Watershed Consciousness – The Danube: A Journey Upriver
Watershed Consciousness – The Danube: A Journey Upriver

Summary/Abstract: Nick Thorpe acknowledges Gary Snyder up front. In this book he brings over to “the shoulders of the old Danube” (Thorpe’s phrase) some of Snyder’s ideas on ecological and cultural bioregionalism. Snyder has been writing about reclaiming the home watershed, from his farm in the Sierra foothills, where 19th century Yuba river hydraulic gold miners washed out of the Sierra eight times the amount of dirt removed for the Panama Canal. Literally the watershed is a river’s drainage system, along with the varieties of plants and animals and human usages that it superintends, but of course this is equally an image of some power, ecological but also political and aesthetic. For Snyder watershed is the “first and last nation” and also the “final jurisdiction”, overriding political–legal boundaries (like those of the nine nation states along the Danube); river-basins, fish and owls and snails and plants and humans are equal in value and “cities and dams are ephemeral”. To create Snyder’s new community of watershed and to protect the commons, Snyder’s tiny group of river-keepers must think its way out of industrial societies, “having collected or squandered the fruits of eight thousand years of civilisation”, and must turn back to the land like natives and peasants, though we know we are neither.

• Details
• Contents