RE-INHABITING THE ISLANDS - The University of North Carolina at ...

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exclaims in affirmation to this vision, ―shifting of light and cloud, perfection of chaos,
magnificent jiji mu – ge / interlacing action‖ defining the Japanese Zen term for
interpenetration as a dynamic balance between opposing natural forces (Earth House
Hold 16).
Contemporary critic David Robbins writes that ―someday Snyder‘s fusion of
Buddhism, primitive religion and ecology will be recognized for what it is: a great,
single-handed accomplishment of intelligence and feeling, a turning-point in our culture‖
(90). The connection between Buddhism and the ecological vision of reinhabitation is not
immediately obvious. A considerable distance exists between a science that describes
relationships between organisms and their environment and a religion that fosters an
ineffable state of awareness. Ecological science dates back to the nineteenth-century
German biologist Ernst Haeckel, who derived the term, eco-logy, from the Greek word
oikos for house to denote the study of systems of energy exchange in earth‘s metaphorical
households. 17 In the way that economists describe the house-keeping of human goods and
transfer of capital, ecologists describe nature‘s house-keeping and the flow of the sun‘s
energy throughout the ecosystem. Evoking the same concept in his haiku-imagist style of
modern poetry, Snyder writes in a journal entry from the Anita Maru: ―Salt—diatoms—
copepods— herring—fishermen—us. eating‖ (Earth House Hold 31). The ―crossfertilization‖
(Gray 283) of Buddhism and ecology describes a sacred food chain in
which each member affects and is affected by all the other members. In terms of
environmental science, ecology during the 1970s and 1980s shifted from rational,
economic models that maximized the productivity of linear ecosystems to more dynamic
17 See Carolyn Merchant‘s ―Rise of Ecology, 1890 – 1990‖ and Donald Worster‘s
―Words on a Map‖