The Practice of the Wild
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“I hope to investigate the meaning of wild and how it connects with free and what one would want to do with these meanings. To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are—painful, impermanent, open, imperfect—and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us. For in a fixed universe there would be no freedom. With that freedom we improve the campsite, teach children, oust tyrants. The world is nature, and in the long run inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process and essence of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence.”
“Nature is not a place to visit, it is home—and within that home territory there are more familiar and less familiar places. Often there are areas that are difficult and remote, but all are known and even named.”
In nine essays, the poet, environmentalist, and social critic Gary Snyder, described as “the laureate of Deep Ecology,” draws on his understanding of Zen Buddhist & Daoist teachings, Native American mythology, and his personal relationships to place as a logger and conservationist to interrogate what wildness really means how we can recognize and restore it in the world and in ourselves. But primarily, this is not a book about environmental activism; it is a book asking what it means to be human in a world that is rapidly changing. Where the wild used to mean home and source of life, it now means playground and escape.