[Music]
This is entitled opinions coming to you from the studios of KZSU on the Stanford campus.
As he descends from his mountaintop, Zarathustra arrives to a city at the edge of the forest and
enters its marketplace. It's a modern city and that means it's all a marketplace.
There he begins to preach to the people. I beseech you, my brothers, remain faithful to the earth.
To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing. He goes on to declare,
"The overman is the meaning of the earth. Let your will say, the overman shall be the meaning of
the earth." Nietzsche's overman goes over by going under. I love those who do not know
how to live except by going under for they are the ones who cross over. Translation,
the meaning of the earth lies beneath our feet. The overman does not hank her after the elsewhere
or the far off, but rediscover the ground that he stands on. The ground of our mortal
sojourn on this wandering planet we call earth. When the poet Gary Snyder wrote,
"The most radical thing you can do is stay home. He meant radical in the etymological sense of
raddics, the Latin word for root. The radical is rooted." In the Wahaka region of Mexico,
farmers and weavers today talk about the de recho de no me grad, the right not to migrate,
the right to roots. Those inhabitants of the land, those radicals, along with all the indigenous
peoples of America, hear the call of the overman, a call to dwell on the earth as natives and
earthlings rather than as resident aliens. In an essay published in 1980 Edwin Folsom wrote that
before the 20th century, our literature and our energies in America looked west and to the future.
However, quoting Folsom, instead of looking west and to the future, like Whitman did, 20th century
American poets, or at least some of them, have been engaging in imaginative descents
through the various layers of what America is and has been back to the Aboriginal land.
One of the major American poets of this kind of descent is the one I invoked a moment ago,
Gary Snyder. Snyder advocated digging up the old ways, so as to know the ground you're on,
his words. He called this project of regrounding ourselves the re-inhabitation of place.
Forning Snyder, re-inhabitation means learning to live in place in an area that has been disrupted
and injured through past exploitation. It involves becoming native to a place through becoming
aware of the particular ecological relationships that operate within and around it. It means
understanding activities and evolving social behavior that will enrich the life of that place.
We've not done a very good job of re-inhabitation since Gary Snyder wrote those words,
nor in the 140 years since there are through strip preached the meaning of the earth in the marketplace.
We denizens of the contemporary marketplace have become ever more the exhabitants rather
than inhabitants of the earth, and few among us would know how to give a radical answer
to the question that Emerson asks at the beginning of his essay experience,
which I've invoked more than once on entitled opinions, namely, where do we find ourselves?
I'm going to ask that question of the guest who joins me today. He's a bio-regionalist and
re-inhabitant who promotes the term "no-where." That's "no" with a "k." First, a little background,
after attending Harvard Divinity School, my guest, Mark Conerman, completed a PhD in
Religious Studies at Stanford with a dissertation on Gary Snyder. He has been a visiting professor
of American literature at Hoonan University in China. He has conducted fieldwork at home
and abroad. He's traveled the world and lived for three years on Sato inland sea near Hiroshima,
Japan. He and his wife Mary Mitsuyoshi are now householder inhabitants of the Guadalupe River
watershed in Santa Clara Valley, the ancestral land of the Tamien, a loni people.
Mark Conerman's book, A Sense of the Whole, Reading Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers
Without End, grew out of his year-long Stanford Humanities Center workshop. Mark Conerman,
Welcome to entitled opinions. Thank you, Robert. It's great to be here.
So I mentioned that you're a "no-where" man with a "k" and I'm curious how you might answer that
question. Where do we find ourselves? You and I here and now. That's a great question always,
and I'm thinking about this place right now. We're in the studios of KZSU Radio Subterranean,
beneath the weight of Memorial Auditorium. To remember the war did from the First World War,
we go up the stairs outside and we're close to Frost Amphitheater, another memorial,
or John Lawrence Frost, an undergraduate who died from polio, just after graduating,
1935. We walk further around the Stanford University campus itself,
a memorial to Leland Stanford, Jr., who died in Florence in his teens. So there's a lot of
remembrance and grief in this land. And events that took place in some of the places you mentioned,
the Memorial Auditorium Martin Luther King has delivered a famous speech in the late '60s, Frost
Theatre, one of the all-time venues for the band, "Great Full Dead," whom I hope we'll get a chance
to talk about later in this show. So it comes with more recent memories and just the founding indeed.
That's right, and if we keep walking, we're in the San Francisco Creek watershed,
the ancestral land of the Rami Tush O'loni people. And this watershed is set in the larger
Santa Clara Valley trough, which goes all the way from San Francisco to Hollister, which is 90 miles,
and it's about 15 miles wide all the way down and braced on one side by the Diablo range,
and on the other side by the Santa Cruz Mountains that meet south of Hollister. And if you take the
K off of nowhere, you get the word "now" here. And now here we're in the mind space of entering
into a conversation, the kind of conversation that one hears on entitled opinions.
Yeah, and I know that you value the space of public conversation because you found it and directed the
Aurora Forum at Stanford for a good many years, and that was a forum of very much of a mind space
with a lot of dialogue with thinkers, writers, poets, and ecologists, conservationists,
and it brought together a lot of people in interesting creative ways. And do you want to say a word about
forum before we move on? Sure, yes. I talk about the forum as a place where we have conversations with
people who turn vision into action or positive social change. And when you talk about descending
and inhabiting the earth, one of my very first guests was Julia Butterfly Hill, who sat in a tree,
a redwood tree, a thousand year old redwood tree, 200 feet up for two years to prevent it from being
cut down by the Pacific lumber company that tree up in Humboldt County. So she was a magnificent guest.
I know that among all the people you had, you never really had Gary Snyder as part of the
Aurora Forum. You had written your dissertation on the designer. So you knew him, but he was never
actually a participant, right? No, he was never a guest at the Aurora Forum, though the forum was very
much informed by his vision because it has informed my vision of vision into action. Yeah, that's
right. Yeah, and how to live on this earth. Gary was on campus often during my mountains and
rivers workshop at the humanities center. I was fortunate also to live with him up at the
Tom setting hit Kid Dizzy for a summer. Right. Gary Snyder is well known for renaming the continent
on which we find ourselves. That's right. In 1974, this is the 50th anniversary. He published a collection
of poems called Turtle Island, the new old name for North America. He had spent many years in a
Zen monastery in Kyoto after growing up in the Pacific Northwest, where he got to know a lot of
indigenous people, especially the Salishan Indians. And he went to read college and met
anthropologist named David French, who had been studying anthropology at Columbia University with
Franz Boaz. And professor French understood that Gary had a great knowledge that was very valuable
and encouraged Gary to really develop that. So he did, he studied anthropology and English literature.
And after he finished a read, hitchhiked out to Indiana University to study folklore with
Stiff Thompson and Native American languages. Well, there unfortunately, Professor Thompson was
off on leave that year. And Gary came back to California before heading off to Japan.
He is one of the ideators of what we call bio regionalism. Am I correct about that? That's
right. So we speak about bio regionalism. His name is at least closely associated with this
attempt to rethink the nature of place. That's right. When he was in Japan, he was thinking a lot about
how he would live when he came back to the west coast, came back to California. And this idea of
re-inhabitation was connected to ecological thinkers and people who were realizing that we need
to understand better the land where we live so that we can be more actively engaged in taking
care of it. So Gary was certainly a pioneer, Turtle Island, the collection of poems had a lot to do
with launching the bio regional movement because the poem, the publication itself contains four essays
called Four Changes, which are things we need to pay attention to in order to be able to have
long-term sustainability on this land. There were others as well, Ray Dosman, a University of
California ecologist had written the book in 1963 called The Destruction of California,
also in San Francisco, Peter Berg, founded the Planet Drum Foundation. And of course, Earth Day
happened in 1970, which brought all of this together and people were starting to pay attention.
The collection, Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, the same year Annie Dillard
received it for pilgrimage, Tinker Creek. She was 29, Gary was 45. And that coming after the start of
Earth Day and growing ecological awareness was an indication that people were waking up to what the
poets and writers were talking about. Yeah, I don't recall now what those four things that
want us to take into account when it comes to place. But I think that the cultural history of
places, if not equally important, at least almost as important as knowing the geographical
liniumments and aspects of the place you're in. I completely agree that the bi-regional movement
is at once an appreciation for physical geography, but also it's an exercise of imagination
as a way of understanding knowing where we are. But beginning by knowing the land by walking
on it with your feet. Yeah. And here, I want to quote Folsom, I mentioned to my intro, but here's a
quote of his, which I think is, you know, quite telling of what this bi-regional descent entails.
He says, the image becomes clear. We are part of an immense palimpsest. The USA is but a
superficial layer, the most recent and damaging inscription over a series of earlier texts.
Whitman may have found the United States themselves to be essentially the greatest poem,
quote from Whitman, but post-Whitman poets have found them to be a poem that was violently
scratched over earlier poems imposed on and obliterating native texts, native ways,
native themselves to descend in the palimpsest then to learn what meanings life reserved in the
lower layers to rediscover ways of existing on the land without destroying it. This is the
basis for the American poets desire for descent, but descent become increasingly difficult for our layer,
the texts of the American present has been a violent inscription one that continues to tear
into the continental tablet itself, quote, something is always eating at the American heart
like acid Snyder says, it is the knowledge of what we have done to our continent and to the American
Indian. And when you talked about Hill spending two years in that redwood a thousand years old,
the Pacific lumber company was about to tear that tree down in a kind of endless reenactment of
this same sort of assault on the land. That's right. And here you've you've evoked the American
unconscious at some level. We know that this has been a rapacious violence in habitation,
which calls for reenhabitation conscious awareness of what has happened in the past so that we can
rework our way of residing here and recognize the slaughter of so many innocent people who were
living responsibly on and with the land and with each other in their small scale communities here in
this valley and all over the United States. So this awareness is a great part of the work of reenhabitation.
How much of an importance does recovering native knowledge as well and rituals and even languages,
how much of a role does that play in reenhabitation? Well, I mentioned earlier that Gary studied
in the Boazian tradition of cultural anthropology. Franz Boaz came from Prussia in the 1890s
to Canada to the Pacific Northwest to study the Quaguidal Clingit and Haidah people.
He then went to Columbia University to establish a department of anthropology and he had students
such as Alfred Krober who came to California, the University of California at Berkeley to establish
an anthropology program and had graduate students who went out to do fieldwork to gather
the languages, the lifeways, recipes, maps, everything they could pull together about the people
they were meeting on the land. These volumes were issued by the United States government,
a great use of taxpayer money, called Bureau of American Ethnology Reports. And one after another
was preserving the languages, preserving the knowledge of native people because they thought those people
were vanishing and they were. Those populations were under extreme duress. But they didn't
vanish completely and now these days native peoples are able to use these volumes to recover their
cultures, to recover their languages. Krober is a name that's a little bit
polemical or controversial in this area. If only because I mentioned at the beginning the
aloney, yes, American Indigenous people of this area. And you were telling me off air that Krober
had come to the conclusion that the aloney tribe or nation had essentially didn't really constitute
a tribe anymore and that therefore they were denied government subsidies and land and other things.
Can you tell us a little bit about Krober and what happened to the aloney Indians here?
We're still with us at least. Yes, it was a tragic mistake and especially tragic because
Krober had done so much to bring attention to and support native people. He loved native people
and he was their champion and he wrote a book called the Handbook of Native Californians, 1924-25.
And in that book it's a huge volume. There were 500 different tribes in California speaking
hundreds of languages of which there were 300 dialects and Krober was especially working here in
Northern California. And he made a comment one sentence saying that for all practical purposes
the aloney are extinct. And the federal government caught that and consequently has not recognized
the aloney people and a federally recognized tribe has access to resources that the people
in this valley haven't been able to get access to. However, there are good political actions happening
now and the aloney are quite optimistic that they will be recognized. Now there is an aloney
Indian woman named Emory Sayers who fought throughout the 1970s to get her ancestral land recognized
by the federal government. So now Indian Canyon, which is near Hollister, is a place that she has
opened up for native peoples to come and conduct ceremony. And it is the only federally recognized
Indian land between San Francisco and Santa Barbara at this time. So have they received their own
designation from the federal government? Not yet. Not yet. For the aloney. But they are
optimistic. You said that Sayers has said that she feels more optimistic now than since first contact.
Yes, this is, she says this is the best time to be a native person since first contact.
Partly is recovery of culture and language and also a political action and also more and more people
are understanding the harm that has been done and want to address that. Yeah, I'm looking at my
notes here, which generously provided by you that there are as many Native Americans in reservations
on Turtle Island these days as the population of San Jose at about one million. Yeah, that's correct.
Those who are federally recognized constitute sovereign nations within the United States.
And that's another reason you want federal recognition. You become a sovereign nation so you can
determine your own destiny as a community. So Mark, we live in California, California has
any number of place names. And there's something about these place names that indeed
descend into a palimpsest of sorts. A lot of our place names certainly in the Bay Area and
Southern California are Spanish and many of them Catholic and San Francisco, Santa Barbara. These are
all Saint names from the history of Christianity, but there are also a great many Indigenous names
that are still current among us. Yeah, I think one of the best ways to develop an awareness
of Indigenous people on Turtle Island is to look at place names and know that we're still saying
the names that the Native people use in the places we live. And in California, approximately 20%
of the county names are Native American names such as Inyo County named after a Monocheaf or
Marin County. Don't Marin is an integer. It's the name of a coastal mewalk chief.
Modoc County named after the Modoc people, I mentioned Monoc County, which means those from the Sierra
Nevada, Napa County from the word Napa meaning home, for example. So we have Mount Tamal Pius,
Mount Tamal Pius is a mewalk word meaning Bay Mountain. And in fact here in Santa Clara Valley
where I live, the Guadalupe River watershed, we can look up and see Mount Ammonum, which is the
Poloni word for the place for the hummingbird rests. And we can also look and see Mount Hamilton,
which is named after a Presbyterian minister. And I'm trying to find the Native name and it would be a
great project for us to join together and rename that mountain. And we have Mount Diablo at the
head of the Diablo range, which means devil's mountain sadly because there are several native words
for that mountain. And they mean the place of our origins that we came out of this mountain.
And it would be wonderful to get those names in the minds of the people who live here.
Right. Yeah, of course place names naming that's also become intensely political. And I think there's
a building named after Krober at the University of Berkeley. And as usual, there's a kind of movement
to kind of rename it. And yeah, well sadly, it's been decided to rename it without even consulting
members of the Department of Anthropology there who know the story, know the history,
know how much Krober meant to native Californians. The best solution so far has been proposed
by a member of that faculty that have been renamed Krober, hyphen ishi hall. Ishi was a California
Indian who came out of hiding after his people had been slaughtered in 1911. And Elphor Krober took
him in and took care of him to learn as much as he could from him. And he, she was a dear friend
of his. Unfortunately, when he, she died in 1916, Krober was away in Washington DC. And
there should not have been an autopsy performed. And that was a great offense to the people.
And Krober was away and he was so distraught. And some have blamed Krober for that, but it was not
prober's doing. I think Krober was such a champion of native California's and has really done the
most work of anyone to allow native people to recover their knowledge of themselves and their
longer story. So I think it's a great idea that the Hallby name, prober ishi hall.
You all hear that out there? No. And take note, let's hope that happens. Let's hope.
I think sometimes that names are destiny. Proids at anatomy is destiny. I think auto rank had a theory
that people were destined to play out the meanings of their names, their last names, especially
so that I don't know how empirically corrected is, but that Mr. Grosses tend to have, you know,
big egos, Mr. Clines, which means small in German inferiority complex. When it comes to
place names in this area, I've always felt that St. Francis, the spirit of St. Francis permeates
the culture of the big area and a lot of its cultural manifestations and also its intense ecological
sympathies and activism. Hill, I don't remember a first name, Julia Butterfly, Julia Butterfly,
climbing a redwood for two years. You know, St. Francis wrote these beautiful poems in which
all of the creatures, both those who fly, those who crawl and the plants themselves,
they were all brothers and sisters. A mechanical of brothers, a mechanical move.
Exactly. And I'm thinking even the way in which
Francis would call death his sister, Swara Morte, and express gratitude to death for the role that it
plays, you know, in human destiny. And I'm sure the grateful dead, a local ban, part of the history
of this place, did not have St. Francis in mind, but this covert way in which the spirit of a word,
of a place name like San Francisco can permeate even the ban name. I think the grateful
dead is something that St. Francis would understand intuitively as correlating with his gratitude.
Oh, I do too. Death plays. Do we know where the grateful dead got their name?
Well, it's a good story going back to St. Francis. Yes, isn't our work to become friends with death.
And the grateful dead name here in the region of San Francisco for St. Francis the hippie saint.
Came about here in Palo Alto. The band had begun to form with Jerry Garcia,
Rod McCurnnon, Pigpen, Bobby Weir, as a jug band, plane folk music here in Palo Alto,
Menelow Park more than Palo Alto. Well, the jug band was playing in Palo Alto at a place
called the, what was the name, just a little club. And someone there from KZSU went to record them
in 1964 called the tangent. They went in 1964 and recorded them. And we have the tapes from this
little band that was the first three members of the quintet that was the grateful dead once,
well, first it was the warlocks once Phil Lesh and Bill Kreitzman joined.
So did KZSU air? Yes, recordings. They were the first to broadcast. It all comes back right here.
No, right. Where we are, Centuranian KZSU,
playing these tapes. And there is a CD out of more tapes were discovered in later years from that
little trio. They were called the warlocks, but they realized when they were about to sign with
Warner Brothers records that there was also a band in New York City called the warlocks. And that
became the velvet underground. Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh were sitting in Phil's apartment on high
street in Palo Alto. Well, named 1965. And Phil had on his bookshelf a funk and wagnles
encyclopedic dictionary. And as Jerry tells the story, he opened it up in the only two words he
saw on one page amidst all the others were the words, grateful dad. And he said, that's it.
That's the name. Not everyone liked it right away, but it's stuck. And I'm glad it did.
Well, again, thanks to you, I have the entry to that grateful dead. And it says that
the motif of a cycle of folk tales, which begin with the heroes coming upon a group of people,
ill-treating or refusing to bury the corpse of a man who had died without paying his debts.
He gives his last penny either to pay the man's debts or to give him a decent burial.
Within a few hours, he meets with a traveling companion who aids him in some impossible task.
Gets him a fortune, saves his life, etc. The story ends with the companion disclosing himself
as the man whose corpse the other had befriended. So now we're returning once again to burial,
the descent into the ground, the sacrality of the land for the indigenous people where their ancestors
were buried, the offensive doing an autopsy, all these things come together under the rubric of this
band's name, the grateful dead. And yes, people need to understand that the offense of digging up
Indian graves is that the body is put back into the earth as part of a natural cycle. And once you
disrupt that cycle, it cannot be repaired. So here at Stanford, when the Stanford shopping center was
built, graves were uncovered. And this creates a great anguish among the people who are descended
from the people who were buried in that land. And it's all over America, wherever they are
exhuming remains of the indigenous Indians. Yeah, there's this pain, this very palpable pain that
goes throughout the whole community. That's right. Yeah. So the project of descent that's involved
in re-inhabitation is a kind of going down into the ground, but not in the violating way.
Returning, uncovering and exposing, but rather call it the grateful dead way. Yes. In other words,
with a certain piety towards the fact that the land holds more than just memories, it holds the
actual legacies and the genealogical histories of great many people. All the earth is a grave.
And you know, it's not only the indigenous people for whom burial sites are sacred. There's plenty of
stories of trauma in our own Western culture. I wrote a whole book on this weather. That's
a very dominion of the dead about what happens when you don't have the remains of a loved one to
bury. And the site where it's buried, where there are charisma, accrues around the grave and the
tombstone and so forth. Yeah. I like that grateful dead origin story because it is about kinship.
It's about friendship. It's about connection. And the re-inhabitation movement is about
ecological awareness, which means seeing yourself within the systems that sustain our lives.
We're not separate from the earth. We inhabit. Mark, can we talk a little bit about the literary
dimensions of bio regionalism? For example, I think one of the archetypes of the way in which
literature and place accommodate or welcome one another would be for me, Walden, for example,
where Walden is a place where the row resided, a place that he inhabited. It's also the name of a
book that he wrote, if not entirely while at Walden, certainly Walden, the place inhabits the book,
Walden by Henry David Thoreau. And the book has enabled its readers, would you agree that
if you read Walden with a certain amount of care and attention that the literature has the power to
enable you in some way to inhabit also the place Walden in its spirit, if not in its body.
I would agree with that. It brings you into the place and it brings you into realizing
our emplacement wherever we are. And I think people go looking after reading the row for their own
Walden. And that's a very powerful consequence of entering into bio regional literature.
So places have a transitivity. They can migrate into literature and literature can also extract the
spirit of place or if not extract at least metabolize. And that's an important consideration,
because literature is made of words and we were speaking about place names and also,
I think that you make a really interesting recommendation for people who, okay, so we have
listeners say, well, what do I have to do? What's the first thing I should do if I want to
re-inhabit the place where I'm residing? And your suggestion is try to identify
where you are without reference to human markers of the place, but to the way you identified
where we are in terms of the watershed and the valley and the natural geographic indicators.
Yes, to enter into this experiment of bio regional thinking and awareness, the first thing to do
is to find out what your watershed is, which watershed do you live in? And there are tremendous
resources and maps from the US Geological Survey, USGS, if you go online, it's easy to find out
what your watershed is. But then the next step is to imagine sitting down with a friend
and explaining to them where you live without, as Robert said, any reference to human-made landmarks.
And once you start to figure that out, it's a good step to be more aware of the land and the waters
and the actual place you reside. Hence, I am in the Guadalupe River watershed at the confluence
of Lascato's Creek and the Guadalupe River, as Robert said earlier in the introduction.
And then you can go from there and start to follow the creeks and you'll see how the watershed works
and how it flows, everything flows to the sea. And that's a really fun experiment. And then you can
start to meet people from other watersheds. We're in the Shasta Bio Region here from Mount Shasta,
all the way down to Monterey Bay. And then that contains many other eco zones that,
and especially here in Santa Clara Valley, there's a great amount of ecological diversity.
It's, once you start down this road, it's just an endless path of exploration and discovery.
So the SaaSHA to Bio Region is not the same as Cascadia, right? Cascadia is further north. Cascadia
goes from what we call, this is a Vancouver Island, that area that Franz Boaz explored,
the Pacific Northwest, water culture. All the way touches northern Oregon and goes east into Idaho.
Cascadia is the most evolved Bio Region in terms of people living there, understanding
their Bio Region and it has produced really great resources, including an incredible map made by
a professor at Seattle University. So even when we're identifying places
geographically rather than with human landmarks, we do have place names that are human. And again,
we're going back to the question of how place and names, place and words can inhabit one another.
Words are little houses. I mean, Haidgir has that phrase, language is the house of being
kind of typically portentious Haidgir statement, but nevertheless, there is something about the way
in which language houses, many things apart from just concepts. And of course, when words become
particularly creative in poetry and other forms of literary expression, then we find that you can
have imaginations of places that don't quite exist or may exist in the future. And I know that
you're particularly fond of Warsaw de Lagoins book always coming home, which is, would you call it
a novel or something else? It's novelistic. I call it fictional anthropology. And it does have to do
with place or reimagining the nature of place in a future moment. Very much so. I love the first
sentence of always coming home. The people in this book might be going to have lived a long, long
time ago in northern California. Ursula Kay Le Guin, the Kay is for Crowber. She was the daughter of
Elford Crowber. She's a contemporary of Yuri Snyder born a year before him, 1929 that she died in
2018. And in 1985, she published this unique work of literature about the Keshe people
who live way in the future. In fact, so far in the future that they aren't really clear
on what happened in the apocalypse. Much of the west coast is underwater. They have their place
in Napa County region, which is where the Crowbers had a cabin where Ursula would go as a young girl.
And then she got older. She began to explore more and more, not just that particular place,
but also was learning from these Bureau of American Ethnology reports. So she was steeped
in the lore of Native California and being herself a tremendous researcher and writer, mostly of what
we would call science fiction, she enters back into this place of her childhood and uses that as
the foundation to tell the story of the Keshe people. It's an incredible book to read. It's somewhat
encyclopedic and she's recreated this entire world of these people, including their music.
And she partnered with a composer named Todd Barton who wrote the music of the Keshe.
And so you can hear that online, the original boxed set book included the cassette tape.
And it's so convincing that the marketing people at Harper and Row who first published it
were concerned about copyright for the music and all of these things, assuming that she had been
pulling from other creators, original creators.
And so I highly recommend if you want to read something that gets you into the spirit of
bi-original awareness and inquiry, Ursula K. Le Guin's always coming home. I'm going back to it all
the time, depending on the time. So I haven't read it Mark, but if I were to read it, would I develop a
more intimate connection with the place where I am now or is it merely a utopian imagination?
No, I think you would start to be aware of all kinds of details in the more than human world
and in culture, tools, ways of doing work that are still here. Thought we don't think about that so much.
I mean, we don't think about people who still work with their hands to make things, but they're
all around us. And so it opens up more room to explore.
But I have two questions related to conclude our conversation. One is always coming home.
Would Ursula Le Guin have been able to write that book had she not been a native of her bio region?
And at the same time, would the grateful dead have ever become the band that we know as the
grateful dead if they were, if they didn't originate and live in the Bay area? I don't know if I'm
putting you under too much pressure with these two questions, but it's a salvo. It's a great question.
Well, you can become native to a place, but it certainly isn't advantage to have in your
mind and your imagination that landscape you were in when you were nine or 10 years old.
Studies show that that's the landscape that we feel most at home throughout our lives.
She was very fortunate that she was exploring the place that she wrote about and she wrote it
in order to know it better. And that's also an important part of the work of writing and the work
of bio regional research is to put down the words and the awareness that comes through the
act of writing is enhanced that way. The grateful dead, as I think about them,
being from this place are an ecological band. And what I mean by that is, I think I mentioned earlier,
to think ecologically is to see yourself as within the place, to see the systems you are in.
And the amazing thing about the grateful dead to me is how they created a system for making
new music by being so interconnected themselves.
And with their audience, amazing interconnects. Exactly. It was so open and free and
entrepreneurial in the sense of being on the edge of constantly making new here on the very edge of
Turtle Island that I think this place has a lot of resonance through their music with the sound of
people coming together and share their love for one another and the sounds and the feeling and the
climate of this place. Their music was also very improvisational and it also belongs to a larger bay
area kind of psychedelic rock. If you want to use that moniker, but there are many
bay area bands of that era which have something distinctly in common, you can hear the bay area
palpitating through bands. We're talking about Jefferson Airplane and Quicksilver messenger.
It's a beautiful day. Moby grape, grateful dead. There's a Lucy Guzy kind of feel there and it would be
for me very difficult to imagine the kind of music grateful dead have given us coming out of New York.
Almost impossible. Yes. Yes. The spirit of place seeps into the poem. It seeps into the music. It
seeps into the mentalities and even into the ecological activism that this area is so well known for.
That's right. Want to remind our listeners we've been speaking with Mark Gonerman here about
re-inhabitation and it's been a fascinating discussion Mark. I hope we can get you back.
I'd really enjoy that. I really value entitled opinions and thank you so much for everything you've done
here at Stanford. Yes. Well, thank you. And we're going to leave our listeners with a song
by canned heat, another band that is in that Lucy Guzy. If you want to use that term, it's called
Dear Mother Earth.
(upbeat music)
♪ Dear mother ♪
(upbeat music)
♪ Dear mother ♪
(upbeat music)
♪ Dear mother ♪
♪ Like can we understand ♪
(upbeat music)
♪ Dear mother ♪
♪ Like can we understand ♪
♪ We got the same water ♪
♪ We got the same love ♪
♪ Dear mother ♪
(upbeat music)
♪ Dear mother ♪
(upbeat music)
♪ Dear mother ♪
(upbeat music)
♪ Dear mother ♪
(upbeat music)
♪ We got the same love ♪
♪ Dear mother ♪
(upbeat music)