This alone from “Nobody Home: writing, Buddhism, and living in places” by Gary Snyder in conversation with Julia Martin is worth the price of the book and the pleasure of the read:

“Snyder: Part of the actualization of Buddhist ethics is, in a sense, to be a deep ecologist. The actualization of Buddhist insights gives us a Buddhist economics not based on greed but on need, an ethic of adequacy but simplicity, a valuation of personal insight and personal experience over possessions. What I like most about Buddhism really is its fearlessness. So much of what warps people is fear of death and fear of impermanence. So much of what we do is simply strategies to try and hold back death, trying to buy time with material things. So at its best Buddhism provides people with a way of seeing their own frailty: you need less in the way of material objects and fortresses around yourself.”

As always with Snyder, there is more. Born in 1930 he was a founding father of the “Beat Generation,” a cultural/literary movement of the 1950s with an outsized influence on the consciousness of America. It was never large in numbers, but its early members included Jack Kerouac, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Lucien Carr, John Clellon Holmes, Neal Cassidy, Gregory Corso and William Burroughs, while later adherents included Richard Brautigan and Ken Kesey. The Beats viewed the accepted mores of the establishment as constrictive to the human spirit, destructive to social equality and a sell-out of the best of humanity. Whether or not one embraced (I did and do) or rejected it (many did and do), the message of the Beat Generation lives on, nowhere moreso than in the work and life of its last standing founding father whose book Turtle Island earned the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975.
This latest book began in 1984 when a young South African graduate student, Julia Martin, wrote Snyder a letter with questions about his writings. She writes, “It started as an intellectual exchange and became an exploration of practice. As a young person living in a society demarcated by the paranoid logic of apartheid, it was refreshing to meet the spaciousness of Gary’s way of seeing. His delight in wildness…the truly radical realization that things are not things but process, nodes in the jeweled net… a tendency to walk out of the narrow prison of dualistic thought.” Nobody Home is a compilation of some of their correspondence and interviews of nearly 30 years and shows, among other things, how the beat of the Beats is still keeping time. From opposite sides of the world they illuminate the connectedness of all things, times, places and people‑‑‑apartheid and a valuation of personal insight and personal experience over possessions, Snyder’s comment to Julia that “…you can hope that your country never becomes a superpower because that’s a huge drag” and the book’s closing lines from HH Dalai Lama, “Compassion, love, and forgiveness, however, are not luxuries. They are fundamental for our survival.”
The Beats go on.