Planet: In your poems, nature often intrudes. The narrator might be describing a memory and then notices the cry of a bird or the flick of a deer’s ear. Why does nature play such an important role in your work?

Hass: From the beginning of language, nature gave us a vocabulary to talk about things that are hard to talk about. In my first book of poems, Field Guide, I set out in a self-conscious way to write about the natural world of California. And after that I made a decision—I’d read a lot of Gary Snyder and Wendell Berry and admired them both enormously and was very influenced by them—and I had some feeling that I’m not going to go there; that is, to write directly about place. What I will end up doing is writing about my life as I live it, drawing on the imagery of the natural world that I live in.

I’ve spent a lot of time translating Japanese haiku. The haiku tradition starts in the 16th century, and draws on imagery that goes back to the 8th century, which goes back to folk songs that probably go back to the Neolithic. So that in Japanese poetry, in European poetry, Chinese poetry, people found a language of spring trees for a certain kind of feeling, summer rain for a certain kind of feeling, bird song in winter for a certain kind of feeling. I found myself thinking “Maybe a way to do this is to live your life.” And if your parent dies, if you’re bewildered about the meaning of your life, if you go out, if the things that come to you naturally—that light, like birds on your ledge, are images of the things you’re feeling.

Planet: You once told an interviewer “I think that the job of poetry, its political job, is to refresh the idea of justice, which is going dead in us all the time.” Do you think poetry has an environmental job?

Hass: Yeah, I do. There’s a famous thing said by a Russian formalist critic named Boris Eichenbaum years ago. He said the function of poetry is to make the rock rock and the grass grass by freeing us from the automatism of perception.

Planet: That reminds me: I met Robert Creeley [a poet], and at the time I was hung up on this idea that poems had to have a hidden meaning and asked him about that. He said, “Sometimes pass the potatoes means pass the potatoes.”

Hass: Of course, in a poem “pass the potatoes” never means “pass the potatoes.” It’s the one time when if someone says to you “pass the potatoes” that you’re not supposed to pass the potatoes. You’re supposed to think “God. How interesting human life is. And it’s all summed up by pass the potatoes.”

Planet: If somebody asked, “How can I reconnect to the natural world?” what would you recommend?

Hass: I’d recommend that they take a walk, for starters. The place in which I confront this question is in my work in environmental education. I teach a course at Berkeley with my friend Gary Sposito—he’s a geologist and mathematician who works on water issues—and we ask the students to learn the names of a few trees and a few birds, and try to describe them in their journals as a way of paying attention to the world around them.

The other project I work on is called River of Words, an art and poetry program that invites kids to write poetry about their watersheds. That includes a whole range of things—birds, wildflowers—but also, with urban kids, whatever they see that makes a connection to the natural world. In some places, that might just be rain.

Planet: How do those kids react to River of Words?

Hass: I invite you to look at our Web site [www.riverofwords.org]. We now have ten years’ worth of art and poetry. We got one poem from a kid in one of the poorest neighborhoods in Washington, D.C., called Anacostia, and the teacher must have tried to explain to him what a watershed was by saying “It’s where rain falls and how it flows through the place where you live.” So, this kid wrote a poem that went “If I were a rain drop, I would not like to land on the back of a big black dog because it could just turn around and lick you off with its tongue. And I would not like to land right on the top of a fence, because if you fell off on the left side you might break your arm, and if you fell off on the right side, you might break your leg. So I would like to hit in the gutter and flow straight home.” This is a case of children teaching us what environment means: it means safety first. And then there are exquisite drawings of egrets and muskies from kids in the upper Midwest, drawings of sunsets over bayous from kids in Louisiana, little pictures of wood ducks in drainage ditches.

One of the powerful things that Aldo Leopold says is that you can’t be a steward of something you don’t love, and you can’t love it if you don’t know it. One of the fundamental tasks of environmental activists in the next 25 years is to launch a campaign to make sure that nature literacy is taught in the schools. And the more that we have this intense pressure to test for the No Child Left Behind Initiative, the harder it is for teachers to do the kind of things that principals and, increasingly, schools of education, are inclined to look on as frills. That includes art education and education in the natural sciences. So we have to be in a dialogue with teachers and try to support what they’re doing in giving environmental consciousness to kids. I hope one of the things that might come out of the Sierra Summit is a gathering of people to talk about what a national agenda for nature literacy would look like.

Planet: How can environmentally focused art ultimately affect government policy? You’ve described for instance, a thread running from Wordsworth and Thoreau to national parks. (“Thoreau read Wordsworth, Muir read Thoreau, Teddy Roosevelt read Muir, and you got national parks.”)

Hass: Well, I think there is a series of sequences, it’s hard to track any of them down, whether they begin in art or in philosophy or in individual perceptions in lived life. First, [there are] these unusual and new ideas. [And then they become] ideas of wide influence. And then [they are] a sensibility, the way we imagine the world, an atmosphere in which we live. I think we don’t have a very strong historical sense. Not very long ago—two or three hundred years ago—theologians found mountains an appalling problem. They couldn’t understand why God would bother to make such waste places where you couldn’t grow anything. We now have this idea that mountains are the very expression of the beauty of creation. That’s a change that happened, partly through the sensibility of art. And those changes are happening all the time.

Planet: Given the current climate, do you have a story that gives you hope about the environment?

Hass: No, I don’t. I think that the old formula of the civil rights and anti-war movements—which was pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will—seems to me really necessary right now. It’s very hard to be optimistic, except at the level of individual experiences. I find the work of the children inspiring. I’m on the board of an outfit called International Rivers Network that works with people affected by large dam projects to give them better and more objective economic and technical analyses as tools to combat these gigantic dams that are going to displace them from their lives. And every once in a while, the people who are fighting the dams, both as an environmental issue and a human rights issue, have a victory. They’re actually able to block a dam.

There’s a meadow up in the Sierra Nevada that I’ve loved since I was a small child, and there are a few people who have summer homes around the meadow. Recently a huge resort was built there, a big black glass Darth Vader of a thing. I said to the children of my friends, who are now the grown-ups there, “How did you let it happen?” And they shrugged, and one said to me, “You know, they’ll always go to one more meeting than we will because they get paid for it—it’s their job. For us, it’s extra.” The number of people who contribute time and money and find ways to work inside the environmental movement—despite the fact that such massive amounts of corporate money are disposed against them, working 24 hours a day—that’s inspiring to me.