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By Root 3149 0

event occurred in December 1959. President Dwight D. Eisenhower led the way to set Antarctica aside as a scientific preserve. All militarization of Antarctica was banned. This agreement—promoted by the United States—was considered the first major arms control treaty of the cold war. Forty-seven countries concurred in making Antarctica a sanctuary. Perhaps Eisenhower wanted to do the same with the Arctic?

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Ginsberg’s poem “America”—epitomizing the spirit of the First Amendment and the impulse to “speak truth to power”—was clearly applicable in Alaska. But what Kerouac loved most about the reading at the Six Gallery was how Snyder made the coyote—the Native American trickster figure—into a protagonist. With suburban developers chasing the coyote out of its homelands in the West, Snyder placed Canis latrans on a hillside, wiser than humans, scoffing at the idiocy of clear-cutting, bulldozing, and despoiling the natural world: “The Chainsaw falls for boards of pines/Suburban bedrooms, block on block/Will waver with this grain and knot,/The maddening shapes will start and fade/Each morning when commuters wake—/Joined boards hung of frame/A box to catch a biped in.” As Snyder’s Coyote watches a “Fat-snout Caterpillar, tread toppling forward/Leaf on leaf, roots in gold volcanic dirt . . .” all he can say is “Fuck You!”58

But Snyder doesn’t end “A Berry Feast” with the long-suffering coyote losing out to what the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, publisher of City Lights Books, called “the omnivorous corporate monoculture.”59 Instead, the deity Coyote, after grievances accumulate, watches the world being restored, as a new generation adopts The Wilderness Society’s ethos of leaving nature alone: “From cool springs under cedar/On his haunches, white grin long tongue panting, he watches: Dead city in dry summer, Where berries grow.”60 The Coyote and the poets themselves were messengers, perhaps fools, certainly brilliant trickster figures filled with creative power; their ideas about ecology were revolutionary. “The idea of saving wilderness for wilderness’s sake came from West Coast consciousness,” the poet and cofounder of the Fugs (a rock band) Ed Sanders recalled. “Ginsberg was the first one to use universe in poems. But it was Gary Snyder who taught us to think in terms of river systems, not boundary lines.”61

Besides Thoreau, Blake, and Zen, the West Coast beats also developed an affinity for old Rockwell Kent. Considering himself a conservative, an ascetic, and a political socialist, Kent became a target for Senator Joseph R. McCarthy. When forced to testify before a Senate investigations subcommittee, Kent took the Fifth Amendment, refusing to state whether or not he was a communist. Once the most popular illustrator in America, Kent now found himself blacklisted, and his Wilderness was removed from libraries as subversive literature. New York galleries and museums in the late 1950s refused to show his Alaskan work. Defiantly, Kent donated his paintings, illustrations, and manuscripts to the Soviet Union. Today many of his Alaskan paintings and illustrations are on permanent display at the State Hermitage Museum of Saint Petersburg.62 Only one painting—his portrait of Virginia Hawkins—remained in Seward, Alaska.

Ferlinghetti—publisher of Howl and Other Poems—also had a fierce ecological consciousness in the 1950s. However, he was concerned more about Malthusian theory than about the wilderness per se; he considered overpopulation “the root of all the other ecological problems.” Why were rain forests in the Tongass being destroyed? To make more houses for people. Why might Point Hope be bombed? Because an oil port was needed to fuel people’s vehicles. Why was air pollution becoming a health hazard in Los Angeles? Because more automobiles were needed. “No matter what subject you brought up in the 1950s,” Ferlinghetti recalled, one “can trace it back to overpopulation. This is the basis of all ecological problems.” Ferlinghetti, through City Lights Books, provided an open forum to any ecologically minded poet seeking to promote