Critical Review

The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016) Critical Review Chad Wriglesworth, ed. Distant Neighbors: The Selected Letters of Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder. Counterpoint, 2014. Distant Neighbors is an important book for many reasons, not least because it is of that increasingly rare genre, the epistolary portrait of a long, deep friendship. (Perhaps, in the dubious future of books, there will be volumes titled The Selected Emails of . but they are not likely to breathe the warmth, leisure, and rootedness of this forty-year correspondence!) The greater importance of this record of a friendship is that Wendell Berry and Gary Snyder are both leaders in one of the most important counter-revolutions of our time. That is the growing recognition that, despite the placelessness of urbanization, globalization, commodification, and the internet, we are most fully human when we are rooted in a place. Through their many books, articles, stories, and poems, Berry and Snyder have helped many people to see that we are each members of communities that include not only people but plants, animals, soil, and weather. We have rather lamely labeled this complex set of relationships “the environment”—hence the popular name for this diverse revolution, “the environmental movement.” The first letters in this correspondence are dated 1973, at about the time that my wife, Mary Ruth, and I began reading Berry and Snyder seriously, as guides to our own thinking about how to live wisely on the earth. “The environment” back then was a word that had only begun to be used in its current (and highly inadequate) sense, as a synonym for the great gift we call “nature” or “creation.” We had first encountered Wendell Berry in an essay reprinted in 1969 in that venerable, counter-culture bible The Whole Earth Catalog. The piece was called “Think Little,” and it expressed with great clarity what we had begun vaguely to feel and try to live out. After pointing out the tendency of the recent civil rights and peace movements to degenerate into faddish posturing (mainly because they were about bad things done by other people), Berry wrote: The Environmental Movement rises close to home. Every time we draw a breath, every time we drink a glass of water, every time we eat a bite of food, we are suffering from it. Nearly every one of us, nearly every day, is contributing to the ruin of this planet. A protest meeting on the issue of environmental abuse is not a convocation of accusers, it is a convocation of the guilty. This realization ought Loren Wilkinson 75 The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016) to clear the smog of self-righteousness that has almost conventionally hovered over these occasions and let us see the work that is to be done.1 The astringent words about guilt and righteousness resonated deeply with our own Christian understanding (though we have gradually come to understand, partly through Berry’s writings, how much more the Christian way is about joy and gratitude than it is about guilt!). Mary Ruth and I encountered “Think Little” again in a 1973 book called A Continuous Harmony, which we used as a text in an environmental studies program we started in 1974 at Seattle Pacific College. In my teaching in that program I was also helped and troubled by a book of poetry and essays by Gary Snyder, Turtle Island, published in 1974 (it won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for poetry). In its preface he explains the title: Turtle Island—the old/new name for the continent, based on many creation myths of the people who have lived here for millennia, and reapplied by some of them to North America in recent years. Also, an idea found world-wide, of the earth, or cosmos even, sustained by a great turtle or serpent-of-eternity.2 At the end of the collection in an essay titled “The Wilderness,” which draws widely on North American, Hindu, and Buddhist mythology and practice, Snyder acknowledges, “The voice that speaks to me as a poet, what Westerners have called the Muse, is the voice of nature herself, whom the ancient poets called the great goddess, the Magna Mater.”3 Thus there is no “god” other than nature: nature is god. A native Oregonian, I found Snyder helpful first because, as one who had grown up in the Northwest, he wrote vividly, and at first-hand, of the damage done—mainly through logging—to my own place. (I was and am less familiar with Berry’s strip-mined and eroded Kentucky.) But also, he began to connect me to the ancient, almost-obscured practices, traditions, and myths of “the people who have lived here for millenia.” He began to make me more aware of the importance of those “old ways” (the title of a later book by Snyder). As one who was trying to work out an ethic of care for the earth as part of the gospel (the “good news”) of the Christian story—I found Snyder troubling because he clearly (along with most of the then-emerging “environmentalist” community) understood the Christian story to be part of the problem. In his view, it encouraged an ethic of human 1 Wendell Berry, “Think Little,” The Berry Center, http://www.berrycenter.org/think-little-wendell-berry/. 2 Gary Snyder, Turtle Island (New York: New Directions, 1974), introductory note. 3 Ibid., 107. Loren Wilkinson 76 The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016) dominion and exploitation, stressing a transcendent God and a (correspondingly) transcendent “man” made in his image. If there was to be a way forward, Snyder argued, it lay in recovering “the old ways” of those native people, to whom the divine was resident in all things and people. A serious Buddhist, he found equivalents of Native American mythology more fully spelled out in the animism underlying Japanese and Hindu myths. In the years that followed I have read most of the work of both writers with great interest and profit. In 1977, when I joined a group of scholars at Calvin College in a project to articulate a Christian theology of environmental ethic (later published as the book Earthkeeping: Stewardship of Creation), Snyder wrote a note of encouragement, saying he had been trying without much success for years to get Americans to care for the earth from a native and Buddhist starting point; maybe we would have more luck from a Christian foundation. We appreciated the encouragement. Snyder, in important works like The Practice of the Wild, continues to draw on what he considers to be remnants of Neolithic wisdom, captured in Native American mythology, and in the animism he detects beneath Zen Buddhism. And Berry, in his poetry and fiction—and especially in essays like “The Gift of Good Land” and “Christianity and the Survival of Creation”—has made clear the biblical roots of his thought. These biblical dimensions have been made even clearer through more recent interpreters like Ellen Davis, in Scripture, Culture and Agriculture: An Agrarian Reading of the Bible, and Norman Wirzba, in From Nature to Creation. I begin this review with these personal reflections not simply because they explain why this book is so important to me, but because hopefully they give some indication of why the long, friendly dialogue between these two thinkers is so important today for all who are concerned with (as Pope Francis recently put it in his great encyclical) “care for our common home.”4 Berry and Snyder continue to be among the most important voices influencing that movement, which is attempting to reshape and restore our relationship with the earth. Both write passionately about their commitment to the local: the need to know and be at home in our own communities. The letters often reflect their delight in and gratitude for this deep agreement. In 1975, after reading Snyder’s newly published Turtle Island, Berry wrote, “Your poems offer a sort of companionship that is of the greatest importance to me. I feel the differences of 4Pope Francis, Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, 24 May 2015, http://w2.vatican.va/content/ francesco/en/encyclicals/documents/papa-francesco_20150524_enciclica-laudato-si.html. Loren Wilkinson 77 The Trumpeter ISSN 0832-6193 Volume 32, No. 1 (2016) our origins and educations—and the similarity of our hopes and aims. That is good” (8). A little later (1977) Berry writes, “Your words, wherever I find them, give me the sense of being spoken not just to but for. What a relief!” (23). Those words appear in a letter in which Berry thanks Snyder for what he wrote when praising Three Memorial Poems, which Berry had just published in honour of a recently departed neighbour and mentor. Snyder’s words were —poems that go off the edge of the world to visit the dead: our teachers still. Brave poems—they send me back to my own life. refreshed; work joyfully in impermanence!5 The harmony between the two men is re-enforced by their common vocation: to be both poets and farmers. Yet the two bodies of poetry that they have produced are very different from each other. Their farming is different as well. Berry is working to recover and sustain traditional agrarian life in the fertile hills of Kentucky; Snyder is trying something rather different, to homestead and “re-inhabit” the dry foothills of the Sierra Nevada, in a way consistent with the hunter/gatherer culture of the nearly vanished native people. Yet as Berry writes, after his first visit to Kitkitdizze, Snyder’s homestead in California (referring to his description of the visit in an article for Organic Gardening): It’s clear from what I wrote, I hope, how much I was pleased and moved by what I saw there.

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