This volume gathers the essential prose writings of our “poet laureate of Deep Ecology,” spanning the entire arc of his seventy-year career and sounding his deepest themes: How can we learn to tread lightly on the land we inhabit? What can ancient faiths and traditions teach us about living creatively and in community in the here and now? A companion to Snyder’s Collected Poems, it completes the definitive Library of America edition of his writings, which has been prepared in close collaboration with the author by his friend and longtime editor, Jack Shoemaker.

The volume begins with essays, memoirs, and poetic notebooks from Snyder’s landmark first prose collection, Earth House Hold: Technical Notes Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (1969). In “Lookout’s Journal,” he describes his life as a young fire spotter in the mountains of Washington State, and his emerging sense of vocation as a poet; in “Spring Sesshin at Shokoku-ji” and “Suwa-no-se Island and the Banyan Ashram,” he recounts his experiences as an initiate in a Kyoto monastery and in communal living on a remote island in the Ryukyus; and in “Buddhism and the Coming Revolu­tion,” he foresees the “nation-shaking implications” of personal enlightenment and spiritual discovery.

Selections from He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth (1979) reflect Snyder’s lifelong studies in Native American religions and cultures. His sense of humor and con­versational brilliance shine through in wide-ranging interviews from The Real Work (1980) and elsewhere. In chapters from Passage Through India (1984), his account of a six-month tour through South Asia with his wife Joanne Kyger and his friend Allen Ginsberg, he explores holy sites both ancient and modern, from the temples at Khajuraho to the Dalai Lama’s resi­dence-in-exile at Dharamshala.

In The Practice of the Wild (1990), now considered a classic of American environmental writing in the tra­dition of Walden and A Sand County Almanac, Snyder offers an “exquisite, far-sighted articulation of what freedom, wildness, and grace mean, using the lessons of the planet to teach us how to live,” as Gretel Ehrlich puts it. Essays from A Place in Space (1995) and Back on the Fire (2007) explore biore­gionalism, forestry practices, sustainability, and the ecosystems of the Sierra Nevada, where Snyder has lived since 1970. The Great Clod: Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia (2016), included here in its entirety, meditates on the intersections of nature and culture in Asian art, literature, and his­tory over millennia.

Volume features include an introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson—Snyder’s former colleague and frequent hiking partner—explanatory notes, a chronology of Snyder’s life, an essay on textual selection, and an index.

Jack Shoemaker, editor, is founding editor of Counterpoint Press, publishing the works of Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan S. Connell, Robert Aitken, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and James Salter, among many others. He has worked with Snyder for more than fifty years.