Gary Snyder & Kim Stanley Robinson: Mt. Thoreau, Civil Disobedience, and Naming What Can’t Be Named

Laurie Glover, Kim Stanley Robinson, Jack Shoemaker, Gary Snyder

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• Darryl DeVinney
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Legendary Zen poet (and Pulitzer Prize winner) Gary Snyder and his friend Kim Stanley Robinson, the renowned science fiction writer and environmentalist, had an adventure up their sleeve. They were going to hike up an unnamed peak in the Sierras near Mt. Emerson and christen it Mt. Thoreau. You aren’t allowed to just name peaks, as Robinson wrote in an account of the adventure, “Is It Civil Disobedience to Name a Mountain for Thoreau?” They did the deed, despite what they felt surely would have been Thoreau’s disapproval. They come to us now to talk about civil disobedience, nature writing, the environmental movement, poetry, and naming what can’t ultimately ever really be named. In conversation with Laurie Glover, the editor of “Naming Mt. Thoreau,” and Snyder’s longtime publisher Jack Shoemaker of Counterpoint Press.

Sponsored by the Journal of Alta California