Hello and welcome to the inaugural edition of the Wise Talkers Podcast. I’m your host, Ronald Fel Jones. 

Three or four months ago I got the idea to start this podcast, where I’d interview a wide range of knowledgable, insightful people in search of wisdom. 

And not just the armchair philosophizing kind of wisdom, but “actionable wisdom” – ideas and insights, strategies and techniques, that can help us navigate the unprecedented both peril and the promise of these, uncertain, turbulent times we’re all living through.

And when I got the idea for Wise Talkers a few months back, I knew almost instantly where I would start my quest for ‘actionable wisdom.’ And I knew this because I had already interviewed a person who is not only one of the wisest people I have ever met, but a man who embodies… the very heart and soul of what I envisioned the Wise Talkers podcast to be all about.

And that man is Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder.

And what makes this interview even more noteworthy, I believe, is that I conducted way back in 1979! And what’s most interesting about the fact that it was so long ago is that it’s still relevant today. 

In fact, it will always be relevant, and as such I have titled this evergreen, inaugural episode… 

The Timeless Wisdom of Gary Snyder

Now, even though Gary Snyder is a major figure in American literature, and a celebrated scholar and well-known environmental activist, I recognize of course that some listeners may not be familiar with Gary. So I’ll provide a brief overview of Gary’s background before replaying the interview.

But first, let me give you the backstory of how I happened to interview Gary back in 1979.

I was doing a weekly live, one-hour interview show in those days called World Views on KVMR radio in Nevada City, a popular tourist town in the Sierra foothills of Northern California. In many ways my World Views show was a precursor to the podcast I’m starting now, as each week for about three years, I interviewed a local resident or perhaps a visitor to Nevada City about their life and views

Gary lived about 20-30 miles north of Nevada City, on a homestead that he built with friends sometime around 1970 – and where in fact he still lives today! So when he agreed to be interviewed on my show on the local radio station, I was thrilled. And so… on Wednesday, July 18, 1979, I had the privilege of interviewing Gary Snyder, just four years after he won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Turtle Island. 

Oh, and here’s a funny little anecdote from that day – well, funny in retrospect anyway. Before our 7 PM interview, Gary and a visiting friend of his, named Scott, joined my wife and I for an early dinner at our home. When we sat down to eat, my wife put a big bowl of home-made chilled gazpacho on our drop-leaf dining table in front of Gary’s guest… And yep, the hinge instantly snapped, the leaf collapsed, and a very large quantity of cold soup was dumped all over Scott’s lap. So that was embarrassing! What a way to start my encounter with the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet! But Scott and Gary took it in stride, and we all agreed that at least, thank god, it wasn’t a bowl of hot soup! Then Gary and I drove to the KVMR studio to conduct our live interview.

So, I’ll play that interview in a moment, but first a quick rundown of Gary’s rather remarkable life story. 

Gary and his poetry first came into the public eye in the mid 1950s, when he was a member of the original Beat Generation in San Francisco, along with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and others. Lawrence Ferlinghetti called Snyder “the Thoreau of the Beat Generation.”

Ferlinghetti’s association of Gary Snyder with Henry David Thoreau derives from their shared love of nature, an affinity Gary developed as a child growing up in the Pacific Northwest. 

And it was in those same early years Gary that became fascinated with Native American history and customs, a fascination that proved to be lasting, as Gary became a student and scholar of indigenous cultures around the world.

Gary’s respect for the wisdom of indigenous peoples deeply informs his worldview, and his poetry, and he shares their ancient understanding of the interconnectedness of all of life.

Gary also studied Asian cultures and language, when he was a student at UC Berkeley in the early ‘50s, where he learned classic Chinese language and began translating ancient Chinese poetry.

He then lived in Japan for 12 or 13 years, became fluent in the language, and translated Japanese poetry. 

While in Japan Gary also studied Zen Buddhism, which is another major influence in his life and work. He spent time in monasteries with Zen masters and teachers, and became a devoted practitioner of Zen Buddhism and Zen meditation throughout his adult life. 

Gary is, unsurprisingly, a passionate advocate for environmental protection. Ecological philosopher Max Oelschlaeger called Gary the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology.”

So, personally, I cannot imagine a more well-rounded, deeply informed, viscerally wise human being than Gary Snyder. 

And since this podcast is all about seeking wisdom, I don’t think there’s a better place to begin that pursuit than with ‘the timeless wisdom of Gary Snyder’ – a wisdom Gary not only eloquently writes and talks about, but exemplifies in his own life.

So I invite you to sit back and listen not only to Gary’s vision of how life could be here on planet Earth, but to the tone and feel of how he expresses it. 

After the interview, I’ll come back live with a few closing words to underline what I believe we can learn from Gary Snyder, and why his vision is not only relevant today, but in fact needed now more than ever.

And finally, I will close this inaugural edition of the Wise Talkers podcast by reading one of Gary’s most popular poems. 

So here it is… my 1979 interview with revered poet Gary Snyder. The very beginning was somehow lost, so the recording picks up a few minutes into our conversation…

—- music

GARY:

…stimulated my curiosity about what was going on. And generated a series of studies that have been going on ever since into the nature of economy and ecology and the question that is with us yet, namely: Do we, as predominantly white people from predominantly Western Europe, know where we are yet? Do we have any idea what we're doing here yet?

Because we can look around and see similar things still going on. 

RON:

I would think the answer to that is an overwhelming no. As a society that we don't know exactly where we are. 

GARY: 

Well, in certain simplistic scientific terms, of course, we do know where we are. We've learned a lot in geology and botany and so forth.

But the heartfelt sense of being in place, the heartfelt sense of commitment to the place, it's something that Americans are now just teetering on the edge of. We can see that it comes in our future as a necessity, perhaps, of a lower energy, lower mobility future. We just begin now, I think, to realize what we don't know.

Like what we don't know, literally, is we don't know the local plants. People don't grow up knowing the plants where they live. In Europe or in Asia, even city people know the plants. That's a measure of what it means to be people who are at home. 

RON:

Why do you think we don't know?

GARY:

We don't stay in place long enough. You know, the average Californian, according to the statistics, moves once every three years. How can you learn the plants when you move every three years, even if you wanted to learn them? But there's something more profound in it than that. I take learning the plants as a symbol, but also, you know, it's almost exactly literal.

The alienation of Americans can be measured by the fact that they don't know that they don't know the plants. That they take it for granted that this isn't something that you know. Yet, these are part of your community. These are the beings that make possible the oxygen, the fiber, the timber, and the food, all around us. And there's an infinite wealth of delighting information just in that. And that people have always known in the past.

RON:

Do you think that this lacking on our part, this lack of sight or hindsight, you might say, is a function of the history of at least the white people in this in this country, that we're all from Europe and relocated? So we just don't go back more than a couple hundred years? Is that partly what's at work there? 

GARY:

It’s partly what's at work here. And the other part of it is the dynamics of our economy in the last 70 or 80 years, drives everybody fast. Makes everybody move. Bop around like ping-pong balls from place-to-place in search of the best economic opportunity. You can't blame people because if you don't go for the best economic opportunity, you're penalized by the way it works. If you try to stay put and figure out what's happening in your life, it's hard. 

RON:

Somebody else gets the job. 

GARY:

Right. You don't go up anymore in the in the organization.

RON:

Do you see any chance for change in that mindset of America in that sense? 

GARY:

The chances for change are looking us right in the face right now. We can either regard them as global coming crises, or we can regard them as chances for learning and chances for change. By that I mean the rising price of oil, for example. How do you deal with the coming decreased mobility that high gasoline prices impose on us? Do you respond to that with anger, anxiety, frustration, and rage? You could. I mean, there are plenty of companies and individuals that you might want to be angry at. 

But on a larger scale, the ultimate disappearance of fossil fuels is to be expected. It's a finite resource. So facing up to that, we see it also as a chance. And the chance is to learn how to walk. To learn to stay home, to learn the plants, to spend more time with children, to work in the garden, to learn to sing, to learn to play instruments and dance, things that are really what the richness of culture implies, and the richness of community implies, and we know that we need those things, but we don't have them.

RON:

Definitely seems, from my perspective anyway, and I'm sure a lot of others, that a lot of those things are happening, especially in the West and in California. There’s a whole, oh, it's been called a lot of different things – the human potential movement or return to basics and back to the land, where just the types of things you're talking about – walking and understanding plants and being with children and singing and so on – are really taking foot. Do you feel that kind of an ethic has any real chance of becoming the ethic? The the one that moves our institutions, et cetera? 

GARY:

Well, Ron, first let me say that this nice vision that I just presented of all the lovely alternatives to gasoline is not easy. It's very hard. It isn't just a bunch of hippies laying back and grooving with nature.

It's hard work. That's something I think people are beginning to learn now. ‘Labor intensive’ means what it says. So a joy in work and a joy in self-sufficiency has to come with that. That's the only way that the anxiety people deeply feel when they see the 19th and 20th Century secular icon called progress crumbling in front of them deeply feel. Can that happen? The answer would be, allowing as it's difficult and allowing as it's hard work, but also allowing as it is something that harks back to what we know to have been basic health throughout most of human history, then we have to say that it has to work. 

RON:

Or what? Or what happens?

GARY:

Or, we go kicking and screaming into the 21st Century, still trying to keep our thermostats at 72 degrees, and still trying to drive our cars down to the corner to buy cigarettes when we can walk – which is babyish. 

RON:

And also just not going to be feasible at some point. 

GARY:

Ultimately it becomes not feasible. Now, what do you do when something like that becomes not feasible? Are you going to bomb the Arabs? Or try to snatch every last scrap of resource from other places on the globe? Definitely undignified, and definitely not what Washington or Jefferson would approve of. 

So yeah, we have to learn how to do it right. Which is, you know, not all that far out. It's what our grandparents would have said: yeah, that's the way to do it. It's just going back a couple of generations. And that is a kind of going forward. 

RON:

Back to old ways. 

GARY:

Forward to new old ways. 

RON:

Something from your book, Old Ways, I think applies to this. In a talk you gave at a ethnopoetics conference, you made a statement towards the end that was reproduced in that book in an essay called, I believe, The Politics of Ethnopoetics.

You said that the way the world or the universe works is reciprocal and interacting rather than competitive. And that seems to be somewhat central to the different types of driving worldviews that, that we as a society, especially in the West, take. We're definitely… it's well documented and obvious everywhere, that the basic mindset is competitive, certainly as far as economics goes. And in other areas, sports, etc. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about what you mean about the difference between a competitive way of interacting and a reciprocal way. 

GARY:

Yes. Now let me say first of all, I have nothing against a certain amount of healthy competition. And it does exist in nature and in us, and it's fun.

But 19th Century social Darwinism, to go back into the history of ideas a little bit, social Darwinism was used as a justification for late 19th Century monopoly capitalism and imperialism. Survival of the fittest became a key phrase to justify taking land away from the aborigines, or whomever.

Competition and progress somehow became closely linked in people's minds. Every society likes to think that it works in a way that is somehow a model of natural law. And so late 19th Century society found it very easy to interpret Darwinism to its own use and to see everything in a tooth-and-claw competition for survival. The more sophisticated ecological and biological understanding of how things work shows how many exceptions there are to that, and how much reciprocity or mutuality there is in actual fact in the evolution of species and in the survival of populations of creatures.

In fact, the ecological insight which is beginning to creep into everybody's awareness finally, is just that, that there is an elaborate balance of nature. And that from one standpoint things may appear to be competing, from another standpoint, they are cooperating. The wolf is a friend to the caribou. The hawk is the brother to the rabbit. They need each other in certain ways. 

RON:

But if western man looks at it through competitive eyes, you'd look at it as enemies.

GARY:

Yeah, and also simply as one or another varieties of possible exploitation.

The mutuality and interconnectedness of the universe is what we now have to learn. That we are literally not separate from the destiny of the natural world, for example. We as human beings do not have a destiny apart from that of the rest of the living beings on this planet. It's hard for people to quite grasp that, because there's still a lingering but very strong image of human self, in this culture, as having a separate and somehow nobler and somehow safer destiny than the rest of created nature.

It might have been a few decades ago that we would go to heaven. It might be now that some technological utopians would still like to go to space colonies in outer space. It somehow seems unworthy to some people still to think that our destiny is tied to the destiny of sea urchins. But it is. And right there is the best, if you want to be just pragmatic, the best and also most scientific argument we have for paying close attention to all of the components of our biosphere.

To put it in another way, as the farmer and poet Wendell Berry says, “the first rule of intelligent tinkering is to save all the parts,” which is why we don't want to see certain species become extinct. 

RON:

You mentioned space colonies. I take it from what you said that you are not an advocate of space colonies.

GARY:

Oh, I think it's a trashy idea. 

RON:

Do you think it will ever be a good idea? 

GARY:

The only reason that the idea has any activity around it at all is because it would provide employment for presently unemployed NASA engineers and give the defense space program something to talk about again.

RON:

Then you don't buy some of their arguments about the ease of energy access and lack of gravity to work against, et cetera. 

GARY:

I don't think it would pay for itself. I don't think it's cost-effective. I mean, I'm going to talk real tough about that, you know, in the same terms that economic people and engineering people talk about it.

My teacher in this regard happens to be Howard T. Odum at Florida State University in Gainesville, who does these very elegant mathematical energy and cost analyses of things. And he says that the whole space colony thing is unworkable because it costs more in resources and energy to get those things up there than any gain we'd get back.

But then he goes another step and says that also along the same kinds of analysis, that nuclear power will never be cost-effective either. And that the only way that it seems to have any benefit to us at all now is because we are not counting into it the cost of the  fossil fuel subsidy that it is secretly running on.

RON:

I don't know just what the details of the economics are, but I know that there's a lot of people now looking at nuclear power and who thought 10 or 15 years ago that it was going to be cost-effective and it’s just turning out not to be, even on whatever basis they're presenting it to us.

GARY:

A lot of people inside the industry are ready to let it go now, actually. 

RON:

Do you think Three Mile Island had a lot to do with that? 

GARY:

It didn’t have anything to do with it on a scientific or a really tough informed level. It certainly had a lot to do with it in turning the public's head around, though.

RON:

Yeah, that definitely seemed to be true. 

In keeping with the ways that modern humankind looks at the world, another interesting distinction you made in that talk on ethnopoetics was between global and planetary consciousness. And maybe you could talk about that a little bit.

GARY:

That fits, and I'm really glad you brought that up because it's another kind of a distinction that is useful to make. Global and planetary mean, in most people's minds, the same thing. Indeed, they do mean the same thing, but we are now beginning to try to use them to make a distinction, in two ways, to make a distinction between two kinds of internationalism. I follow the lead of the eminent ecologist Ray Dasmann in using the language this way. 

We will hitherto, henceforth, use global and globalism to mean progress-oriented, centralist, industrial, technological internationalism. A monoculture, industrial, one-world engineering view – a view toward which many scientists and even what you might call academically speaking ecologists are working, and undoubtedly the predominant intention of most people with power, money, and scientific information in the world today. Green Revolution, multinational corporations, rational distribution of resources, centralization of everything that can be centralized. That's globalism. It's a Hilton Hotel in every capital and an airline for every small country, as well. 

Planetary means an internationalism which recognizes and fosters and nourishes biological and cultural diversity, and assumes the possibility of a biologically sophisticated future rather than a heavy-industry future. That does not mean anti-technological. It does mean appropriate and decentralized technological. It means low-energy future, but very sophisticated scientifically low-energy future. In which sufficiency agriculturally and energy-wise would be developed right down to the point of, say, the Hawaiian Islands would not have to import oil. The West Coast would be food-sufficient unto the West Coast. New England could be food-sufficient unto New England.

Large-scale transportation of resources back and forth would be rendered unnecessary because of more self-sufficient and appropriate agricultures to each area. This is biological, and it implies that much of our future knowledges and wealth will be involved with fisheries, forestry, and agriculture. On a level of biological sophistication that we haven't even approached yet. That's planetary. 

RON:

Do you think that some of that sophistication might come through some of the communication channels that were established under this sort of global consciousness? I'm thinking, it sounds like it would be a mass education effort. ‘Mass’ meaning everybody would have to learn a lot of different things. Now, it would also be very different from region to region, which I assume is sort of the heart of what you're saying. But, I'm just wondering if there's some place for high technology, or if there is some fruits from some of the efforts made in terms of global communications that might go hand in hand with this.

GARY:

You know, KVMR right here is an example of that. It's a beautiful example. Scott and I were talking about it while we were driving over here today. Namely, that a low-output power, relatively easy to get licensed station that works within its own watershed and speaks to its own community is just right.

It gives a place for everyone in the community to listen and to talk back and to circulate information and ideas and inspiration with each other. That's a big plus. That's what I call appropriate technology. And that's as useful to us as bouncing messages off of satellites and sending them 3, 000 miles away. Maybe more useful to us. Sure, I'd love to see a network, a mosaic of KVMR-sized radio stations all over the country doing this kind of work. So it doesn't have to be like a blanket mass media. To the other side of it, more beautifully, like people in local areas, all doing it. 

RON:

So it's really the networking that's important in terms of interconnecting all those things.

GARY:

It's the networking and it's the the building of cellular sophistication rather than monoculture, one large bland sheet. To do good agriculture… see, here why that won't work. Suppose we're talking about doing good future agriculture. The agricultural problems of Yuba County are not the same as those of Nevada County. And Nevada County is not the same as Plumas County. And over on the other side of the Sierra and Reno, and out beyond, it's entirely different, too. We don't need one big bland mass of information. What we need is the development and the dissemination of the specifics for each of these little pieces, say, just talking about agriculture. Same could be true of forestry. Same could be true of all other kinds of community and economic affairs. And that, what I've just described, does not contradict also on other levels, such as certain kinds of cultural levels of course, a broader kind of communication, too, between all of these cells in the network.

RON:

Gary, one of the things that I gained from you and reading your things is this grasp of human history that you have and the perspective on it and where you can relate things from Middle Ages to contemporary China, to even going back 40, 000 years ago and making it all relate. One example that relates to what we're talking about, again from the same essay I mentioned before, you talked about one of the primary fuelings of monoculture as being the two energy hits that the human race has had. Number one being slavery, and number two being fossil fuels. That's a real interesting couple of things to put together like that. Maybe you could explain a little bit about how you feel that’s an “energy hit” and what effect that has on culture, or evolution. 

GARY:

Well, what we're talking about really is civilization. And not with a capital C, but a small c. Civilization not in the sense of good manners and nice culture, but in the sense of a kind of social organization which enriches some people to the detriment of others, builds great monuments and buildings like the pyramids, like the Sphinx, like the Colossus of Rhodes, some of which are perhaps very beautiful, but which have cost a great deal in human suffering, too.

How do you move from a self-sufficient network of, say, Neolithic cattle herding or little agricultural villages, which pay taxes to no one, which do not support a standing army, and which in turn get to keep all of the produce that they grow for themselves, and thereby have a surplus, which enables them to have a rich cultural life of song and dance and ritual. But does not build monuments, does not have big cities, and does not have a capital or a king or a pharaoh. 

What is it that enables an organization of some people to channel energy and intelligence and skill into the production of giant public works projects? Historically, it's slavery. It's some people getting all of the labor of other people for their own projects, and keeping them busy for 20 years. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, 500 B.C. I'm sorry, that date's not right, it's 250 B.C. He moved a population of 20 million people north, men, women, and children, to build the Great Wall of China. They were up there for 25 years, most of them never returned. That's how you get big public works projects. 

RON:

Right. Without high technology and fossil fuels. I've often thought that. You look at the pyramids and you think it could never…slavery was a must. There was no other way you could use them.

GARY:

It was a must if you assumed that they needed them. 

RON:

Yeah, right. To get it done. 

GARY:

There’s really no evidence that the Chinese really needed the Great Wall of China either. Although it is the one thing they say you'll see from the moon. 

RON:

Yeah, I've heard that. 

GARY:

So there's somebody's megalomania in that. It's the megalomania of a few messing with the lives of the many for that energy. It's just to get the energy. 

This began to appear obviously too outrageous a little later in time. And somewhat more humane social philosophies began to emerge. Like Confucianism in China, like the elegant and somewhat more socially oriented thinking of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, and later Christianity.

Again, it's either surplus human labor or nothing that makes things happen – until fossil fuels come along. And you have then what some people call energy slaves to put to work for you. To accomplish vast amounts of work without having to do it yourself. Now the question really is, it's a question of spirit and a question of character.

Do we need to get more done than we can accomplish ourselves, by ourselves? As to say, a voluntary agreement, by virtue of a voluntary agreement that we will get together and do some work, a work day. The work that we can do voluntarily and of our own free will by getting together and doing the work day, feels good. 

Do we want monuments, achievements, and giant public works that require dragging some people in by force to do it? Like the Chinese who built the railroads, you know, virtually by force, over Donner Pass. Or using energy resources, which ultimately debauch the planet. Or are we willing, as a matter of morality and character and spirit, to be content with the size of ditch, the size of house, the size of temple, that can be built by a voluntary coalition of people working together in good spirit. Smaller scale, small is beautiful.

RON:

Do you think there any place for high technology anywhere in the future? 

GARY:

What do you mean by high technology? 

RON:

Oh, whatever it took us to get to the moon. Or development of, I don't know, metal alloys that do wondrous things inside of other electronics. Microcomputers, etc. Do you think that those things are all sort of mistakes of humanity, or do they have a place?

GARY:

I'd be hard-headed about that and say it's a cost-effectiveness measure. And cost-effectiveness means energy cost-effectiveness. And biological or ecological health-effectiveness measure. It's true, you know, with any kind of electronic technology the quality and amount of work done in ratio to the amount of energy used is very high.

These are highly efficient technologies, and I would hope that we can make use of them. I have a friend who's quite a businessman and quite a philosopher and successful as a businessman, too, in spades, who has a vision of what amounts to a darn near hunting and gathering and fishery and forestry planet, in which everybody is in exquisite touch with each other via high-tech information retrieval systems and communication systems while managing the earth almost like a national park. 

RON: 

That's sort of the kind of vision that I have in mind. How does that bounce off you?

GARY:

That’s pretty utopian.

RON:

Well, it may be utopian, but thinking of dismantling the entire economic and societal structure that we have to be coming to the type of thing you're talking about sounds quite difficult as well. 

GARY:  

I'm not talking about dismantling it, man. It's going to dismantle itself. What I'm talking about is how to go along with the changes that are going to come – whether poets like me say so or not – gracefully. And make it work to a human advantage and allay anxiety and show the pluses in it. That's a very simple exercise, to show the good side of our low-energy future, rather than a high-energy, centralized, industrial future. To identify other meanings of the word progress. That it is not the ultimate goal of humanity necessarily to go into outer space, and if we never happen to manage to get out there, we still won't have failed. There are other ways in which we can succeed in human destiny, right here on Earth.

RON:

So then you think that happening, in other words, going back to the new old ways and so on, is going to be really more picking up the pieces rather than somebody's conscious decision. 

GARY:

I don't think people can make conscious decisions about the energy in the inertia of historical affairs right now. We're all caught in the same…

RON:

Too locked up in it. So you foresee tough times ahead. 

GARY:

Why sure. 

RON:

How tough? What types of things are going to happen? 

GARY:

Oh, I'm not a doomsdayer. I just, you know, difficult, turbulent. Energy short, high inflation, plus depression, whatever. And real tough times for some living creatures. Real tough times for our forests, for certain populations of sea mammals, for our soils, for our waters. Those are going to be real tough times. 

And that's why I say we must adapt to a resource-short, low-energy future and make the best of it and make the pluses out of it gracefully. Because if we don't do it gracefully, it means literally a biological holocaust. It means the extinction of much life species on Earth. Irreplaceable parts that we wouldn't want to lose in our tinkering. 

RON:

Sounds like a big job of education, or people coming around one way or another. 

GARY:

Yeah, but I'll say this for Americans: They do seem to learn once the shit hits the fan. Or they try anyway.

RON:

Yeah, that seems to be true. 

With 15 minutes left here or so, let's talk a little bit about poetry. That seems to make sense. I know that you're involved in a study or an advocation of ethnopoetry, or ethnopoetics. Maybe you could tell our listeners just what that is.

GARY:

“Ethnopoetics” is a kind of a unnecessarily academic-sounding term that we invented so we could get into universities and talk about it, but what it really means is recognizing and trying to learn from, and also trying to nourish and encourage, the poetries of non-literate people, people who don't have writing systems. It’s very important to realize that literature, and in fact Culture with a capital C, is not simply a property of people with writing systems and cities and money.

Everybody in the world, every culture in the world, has these things. And in great richness and in great detail often. As much information in storytelling, singing, music is sent along by memory, by telling, by what we call the oral tradition, almost, as a writing tradition. And of course, in the oral tradition, poetry, or song is never far from music, is never far from drama, or dance.

And so, we see a kind of a wholeness in that. The performance, the living audience, the telling of information that belongs to everyone, the feeding back of this information, becomes a kind of a model, I think, for a lot of modern poets, including myself, for what the work of culture could really be. What the work of the singer or the musician could really be, what the wholeness of it might be. So we do two things at the same time. We try to defend these traditions and help the lives of the people who still carry them. And we try to learn from that in our own work, in our own lives, and to give new universality and new richness to modern culture.

RON:

That’s another thing that definitely comes out in your work is that poetry to you is so much larger a concept than poetry is to how we learned it in school. I mean, it's a totally different thing to say the least. 

GARY:

I have to remember that. 

RON:

Yeah. I mean, you know, we all have it as a very literary and written sort of thing. Yet your concept of poetry relates largely to what you just said about the fact that most of our tradition is oral. Again, looking at that large span of 40, 000 years. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about how you see poetry operating in this sort of healthy society. And I know that that fits into shamanism and the rites and rituals of traditional peoples in terms of dance and song. And maybe you could sort of tie that together a little bit for us.

GARY:

Well, I don't want to claim too much for poetry. So I'll put it this way. Poetry, when used in talking about a relatively sane and functioning archaic or preliterate or primitive society, poetry is kind of shorthand for, say, metaphysics, psychology, philosophy, religion, and art, all in one. The story, the storytelling, and the singing become almost the major way in which people's sense of themselves and their sense of their people and their people's place in the universe is taught.

It's not just a matter of having a creation story that says where you came from. Creation mythology is not that interesting or important, I think, to most people. Where it becomes fascinating and useful is in the details, is in the specifics. Where a body of storytelling and singing information can tell you in the same stanza precise, accurate biological details about a certain plant or a certain animal and at the same time tell you what its kinship relationship to you is, and some tags of funny storytelling about it in another mode.

There's Magpie. Well, Magpie does this (biologically accurate information). Also, you remember that time that Magpie went off with Raven and stole fire? See, there's two different kinds of levels of information that are being given to you simultaneously. One is from the inner world, one is from the outer world. One connects with the human psyche, one connects with the biosphere. What an incredible weaving together of material. 

RON:

Which ties into your thoughts about something else I find very fascinating, is your use of the terms “unconscious wilderness”or “mind wilderness” and connecting, again, the biosphere to inner realms of wilderness. And that part is part of the poetic process, is it not? Or the poet's process? 

GARY:

Well, that's how I've seen it, at any rate. That there's a continuum between the self-maintaining nature of the wild outer spheres of the planet and the, in some ways, equally intractable qualities of our own mind, which we cannot make do what we want.

We can't program our own dreams. Nor can we make ourselves feel certain things the way we want to feel them. Our feelings arise from someplace else. And we make decisions and choices in our lives that cannot be justified rationally. So there's the wilderness within. Maybe it's just a metaphor, maybe on a profound level it's true. My Buddhist teachers say, on a profound level it's true. That the inner and outer is one. In poetry we can certainly sing about that. 

RON:

Also, again, in indigenous cultures the role of a shaman, for instance, in taking on the costumes of animals and dancing and giving that message connects into this whole way of looking at the unconscious and the wilderness, does it not? 

GARY:

That works two ways, too. It gives human beings a way of participating in other ways of being and other modes of being. Just as we know that in a certain way we can be a tree, or a rock, or a cloud, because sometimes we do it. We forget what we are, and we're looking off at a cloud, and for a little bit we're just a cloud floating in the sky. The practice of that is enacted publicly by dressing up like a cloud, and manifesting your capacity to become a cloud in front of other people while they sing about it. 

So that's a personal learning about identity. It's learning that you can be many different things. You can be all sorts of things. This is what they teach in method acting. To be something else, to become one with something else. But then it's also – and that's fascinating in its own right – it’s also a mode, perhaps, to accomplish the next step in democracy. Namely, giving a voice to the non-human in our political decision making. And we've been talking about that in a funny kind of way for several years. 

The lawyer, Christopher Stone, wrote an elegant little legal booklet called Should Trees Have Standing? Meaning, should trees be given standing in court cases. And arguing about how that might be made possible. The rationalist way of approaching that interesting issue is to say, but how do they present their case at a hearing in a supervisors chamber since they can't stand up and talk? Or how can Fox or Coyote come in and say, I don't wanna be trapped, and here's why.

The only way I know that this can be done is by having a human being who is capable of becoming one with Fox and Coyote come in and do a dance in front of the supervisors. And they can study this nonverbal expression of Coyote's opinion of the affair. This is actually what the Pueblo Indians did.

This is an understanding of the role of animal- and plant-dancing in archaic cultures. One part of that role was, it was a way of bringing a voice from other kinds of beings into the human realm so that human beings would know what they were thinking also. 

RON:

So the understanding is that when a person was donning the costume of Elk and dancing, that there was an unconscious connection, perhaps I should say a connection through the unconscious, of that man or woman to the Elk.

GARY:

Yeah, because you couldn't do that without having been an excellent observer of Elk. No one would undertake that without having spent time in the company of Elk. When you see those dances, you see how precise the movements are, the neat little gestures that show that wonderful observation.

Then beyond that, having entered the spirit of the Elk, then the Elk having entered the spirit of the human being. And then, you have the basis for intelligent game management. 

RON:

Well, that would be a concept to set before the Forest Service, or whoever it is that does that! Well, that sounds like it's a long way away in Western culture, something I'd sure like to see happen. It sounds quite fascinating. 

Let's talk just briefly about government and politics. You recently ended a four-year term on the California Arts Council as an appointee of Governor Brown. What do you think about the governmental process and how that worked, and did you enjoy it, and what was your experience?

GARY:

Well, I learned a lot from it, four years on the California Arts Council with my fellow council members, all of whom were appointed by Jerry Brown, and all of whom are working artists and all of us going in there with, I think, equal enthusiasm and naïveté. 

We had to come to grips with the fact that government processes move indeed very slow, and that very little can be accomplished. But with stubbornness and patience, that little bit can be accomplished. So I think that we did move things just a trifle in the direction of giving support and sustenance to a wider range of arts concepts in California, giving recognition to minority arts, to the cultural needs and beauties of the Chicano people and the Black people, and also native California Indians.

And that's what we were trying to do in a great measure. And to develop programs that would bring art closer to the schools and closer to the communities was a deliberate choice and effort of our council. Those programs are going on, and they're beginning to prove themselves and, if anything, get better.

Artists in the communities, artists in the schools. But with the kind of budget that we've had over the years, none of these programs amounts to more than a pilot program. 

RON:

Didn’t the budget just triple recently? 

GARY:

It's up to a figure which is considerably lower than many states, of less population in California, even now.

RON:

On a per capita basis? 

GARY:

California was 43rd in the United States in per capita funding of the arts up until this recent budget went through. 

RON:

That’s amazing. 

GARY:

It is kind of odd, isn't it, considering how California considers itself a cultural center.

So that was tedious and very conventional, normal, ordinary work. And work which I benefited from personally, and it gave me great respect for individuals who labor in the halls of bureaucracy, and have good hearts and do, in 10 or 15 years of hard work, get a little bit done. 

And it also made me realize how, how vastly expensive and perhaps ultimately unnecessary centralized government is at all in getting anything done.

RON:

Unnecessary? 

GARY: 

Unnecessary. 

RON:

What would you replace it with? 

GARY:

All you need is a postal system. In India, all the British ever really established was a postal system and a network of railroads. The rest they left up to village decisions. 

RON:

There might be some disagreement about how effective it's been, but…

GARY:

Well, that's another story, isn’t it.

RON:

I'd like to ask you just briefly how all of this relates to us here in Nevada County in this day and age. I'm speaking mainly about environmental aspects and the progress and march of our economy, et cetera. What can we do here and what are the issues here? 

GARY:

Nevada County is right on up against the line of rapid growth. Every place to some extent, Nevada County right now in particular, is feeling what that expansion means. Both in population and in economy.

We're in a somewhat special situation, too, because we are stewards of a large natural resource here, namely the forests. The argument that you sometimes hear, that it is elitist to want to slow down growth, preserve large parcels, maintain a rural atmosphere, is overlooking the simple fact that on a long-range ecological and biological basis, keeping our forests healthy is essential, and that to opt for a low density rural way of life in one sense is scarcely elitist at all since it's a lot of work, and many people don't want to do it.

Something that goes along with saying that is that we should remember that the gold rush and the gold country mentality reflects a very short period of Nevada County history. In the long range future gold will be of very little importance, and the romance and glamour of gold is something that we should probably leave behind, like children leave toys behind.

As we recognize that in the long range, thousand-year future, Nevada County’s real wealth is her forests, and that most of us in the long range who live here and continue to live here in an inhabitory way will be forest managers or forest resource extractors, which is a kind of a crude way to put it.

We'll be people who live in a way that is connected with these wonderful Ponderosa Pine forests. So we should call on the U. S. Forest Service to manage these lands for genuine sustained yields, not for just 50-year sustained yields. And we should hope that our elected political officials, and everyone else in the county, begins to realize that the health of the land is more important than fast bucks, and that the issues are not whether it's elitist or not elitist to have an outhouse on your property. That what we're all together in is leaving a healthy environment which will be economically viable for our future generations and also beginning to build a working community with each other.

RON:

Nevada County in particular, in terms of the decisions that are made here that affect these things … do you think that Nevada County can become sort of a vanguard of environmental concern, and perhaps change…? 

GARY:

Well, you know, other counties in the state have just as much of a confrontation and dialogue going as ours does, like Humboldt County in its way. Parts of Mendocino County. It's a problem and even down to the conflicts in lifestyles that are found all over the state, and in fact all over the United States. It ultimately boils down to one thing: What is healthiest? We should look for health, for that which is healthy for all of us. Which means the trees and the animals as well as the people.

—-

So there it is, my interview with Gary Snyder conducted on July 18, 1979 on KVMR radio in Nevada City, California. 

In a few moments I’ll wrap up this podcast by reading a short poem of Gary’s, but first I’ll say a few closing words of my own.

And I’d love to hear your thoughts about the interview, about Gary’s way of seeing the world, or anything else you care to address. If you’d like to comment, and perhaps join a conversation with other listeners, you can do so on wisetalkers.com. Just look for the post about this edition of the podcast.

OK, so when I listened to this interview a couple months ago – which was the first time I had done so in more than 40 years – hearing Gary speak so gracefully, with such equanimity and humility, with his quiet respect for all of life, my initial reaction was a feeling of poignancy.

The world has become so much more coarse since the time of this interview, and, I think it’s safe to say, on the whole, objectively worse on pretty much all the issues that Gary spoke to so carefully and wisely here.

But I soon realized that my feeling of poignancy is part and parcel of what makes this interview relevant today, and why Gary’s wisdom, and his vision of healthier ways for humans to live on this earth, are more important than ever. 

Now, needless to say, Gary is not the first or the only voice speaking eloquently and passionately about these subjects and envisioning a healthier world for all. 

Indeed there is a rapidly growing number of people who are not only speaking about but also working hard toward such a world. And I will be talking to just such people on this podcast, as we seek – in the words of the Wise Talkers theme – “Actionable Wisdom for Turbulent Times.” 

And I can think of no better place to begin that pursuit than with Gary’s poetic grace and clarity as he addresses this vision, and with a directness and simplicity that reflects his own embodiment of these values. 

For example, consider his final words in our conversation: 

It ultimately boils down to one thing: What is healthiest? We should look for health, for that which is healthy for all of us. Which means the trees and the animals as well as the people.

‘What is healthiest’ - such pithy, spot-on exhortation to guide our decisions, both public and private. Obviously not easy to achieve – that’s our whole quest here on Wise Talkers. But it’s such a simple-to-apply measuring stick, and guiding light for that quest.

And then there’s this simple yet profound admonition, where Gary states, again in clear simple terms, the very heart of our challenge and opportunity: 

The mutuality and interconnectedness of the universe is what we now have to learn. 

And in this clip, he talks about the difficulties we face in this pursuit, and suggests a simple, positive attitude that can help us deal with those difficulties:)

The chances for change are looking us right in the face right now. We can either regard them as global coming crises, or we can regard them as chances for learning and chances for change. 

And here again, he sees the problems we face as an opportunity to change our ways: 

What I'm talking about is how to go along with the changes that are going to come – whether poets like me say so or not – gracefully. And make it work to a human advantage and allay anxiety and show the pluses in it. That's a very simple exercise, to show the good side of our low-energy future, rather than a high-energy, centralized, industrial future.

I think that’s a key point, that it’s not really difficult to imagine a better world. Accomplishing it, yes, that’s anything but a simple exercise. But it starts with imagining a better world, envisioning a healthy future.

Finally,  I take heart in this last snippet that I’ll replay here. When we were talking about how this enormous transition we need to make would require a massive change on our part, we had this brief exchange: 

[RON:]

Sounds like a big job of education, or people coming around one way or another. 

[GARY:]

Yeah, but I'll say this for Americans: They do seem to learn once the shit hits the fan. Or they try anyway.

I loved hearing Gary say this. It’s a point I make myself, when talking to people who are feeling hopeless in the face of our current predicament – that we humans rarely do anything that requires a lot of effort until till the wolf is at the door.  

So yeah, this procrastinating habit of ours actually gives me hope that we can still get our act together and rise to the occasion in time to avert the worst possible future scenarios and start building the better world that the great majority of humanity has always longed for. 

So in future episodes of the Wise Talkers podcast, we’ll be talking about what people are in fact doing, and what more we can all do, to help achieve that goal. 

Thank you for tuning in. Check wisetalkers.com to see what’s coming up next on Wise Talkers. And I said earlier, you can also comment on this interview with Gary Snyder on the website.

So now I’ll close by reading a short poem of Gary’s that seems like a fitting way to sum this all up.  And Gary, if you’re listening, I hope you don’t mind if I put a music track behind your poem. It’s something written and produced by my late son, Mark David Jones, about 25 years ago.

For All

by Gary Snyder

 Ah to be alive

 on a mid-September morn

 fording a stream

 barefoot, pants rolled up,

 holding boots, pack on,

 sunshine, ice in the shallows,

 northern rockies.

 Rustle and shimmer of icy creek waters

 stones turn underfoot, small and hard as toes

 cold nose dripping

 singing inside

 creek music, heart music,

 smell of sun on gravel.

 I pledge allegiance

 I pledge allegiance to the soil

 of Turtle Island,

 and to the beings who thereon dwell

 one ecosystem

 in diversity

 under the sun

 With joyful interpenetration for all.