This book, as the preview declares, is a collection of essays, each essay occupying a chapter. Here are my comments on a selection of those essays.

Chapter: energy is eternal delight

Written in 1974, Snyder suggests that the Judeo-Christian worldview with its exploitation of the world’s resources and uncontrollable growth may lead to our destruction. He proposes an alternative for our salvation, namely a respect for all life as adopted by Buddhism and many Red-Indian societies. He proposes “scaled-down, balanced technology” and “steady-state economy”.
My thoughts are that corporations need to change as they have developed a global reach since 1974. Governments are unlikely to help as growth and immigration is wanted.

Chapter: Earth Day and the war against the imagination

Snyder gave a talk at the 1st Earth Day in 1970 and 20 years later at the 1990 event. That 1st event in 1970 put conservationism and ecology on the map. Since then there have been some changes in forestry management on public lands but largely the world scale issues of 1970 persist:
1. deforestation
2. soil erosion
3. biological diversity erosion
4. water and air pollution
5. overpopulation
6. unequal wealth distribution
7. unequal environmental cost distribution
Snyder espouses the philosophy of the Native American who lives with nature and sees his home as a place for future generations up to the 7th generation in contrast to the socially and politically entrenched attitudes and institutions that reinforce our misuse of nature and our cruelty toward each other” (page 61). Corporations do not pay a fair share for the pollution they cause. People and corporations are making themselves rich through the pursuit of profit while their consumption of natural resources threatens future generations. More emphasis should be given to communities looking to sustain a quality of life. One community may be successful in preventing an environmental issue in their area but it is a hollow victory if in so doing it displaces that problem to another community not so well equipped to oppose that threat. Better to say “not in anyone’s backyard” and get nationwide changes in policy.
This chapter ends with a call to keep politically active at the local level in order to shape a better future that is closer to nature.

chapter: re-inhabitation

This chapter is about people who inhabit land. Inhabitants are people who never move more than 30 miles from their home - people who know the land and know how to crop its produce in a sustainable way. Inhabitants are people who expect their grandchildren to be living the same kind of life as them.
Modern society is against inhabitants. Modern economics are in favour of exploitation for a quick buck rather than investment in the future.
Of course people have moved to get to where we are now.
Also agricultural knowledge is pre-civilisation, probably from the Neolithic age. That would be the time that animals were domesticated. Re-inhabitation is to do with the small number of people who choose to go back to being inhabitants.

Chapter: Nets of beads, webs of cells

On page 65 the author conducts an appealing study of the interpretation of ‘ahimsa’ - the philosophy of causing no unnecessary harm, which can be done by anyone, even a soldier. He illustrates by the Zen story of a single chopstick that has been harmed when its partner is lost - the idea is that a single chopstick is useless for its intended purpose. As an aside, Snyder points out the toll on the rainforest to source disposable wooden chopsticks. But the forest station is not new. It was extensive in Buddhist China in 500 to 1500 and also in pre-modern India.
On page 68, he argues against, surprisingly, an absolute ban on eating meat, something possible in the west, but not so in the Third World, pointing out that eating meat is practised by some Buddhist monks.
On page 71, he derides Europeans for fondly quoting “nature, red in tooth and claw” and suggests popular Darwinism implies human beings have “moral superiority over the rest of nature.”

I do not see this in Darwinism. I see survival of the fittest and natural selection as teaching our interdependence.

Ultimately, Snyder says, if human beings do not pull back, then nature will do it for us - most likely by thirst or starvation. He also says that ecology has brought an understanding of the “inter-relationship and interdependence” of species.

I would say that this is implicit in natural selection.

He concludes with the call to work tirelessly to maintain ecosystems in the face of our aggressive economic structures.

Chapter entitled "Language goes Two ways"

Language has evolved out of wildness. It gives us a way of understanding the world, but also shapes, by virtue of syntax and vocabulary, how we see that world.
"Good language usage is associated with the speech of people of power and position". Another standard is the technical sort of writing. Technical writing must be mastered in order to do the boring stuff.

Having an interest in bird watching, the following piece of mysticism appealed to me: "to see a wren in the bush, Call it a wren, and go on walking is to have seen nothing. To see a bird and stop, watch, feel, forget yourself for a moment, be in the bushes shadows, maybe then feel wren that is to have joined in a larger moment of the world".

"we are made free by the training that enables us to master necessity, and we are made disciplined by a free choice to undertake mastery"

Chapter: the porous world

Crawling
this short chapter is about the practice of literally crawling on the forest floor in the Sierra forests of California. You might be wondering why would you be crawling? why not walk? well the answer is a lot of the Sierra forests are under process of regeneration following logging or fires and as a result the vegetation is dense but of a low height, so the only way to navigate it is to crawl on the forest floor. Snyder sees this as the only way to explore such forests.

Living in the open
In this short piece, Snyder describes his family’s way of life in the Sierra Nevada.
His idea is not to fight against the environment but to live in it. So part of the philosophy involves not attempting to keep out the mice and the insects, but to take some precautions for looking after food in proper containers and also bedding containers which are non-accessible to insects. Other than that the environment is left to encroach. This is his Buddhist philosophy in practice.
He’s not worried about rattlesnakes or bears or poison oak as he sees the risk from these as low.

Chapter: the forest in the library

Prepared as a dedication of the new West Wing of Shields library University of California at Davis, Snyder begins by making connections evoked by the libraries location and construction. He connects to the native Californians who lived on the site for thousands of years and to the old oaks which potentially have a longer heritage and include an existing oak within the courtyard. He evokes Swainson’s Hawks, which are often seen soaring in the sky, the burrowing owls and the local creek which is now dry but which runs close to the site. The structure itself has a large proportion of concrete which consists of water washed gravels from the Stanislaus River drainage, so he suggests that the structure is “a riverbed stood on end”.
He also invokes the connections with Europe, Africa, Polynesia and Asia and highlights the diversity of the student body and studies.
He lauds libraries from Aristotle’s own words proclaiming “our Occidental humanistic and scientific intellectual tradition”.
Anecdotally he tells how, while in his grandparents time, stories were told around the campfire and passed on from generation to generation orally, nowadays stories are passed on via reading books.
He points out that our habit of collecting, and in this case collecting books and libraries, is not original or not exclusively human. He tells of the wood rat nests found in the Mojave Desert containing wood rat treasures that are 12,000 years old.
For fun Snyder makes an ecological analogy. He starts with the graduate students and young scholars who he says are basic photo synthesisers “grazing brand-new material”. Others are in the detritus cycle tunnelling through huge amounts of boring literature and converting them into something fresh. The library itself is a place where the nutrients of this degradation of literature are stored. He goes on to suggest that dissertations and technical reports of primary workers are digested by senior researchers and condensed into conclusions and theories. “The studies in turn are passed up the information chain to the thinkers at the top who will digest them and come out with some unified theory .“ Though the final texts are seen as the pinnacle of assembled information these themselves are destined to become, in years to come, the detritus on the forest floor.
He praises language, which is the source of all literature, in a rather mystical way and finally he returns to laud the library for its organisation of literature.

Chapter: Walt Whitman's old New World

Snyder examines Whitman's essay "Democratic vistas" in which Whitman envisages an America of the future, ideal and human centric. Snyder regrets that Whitman missed out reference to the biodiversity of the United States. Giving as an example the 50,000,000 bison and approximately 20,000,000 pronghorn which were on the great Plains as late as the mid 19th century. "This was the largest single population of big animals anywhere on earth".
He points out that at the same time "15 to 20,000 buffalo hunters were killing and wasting literally millions of bison every season." Central to Snyder's vision of the future are the native Americans who have suffered a poor lot in the face of European expansion. It seems that in 1992 Inuit Indians of Alaska, Canada, Greenland and Siberia were looking to setting something on Turtle Island. He hopes that Whitman would have given his optimism to this venture.

I'm not sure, but I think Turtle Island may be a pseudonym for North America. ( )

Mostly positive. I admire the poet but am left wanting to engage the author over the apparent hypocrisy between his decrying our human manipulation of the earth and all the consequences of that, with everyone living on 100 acres bordering a National Forest. We can't all live the way he chooses. Urban density is the only possible answer to 7 or 8 or 10 billion humans, and a functioning natural world. ( )

A collection of essays reflecting attitudes toward the environment and our local communities and calls for action that gives moral standing to all beings.