Nine essays, and the central move is to separate wilderness from wildness. Wilderness is a legal designation; wildness is a quality of self-organizing process, present in an old-growth forest and equally in your own body and in language. Snyder writes about walking, about the etymology of wild, about the difference between a place and a piece of real estate, about bioregionalism and learning the watershed you live in, and about the ethics of eating. He’d been a logger, a fire lookout, and a Zen student in Japan, and the book carries all of it without ever getting mystical about it.
The Practice of the Wild