The Plowboy Interview
(Page 10 of 18)
Michael McClure loves to do that, too. I suppose this would
be a good time to list some of the other active
bioregionalists. Nancy Morita has been working with Peter
and Zach on her project, which is called Wild in the City.
She's actually laid out a set of maps that show the old
pre-white habitations in San Francisco, the peninsula,
delineating what the original vegetation of the Sunset
District was, and where the salmon streams were in downtown
San Francisco, and where the deer and the tule elk were.
And she created an overlay map that allows you to lay a
modern San Francisco map on top of her chart of
original San Francisco to see what plants and
animals and birds used to be found where different urban
neighborhoods now are. And it's not done just as an
exercise in nostalgia. It's a way of saying that if we make
our city right, we can have these things here with us
again. That, in a sense, is the ideal. That's the dream of
all bioregional visionaries: to have human habitation
integrated with natural populations, to bring back what was
here before and to be able to live with it.
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And we could have salmon running in Strawberry Creek right
up here on the Berkeley campus, as they used to. Or have
orcas coming into San Francisco Bay as they used to. It
could be the culmination of a future technology ...of a
postindustrial sophistication, and a refinement of
everything we know. We could have clean air and clean water
and still have-not as huge a population as we have now-but
have large and delightfully diverse human
populations living within it all.
PLOWBOY: It almost makes you wonder
whether the former makeup of an area doesn't have some kind
of spiritual influence on the neighborhoods that are there
now.
SNYDER: That's an interesting speculation.
I talked to an elderly Crow Indian up in Montana a few
years ago who said just that. He was an interesting man, I
guess regarded as a medicine man, and we were at a meeting
where there were a lot of younger Indian radicals and
activists. This older man said to me, kind of as an aside,
"You know, I'm not really worried about what white people
are going to do to this continent. If anybody lives here
lone enough, the spirits will begin to speak to them. It's
the power of the spirits coming up from the land," he said.
"That's what taught us, and it would teach everybody, if
they'd just stay here. The old spirits and the old powers
e: , aren't lost; they just need people to be around long
enough to begin to fluence them."
Now that may be overly optimistic, but it's an elegant
perspective. To some extent, you can see it
working. If people will just be in a place long
enough and will begin to actually say "OK, I'm here," then
they'll begin to learn.
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