“I saw old farmers in Kentucky last spring who belong in another century. They are inhabitants; they see the world they know crumbling and evaporating before them in the face of a different logic that declares, ‘everything you know, and do, and the way you do it, means nothing to us.’ How much more the pain, and loss of elegant cultural skills, on the part of non-white fourth-world primitive remnant cultures who may know the special properties of a certain plant, or how to communicate with Dolphins, skills the industrial world might never regain. Not that special, intriguing knowledges are the real point: it’s the sense of the magic system; the capacity to hear the song of Gaia at that spot, that’s lost.” – Gary Snyder