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PAULA SCHROEDER: Gary Snyder is one of these. In his essay, "Earth Day and the War Against the Imagination," he writes, "There are socially and politically entrenched attitudes and institutions that reinforce our misuse of nature and our cruelty toward others. Our major civilizations objectify and commodify the natural world.

They regard nature as a mere inanimate resource and a target of opportunity. I could say that this is bad metaphysics, but it is worse than that. It is a failure of the imagination." That essay written for Earth Day 1990, is reprinted in a new book by Gary Snyder called, A Place in Space, Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds, New and Selected Prose.

Gary Snyder was a contemporary of Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, one of the formers of the beat society of the San Francisco area back in the 1950s and continues to be highly influential on intellectuals and people with imagination. We are very fortunate to have this Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet with us today by phone on Mid-Morning. Good morning to you, Gary Snyder.

GARY SNYDER (ON PHONE): Good morning, Paula.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It's wonderful to talk with you. I want to get right into this whole question of what's happening to imagination and what our society is doing to imagine. You call it a war against imagination. What do you mean by that?

GARY SNYDER (ON PHONE): Well, I'm quoting a line from a poem by Diane Di Prima there. And the line of the poem is, "The only war is the war against the imagination." An interesting point of view with a certain specific truth in it. Because it is the imagination, which gives us moral flexibility and empathy, sympathy, the capacity to step out of our own narrow egos and our own personal ego Everests to understand the plight not only of other human beings and their pain and poverty of both material and spiritual means, but to appreciate the whole of the non-human world.

PAULA SCHROEDER: As a poet and someone who probably really is not understood very well by that mainstream society, how can you help develop that ethic without getting too sentimental about it and idealistic?

GARY SNYDER (ON PHONE): Well, first of all, you don't have to worry about sounding sentimental and idealistic. Why not? To talk about human pain and human suffering is to risk sounding sentimental and idealistic also.

But it isn't, of course, simply a matter of sentiment and ideals. There are some very strong and compelling self-interest reasons for treating other human beings right, and also for treating the world right. There was a sports catalog that came out of your part of the world some years back, the Christian Herder catalog that said at the bottom of it-- and they sold guns. At the bottom of every page, it said, "Where wilderness cannot survive, humanity cannot survive."

A wonderful right-wing way of saying at that time, 25 years ago, that we are all interconnected with each other. And that the natural world and the biological systems are really what make it possible for human beings to-- we're part of nature. So the expansion of a moral concern to the rest of the natural world, the rest of the non-human living beings, is not idealistic or sentimental. It has some very specific self-interest motives behind it, too, if you want to get that way about it.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, certainly in one of the essays in this book, too, you talk about human beings being a part of nature and therefore a part of ecological science. And you say that throws light on the fundamental questions of who we are, how we exist, where we belong. Are these questions that you think we don't ask enough in Western society and that are considered in Eastern society? because I know that you incorporate much of the Zen Buddhist thought into your writings.

GARY SNYDER (ON PHONE): Well, I'll give you a very simple example. There is still a tremendous resistance to the Darwinian model of organic evolution. Yet all of the evidence, which is really charming to my mind, clearly indicates that human beings are kin with other animals, that we are indeed a species among other species, that a human being is another variety of animal.

And this is an insight and a way of seeing human relationship to the rest of nature that has been common to Far Eastern and India-- the Far East and India for centuries. They've understood this, and accepted it and dealt with it in various ways. But we have a curious history of ideas in the Occident that causes us, even though we intellectually perhaps will accept the idea that we are animals, that we resist it, and look for all of the ways to describe human beings as also more than animals, or other than animals, or surpassing animals, or going beyond animals or being not responsible to organic evolution. And that is a very curious feature.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It's interesting that you say that we have not yet accepted the Darwinian model of evolution, and yet social Darwinism in the West has been very well accepted.

GARY SNYDER (ON PHONE): Well, social Darwinism was a very rapid interpretation and misinterpretation of Darwin's intention, of course, which picked up simply on the idea of competition and survival of the fittest. And that certainly fit the model of the developed world, the Occidental developed world, and its relationship with everybody else in the world. It gave them an excuse to go ahead and be imperialists.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It's 12 minutes past 10 o'clock. We're talking with Gary Snyder, whose latest book of essays is called A Place in Space, Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds. We're talking with him by phone from Washington DC. And you're listening to Mid-Morning on the FM news station. I'm Paula Schroeder.

Just quickly, the weather today calls for mostly cloudy skies across much of the state of Minnesota. And it's going to be a bit warmer, highs in the low 30s in the Northwest to the mid 40s in the Southwest. Some light snow expected late this afternoon, mixed with freezing rain or sleet. But it looks like by the weekend, we will have highs right around 50 degrees. So we'll take that certainly.

Gary Snyder, you just returned from three weeks in the Himalayas. Why do you travel to places like that? And what do you get out of it in terms of your work and your writing?

GARY SNYDER (ON PHONE): Understanding the various possibilities of the geography, and its ecosystems and the way human beings adapt themselves to living in various parts of the planet is a fascinating exercise. In the Khumbu Himalaya section of Nepal, where I just came back from, that's where Mount Everest and a cluster of the highest mountains in the world are right along that Tibetan-Nepalese border there. And right in that same area is a population of a couple of thousand Sherpa people who live in their little agricultural villages in sites that are so remote, and so difficult to get to, and where the climate is so forbidding, and are self-sufficient, entirely without automobiles or wheels, doing everything by trail, growing their own food and are an enormously enlightened and cheerful people.

I wanted to see that. And I wanted to live in a place where there was-- where everything was done on foot. We walked for 20 days.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Then, did you have the sense that, gee, if they can do it there, we can do it anywhere?

GARY SNYDER (ON PHONE): Well, one wouldn't want to replicate that model exactly, but it certainly is true. Human beings have an enormous capacity to adapt and make skillful use, as we can see all over the globe, of what is produced locally within a given ecosystem. And when I speak of a place in space, I'm talking about countless places, each of them specific, that have different climates and different terrain within which we live because we always live somewhere. We don't live in on an abstract planet. And a lot of what the Place in Space essays are about is learning to appreciate that you too live in a place and that you can be a real member of the community of that place, not just a rootless cosmopolitan.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Yeah, what do you mean by ecological cosmopolitanism anyway? I love that phrase.

[LAUGHS]

GARY SNYDER (ON PHONE): I think that means, for me, that there's a busy richness about the way ecosystems work. And that even as we are all located somewhere and live within a specific context and a limited terrain, we can understand that the same principles and processes are at work in various diverse ways everywhere and maintain a provincial, if you like, rootedness with a cosmopolitan consciousness.

PAULA SCHROEDER: It's really interesting to look back and read some of the essays, which, again, are included in this book that you wrote in the late 1950s, early 1960s, where you talked about being separated from the American standard of living on a conscious level for creative reasons, which some people considered subversive, of course, at that time. Are you still in that same place?

GARY SNYDER (ON PHONE): I make my choices. I live in a rather remote place of my own choice where I can keep an eye on natural processes and am engaged with a large, and diverse and noisy community of birds and trees--

[LAUGHS]

--as well as fellow human beings who are each in their own households and in their own living, working out a life that is a balance between human, social and political demands and understanding the flow of nature around them. It's a fascinating exercise.

PAULA SCHROEDER: You even raised the question back then about the ability of the biosphere, the Earth to survive. Is that still the primary question and concern that you have?

GARY SNYDER (ON PHONE): To refine it a bit I don't doubt that the Earth and the biosphere will survive. It's enormously resilient. And of course, there are millions upon millions of years yet to come. So our concern really is a specific 20th and 21st century concern that we do not mistreat the current biosphere in such a way that we lose too many species

The loss of species is an irreversible ecological effect. Many things that can be done to the Earth will heal themselves in time. Virgin forests will grow again. But to lose a species, to lose, say, some of the beautiful large mammals that are teetering on the edge of extinction in Africa, the elephant, which is endangered almost everywhere except in Botswana, other large predators that are really against the wall, to lose those would be a great sadness and certainly a failing of civilization.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Well, Gary Snyder, I want to thank you so much for introducing us and reminding us about some of your views of the world. It was really generous of you to spend some of your time with us this morning. Thank you.

GARY SNYDER (ON PHONE): Thank you, Paula.

PAULA SCHROEDER: Gary Snyder's latest work is A place in Space, Ethics, Aesthetics and Watersheds. He will be speaking at the Macalester College chapel this Saturday night, but we've been informed that the tickets are all gone. So sorry about that. But you can get a sense of Gary Snyder's writings through that book, his book of essays. It's published by Counterpoint.