## Metadata - Author: [[Gary Snyder and Robert Hass]] - Full Title: The Practice of the Wild - Category: #books ## Highlights - Such are the lessons of the wild. The school where these lessons can be learned, the realms of caribou and elk, elephant and rhinoceros, orca and walrus, are shrinking day by day. Creatures who have traveled with us through the ages are now apparently doomed, as their habitat — and the old, old habitat of humans — falls before the slow-motion explosion of expanding world economies. If the lad or lass is among us who knows where the secret heart of this Growth-Monster is hidden, let them please tell us where to shoot the arrow that will slow it down. And if the secret heart stays secret and our work is made no easier, I for one will keep working for wildness day by day. ([Location 392](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B087X1X3D9&location=392)) - North America was all populated. One might say yes, but thinly — which raises the question of according to whom. The fact is, people were everywhere. When the Spanish foot soldier Alvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca and his two companions (one of whom was African) were wrecked on the beach of what is now Galveston, and walked to the Rio Grande valley and then south back into Mexico between 1528 and 1536, there were few times in the whole eight years that they were not staying at a native settlement or camp. They were always on trails. ([Location 422](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B087X1X3D9&location=422)) - All of the hills and lakes of Alaska have been named in one or another of the dozen or so languages spoken by the native people, as the researches of Jim Kari (1982; 1985) and others have shown. Euro-American mapmakers name these places after transient exploiters, or their own girlfriends, or home towns in the Lower 48. The point is: it’s all in the native story, yet only the tiniest trace of human presence through all that time shows. The place-based stories the people tell, and the naming they’ve done, is their archaeology, architecture, and title to the land. Talk about living lightly. ([Location 433](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B087X1X3D9&location=433))