The Plowboy Interview
(Page 8 of 18)
PLOWBOY: Right.
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SNYDER: To give you an example of
artificial versus natural boundaries. there are the
political borders of the states of California, Washington,
and Oregon, say. In that same region, though, there are
also-among others-the natural boundaries established by the
range of Douglas fir. This type of tree grows from
somewhere just around Haines, Alaska, down the coast and
along the crest of the Cascades and the Sierra as far as
Big Sur ...and extend east to the crest of the Sierra
Nevada. It's found around where I live, but not over on the
other side into the Great Basin.
From Big Sur north to Haines, and from the crest of the
Sierra and the Cascades to the Pacific Ocean ...the range
of Douglas fir is almost exactly precise definition of what
my natural nation would be. The agriculture and
forestry of the region within which Douglas fir grows are
defined by the amount of rainfall and the
temperatures found in that zone. South of the Douglas fir
range you find a really hot and much drier, truly
Mediterranean cli mate, which has different
agricultural needs. And so you could take, say, the Douglas
fir-because it's dependent upon that rainfall and those
temperatures-as the signature of this natural
nation. And what we already know about Douglas fir tells us
nearly everything else about the locale ...including what
kind of farming we should do, what kind of raincoats we
should wear, what boots will be the best to wear, and even
what our poetry should be like. [Laughter] That's the way
those things work, you know.
I felt this on my last trip up to Alaska, when I drove from
Anchorage up around the basin of the Copper River and over
into Canada and came down through the Yukon. I turned off
at Haines Junctioh and went over Haines Summit-all of that
being white spruce taiga, still frozen in-and dropped down
then to the Pacific, to Haines, Alaska, which is on the
water. And suddenly I was in the green trees, the skunk
cabbage was beginning to come out, the eagles had already
left ...and it was spring, where 40 miles back up the road
up in the taiga I'd been in the winter of the Yukon. I knew
I was back in my country, seeing Douglas fir. All
of the terms suddenly changed. The plants became plants I
know.
That's a bioregional boundary. I could
feel it. And if you look at the maps in Kroeber's
book Cultural and Natural Areas of Native North
America, you'll find (this is exactly what he does in
that book, using a series of overlay maps), that the
natural regions of North America and its native cultural
regions are almost identical.
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