigs / / listen” to the wind, just as
that pause asks us to listen too. We arethe land and it sings through us.
All his life Gary Snyder has pledged himself to holding both wilderness and
history in mind. Danger on Peaks (2004) arcs back to August 1945, when he