Jason M. Wirth 
Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth 
Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis

FINALIST for the 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Award in the Philosophy category



Meditating on the work of American poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder and thirteenth-century Japanese Zen Master Eihei Dōgen, Jason M. Wirth draws out insights for understanding our relation to the planet’s ongoing ecological crisis. He discusses what Dōgen calls ‘the Great Earth’ and what Snyder calls ‘the Wild’ as being comprised of the play of waters and mountains, emptiness and form, and then considers how these ideas can illuminate the spiritual and ethical dimensions of place. The book culminates in a discussion of earth democracy, a place-based sense of communion where all beings are interconnected and all beings matter. This radical rethinking of what it means to inhabit the earth will inspire lovers of Snyder’s poetry, Zen practitioners, environmental philosophers, and anyone concerned about the global ecological crisis.

Table of Content

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations

Preface (Milarepa’s Stone Tower)




Part I: The Great Earth


1. Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth



2. Geology (Poetic Word)




Part II: Turtle Island


3. Place (Land and Sea, Earth and Sky)



4. Bears (The Many Palaces of the Earth)




Part III. Earth Democracy


5. The Great Potlatch



6. Seeds of Earth Democracy



Notes

Bibliography

Index

About the author

Jason M. Wirth is Professor of Philosophy at Seattle University. He is the author of
Schelling’s Practice of the Wild: Time, Art, Imagination and
The Conspiracy of Life: Meditations on Schelling and His Time; the translator of
The Ages of the World by F. W. J. Schelling; and the coeditor (with Patrick Burke) of
The Barbarian Principle: Merleau-Ponty, Schelling, and the Question of Nature, all published by SUNY Press.