D. Ryan Foster- Nature in Us, Response To Snyder's The Practice of the Wild

April 22

“One should not…hope to leave the political quagg behind…The purpose of such studies and hikes is to be able to come back to the lowlands and see all the land about us…as part of the same territory- never totally ruined, never completely unnatural.” (Snyder, pg. 101).

I always was skeptical of nature worship or people who were nature enthusiasts. It was something interesting that they set nature apart from everything humans touched. Like the Preservationists of the early 1900s they seek pristine untouched nature, something uncorrupted by humans. I never liked this much as the modern definition of nature is the base state. In this nature is wild and uncontrolled and in such has a poetic beauty, but if humans are not part of this base state, in fact seen as invaders upon it, then (since there is nothing below a base state) humans must be above nature in some manner. This arrogance of the philosophy inherently taints any love or worship of nature as being somehow better than human as distinguishing ourselves from being natural beings is clearly antithesis to the concept. This was my original skepticism with Snyder, allowing me to take (as I do with most works) his philosophy with a grain of salt. However, this line on page 101 points out the very thing I've always struggled with and is to show that as a deer treats its wilderness, humans as natural beings, have created their own form of wilderness that lives inside the land even when prospected and paved over. But then one has to ask if that too is natural then what defines a wilderness from the preconceptions we've always known as nature/wilderness? I think to reconcile this we look to the power of a land. The ability to support life, or the ability to extinguish life, or perhaps even the ability to make life run smoothly and comfortably as the wilderness of a suburban side street. I have to reference Sinclair's The Jungle here as a perfect example of how even an urban environment can be seen as a wilderness unto itself and it too has its sacred places in the forms of the family room, the child's playground, the school, the library, or the local synagogue or other holy building. The human wilderness certainly has its rituals and it certainly can be tread upon without being experienced and very well meets the requirements to having its own sacred landscapes. So the next time I see that small patch of woods behind a house, I may be sad to see it go down, but I will consider the possibilities of nature to continue in a modern human way in the townhouses that will be thrown up where tall trees used to stand.