Sustainable Living Advice from Gary Snyder: Find Whatever Moves You to the Core; Move Never More

Lloyd, Rio, and Marci on the hike up Paradise Canyon Trail--part of our realm.

Phil visits our realm.

Moss Falls, the destination for this particular day.

As I’ve said before, my idea of Sustainable Living is not simply an environmental act.  Although living lightly (leaving the smallest carbon foot-print possible and being water conscious) is vital to our survival, the reality is, it’s often easier to help the planet ecologically by living in a high rise a couple blocks from the office than by buying land in Nebraska, Wyoming or Utah and deciding to live off the land.  For one thing, because of the scant population, human resources and services are scarce in rural areas.  Jobs are few and far between and there is no public transportation.  Some places are so remote buying a loaf of bread requires a road trip.

Marci walks a gravel road across a desert lake--part of the great expanse that is our realm.

For example, when I lived on the Navajo Nation, the nearest grocery store was 30 minutes away.  The nearest town with clothing, hardware and a movie theater--Gallup--was an hour and a half.  We did our best to cut down on fuel consumption by only going to town twice a month, but in order to comfortably make that trip with four kids, we purchased a full-sized van so that the boys wouldn’t have to ride back with bags of groceries on their laps.  In the rural west, it’s not uncommon to drive an hour and a half for a good steak and a movie afterwards, an absurd idea for urbanites, and clearly not good for the planet, but sometimes a psychological necessity, especially in the dead of winter.  That is why places like Denio, Nevada exist--dots on the vast uninhabited expanse--to provide coffee, a good steak and baked potato, and most important of all, human contact beyond spouse and children to the last frontiersmen.

The county in which Dry Creek is located in (which I’ll always leave unnamed so that I don’t accidently commit the same atrocity that Edward Abbey inadvertently committed against Moab), is an expanse of 6,828 square miles with a population of 12,420,  If you do the math, that’s an average density of 1.5 people per square mile.  There is lots of elbow room, but minimal services and career opportunities.  In fact, until Dry Creek is truly sustainable, I may have to commute an hour or more each day to work.  I’m a teacher and there are only three high schools serving that great expanse, half a dozen total within an hour’s drive.  Teaching positions seldom open up, and when they do, an administrator’s relative, who has been trying to return home for years, is usually the first applicant.  I don’t resent that; these communities are built on deep family ties.   But to claim that I’ll be assisting the planet ecologically by moving to Dry Creek is absurd--at least to begin with.

Remnants of ancient Lake Bonniville: Part of the 239 square miles or 3.50%  of the mostly arid 6,828 square mile county.  During the last ice age, western Utah was covered by an enormous inland lake.

But the ecosystem is not the only diseased system in the United States.  In most of the places I’ve lived since leaving home, I haven’t even known my neighbors.  Humanity in the United States is becoming a desert where roots are shallow and people tumble along the sands of dreams, blowing from one sink hole to another sink hole, searching for fertile soil, desperately looking for land where family can take root, but it never does, because we are career-driven rather than life-driven.  We go wherever our careers take us.  That is a monumental cultural change and I believe a spiritually devastating one.  People use to work in order to live; now people live in order to work.  The office has replaced the family as the center.  This cannot be good.

This, I believe, is what truly drives the sustainable living movement--a hunger for earth, for people, for place.  In Gardening at the Dragon’s Gate, Wendy Johnson includes a quotation by Gary Snyder that captures this simple, radical philosophy so vital for our times:

Don’t move.  Stay still.  Once you find a place that feels halfway right, and it seems time, settle down with a vow not to move anymore.  Take a look at one place on earth, one circle of beings, one realm of beings over time.

It will require sacrifice.  Losing a job might require taking a pay cut and/or a job with less social status in order to stay put.  It may require that the philosopher take up the socket wrench, the poet flip burgers, the anarchist mow the lawn and trim hedges at the cemetery.   But deep roots make it worth it.  I know it.  As a kid, I knew it.  All I ever wanted to do was float pop cans down the creek, run along the bank, catch them at the bridge, and run back again.  Does anyone ever really need more than this?  Not me.  When I initially left my home to "become something" I slowly grew ill and didn’t even know why.  And because I was ill, I couldn’t become what I’d set out to become anyway.  And if I had, nothing would have changed, as my spiritual center would still be along some creek watching a pop can ride the small rapids under the dappled shade.

Perhaps your center is a certain smell:  the dry pines of northern California in the summertime; the smell of coffee and bread from the corner bakery; maybe the ready-to-ignite air of Texas City on Galveston Bay.   Or perhaps your center is a sound: the peeling of church bells echoing through the concrete canyons as shadows are cast long and a stream of taillights heads for the suburbs; the rattle of tracks of the elevated outside the apartment window; the long, low moan of the foghorn or the hum of that great suburban serenador, the lawn mower.  Whatever it is that moves you to the core--find it and move never more.   For you will never feel quit right without that small something that rationally has no great impact on the world but to you is the universe.  That for me is Dry Creek.  Everything.  I simply do not fully exist elsewhere.

The garden at Dry Creek--the center of our realm.



© Steve Brown, 2012