a few more from gary snyder

In his poem “Front Lines” Gary Snyder describes the coming of industry to America and the damage it has wrought on the Earth. Words like “cancer,” “rot,” and “sick” describe how Snyder sees industrialization. The imagery created in to poem is to show how the land is raped and pillaged by humanity. And it closes with a group of people, drawing the line to protect parts of the earth so that they may survive. Attempts at bioregionalist communities for the betterment of nature.

                In “Magpie’s Song” a bird sit in the midst of humanity and longs for a clear blue sky that’s not interrupted by the buildings of humanity. Snyder uses the song as a warning that man’s current growth and resource depletion is not sustainable and that humanity might one day die off because of it. But there might also be a bright spot to the song that man might once again join with nature so that humanity and nature might be in harmony again.

                “Ethnobotany” opens with a comparison between a tree dying of natural causes and another being chopped down to be used as paper in a book to teach people. This is done to show the impact of a tree falling naturally as opposed to falling because of man. In nature all of the animals help to recycle the tree as it lay there rotting but when it is turned into paper only humans are able to use it and will probably never be able to reuse it as knowledge becomes outdated.