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MARTIN: To take a different direction, being here at Kitkitdizze makes me particularly aware of your writing on place. You’ve been one of the people who is defining what we understand by a long-term commitment to a place, and a bioregional awareness.
SNYDER: You know, for you to say that (which I gratefully accept) is also a cultural admission of the fact that we are an unsettled and disenfranchised people.
MARTIN: Absolutely.
SNYDER: I mean, I’m nothing.
MARTIN: You’ve only been here forty years.
SNYDER: I’m nothing. My ancestors’ bones are not buried here. What do I know? [Laughs] If you want to talk about place, the sense of place, or the placedness of human beings prior to the mid 19th Century, you’re talking about something entirely different that we have almost no idea of.
MARTIN: OK, I agree. But what you’re doing is an attempt at some kind of reparation, turning things around?
SNYDER: Oh, it’s just my choice. I made up my mind that I wanted to find some place where I’d settle down for the rest of my life. I didn’t assume that the children would want to stay. And I don’t assume - you can’t make that assumption in the 21st Century, in this world.
The other side of it is that we are capable of beginning now to think of the whole planet Earth as our place – which nobody was quite up to before. They didn’t have quite that much information. But saying that is not to free people to say ‘I am a citizen of Planet Earth, I am a member of this planet.’ They’ve got to prove it. It’s too easy to say ‘I am a citizen of the Cosmos, I live in the Universe, I am at home here…’ Well, come on kid, show me how you do it. [Laughs] So you still can only know place specifically.
MARTIN: In the particulars.
SNYDER: You have to know the particulars. If you can begin to talk about the particulars, you might then be able to get a sense of what a larger planetary space might ultimately be. So it does come down to starting out with particulars, and being engaged with them. And that’s really hard to come by. With most people you have to just start right out with putting them on the map. You know, which direction is North? And then, what does North mean? What is North?
MARTIN: What does that question mean?
SNYDER: Which direction is North? What is North? That question means can you answer it, where is North?
MARTIN: Well I know where it is on the map.
SNYDER: What is it in worldly terms? On the map it’s just up.
MARTIN: Well I know how the sun travels across the sky, and I get North in relation to that.
SNYDER: The East and West are created by the spinning of the Earth. The axis of rotation is what we call North and South. The projection of the axis of the rotation of the Earth in the northern hemisphere is North. It happens to come out very close to a star. It’s not quite on it, it’s just off a little bit. But that’s what North is. It’s the axis of the turning of the Earth, and measuring yourself against that.
MARTIN: So for us, where I come from, we need to know where South is.
SNYDER: Yes. The Southern Cross is even further off the axis. One time in Northern Botswana, I was looking at the Southern Cross and actually pointed to the axis of it, like that, and took a line from the stars that were up over the horizon, so I knew where the North pole was down under the ground. And then I knew that for sure I was on the planet. [Laughs] When I first landed in Japan, in 1956, they happened to have a clear night the first or second night I was there. And sure enough I could recognize the constellations. So then I knew I was still at least on the same planet.
Well those are what the local Palas are all about, the guardians of the Four Directions in Buddhism, and the importance of knowing what is meant by the guardians of the Four Directions. But in Buddhist East Asia they speak of Ten Directions: the four cardinal directions that we are acquainted with, plus the quarters — (North-West, South-East and so on), plus: Up and Down. That makes ten.
So some of the Buddhist recitations invoke all the Buddhas in the Ten Directions. And the Three Realms: the Realm of Form, the Realm of No-Form, and the Realm of Desire. We live in the Realm of Desire, being metabolic beings, whereas rocks are in the Realm of Form. They have no metabolism.
MARTIN: They just are.
SNYDER: That’s what it seems.
MARTIN: And the Realm of No-Form?
SNYDER: Well most people have never seen that [Laughs]. That’s Arupa, No-Form. That’s one of those things that when you get into trying to figure out Buddhist philosophy you think now what do they mean by that? You can find commentaries that describe it, but they’re not very helpful.
So the idea of how you locate yourself is interesting, those cosmic guidances that are given. And then there are the local guidances, which are always: Which way does the water flow? What’s the watershed? Where’s the river going? The mountains are that way, it’s downhill that way… you sort of orient yourself. The watershed is a great way to orient yourself.
MARTIN: And do you think that understanding the particularities of one location enables you then to extend that further?
SNYDER: Well then you know at least what you’re looking at. Otherwise you wouldn’t have ever noticed, no matter where you are. You know what to look around for, and what questions you want to ask. The next step that’s important for people is knowing what the plant life is.
MARTIN: There’s been a certain criticism of the literature associated with place-based bioregionalism which says that in North America it sometimes gets too parochial, too insular, too disconnected from the global. But in your work, I think, you can’t make that division. The particularity is there, but if one’s going to think ecologically at all, you’re going to think interpenetration and flows, and the particular manifesting the global.
SNYDER: Yeah, but you know for a lot of people that doesn’t do a damn bit of good.
MARTIN: Explain?
SNYDER: Because most issues are more local than that. Like the timber issues here are the issues that belong to mountains (that is to say there is a fast run-off of the rain), issues that belong to a summer-dry, winter-wet climate which changes what you can do. And you have to be much more careful in a summer-dry climate because when the winter rains come they cause a lot of quick erosion in the sense that the ground has totally dried out, and you can lose your forest. In a few decades you can have lost enough soil that you can never get your trees back. That’s what happened to Greece, and a lot of other parts of the Mediterranean. That’s how they lost their forest. They cut too many trees down, and it was impossible for them to regrow because of the rainfall washing out the soils. Plus goats.
MARTIN: After the goat, the desert, they say. They eat everything.
SNYDER: Yeah. And they eat the young trees. They can eat grass and it will grow back.
So I don’t know what the criticism there is of place, except a misguided criticism from urban people who are educated and don’t understand that they live in a place, or that it matters.
MARTIN: I think it’s saying that yes of course, we need to rediscover our locatedness in place, but that global flows and patterns – political, social, economic and so on – are inextricably part of where we are as well.
SNYDER: Nobody argues that. But everybody knows those things already and doesn’t know anything about the place. So it’s not a fair argument, because a lot of people haven’t given place even a start in their thinking. They just come in already with, you know, Western civ. on their minds, and they think that place is for the peasant - the paysanne, the person of the land, the person of the place.
MARTIN: The other day when I was flying here, a daytime flight from London to San Francisco, it was a wonderful thing to travel over the surface of the planet, see it all for a change from that perspective, that big view – the mountains, the rivers, lakes, fields, forest fires. The world. I kept thinking about your essay on Dogen’s ‘Mountains and Waters Sutra’ in The Practice of the Wild, and also, of course, Mountains and Rivers Without End. It does seem to me that you do it beautifully there: a big view of the whole phenomenal world continually arising, all of it seen as mountains and rivers, a nondual view.
SNYDER: Well, that’s one of the things I’m trying to do, yes. Did you go over Greenland? Isn’t that remarkable?
MARTIN: It is remarkable.
SNYDER: The first time I flew over Greenland I realized that I hadn’t known how many rocky mountains there were. Big mountains.
MARTIN: Yes. And even before that, the coast of Scotland was so extraordinary, a very ragged, wild coast, so many inlets. When we finally got to San Francisco, my initial feeling after all those hours of mountains and rivers and sky was quite negative. Kind of: Oh no look at all these grids that the humans have built. But then the pattern of it all was really so interesting, a fascinating thing this human mind has made, this world of San Francisco.
SNYDER: Or any place.
MARTIN: Or any place, but that was where I was. So I realized again how easy it is, initially, to love the so-called undeveloped environments of a continent, and to feel a kind of repugnance towards its cities. But actually seeing the patterns of San Francisco from the air, it all looked so intelligent, lively, beautiful even. It reminded me of that poem from Mountains and Rivers, ‘Walking the New York Bedrock’, where even that city of cities is in a curious sense a natural formation.
So one does have that sense sometimes, that all of it is really mountains and rivers. But can you say something about maintaining such a view?
SNYDER: Well the watershed goes through cities.
MARTIN: ‘Rivers that never give up.’
SNYDER: Yeah, for one thing. All cities are part of some natural conformation of the wild, and they are adapted to the conformation of the land. And they are where they are for some human reason. San Francisco is where you can bring a ship in out of the ocean, and where a great part of the drainage of California comes out into San Francisco Bay, a huge, huge watershed (the San Joaquin Valley to the South, Sacramento Valley to the North). All that is coming out into San Francisco Bay. It’s been mistreated a lot, and the gold-mining they did up here shallowed the Bay considerably, but they are still able to get aircraft carriers in, just barely.
To think about cities, you think a little bit about the idea of the mandala, and the uses of human habitation and the possibilities of different sets and structures of habitation, and the infrastructure that brings water and takes waste away, and so forth. It’s not simple. It’s better done some places than others, but there have been some intelligent and magical – deliberately magically intended – constructions of concentrations of population.
However, it would be a mistake to think that all human accomplishment comes out of those concentrations. What the intervening lands offer, each in their own way, are particular lessons, including the places that are not suitable habitat for any economy other hunters and gatherers —they just won’t work for pasture or for agriculture. Like much of the Great Basin of Western Turtle Island.
