Award-winning poet Gary Snyder will give a lecture on Buddhist resource management in Asia and California and reading of his poetry, as part of the Edwin Way Teale lecture series, "Nature and the Environment."

Snyder, a professor of English and creative writing at the University of California-Davis, will speak on "Gratitude to Trees: Buddhist Resource Management in Asia and California" at the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center's Konover Auditorium on September 24 at 8 p.m. He will present a poetry reading from "Mountains and Rivers Without End" in Konover Auditorium at 3:30 p.m. September 25.

Snyder was born in San Francisco and was raised in the Pacific Northwest. A graduate of Reed College with a degree in literature and anthropology, Snyder was at the forefront, with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, of the Beat Generation/San Francisco movements of the late 1950s. He lived in Japan and studied formally in a Zen monastery; Zen Buddhism continues to influence his thought. Since 1970, he has taken a public stand on ecological issues.

A reflection of the unusual balance of literary, ecological and public policy interests in his work is his receipt of two literary awards - the Bollingen Prize for poetry and the John Hay Award for Nature Writing, both in 1997.

Snyder founded "The Art of the Wild," an annual writing conference on creative writing and wilderness that was featured in a one-hour documentary on PBS in 1996. In 1995, he was a featured poet in Bill Moyers' "The Language of Life," a PBS video special series. He was also instrumental in the founding of the widely acclaimed UC-Davis major "Nature and Culture," that has become a national model.

The Teale lecture series, launched last year, is designed bring a variety of distinguished speakers each year to the University to speak on various aspects of nature and the environment in a number of different disciplines.

The series is named for Edwin Way Teale, a distinguished Connecticut author, naturalist and photographer. Teale donated his papers and photographs to the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center and gave his farm in Hampton to the Audubon Society as a public nature center. There will be five more lectures in the series this academic year.

The series is co-sponsored by the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School and Research Foundation, the environmental engineering program, the Center for Conservation & Biodiversity, the Museum of Natural History and the departments of ecology and evolutionary biology, economics, English, philosophy and political science.

Sherry Fisher