Ecology Hall of Fame: Gary Snyder

By Lauren Economou

Gary Snyder, born in 1930, is an internationally renowned poet and ecological philosopher who believes that “the post-human era begins as humanity realizes that we have created a self-destructive culture” (Blanchard, 1995). When a childhood accident laid up Snyder for several months, he constantly read books from the Seattle public library, and attributes this time in his life to sparking his interest in reading and writing. During the ten years he lived in Washington, Snyder “became aware of the presence of the Coast Salish people and developed an interest in the Native American peoples in general and their traditional relationship with nature” (Wikipedia).

Snyder published his first poem in a student journal while attending Reed College in the late-1940s. He graduated in 1951 with a degree in anthropology and literature. He spent his summers during college outdoors: as a camp counselor, a seaman, and a timber-scaler on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, “experiences which formed the basis for some of his earliest published poems.” He then worked as a fire-lookout in a national park, where he “encountered the basic ideas of Buddhism” that dealt with the appreciation of nature. He decided soon after college to return to San Francisco to either “sink or swim as a poet.”

While enrolled at UC Berkeley studying Oriental culture and language, Snyder continued to take summer jobs outdoors, such as one job as a trail-builder at Yosemite. In the 1950s, he briefly lived with Jack Kerouac in a cabin, and wrote his own work, also translating poems by Han Shan, the 9th-century Chinese recluse, which Snyder had made into a book called Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems (Steuding, 1969). The following is a poem from the book:

“Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout”

Down valley a smoke haze

Three days heat, after five days rain

Pitch glows on the fir-cones

Across rocks and meadows

Swarms of new flies



I cannot remember things I once read

A few friends, but they are in cities.

Drinking cold snow-water from a tin cup

Looking down for miles

Through high still air.

The ecological poet and social critic won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975. Many of Snyder’s later writings “focus on alternatives to city living and show a reverence for nature and a deep interest in the philosophies of the East. The latter is a characteristic that seems an almost ubiquitous attribute possessed by many other Beat writers” (The Beat Page). In 1985, he started teaching writing at UC Davis, focusing on the Far East. His teaching kept him away from poetry for several years, but he had more poems published in the mid-1990s. He currently teaches English at UC Davis and stays active in his interest of the natural environment.


Sources

Blanchard, Bob. (1995). A voice in wilderness. The Progressive, v. 59 (November 1995), 28-31.

Gary Snyder. Retrieved March 26, 2007, from The Beat Page. Web site: http://www.rooknet.com/beatpage/writers/snyder.html

Gary Snyder. Retrieved March 26, 2007, from Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Web site: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gary_Snyder

Steuding, Bob. (c.1969). Gary Snyder: Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems. Boston: Twayne.