The Plowboy Interview
(Page 6 of 18)
So the work actually has been there all along. And prior to
my work, and the work of the other poets that I've
mentioned, were the long-held concerns of people like John
Muir. He inspired a couple of generations of
conservationists, many of whom were very fine writers. Aldo
Leopold, for example.
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In fact, we have a real history and tradition of work in
the field by all sorts of cranky, intelligent, and often
very wild people ...all the way from the last century till
now.
Most poets got into the game a little bit later, but the
concern has been there all along. You can even find
nineteenth-century precedents for it. Of course, all of us
in a way go back to Thoreau ...and that trail leads back
into Europe, to the writings of anarchists and of people in
the heretical independent Christian movements, among
others.
PLOWBOY: Isn't it true that the
environmental crisis itself has escalated so much in the
last few decades that it's caught more attention from the
public?
SNYDER: Yes, but the direction in which
the world was going was recognized a long time ago.
Rousseau comments on it ...Edmund Burke ...Tocqueville
comments on it specifically in terms of what was then
happening in America. There have always been some eyes that
saw, with horror and amazement, where the logic of
unbridled materialism and the dualistic worldview and the
lure of endlessly available resources would lead ...when
tied to a kind of deified notion of the free-market
economy.
PLOWBOY: The bioregional movement is a
more recently emerging environmental cause and one that
you've championed lately. Could you define this term for
us?
SNYDER: OK, but first I have to admit that
I don't know where the term bioregionalism first came from.
I do know, however, that it has some old and interesting
predecessors that are by no means necessarily
environmentally oriented. Part of the history of the
emergence of bioregionalism must, I think, have to do with
the completely natural-and to be expected-resistance of
local economies and local cultures to being colonized by,
and swept away by, urban cultural centers. The movement
probably has its origins in the gradual expansion of the
power of the city, or of the metropole, in European
culture-at the expense of sustainable local, small
cultures. And these local cultures, which usually have
their own languages or dialects and their own traditions,
have always resisted being swept into somebody else's
urbanized mainstream in which they would come out second,
both economically and culturally ...they would be
second-class citizens.
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