Ecocriticism, an emergent literary discourse which addresses the ecological crisis, stresses the importance of transforming our ego consciousness into an eco-consciousness. If the nature writing of romantics and American transcendentalists still objectified Nature as a metaphysical absolute, recent environmental writing takes a more radically empirical perspective, beginning not from the (anthropocentric or even zoocentric) “self” but from the situation of being already-embodied, already within-nature, already dependent on the natural environment for its/our/the earth's (mutual) survival. Thus the otherness of the surrounding environment is now seen as being central to the formation of an organism's symbiotic identity. In a sense this otherness is also wildness, and the concept of wildness has become central to discussions of a perhaps collective eco-consciousness－a much more empirical, non-anthropocentric, “wilder” wildness than that of traditional nature writing. I will argue here that Gary Snyder's The Practice of the Wild sets forth ecological idea(l)s that can shape our contemporary environmental imagination and help us to forge a “culture of wildness.” I also will interpret the Snyderian poetics of symbiosis－where symbiosis suggests the necessary and inevitable interweaving of ancient aboriginal and future high tech cultures, and of Eastern and Western thinking, as well as of organisms and environment-as a radically empirical extension of Thoreau's and Emerson's naturalist (and “universalist”) poetics.
