ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 addresses the problems of privilege and domestication by turning to the work of Gary Snyder, who figures the wild as a cure for the disaffections of the modern industrialised world. It asks whether this conception of the wild can be applied to urban societies and takes issue with current scholarship in order to suggest that Snyder’s insistence on ‘attentiveness’ means that the wild can be found even within the urban. The critiques of state control that are presented in Snyder’s essays and poems attest to a fundamental human disconnection from ‘wild’ nature, and imply that in order to reconnect with this wild, we must be attentive to the ‘shockingly beautiful’. Snyder’s writing is shown to attest to the complex interrelations of a life that is not necessarily visible to us in its intricacy and that entails the force of life in ways that are beyond the littleness of humanity. Yet, Snyder’s insistence on wholeness as systemic and interrelated does not account for unevenness between parts of the system, and this is shown to become problematic for a notion of environmental justice in different locations across the globe.
