Gary Snyder knows what modern and post-modern industrial society has forgotten--that true culture arises out of fully inhabiting the place where you live. A Pulitzer prize winning poet ( Turtle Island), he spent over ten years working as a researcher and translator of Zen Buddhist texts, studying Rinzai Zen Buddhism under Oda Sesso Roshi, and traveling with poet and cultural leader, Nanao Sakaki. He is the founder of a mountain farmstead in Sierra Nevada where he works with the Yuba Watershed Institute. He continues to travel world-wide to read poetry, teach Buddhist meditation, and lecture on environmental, bioregional, and community issues and is a faculty member at the University of California at Davis where he was instrumental in starting the Nature and Culture program.