VOA常速英语:For Poet Gary Snyder, Every Day is Earth Day

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For nearly 60 years, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder has combined an environmental awareness shaped by America's Far West with a Zen Buddhist perspective that celebrates and reveres the natural world.

With his laughing eyes, deeply furrowed skin and unruly white beard, Snyder looks every bit the wizened sage as he reads an excerpt from his translation of a poem by Han-Shan. This Chinese poet, whom Snyder affectionately calls a "mountain madman," lived more than 1,100 years ago in a cave, deep in the wilderness.   

The path to Han-shan's place is laughable,  
A path, but no sign of cart of horse,  
Converging gorges - hard to trace their twists Jumbled cliffs - unbelievably rugged.  
A thousand grasses bend with dew,
a hill of pines hums in the wind.  
And now I've lost the shortcut home
Body asking shadow, how do you keep up? 

(Click to listen to Snyder read an excerpt from Han-Shan's "Cold Mountain.")

Off the beaten path

Like Han-Shan, Snyder says he has gained personal and spiritual insights from his experiences in nature. He is intimately familiar with the wild landscapes of Japan, where he lived and studied Zen Buddhism as a young man. And he knows the winding trails of California's Sierra Nevada mountain range, his home for many years.  

"A trail is really a handy thing," says Snyder. "It's a lot easier to hike on a trail than it is to crash through the brush. You get from Place A to Place B that way."  

Snyder explains that, in earlier times, before village agriculture, people went into the woods and fields and the marshes to gather the various things they needed, such as berries for dye or food.  

"And, of course, if you are going fishing or hunting, you know where to go to a marsh, a lake or stream. So the trail is only useful to get you to where you're going to leave the trail."

"The trail is not the true trail," he adds with a chuckle. "It's true in life, too."  

In his poem, "Off the Trail," Snyder recalls hiking with his late wife, Carole, and the pleasures of a trackless wilderness:

…We are free to find our own way  
Over rocks-through the trees-
Where there are no trails. The ridge and the forest
Present themselves to our eyes and feet  
Which decide for themselves
In their old learned wisdom of doing  
Where the wild will take us… We have
Been here before… 

(Click to listen to Snyder read his poem "Off the Trail.")

Rediscovering the natural order 

Snyder says there is also a unique fellowship between humans and nature that is embodied in one's "home place."  

"And it can be developed - even in Manhattan - by paying attention to where you are and by paying attention to what the elevation is, what the rock outcroppings might be, what birds stop there when they are migrating, if any."  

Snyder considers himself "a watershed bio-regionalist." As such, he says, "I am particularly interested in where the original streams were, and can we find them again and maybe 'daylight' some of them?"

The term "daylighting" refers to efforts by some urban environmental planners to identify natural streams that have been diverted or paved over and restore them to their original state. Snyder says concerns about the natural environment are especially keen in California, where farmers depend on melting snow pack each spring to irrigate their fields.  
 
"… And if global warming causes less snow to fall and to melt faster, and turns it into just rain so it runs off in the winter, that'd be the end of California agriculture," Snyder says matter-of-factly. "There were periods in the past when that's the way it was anyway."  

A call for humans to clean up their act

Despite his concern about the enormous damage humans have done to the environment over the years, Snyder is hopeful such practices are changing, and he is confident, too, in the power and resilience of nature.     

"We can say two things at the same time," he muses. "We can say we really have to work on improving our style here and clean up our act, and if we don't, we'll maybe be in very bad trouble and also cause a lot of trouble for other beings.

But then you can also say that, given the longer cycles of planetary change, nature always bats last. We can hope that will continue to be the case!"  

Snyder, who was born in 1930, still has a few more books to write - including a Buddhist memoir - before, as he puts it, he "packs it away, drinks red wine and watches the sunset."