by Adam Frank

I have been reading Gary Snyder's The Practice of The Wild and thought I would pass this along.

So we can say that New York City and Tokyo are natural but not wild. They do not deviate from the laws of nature, but they are habitat so exclusive in the matter of who and what they give shelter to, and so intolerant of other creatures, as to be truly odd. Wilderness is a place where the wild potential is fully expressed, a diversity of living and non-living beings flourishing according to their owns sorts of order. In ecology we speak of wholeness. Human beings came out of that wholeness, and to consider the possibility of reactivating membership in the Assembly of All Beings is in no way regressive.

By the sixteenth century the lands of Occident, the countries of Asia, and all of the civilizations and cities from the Indian subcontinent to the coast of North Africa were becoming ecologically impoverished. The people were rapidly becoming nature-illiterate. Much of the vegetation had been destroyed by the expansion of grazing or agriculture, and the remaining land was of no great human economic use, "waste", mountains regions and deserts. The larger animals — big cats, desert sheep, serows and such — managed to survive by retreating to the hasher habitats. The leaders of theses civilizations grew up with less and less personal knowledge of animal behavior and were no longer taught the intimate and wide-ranging plant knowledge that had once been universal. By way of trade-off they learned "human management", administration, rhetorical skills. Only the most marginal of the paysan, the people of the land, kept the practical plant and animal lore and the memories of the old ways. People who grew up in cities, or on large estates, had less chance to learn how wild systems work.