A year and a half after Snyder's birth the family moved to a farm north of Seattle, where they scratched out a meager income amid the stumps of a cutover forest. Snyder was deeply imbued with his parents' working-class, West-Coast, left-wing ideas, and in the rain forests and mountain landscapes of the Puget Sound region he came to the realization that the environment serves more complex human needs than that for natural resources. This recognition later emerged as his most profound theme, both as a writer and a political activist.
From childhood Snyder was a voracious reader. His mother, a writer herself, encouraged her son's literary sensibility by taking him on weekly excursions to the public library in the University District of Seattle, where he would check out ten to twelve books a week. In his teenage years Snyder discovered the writings of John Muir and Robinson Jeffers, two authors widely regarded by critics as his literary precursors. While these writers served to focus his thinking along the lines of what he now refers to as "Bioregionalism," Snyder's aesthetic foundations had already been laid by his childhood reading of such Western writers as Stewart Edward White, H.
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