It is my pleasure to present the report of the Committee on the Faculty Research Lecturer and the nominee for the fifty-eighth annual Faculty Research Lecture. The candidate has written extensively on a wide range of topics. He has been the subject of many interviews. I will introduce our nominee by quoting some of his words, on a topic that is dear to his heart: wild places.

He spent much of his childhood in the woods, staying out overnight as soon as his parents would allow him. In his adult life, he often has a pack on his back, walking in various corners of the world and climbing mountains.

An interviewer asked our nominee: "Did growing up near the woods make a big impression on you?"

"It was me. It's the difference between being made an impression on and being something ...I was part of the woods. I grew up normally, in other words. I grew up in terms of the planetary normal, which is to say growing up in close contact with the fabric of nature, rather than removed from it. I had a normal childhood ... Human beings probably get a little crazy if they don't grow up close enough to the fabric of nature" [O'Connell, N. "At the Field's End", Interviews with Twenty Northwest Writers. Seattle: Madrona Publishers, pp 307-322.]

Our nominee has written that "Nature is no social construction".

"The attacks on Nature and wilderness from the ivory towers come at the right time to bolster the global developers, the resurgent timber companies… , and those who would trash the Endangered Species Act … A wilderness is always a place, basically there for the local critters to live in it. In some cases a few humans will be living in it too. Such places are scarce and must be rigorously defended. Wild is the process that surrounds us all, self-organizing Nature: creating plant-zones, humans and their society … Human societies create a variety of dreams, notions, and images as to the nature of Nature. But it's not impossible to get a pretty accurate picture of Nature with a little first-hand application - no big deal. I'd say take these dubious professors out for a walk, show them a bit of the passing ecosystem show, and maybe get them to help clean up a creek" [Snyder, Gary. "Nature as seen from KitKitdizze is no 'social construction'". Wild Earth 6(4):8-9 (1996/97)].

Our nominee has seen the forest very close up and recommends the experience to us.

"It's not so easy to walk upright through the late twentieth century mid-elevation Sierra forests. There are always many sectors regenerating from fire or logging and the fire history of the Sierra would indicate that there have always been some areas of manzanita fields. So people tend to stay on the old logging roads or the trails, and this is their way of experiencing the forest. Manzanita and ceanothus fields, or the brushy groundcover and under-story parts of the forest, are left in wild peace. … No way to travel off the trail but to dive in: down on your hands and knees on the crunchy manzanita leafcover and crawl around between the trunks. … You can smell the fall mushrooms when crawling" [Snyder, Gary. "Crawling". Wild Earth 3(3):6(1993)]

In early 1997 our nominee received the John Hay Award for Nature Writing. However, he received another award in early 1997, within two weeks of the John Hay Award, an award that reflects the profession that comes most quickly to mind when we consider our nominee. Our nominee, winner of the Bollingen Prize for Poetry, is Gary Snyder, member of the Creative Writing Program, Professor of English at UC Davis, and internationally recognized poet and author.

The Bollingen Prize was awarded for his long poem cycle "Mountains and Rivers without End," published in 1996 [Counterpoint, Washington, D.C.], a work of almost forty years in the making and 165 pages in the printing. Other recipients of the Bollingen Prize include Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, William Carlos Williams, W.H. Auden and Robert Frost. As a part of this distinguished company, Gary Snyder joins a group of the premier poets of the twentieth century. He is the author of 18 books, which in aggregate have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Gary Snyder has been the recipient of many distinguished literary awards and critical and popular attention for more than thirty years. He was a Bollingen Foundation Fellow in 1966-1969 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1969-1970.

Governor Jerry Brown appointed Gary Snyder to the California Arts Council in 1974, where he served for six productive years.

In 1975 he received a Pulitzer Prize for his 1974 book of poetry "Turtle Island". He received the American Poetry Society Shelley Memorial Award in 1986 and the Fred S. Cody Memorial Award in 1989.

Gary Snyder was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1987 and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1993.

In early 1999 he became one of ten poets and novelists to receive a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Writers' Award. With this award, he organized and participated in a series of readings and talks about, and by authors from, the Sierra Nevada region, held at the North Columbia Schoolhouse Cultural Center in Nevada City, California.

Gary Snyder was a "Featured Poet" in Bill Moyers' Public Broadcasting System special "The Language of Life". He, his thinking, his works and his poetry have been the subjects of at least five critical books, many essays and magazine articles, and specials on public television in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Gary Snyder has an interesting life. He was born in San Francisco and was raised in the Pacific Northwest. He has been writing poetry since the age of 15.

He graduated from Reed College in Portland with a degree in literature and anthropology. In the early 1950's he pursued graduate work in Anthropology and Linguistics at Indiana University and in Oriental Languages at UC Berkeley.

He has been quoted as saying "Well, I never did know exactly what was meant by the term 'The Beats'" [Knight, A. and K. Knight, Eds. The Beat Vision: A Primary Sourcebook. [New York: Paragon House Publishers]. Nevertheless, he was instrumental with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the Beat Generation/San Francisco movements of the late 1950's.

Gary Snyder resided in Japan from 1956 to 1968, studying Zen for over a year as a monk and for several years as a lay practitioner. During this period he traveled to India, returned to San Francisco for two extended stays, and worked 8 months in the engine room of the oil tanker Sappa Creek.

His study and practice of Buddhism resulted in the Buddhism Transmission Award for 1998, from the Japan-based Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai Foundation (Buddhist Awareness Foundation). He was the first American literary figure to receive this award. Gary Snyder's contributions as a Buddhist intellectual currently are the topic of a Stanford University Ph.D. dissertation, and many consider that he will occupy an important place in future histories of American Buddhism.

In 1970 Gary Snyder returned to the United States, taking up residence at KitKitdizze, which is a mountain farmstead in the Yuba River watershed and is named after a local plant. He has become an influential watershed activist and a spokesman for stewardship and "reinhabitation", both through his public presentations and his prose and poetry. His 1990 book, Practice of the Wild [North Point, San Francisco], is considered to be one of the best and most influential essays in the field of nature writing since Thoreau.

Gary Snyder has taught at UC Davis since 1985 as a member of the Department of English Faculty. He was a catalyst for the founding of the UC Davis Program in Nature and Culture. In April of 1988 he invited a group of faculty members to KitKitdizze to explore ways to accomplish, more effectively, teaching and research at the intersections of the humanities and the environmental sciences. The result, some years later, is the major in Nature and Culture of the College of Letters and Science. Gary Snyder's ideas and influence were critical in the process of creating this major.

In April of 1996, the then Poet Laureate of the United States Robert Hass introduced Gary Snyder as the keynote speaker at "Watershed," a conference of more than one thousand delegates at the Library of Congress. He said of Gary Snyder that he is "a friend, colleague and a major literary figure of the twentieth century. A major poet and ethical voice in the best honored traditions of the American Thoreau … His work makes us far more alive and attentive; it reaches into our deepest and best resources, heartens us to the challenges and promises of restoration to a natural place from which many of us now feel ourselves estranged."

We of the Committee acknowledge our debt to Audrey Ashford, Valerie Williamson, Linda Morris and David Robertson for their help in preparing this nomination. Please accept as the Committee's nominee for Faculty Research Lecturer, for the year 2000, Professor of English Gary Snyder.

This is the highest honor that the UC Davis faculty can bestow on one of its own.

George Bruening
Samuel Armistead
Donald Rothchild
Sandra Gilbert
Peter Marler