The Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison Guide to Deep Ecological Success

Following up on their conversational documentary The Practice of the Wild, Gary Snyder and Jim Harrison carry over the discussion to book form in The Etiquette of Freedom. In SF Weekly, Jonathan Kiefer is pleased to find that despite a title that could signal "some crummy blowhard's latest George W. Bush–nostalgic gas blast of foreign-policy punditry" (or a guide for the proper table settings when hosting that blowhard for tea), Snyder and Harrison have created something light, delicate, and even useful in its straightforwardness and lack of confrontational politicking, no advance knowledge of fancy napkin folding techniques required.

As Snyder puts it, "Learning the birds and the flowers is not just high school science or nature study — it's local etiquette. It's rude not to know your neighbors, you know?"

The DVD of The Practice of the Wild is included with the book, which might make for some redundancy when many of the conversations are directly transcribed from the film. But as the successes of more and more books hinge on making it to DVD, following the documentary with a book is a statement in its own right.

Although a fundamentally complaisant exercise, The Etiquette of Freedom does at least challenge the prevailing habit of assuming films to be at the top of our cultural food chain. In the case of this material, it suggests, there's still further to go when the documentary is done — namely, into the good, old-fashioned immersive tranquillity of a book.