The Plowboy Interview
(Page 4 of 18)
PLOWBOY: Would you say that there is also
a difference between the nativeEuropean Occidental view and
the American Occidental view, since most of us are
essentially foreigners here?
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SNYDER: Well, you could say that, but the
dynamics of American culture are still, I think, pretty
much European. All the tricks and games we've played were
first figured out in Europe. We iust had a new continent
upon which to employ them.
PLOWBOY: With more raw material. . .
SNYDER: Right. Tocqueville talks about
that, and does so eloquently, n: his description of the
United States. In short, the primary mind-set that our
ancestors brought from Europe has not yet been broken. It's
that Cartesian dualism-of consciousness and nature, of body
and spirit, and of subject and object-that causes our whole
culture to still see this huge continent as essentially a
yard full of resources to be used for whatever purposes we
can comc up with.
We suffer from a lack of sense of nativeness ...a lack of
commitment to spending time in place, to the building of a
culture over the centuries. These concepts haven't occurred
yet to most Americans.
PLOWBOY: We're still acting as if we were
invaders rather than true residents
SNYDER: Right. And, unfortunately, even
the Europeans-on their own an cestral ground-often act the
same way. Or the Japanese, too, as they go about radically
altering and reshaping their environment for the sake of
their current self defined industrial needs, with very
little thought for long-range sustainability. They're
playing the game to the hilt for this century and
hoping that somehow things will come out OK later.
These are huge gambles-huge gambles-that these
people are taking, However, the Japanese are
hedging their bets a little bit. One of the ways they do
this is by maintaining a highly subsidized rice
agriculture. Farmer on the northern coast, on the coast of
the Japan Sea (which is the richest rice-growing territory
in all of Japan), are subsidized to keep raising rice, even
though that production involves a loss to the economy as a
whole.
PLOWBOY: We don't seem to be doing
anything similar to that here.
SNYDER: But we are, to a degree. We
are subsidizing a lot of agriculture Of course, we
don't do it so much with the thought of simply keeping the
skills alive. Rather, it's done in response to the demands
of powerful political lobbies.
PLOWBOY: And I gather that the subsidized
Japanese rice farmers ircr,': mining the soil to the extent
that most of our subsidized agriculture is.
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