The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy
Read The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy Online
Authors: Michael McCarthy
Tags: #Nature, #Animals, #General, #Ecology
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy
Michael McCarthy
John Murray (2015)
Rating: ★★★★★
Tags: Nature, Animals, General, Ecology
Naturettt Animalsttt Generalttt Ecologyttt
A great, rhapsodic, urgent book full of joy, grief, rage and love . . . A must-read' Helen Macdonald, author of *H is for Hawk
*
Nature has many gifts for us, but perhaps the greatest of them all is joy; the intense delight we can take in the natural world, in its beauty, in the wonder it can offer us, in the peace it can provide - feelings stemming ultimately from our own unbreakable links to nature, which mean that we cannot be fully human if we are separate from it.
In
The Moth Snowstorm
Michael McCarthy, one of Britain's leading writers on the environment, proposes this joy as a defence of a natural world which is ever more threatened, and which, he argues, is inadequately served by the two defences put forward hitherto: sustainable development and the recognition of ecosystem services.
Drawing on a wealth of memorable experiences from a lifetime of watching and thinking about wildlife and natural landscapes,
The Moth Snowstorm
not only presents a new way of looking at the world around us, but effortlessly blends with it a remarkable and moving memoir of childhood trauma from which love of the natural world emerged. It is a powerful, timely, and wholly original book which comes at a time when nature has never needed it more.
**
Review
A great, rhapsodic, urgent book full of joy, grief, rage and love. The Moth Snowstorm is at once a deeply affecting memoir and a heartbreaking account of ecological impoverishment. It fights against indifference, shines with the deep magic and beauty of the non-human lives around us, and shows how their loss lessens us all. A must-read Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk An important book about an important subject - the loss of biodiversity locally, nationally and internationally, what this means for humanity and how it could possibly be avoided ... The main argument is that we all have in us the capacity to experience joy and wonder from nature ... Michael McCarthy is a professional journalist and an accomplished and experienced writer who handles his themes skilfully Irish Examiner Impassioned, polemical and personal ... In the autobiographical passages nature is a marvel and a solace. [McCarthy's] descriptions of the night-time clouds of moths - the moth snowstorms of the title - that we saw in the days before farming ruined so much natural habitat are unforgettable, and his recollections of boyhood bird-watching on the River Dee Bay a delight ... At its heart, this is a book aiming to persuade those who are broadly sympathetic to think in a different way, and in that it is surely a success - and a joy Independent A fascinating and very readable book ... full of joy and wonder and luminous moments ... McCarthy is a man who remembers not only the Observer's Book of Birds but the set of Brooke Bond tea cards featuring Charles Tunnicliffe's beautiful bird pictures. But you don't have to be of a similar vintage to enjoy this expansive celebration of a subject too often overlooked in the ongoing discourse about man and nature - sheer joy Dabbler McCarthy has for years been the doyen of environmental correspondents ... he is conversant with the hard facts, the political realities and the moral complexities of the conservation world. But he writes also as a man inspired by the beauty, diversity and abundance of the natural world that we are destroying. This combination of worldly wisdom and deeply felt personal experience makes this a highly original and refreshing account of our current predicament TLS Deserves to be widely read Scotsman Environmental correspondent Michael McCarthy makes an impassioned plea on behalf of the natural world in this inspiring book Sunday Express The natural world, whether birdsong, butterflies or wild flowers, can give us joy. It can bring us peace. The ability of nature to do this, through a sense of awe, is articulated beautifully in a book by Michael McCarthy, The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy. His quest to track down every British butterfly as a tribute to his dead mother brought me to tears Sunday Times A deeply troubling book by one of Britain's foremost journalists on the politics of nature. The case he lays bare in the opening chapters is compelling stuff. Essentially he argues that the world of wild creatures, plants, trees and whole habitats - you name it - is going to Hell in a handcart ... powerful, heartfelt and compelling The Spectator As much as joy, it's a beautiful book about love, damage, and the possibility of redemption Press Association You could do worse to catch up than to read a single chapter in Michael McCarthy's new book, The Moth Snowstorm ... the one entitled 'The Great Thinning' ... powerfully and succinctly summarises the unfolding national story New Statesman More than a simple paean to the glories of the wild world. It is also an impassioned protest against its destruction Daily Mail In his beautiful book ... Michael McCarthy suggests that a capacity to love the natural world, rather than merely to exist within it, might be a uniquely human trait Guardian A mixture of memoir, elegy to nature, and a call to arms ... this is a profound urgent book, among its strength an appreciation of the small things - the common precious treasures of birdsong, butterflies and moths that we all, whatever our stance, stand to lose Country Life I found joy following McCarthy's stories, particularly those of the futile attempts to return salmon to the Thames and the tragic loss of sparrows from London ... His personal revelations are moving, and The Moth Snowstorm left me as grief-stricken as any environmental journalist must be after a career digesting facts such as that, by 2020, the volume of urban rubbish generated in China is expected to reach 400m tonnes - equivalent to the entire world's trash in 1997 Guardian A bold new defence of a natural world under great threat BBC Countryfile Magazine
About the Author
Michael McCarthy has won a string of awards for his writing on the environment and the natural world, first as Environment Correspondent of The Times, and later as Environment Editor of the Independent. These have included Specialist Writer of the Year in the British Press Awards, the Medal of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds for 'outstanding services to conservation', the Dilys Breeze Medal of the British Trust for Ornithology, and the Silver Medal of the Zoological Society of London. In 2008 McCarthy wrote Say Goodbye To The Cuckoo, a study of Britain's declining summer migrant birds, which was widely praised.
The Moth Snowstorm
Nature and Joy
MICHAEL McCARTHY
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK
PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS
435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014
www.nyrb.com
Copyright © 2015 by Michael McCarthy
All rights reserved.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: McCarthy, Michael, approximately 1947–
Title: The moth snowstorm : nature and joy / by Michael McCarthy.
Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2016. | Series: New York Review Books classics | Includes index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016012696 (print) | LCCN 2016016596 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681370408 (hardback : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9781681370415 ()
Subjects: LCSH: Environmentalism—Philosophy. | Wildlife conservation—Philosophy. | Wilderness areas—Philosophy. | McCarthy, Michael, approximately 1947—Childhood and youth. | McCarthy, Michael, approximately 1947—Philosophy. | Joy—Environmental aspects. | Philosophy of nature. | Nature—Effect of human beings on. | Endangered species. | Environmental degradation. | BISAC: NATURE / Environmental Conservation & Protection. | NATURE / Ecosystems & Habitats / General.
Classification: LCC GE195 .M425 2016 (print) | LCC GE195 (ebook) | DDC 304.2/8—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012696
For a complete list of titles published by New York Review Books, visit
www.nyrb.com
or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.
ISBN 978-1-68137-041-5
v1.0
To the memory of Norah
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘Inversnaid’
Contents
Copyright and More Information
6. Joy in the Beauty of the Earth
1
A Singular Window
In the summer of 1954, when Winston Churchill was dwindling into his dotage as British prime minister, the beaten French were withdrawing from Indochina, and Elvis Presley was beginning to sing, my mother’s mind fell apart. I was seven and my brother John was eight. Norah our mother was forty years old and was a teacher, although she had given up teaching when we were born. She came from a poor family but had won scholarships and been well educated, and was well read with a literary bent; she had corresponded with Pádraic Colum, he who wrote
She Moved Through the Fair
, after the Irish poet had struck up a friendship with her father, a merchant marine steward, on a transatlantic voyage; she had a novel sketched out (it was about a paediatrician who was wonderful with children and terrible with everybody else). She was gentle and kind to a fault, entirely unselfish and wholly honest, and a deeply religious Catholic.
Her mind had begun to fray during the long absences of my father Jack, who was a radio officer on the
Queen Mary
. These were the final glory days of the Cunard ocean liners, and it might be said that his life sailing regularly between Southampton and New York was glamorous; certainly it was more so than
the life he found when he came home to our small terraced house in Birkenhead, the town across the River Mersey from Liverpool, for two weeks every three months. He was not loving, either as a husband or a father – he did not know how to love – although he was not a bad man; but he covered up his lifelong insecurity with bluster, which too often turned into bad temper. The ten-year marriage, doctors clinically recorded later, had been ‘moderately happy’.
In her long isolations, bringing us up, my mother was closely supported by her well-meaning but bossy sister Mary and Mary’s biddable husband Gordon, who were childless, but in 1953 Mary and Gordon spent several months in America with friends – they contemplated emigrating – and it was during this time, when she was even more cut off, that my mother’s psyche began to wander. When Mary and Gordon returned they saw a change in her, and as 1953 became 1954 Norah began to behave strangely; she went missing for a day and was found twenty miles away, having walked alone for many hours. She grew increasingly troubled as the year went on and the climax came in the summer when she threw herself upon the mercy of Mother Church, which sixty years ago straitly governed the lives of the Irish Catholic families of Merseyside, and Canon Quinn, iron-fisted ruler of the parish of Our Lady, decreed she should be sent to an asylum.
No one could stand against this because no one understood what was wrong with her, other than that her mind was obviously in turmoil and that she was greatly distressed. As were the rest of the family: Jack and Mary and Gordon and other close relatives were not only at a loss but also ashamed, since this was well before R. D. Laing turned mental illness into martyrdom, and the best my father could do was borrow the money for her to go as a private patient, and off to the mental hospital she went, from whence, as was pointed out to me much later, you did not, in those days, often emerge.