Gary Snyder and "text"

On a more useful notion of text for these times:

“One of the formal criteria of humanistic scholarship is that it be concerned with the scrutiny of texts. A text is information stored through time. The stratigraphy of rocks, layers of pollen in a swamp, the outward expanding circles in the trunk of a tree, can be seen as texts. The calligraphy of rivers winding back and forth over the land leaving layer upon layer of traces of previous riverbeds is text.” (p. 71)

Snyder, G. (2003). The practice of the wild: Essays. Washington, DC: Shoemaker & Hoard.