Beginning with Gary Snyder’s premise suggested by “I came back to myself,/To the real work, to/What is to be done” this article offers readings of environmentally based literature as a way of suggesting that a return to “one’s self” is also a return to a consideration of one’s place in the ecosystem. Included are readings by Snyder himself, Leslie Marmon Silko, Barry Lopez and N. Scott Momaday. Placing Snyder’s own use and interpretations of Eastern Philosophies and Native American cultures alongside Native American writings, I suggest that contemporary “nature writing” represents not necessarily a shift from an anthropocentric to a biocentric or ecocentric perspective but rather a resurfacing of an ecocentric stream that has been neglected in North American writing in favor of more anthropocentric trends.
