Gary Snyder, whose collection Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, developed a poetry rooted in deep ecological awareness that embraced all aspects of the natural world including predation, parasitism, and biological interdependence. Drawing on his background in Zen Buddhism, Native American tradition, and his experience as a logger and wilderness traveller, Snyder wrote poems that refuse to separate beautiful nature from its troubling, devouring aspects. His engagement with insects and the full spectrum of ecological relationships placed parasitism within a framework of interdependence rather than revulsion.

Snyder's ecological poetry, informed by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring and the broader environmental movement, helped transform the literary representation of insects — including parasitic species — from objects of comic or satirical verse into participants in the web of life that sustained all human existence. His work influenced subsequent generations of American nature poets including Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and Lucille Clifton, and it helped establish the genre of ecological poetry as a serious literary tradition. Snyder brought Buddhism's non-hierarchical view of life to the tradition of insect and parasite verse.