Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: The Moth Snowstorm
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: c. 1947
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
https://www.nyrb.com/collections/michael-mccarthy * http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/11/michael_mccarthy_s_the_moth_snowstorm_reviewed.html * http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-moth-snowstorm-nature-and-joy-by-michael-mccarthy-book-review-10231885.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 82021569
LCCN Permalink: https://lccn.loc.gov/n82021569
HEADING: McCarthy, Michael
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670 __ |a [Author of Boston Public Library. Disarmament and substitutes for war]
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670 __ |a A rectilinear and area position calibration facility of sub-micrometre accuracy in the range 100-200mm, 1995
670 __ |a BL database, 5 Jan. 2012 |b (hdg.: McCarthy, Michael)
PERSONAL
Male.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist, writer. Independent, London, England, former reporter.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Michael McCarthy is a British writer. A former reporter for the London Independent, he has released works of nonfiction.
The Sun Farmer and Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo
The Sun Farmer: The Story of a Shocking Accident, a Medical Miracle, and a Family’s Life-and-Death Decision, released in 2007, tells the story of a tractor accident that caused a farmer in Illinois to suffer from terrible burns. The farmer’s case was the first in which doctors experimented with artificial skin. A writer in Bookwatch described the volume as “a moving survey.”
Christopher Booker, a contributor to Spectator, discussed the key message of McCarthy’s 2010 book, Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo: Migratory Birds and the Impending Ecological Catastrophe. Booker explained: “McCarthy’s theme is twofold: to give us a vivid picture of what we have learned scientifically about the birds themselves, but then beautifully to interweave it with the ‘human response,’ in poetry, in music, in all the devotion given by countless bird-lovers to the sight and sound of these small creatures which add such an extraordinary dimension to our lives.” Booklist reviewer Colleen Mondor described Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo as “a stunning and profound book that will make readers realize how very much these amazing winged creatures matter.” Christopher First, writer for the London Independent, called it a “lyrical, poignant, fascinating book.” “This is a valuable guide to what we’ll soon miss,” asserted Olivia Edward in Geographical. John Ingham, contributor to the Express, noted: “At heart this is a joyful book.”
Ashes under Water and The Moth Snowstorm
Ashes under Water: The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck That Shook America finds McCarthy examining a tragedy that occurred in 1915 on Lake Michigan. The sinking of the SS Eastland resulted in 844 deaths. Julia Jenkins, reviewer in ForeWord, suggested: “Ashes under Water is carefully researched yet compellingly told and combines the appeal of famous historical figures and places with everyday men and women struggling to survive. In this thoughtful treatment, the Eastland‘s story will deservedly capture the sympathy and imagination of diverse readers.”
In The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, McCarthy comments on the changes in the earth’s ecosystem. He also includes autobiographical snippets that illustrate his lifelong love of the outdoors.
A Publishers Weekly contributor commented: “McCarthy’s call is unlikely to shape real policy, but his writing is beautiful, sincere, and powerful.” Mark Cocker suggested in the Spectator, “One wonders if shock and shame might be necessary for us to undergo a collective change of heart. Either way, McCarthy gives us both barrels in this powerful, heartfelt and compelling book.” Richard Benson, writer for the London Independent, remarked: “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.” Reviewing the book on the Slate Web site, Mark O’Connell asserted: “McCarthy is a former journalist with the Independent, but he doesn’t write much like a newspaperman. He’s as approachably learned on his subject as you’d expect a longtime environmental correspondent to be; but his sentences are long and sensuous–great sauntering accumulations of clauses and images, heaving with a poetic yearning to capture the passing abundance of the natural world.” Jennifer Senior, critic for the New York Times, stated: “Mr. McCarthy has more than enough descriptive power to drive this book. It’s only when the engine overheats that his readers start to squirm. And while he may claim that statistics are too impersonal, too lifeless, to convey the magnitude of the sickening troubles we face, he repeatedly disproves himself by presenting them in innovative ways.”
A writer for Kirkus Reviews described the book as “a heartfelt, lovely, and thoroughly lived-through meditation on the natural world and its central part in any civilized life.” Referring to McCarthy, Commonweal contributor Philip Connors wrote, “His empathy and appreciation for the great pageant of nonhuman life radiates from every page.” McCarthy “is a professional journalist and an accomplished and experienced writer who handles his themes skillfully,” asserted Dick Warner for the Irish Examiner. Warner added: “This is an extremely interesting book. Unfortunately, for a book that’s supposed to be about joy, it is also profoundly depressing.” A reviewer on the Dabbler Web site commented: “The various elements in this book don’t always sit comfortably together, and McCarthy’s style can become a tad overexcited and insistent. But this is a book full of joy and wonder and luminous moments–not to mention well-chosen quotations from the poets.” Andy Stoddard, critic on the Rare Bird Alert Web site, remarked: “In the hands of a lesser writer, such a diversity of content and direction might be difficult to control and structure but McCarthy pulls off a difficult task with aplomb. The writing is of high quality too, each sentence carefully crafted both in its precise vocabulary and in its balance and rhythm.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 2010, Colleen Mondor, review of Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo: Migratory Birds and the Impending Ecological Catastrophe, p. 63.
Bookwatch, July, 2007, review of The Sun Farmer: The Story of a Shocking Accident, a Medical Miracle, and a Family’s Life-and-Death Decision.
ForeWord, November 27, 2014, Julia Jenkins, review of Ashes under Water: The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck That Shook America.
Geographical, April, 2009, Olivia Edward, review of Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, p. 63.
New York Review of Books, December 22, 2016, Verlyn Klinkenborg, review of The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, p. 68.
New York Times, September 29, 2016, Jennifer Senior, review of The Moth Snowstorm; October 23, 2016, Andrea Wolf, review of The Moth Snowstorm, p. BR23.
Paris Review, December 21, 2016, Susan Stewart, review of The Moth Snowstorm.
Spectator, May 9, 2009, Christopher Booker, review of Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, p. 40; June 6, 2015, Mark Cocker, review of The Moth Snowstorm, p. 41.
ONLINE
All about Birds, https://www.allaboutbirds.org/ (October 15, 2010), Stephen J. Bodio, review of Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo.
British Birds, https://britishbirds.co.uk/ (December 23, 2015), Ian Carter, review of The Moth Snowstorm.
Commonweal Online, https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ (November 30, 2016), Philip Connors, review of The Moth Snowstorm.
Dabbler, http://thedabbler.co.uk/ (May 12, 2015), review of The Moth Snowstorm.
Express Online, http://www.express.co.uk/ (April 10, 2009), John Ingham, review of Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo.
Guardian Online, https://www.theguardian.com/ (May 28, 2009), Stephen Moss, review of Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo; (July 16, 2015), Patrick Barkham, review of The Moth Snowstorm.
Independent Online, http://www.independent.co.uk/ (April 1, 2010), Christopher First, review of Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo; (May 7, 2015), Richard Benson, review of The Moth Snowstorm.
Irish Examiner Online, http://www.irishexaminer.com/ (April 18, 2015), Dick Warner, review of The Moth Snowstorm.
Kirkus Reviews Online, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/ (October 4, 2016), review of The Moth Snowstorm.
Rare Bird Alert, http://www.rarebirdalert.co.uk/ (July 20, 2015), Andy Stoddart, review of The Moth Snowstorm.
Slate, http://www.slate.com/ (November 7, 2016), Mark O’Connell, review of The Moth Snowstorm.
Three Worlds, http://threeworlds.campaignstrategy.org/ (May 19, 2015), Chris Rose, review of The Moth Snowstorm.
QUOTED: "Ashes Under Water is carefully researched yet compelling told and combines the appeal of famous historical figures and places with everyday men and women struggling to survive. In this thoughtful treatment, the Eastland's story will deservedly capture the sympathy and imagination of diverse readers."
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Print Marked Items
Ashes Under Water; The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck That Shook America
Julia Jenkins
ForeWord.
(Nov. 27, 2014): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2014 ForeWord http://www.forewordmagazine.com
Full Text:
Michael McCarthy; ASHES UNDER WATER; Globe Pequot Press (Nonfiction: History) 25.95 ISBN: 9780762793280 Byline: Julia Jenkins
Profiles of the central personalities involved in the career of the SS Eastland help to bring this compelling tale to life.
After more than a decade of research, journalist and Chicago resident Michael McCarthy shares a heartbreaking history in Ashes Under Water: The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck that Shook America. McCarthy gives this little-known Lake Michigan tragedy a thorough and compassionate telling and covers the media frenzy and indictments that followed.
The Eastland had survived several near disasters in its twelve years in service on the Great Lakes by the summer of 1915, when it was chartered for a pleasure cruise that should have been just one of many that season. Some 2500 passengers boarded the steamer before it rolled over while still at dock in a busy business district of Chicago, with crowds of commuters standing by as horrified witnesses. Hundreds of passengers would be rescued, but 844 would lose their lives. Over the course of the next year, hearings by competing state and federal grand juries and an extradition trial would absorb the nation in the quest for blame. Among the accused were the ship's builders, owners and captains past and present, the chief engineer, investors, and the inspectors who licensed the Eastland for service. Ashes Under Water details the Eastland's career, the tragedy of 1915, and the trials that followed, as well as a sampling of those who lost their lives. Major players who enliven this tale range from an immigrant engineer lost to history, to Clarence Darrow, who defended that engineer against extradition to Chicago.
McCarthy opens with a personal account of his attraction to this story and his surprise at its lack of notoriety, even in Chicago. From this appealingly personal beginning, he proceeds with convincing diligence in his research. The history unfolds chronologically, beginning with what motivated a small shipping firm to commission a large steamship for shipping and possibly passenger service. Simultaneously, McCarthy follows his star characters, including Darrow and the engineer, Erickson. The pacing and coverage of parallel stories create a reading experience that is absorbing and accessible. McCarthy flirts with drawing a conclusion about the justice served (or not) by the court cases following the Eastland's shipwreck but appears conflicted by sympathies with actors on both sides. This ambiguity is not disagreeable, however, as it is based upon involvement in his research. Plentiful notes and a lengthy bibliography provide opportunity for further study for those interested.
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Ashes Under Water is carefully researched yet compelling told and combines the appeal of famous historical figures and places with everyday men and women struggling to survive. In this thoughtful treatment, the Eastland's story will deservedly capture the sympathy and imagination of diverse readers.
Julia Jenkins
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Jenkins, Julia. "Ashes Under Water; The SS Eastland and the Shipwreck That Shook America." ForeWord, 27 Nov.
2014. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA392056149&it=r&asid=23bd5f6999c85a6b57eba95370d7665a Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A392056149
QUOTED: "A stunning and profound book that will make readers realize how very much these amazing winged creatures matter."
.
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Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo: Migratory Birds and the Impending Ecological Catastrophe
Collen Mondor
Booklist.
106.17 (May 1, 2010): p63. From Book Review Index Plus.
COPYRIGHT 2010 American Library Association http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Full Text:
Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo: Migratory Birds and the Impending Ecological Catastrophe. By Michael McCarthy.
May 2010. 272p. Ivan R. Dee, $26.95 (9781566638562). 598.156.
In luminous prose, British writer McCarthy addresses the cultural significance of migratory songbirds, from nightingales to turtle doves to the European cuckoo, on the heart and soul. He accompanies ornithologists and bird- watchers in the field, and quotes everyone from Keats to Buddy Holly. Shakespeare is here, of course, as well as Chet Baker and The Lord of the Rings. This dance between art and pop culture, from those who have spent a lifetime tracking the routes these small birds take between Europe and Africa to those who wait in their backyards for the birds' annual returns, is simply divine to read. McCarthy does not assault his readers with fearsome concern; he is much too elegant a writer for that. Instead, he makes his case for why these birds matter in a thousand familiar and forgotten ways. Then, finally, he relates the devastating facts about global warming, which triggers avian "mistiming," and other causes of the current migratory species crash. A stunning and profound book that will make readers realize how very much these amazing winged creatures matter.--Colleen Mondor
YA/S: Bird enthusiasts of any age will find much to love here, and the literary and cultural references will resonate just fine with teens. CM.
Mondor, Collen
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Mondor, Collen. "Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo: Migratory Birds and the Impending Ecological Catastrophe." Booklist,
1 May 2010, p. 63. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA226161057&it=r&asid=5ab0b1d4be5261ae244983341dd6d9d5. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A226161057
QUOTED: "McCarthy's theme is twofold: to give us a vivid picture of what we have learned scientifically about the birds themselves, but then beautifully to interweave it with the 'human response', in poetry, in music, in all the devotion given by countless bird-lovers to the sight and sound of these small creatures which add such an extraordinary dimension to our lives."
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Poisoned spring
Christopher Booker
Spectator.
310.9428 (May 9, 2009): p40. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2009 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo
by Michael McCarthy
John Murray, 16.99 [pounds sterling], pp. 256,
ISBN 96781848540637
[telephone] 13.59 [pounds sterling] (plus 2.45 [pounds sterling] p&p) 0870 429 6655 Wings and rings: a history of bird Migration Studies in Europe
by Richard Vaughan
Isabelline Books 6, Bellevue, Enys, Penryn TR10 9LB (UK) Tel./Fax: (44) (0)1326 373602
e-mail: mikann@beakbook.demon.co.uk
19.95 [pounds sterling], pp. 228, ISBN 9780955278747
On a May night in 1967, walking home down a Dorset farm track, I counted the song of 13 nightingales. Today in those woods no nightingale is heard. For 40 years I visited a bridge on the Dorset Stour to watch sand martins nesting in the riverbank. Since 1984 they have vanished. In 2002 I wrote a letter to the Times, headed 'The last cuckoo', to note that for the first time in decades I had not heard the cuckoo arriving on the button (17 April in Dorset, 18 April in
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Somerset), My letter was not printed.
One of the tragedies of our fast-changing world has been the dramatic decline in the numbers of those migrant birds which since time immemorial have been what Michael McCarthy, in his lovely but heart-tugging book, calls 'the bringers of spring'--the 'great aerial river' of 16 million birds flooding up from Africa between March and May to fill our island with the songs of chiff-chaffs and blackcaps, the aerial displays of swallows and swifts, and that most evocative of all spring sounds, the 'wandering voice' of the cuckoo.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Although Aristotle wrote about migration, as McCarthy deftly recounts it, it is barely a century since we first began to understand the scale and nature of these miraculous wanderings, and since, thanks to the pioneers of ringing, we first grasped how many of the birds we identify with springtime Britain are as much African as British.
McCarthy's theme is twofold: to give us a vivid picture of what we have learned scientifically about the birds themselves, but then beautifully to interweave it with the 'human response', in poetry, in music, in all the devotion given by countless bird-lovers to the sight and sound of these small creatures which add such an extraordinary dimension to our lives.
The book focusses on eight species, each given a delightfully discursive profile, but which he then tracks down with the aid of an expert. Before hearing nightingales in the wilds of Surrey, for instance, he traces what this bird has stood for in European culture right up to Eric Maschwitz's nightingale which never sang in Berkeley Square. He is entranced by the sedge warbler imitating a host of other birds on the Norfolk Broads, conveys how the wood warbler evokes the spirit of those Welsh oak woods which are its last fastness, meets the 'flycatcher gang' who keep a beady eye on every spotted flycatcher sallying across the gardens of a Cotswold village.
He searches out the vanishing turtle dove, poetic emblem of fidelity, in the Norfolk breckland, rejoices in the aerobatics of the swallow and of swifts creeling over a north London garden. Finally, on Wicken Fen, he is amazed to hear Nick Davies, the Cambridge Professor of Behavioural Ecology, summoning up cuckoos with a perfect imitation, before telling us that the Times, which anthologised its once famous letters column as 'The First Cuckoo', hasn't printed a 'first cuckoo' letter since 1940 (let alone my 'last cuckoo' effort seven years back).
But here a dreadful shadow falls, as McCarthy charts the catastrophic decline of so many migrant species in recent decades. In just 13 years the numbers of cuckoos and swifts have collapsed by 40 per cent, flycatchers, nightingales, turtle doves by nearly two thirds. Although no reason given for this disaster quite fits the bill--pesticides, changing climate, environmental degradation in Africa--McCarthy leaves us with a sense that something mysterious and terrible is happening to our world.
A valuable footnote to this mighty story is Wings and Rings by Richard Vaughan, a onetime professor of medieval history but also a distinguished ornithologist, who provides a fascinating picture of how the study of bird migration began, centred round four remarkable men. Heinrich Gatke became the 'uncrowned king' of Heligoland, in the days when this tiny islet off the north German coast was a 19th-century British possession, for the expertise with which he classified the vast flocks of migrants which sought it as a refuge, often by shooting and stuffing them for sale. Hans Christian Mortensen was the Danish schoolteacher who around 1900 rendered this unnecessary by inventing 'ringing'. Johannes Theinemann at the same time founded the world's first proper bird observatory, still there on the major migration route of the Courland Spit, a 60-mile stretch of pine-clad Baltic coast. W. Eagle Clarke, in charge of natural history at the Edinburgh Museum, turned the lighthouse keepers of Britain into systematic record-keepers of the migrants attracted, often fatally, to their lights. Vaughan's expert account will delight serious birdwatchers.
The discount offers on books in this section remain open for three months from date of publication. Email: taggings@bertrams.com
Booker, Christopher
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Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Booker, Christopher. "Poisoned spring." Spectator, 9 May 2009, p. 40+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA205094501&it=r&asid=80f67f3ef0cc7ef9ec72b93d2a75f0b7. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A205094501
QUOTED: "This is a valuable guide to what we'll soon miss."
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Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo
Olivia Edward
Geographical.
81.4 (Apr. 2009): p63. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2009 Circle Publishing Ltd. http://www.geographical.co.uk/
Full Text:
SAY GOODBYE TO THE CUCKOO
by Michael McCarthy
JOHN MURRAY, HB, 16.99 [pounds sterling]
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
Michael McCarthy is keen on reminding us that we experience migratory birds from a limited perspective; that the cuckoo may herald the English spring, but 'it is a bird out of Africa which is calling us'.
This doesn't stop these visitors--the swallow, the sedge warbler, the nightingale and others--playing an enormous role in our mythologies, so it's surprising that in-depth studies of their actual habits didn't start to appear until the mid-20th century, with Gilbert White's excited discovery that 'swifts tread, or copulate, on the wing' going unremarked upon for the best part of 180 years.
McCarthy applauds all attempts to better understand our temporary birdlife, expanding his brief to recount experiments in which real robins literally knocked the stuffing out of fake ones. But the thrust of his text is that the cuckoos are no longer calling, and the unanimous anecdotal evidence of their declining numbers is backed up by intensive sampling.
Cuckoo numbers have fallen by more than 59 per cent since 1967, while the spotted flycatcher declined by the same amount in just 13 years--'this is the high road to extinction'. Causes include insect shortages as a result of intensive farming; changes in woodland management practices; and climate change--migrant birds are arriving too late to prosper, having missed their seasonal cues.
To lament the loss of migratory birds isn't to out oneself as a sentimental twitcher, but to be aware that the globe is not, as Ted Hughes' poem Swifts had it, still working. This is a valuable guide to what we'll soon miss.
Edward, Olivia
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Edward, Olivia. "Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo." Geographical, Apr. 2009, p. 63. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA197492582&it=r&asid=dc4201260d5118fe78fa44562537db0a. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A197492582
QUOTED: "a moving survey."
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The Sun Farmer
The Bookwatch.
(July 2007): From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2007 Midwest Book Review http://www.midwestbookreview.com/bw/index.htm
Full Text:
The Sun Farmer
Michael McCarthy
Ivan R. Dee
1332 North Halsted Street, Chicago, IL 60622-2694 1566637007, $24.95 www.ivanrdee.com
THE SUN FARMER: THE TORY OF A SHOCKING ACCIDENT, A MEDICAL MIRACLE, AND A FAMILY'S LIFE-AND-DEATH DECISION tells of an Illinois farmer so badly burned in a tractor accident that only his feet were untouched--a tragedy which brought his wife a difficult decision: to allow him to die, or allow doctors to enshroud him in a cocoon of artificial skin. Included in this memoir are insights on the world's first artificial skin, its applications in trauma cases, and the short- and long-term consequences of the accident. THE SUN FARMER charts one family's decisions, course of action, and efforts to survive disaster and is a moving survey any general-interest lending library will want.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Sun Farmer." The Bookwatch, July 2007. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA166240534&it=r&asid=044d31461f10ae10a58a2424996ff88b. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A166240534
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What's happening to the bees and butterflies?
Verlyn Klinkenborg
The New York Review of Books.
63.20 (Dec. 22, 2016): p68. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Klinkenborg, Verlyn. "What's happening to the bees and butterflies?" The New York Review of Books, 22 Dec. 2016, p.
68+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA475603488&it=r&asid=360f8b9b13c3229eaa06378bd9a1db9a. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A475603488
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Saving Nature, for the Joy of It
Andrea Wulf
The New York Times Book Review.
(Oct. 23, 2016): Arts and Entertainment: p23(L). From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Wulf, Andrea. "Saving Nature, for the Joy of It." The New York Times Book Review, 23 Oct. 2016, p. 23(L).
PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA467395987&it=r&asid=2d36b5fb5aa83bdbf07d0173cb470b34. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A467395987
QUOTED: "McCarthy's call is unlikely, to shape real policy, but his writing is beautiful, sincere, and powerful."
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The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy
Publishers Weekly.
263.28 (July 11, 2016): p53. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
* The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy
Michael McCarthy. New York Review Books, $27.95 (272p) ISBN 978-1-68137-040-8
In this mesmerizing combination of memoir, treatise, and paean to the natural world, British environmental writer McCarthy (Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo) weaves the personal with the political and the local with the global to create a compelling examination of Earth's current ecological crisis. Whether he is recounting being seven years old and encountering a buddleia bush festooned with hundreds of colorful butterflies or introducing his 17-year-old son to the iridescent blue of a kingfisher, McCarthy shares the absolute sense of joy he feels. It is joy of this sort that he believes can end the devastation humans are wreaking on the natural world. Contra sustainable development or "ecosystem services," he argues forcefully for joy to become a third way in defense of nature. McCarthy asserts that all humans have the propensity to love nature and to experience the same joy he has. The imperative for immediate action is dire, he argues, hauntingly describing the "great thinning" of wildlife in Britain as well as the destruction of the Saemangeum estuary flats in South Korea and the collapse of bird populations that previously depended upon the area to fuel their migrations. McCarthy's call is unlikely, to shape real policy, but his writing is beautiful, sincere, and powerful. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy." Publishers Weekly, 11 July 2016, p. 53. PowerSearch,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do? p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA458915353&it=r&asid=f7ff1e2d0d981c04b381ac0bbcef5650. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A458915353
QUOTED: "One wonders if shock and shame might be necessary for us to undergo a collective change of heart. Either way, McCarthy gives us both barrels in this powerful, heartfelt and compelling book."
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To Hell in a handcart--again
Mark Cocker
Spectator.
328.9745 (June 6, 2015): p41. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2015 The Spectator Ltd. (UK) http://www.spectator.co.uk
Full Text:
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy John Murray, 20 [pounds sterling], pp. 262, ISBN 9781444792775 Spectator Bookshop, 16 [pounds sterling]
Despite the offer of joy proposed in the subtitle, this is a deeply troubling book by one of Britain's foremost journalists on the politics of nature. Michael McCarthy was the Independent 's environmental editor for 15 years, and his new work is really a summation of a career spent pondering the impacts of humankind on the world's ecosystems.
The case he lays bare with moving clarity 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 as a consequence of what he calls 'the human project'.
The cultural response to the various well-documented losses inflicted over the 20th century by industrial capitalism and socialist command economies alike has been two basic environmental arguments. The first is sustainable development, which is an optimistic vision of growth but managed within the safe boundaries of the Earth's natural systems.
More recently environmentalists have presented a harder-headed set of arguments under the heading 'ecosystems services'. The argument runs that nature provides a suite of crucial benefits and functions. If we were to manufacture these artificially, they would cost us eye-watering sums of money. Pollination, for instance, is a prerequisite for the entire human diet, but is performed for us free of charge by hosts of insects. It is calculated that if we had to stump up for the work of the bumblebee or pollen beetle we'd have to find 153 billion [euro] annually. By placing monetary values on parts of nature we'll come to appreciate what is at stake and, theoretically, work to sustain them.
McCarthy suggests that for many reasons, centred on the fundamental short-term selfishness of us all, both philosophies are doomed. In two case studies he maps out how we are eroding the very basis of life on Earth.
His first took him to the shores of China and Korea's Yellow Sea, which is host to one of the wonders of the avian world, known technically as the East Asia/Australia Flyway--a river of 50 million wading birds that crosses the Pacific twice annually during migration.
This astonishing flow of life converges in a small area of the Yellow Sea shoreline for a vital stopover and one Korean spot called Saemangeum was at the epicentre.
Not any more, however. The Koreans out of almost wilful destructiveness built the world's longest concrete barrage and obliterated the entire estuary. Eight years after its construction they still haven't even used the reclaimed land.
Before there is time for any kind of smug recoil from the vanity of foreigners, McCarthy outlines how the British too have fouled their nest. Building on statistics acquired over decades by bodies such as the British Trust for Ornithology, Plantlife and the Rothamsted Institute, he shows how we have lost half of all our wildlife in the last third of the 20th century.
His best illustration of this involves the moth snowstorm of the book's title. McCarthy asks those of us over 50 to recall our evening car journeys of the 1960s and earlier. During nocturnal drives one would frequently have to stop to remove the veritable blizzard of chitin as dead moths accumulated on the car's windscreen and headlights. Not any more. That
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strangely wonderful indicator of abundance has been sprayed out of our lives by agricultural addiction to what the author calls '-cides'--the herbicides, fungicides and insecticide that are applied on average 20 times to every conventional arable crop.
What is to be done? In the rest of the book McCarthy charts the transformative impact of his own encounters with nature. Sometimes the joys are simple, like the sight of snowdrops in late winter or the first brimstone butterfly of spring or the gorgeous marine haze of bluebells in April. Sometimes they are more private pleasures, such as fishing for brown trout in the gin-clear chalk streams of southern England.
At the heart of all these encounters is deep fulfilment, which McCarthy attempts to elevate to a kind of principle that should shape and govern our relations with nature. The author's joy looks and sounds very similar to 'biophilia', a proposition made by the internationally celebrated naturalist E. O. Wilson that all humanity at its core is nourished and dependent upon contact with the other parts of life--wild plants, ancient trees, beautiful birds, delicate butterflies etc.
Alas, neither joy nor biophilia is making too much head way in altering our relations with nature. One wonders if shock and shame might be necessary for us to undergo a collective change of heart. Either way, McCarthy gives us both barrels in this powerful, heartfelt and compelling book.
Cocker, Mark
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Cocker, Mark. "To Hell in a handcart--again." Spectator, 6 June 2015, p. 41+. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA416719146&it=r&asid=450270751836f5065d257713c8c8e3de. Accessed 10 Mar. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A416719146
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QUOTED: "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."
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy, book review
It is part of the human condition to rejoice in the natural world: we should embrace it
Richard Benson Thursday 7 May 2015 11:30 BST0 comments
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Green and pleasant land: Michael McCarthy treats nature as both a solace and a marvel Rex Features
In the past, climate change campaigners have become extremely irritated by sceptics such as Nigel Lawson likening their cause to a new religion. For a start, they reply, religion is based on faith, the belief in climate change on hard evidence. Yes, they and Christians share a taste for apocalyptic narrative, but the environmental apocalypse can be avoided. And while churches tend to be conservative, environmental campaigners are radical and, you know, fun.
Many neutrals, however, find campaigners more finger-waggy than fun-filled and, noting this, some activists are now heretically wondering if churches might teach them something about making converts. Last month George Marshall, founder of the Climate Outreach Information Network, said exactly that, and some environmentally-minded church leaders have agreed.
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, a combination of memoir, natural history and homily by the former environmental editor of The Independent, makes a similar argument. Rather than looking to established religions, though, McCarthy contends that we need to embrace our natural propensity to take joy in nature. This propensity, he says, is "hardwired" in our genes from our distant past as hunter-gatherers on the African savannahs. Its importance to our wellbeing is demonstrated by the fact that in US hospitals, recovery times for patients with garden views tend to be shorter than for those without. And appealing to a sense of joy and wonder in the natural world will persuade more people to care for it than will talk of sustainable development or ecosystems.
McCarthy's exposition is impassioned, polemical and personal. It is interwoven with international reportage and autobiographical accounts of a troubled childhood on Merseyside, and his relationships with his family, particularly his mother, Norah. In 1954, when he was seven, Norah was over-hastily committed to an asylum after a spell of mild mental illness, and McCarthy sent to live with an aunt. He coped by making himself indifferent to his mother, allowing a rapprochement only after adolescence.
In the autobiographical passages nature is a marvel and a solace. His 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. Particularly admirable is the way his knowledge helps him find ways of evoking the beauty of that muddy and rarely celebrated landscape feature, the estuary. "[Waders] are the gift to us of mud… the intertidal ooze at the edge of the sea is the richest in invertebrates of all habitats, able to hold in a single square metre thousands of tiny molluscs, crustaceans, marine snails and marine worms, and waders are linked to it inextricably."
He says at the outset that he does not set out "to make formal argument, a step-by-step logical assembling of evidence". Contro- versial points are made with no acknowledgment of their tendentiousness. Many agree with him that Genesis 1:28, which grants man dominion over nature, has been used to justify the abuse of nature, but he must know that respected sources have convincingly argued otherwise. One could make similar objections at least to his passages about evolutionary biology and psychology, and at times, such disdaining of evidence and counter argument can make the book feel like an exercise in preaching to the converted.
However, that may be no bad thing. 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.
QUOTED: "McCarthy is a former journalist with the Independent, but he doesn’t write much like a newspaperman. He’s as approachably learned on his subject as you’d expect a longtime environmental correspondent to be; but his sentences are long and sensuous—great sauntering accumulations of clauses and images, heaving with a poetic yearning to capture the passing abundance of the natural world."
The Great Dying That Is to Come
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Michael McCarthy celebrates the natural world and mourns our implacable destruction of it.
By Mark O'Connell
illo.
Simon Roy
Ralph Waldo Emerson opened his essay “Nature” by inviting us to imagine how differently we would view the stars if they were revealed for only one night in every thousand years. “How would men believe and adore,” he wrote, “and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!” The point is that the sublime, the heavenly, is all around us; it’s this very pervasiveness that blinds most of us, most of the time, to its majesty. Rather than falling to our knees in nightly transports of reverence and awe, we barely take the time to glance upward at this spectacle; in fact those of us who live in cities—which is to say a majority of currently living human beings—can’t even see it properly anymore, flash-blinded as we are by the glare of technological modernity.
Mark O'Connell
MARK O'CONNELL
Mark O’Connell is a Slate books columnist and a staff writer for the Millions. His book To Be a Machine is now available from Doubleday.
Toward the end of The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy’s elegiac new book about the natural world and our slow and implacable destruction of it, McCarthy quotes Emerson’s line by way of underscoring his contention that experiences of wonder can “jolt us into the realisation of how remarkable not only our own but all existence actually is.” McCarthy himself gives the impression of needing no such jolting. His love of nature, his awe at the abundance and beauty of it all, seems an abiding and unwavering condition: He is, in the Emersonian sense, a permanent resident of the city of God.
His book is a curious, variegated creature—part memoir, part nature writing, part polemic. And as any book about the natural world must now necessarily be, it is also a book about the future, about the terrible damage we are wreaking on our planet, and the great dying that is to come. McCarthy is a former journalist with the Independent, but he doesn’t write much like a newspaperman. He’s as approachably learned on his subject as you’d expect a longtime environmental correspondent to be; but his sentences are long and sensuous—great sauntering accumulations of clauses and images, heaving with a poetic yearning to capture the passing abundance of the natural world. Here he is, for instance, in the early pages of the book, on the profusion of wildlife he recalls from the English countryside of his childhood and of the lepidopteran phenomenon, now lost, for which he’s named his book:
Hares galumphed across every pasture. Mayflies hatched on springtime rivers in dazzling swarms. And larks filled the air and poppies filled the fields, and if the butterflies filled the summer days, the moths filled the summer nights, and sometimes the moths were in such numbers that they would pack a car’s headlight beams like snowflakes in a blizzard, there would be a veritable snowstorm of moths, and at the end of your journey you would have to wash your windscreen, you would have to sponge away the astounding richness of life.
McCarthy writes movingly of the origins, in loneliness and pain, of his own deep connection with nature. From when he was 7 years old in the mid-1950s, his mother suffered a series of nervous breakdowns and spent long stretches in mental institutions, during which he and his older brother had to live with an aunt and uncle. (His father, a radio officer on the Queen Mary, was mostly away at sea and at any rate otherwise aloof.) Though his brother suffered terribly, and remained deeply troubled in adulthood, the young McCarthy processed this trauma into a kind of blank indifference, seeming to displace all his complex human emotion into nature.
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And so there are two traumas, two losses, at the center of this book: the destruction of a family home and the much vaster ruination, ongoing and seemingly unstoppable, of our species’ home, our planet. “It is extraordinary: we are wrecking the earth,” writes McCarthy, “as burglars will sometimes wantonly wreck a house. It is a strange and terrible moment in history. We who ourselves depend upon it utterly are laying waste to the biosphere, the thin, planet-encircling envelope of life, rushing to degrade the atmosphere above and the ocean below and the soil at the centre and everything it supports; grabbing it, ripping it, scattering it, tearing at it, torching it, slashing at it, shitting on it.”
McCarthy is in a state of astonished grief at this situation, and his eloquence and persuasiveness is such that I found myself wondering how any of us manage not to join him there, how we ever manage to think of anything else. (Is it not stunning to learn, for instance, that since the end of the Second World War, Britain’s wildlife population has been reduced by more than half?) It is, as such, an upsetting book, but at its heart is a bid for a kind of redemption: an appealing if idiosyncratic argument that we are predisposed, as humans, to take immense aesthetic and spiritual pleasure in the natural world from which we evolved and that this profound joy, were we somehow all to find a connection with it, might help our species see the error of its ways, might stop us destroying our planet and its other inhabitants.
Sustainable development has been a failure, McCarthy argues, and its successor as a Big Idea for saving the planet, the developing science of environmental economics—which aims to halt environmental destruction by according real world financial value to “ecosystem services”—is too narrowly focused on those elements of the natural world that are useful for our own economic welfare. And crushingly depressing! Possibly the most disturbing part of the whole book is McCarthy’s description of a 1997 article in the journal Nature in which the entire economic value of earth’s “major ecosystem services”—which is to say, nature itself—is calculated at 33 trillion dollars per annum, a full 15 trillion dollars more than the gross world product. “There it was,” he writes, with mournful irony. “The value of nature to human society.” That, right there, is the final pyrrhic victory of capitalism.
But the book is largely an argument for the joyful apprehension of nature, for the experience of ourselves, in our deepest and most authentic context, as creatures among other creatures. This immemorial bond, McCarthy writes, “is the inheritance of every single one of us, it is part of what it means to be human, and it can be found within us—not always easily—and it can be understood, and it can be made the basis of our defence of the natural world in the terrible century to come.” It’s an idea for which he advocates eloquently and stirringly, almost always from the perspective of personal experience.
Michael McCarthy.
Michael McCarthy.
The pleasure he takes in nature seems, at times, almost carnal. At one point, after an aside about how men writing about female beauty has come to seem an act of sexist objectification, he wonders whether “the day might not come when to express open and unqualified admiration for an orchid, say—I mean for its beauty, its elegance and its glamour, all qualities many orchids undeniably possess—might be thought inappropriate.” It’s a weird moment, and I found myself somewhat confused as to what he was getting at. Until, that is, further down that same page, when he describes taking five consecutive walks on five consecutive days in a bluebell-filled wood: “I stopped at the gate, I paused before entering. I savoured the moment. It felt like the minute before sex, with a new lover who is making ready—the elevated heartbeat, the skin-prickle, the certainty of impending pleasure.”
It’s not inappropriate, as such—I don’t think I’m missing any delicate allusions to what might have been going on between the author and those bluebells during those five consecutive days—but it is difficult to relate to such intensity of joy at taking a walk. Part of the experience of reading The Moth Snowstorm, for me, mixed in with all the pleasure and anxiety, was a creeping guilt at my own inability to feel such a heightened connection with the natural world. I found myself wondering what my problem was. Why have I never burst into joyful laughter, as McCarthy describes himself doing, at birdsong issuing from a blossoming tree?
And this is one reason why I cannot view human joy in nature as the redemptive force McCarthy believes it can be. It never quite emerges as more than a hopeful projection of his own deep affinities onto the rising darkness of our collective future. As he himself points out, human life has undergone profound demographic changes over the last century: exponential growth in global population, in particular, and the momentous shift whereby a majority of humans now live in urban areas, many of us in the vast sprawling megacities of Africa and Asia.
It’s hard to imagine how a revolution in consciousness might now take place, a broader and deeper version of the romantic and transcendentalist movements of the 19th century, that might act as a stay against our relentless hunger for expansion and consumption and accumulation. How might we all be made to feel the kind of joy McCarthy so elegantly describes? How might we be made to believe and adore, to apprehend the city of God that, for a little while longer, surrounds us? And if, by some miracle, we were to come to such a collective apprehension, would it be enough to save us?
THE MOTH SNOWSTORM
NATURE AND JOY
by Michael McCarthy
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“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 nonhuman lives around us, and shows how their loss lessens us all. A must-read.” —Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk
The moth snowstorm, a phenomenon Michael McCarthy remembers from his boyhood when moths “would pack a car’s headlight beams like snowflakes in a blizzard,” is a distant memory. Wildlife is being lost, not only in the wholesale extinctions of species but also in the dwindling of those species that still exist.
The Moth Snowstorm is unlike any other book about climate change today; combining the personal with the polemical, it is a manifesto rooted in experience, a poignant memoir of the author’s first love: nature. McCarthy traces his adoration of the natural world to when he was seven, when the discovery of butterflies and birds brought sudden joy to a boy whose mother had just been hospitalized and whose family life was deteriorating. He goes on to record in painful detail the rapid dissolution of nature’s abundance in the intervening decades, and he proposes a radical solution to our current problem: that we each recognize in ourselves the capacity to love the natural world.
Arguing that neither sustainable development nor ecosystem services have provided adequate defense against pollution, habitat destruction, species degradation, and climate change, McCarthy asks us to consider nature as an intrinsic good and an emotional and spiritual resource, capable of inspiring joy, wonder, and even love. An award-winning environmental journalist, McCarthy presents a clear, well-documented picture of what he calls “the great thinning” around the world, while interweaving the story of his own early discovery of the wilderness and a childhood saved by nature. Drawing on the truths of poets, the studies of scientists, and the author’s long experience in the field, The Moth Snowstorm is part elegy, part ode, and part argument, resulting in a passionate call to action.
PRAISE
McCarthy takes his readers on an idiosyncratic and wonderful walk through his joy of nature. Like some of the greatest nature books, from Thoreau’s ‘Walden’ to Annie Dillard’s ‘Pilgrim at Tinker Creek,’ it’s a personal book that describes McCarthy’s own journey while at the same time folding his experiences within a broader context….‘The Moth Snowstorm’ is an inspiring book, and I salute McCarthy for his boldness. Rather than the dire, dry statistical projections often heralded to make the case for conservation, he turns boldly to joy — to imagination and emotion.
—Andrea Wulf, The New York Times Book Review
Terrific, original work.
—Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food
McCarthy writes beautifully about nature’s cycles and rhythms, even in the face of terrible degradation.
—Pamela Paul, The New York Times
Mr. McCarthy is certainly a personable companion, prone to bursts of eccentric charm…Filled with beautiful writing…The Moth Snowstorm, however, is much more than a paean to the Earth’s beauty. It is also an elegy for it, and a particularly distressed one at that.
—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times
An environmental call to arms as powerful as Silent Spring.
—The Conversation (UK)
A chronicle that is both bleak and achingly beautiful; a true treasure.
—Booklist
In this mesmerizing combination of memoir, treatise, and paean to the natural world, British environmental writer McCarthy (Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo) weaves the personal with the political and the local with the global to create a compelling examination of Earth’s current ecological crisis...his writing is beautiful, sincere, and powerful.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review
[McCarthy is] as approachably learned on his subject as you’d expect a longtime environmental correspondent to be; but his sentences are long and sensuous—great sauntering accumulations of clauses and images, heaving with a poetic yearning to capture the passing abundance of the natural world.
—Mark O’Connell, Slate
A heartfelt, lovely, and thoroughly lived-through meditation on the natural world and its central part in any civilized life.
—Kirkus
A beautifully lyrical work, dealing with one of the most urgent problems of our age.
—Tim Flannery
McCarthy has for years been the doyen of environmental correspondents...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.
—Jeremy Mynott, The Times Literary Supplement
In his beautiful book The Moth Snowstorm, Michael McCarthy suggests that a capacity to love the natural world, rather than merely to exist within it, might be a uniquely human trait. When we are close to nature, we sometimes find ourselves surprised by joy....
—George Monbiot, The Guardian
This is a book about the joy the natural world can engender—even in the face of its decline. McCarthy powerfully synthesises the two main literary responses to the current crisis, provoking both shock...and a sense of awe and (most importantly) love that may prove nature’s best defence. If you read one book from this selection, make it The Moth Snowstorm.
—Melissa Harrison, The Times (London), Best Nature Books of 2015
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.
—Richard Benson, The Independent
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...McCarthy is a professional journalist and an accomplished and experienced writer who handles his themes skilfully.
—Dick Warner, Irish Examiner
Deserves to be widely read.
—The 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.
—The 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
A mixture of memoir, elegy to nature, and a call to arms...this is a profound urgent book, among its strengths 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.
—The Guardian
A bold new defence of a natural world under great threat.
—BBC Countryfile Magazine
[A] moving memoir.
—New Statesman
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.
—The Dabbler
QUOTED: "Mr. McCarthy has more than enough descriptive power to drive this book. It’s only when the engine overheats that his readers start to squirm. And while he may claim that statistics are too impersonal, too lifeless, to convey the magnitude of the sickening troubles we face, he repeatedly disproves himself by presenting them in innovative ways."
Review: ‘The Moth Snowstorm,’ and Other Natural Bliss-Outs
Books of The Times
By JENNIFER SENIOR SEPT. 28, 2016
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For the word porn alone, nature writing can be its own giddy reward. Consider the names of shorebirds, which Michael McCarthy deploys to voluptuous effect in “The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy.” Dunlins. Great knots. Curlews. Nordmann’s greenshanks. Bar-tailed godwits.
Not one of them a creature in Rubeus Hagrid’s hut, amazingly enough.
Mr. McCarthy is an environmental journalist in Britain. As a writer and observer, he shares certain similarities with his countryman Robert Macfarlane, whose “Landmarks” came out in the United States this summer. Mr. McCarthy, too, writes about the natural world as if he’s of it, not apart from it, in language both sumptuous and attuned. (His discussion of waders searching for lugworms leaves little room for doubt: He is the bard of mud.) He too has a mystical sense of place.
“The Moth Snowstorm,” however, is much more than a paean to the Earth’s beauty. It is also an elegy for it, and a particularly distressed one at that.
The past few years have seen a number of fine books about environmental depredation, including the possibility of a “sixth extinction,” or great dying off, for the sixth time, of a majority of the world’s species. (Elizabeth Kolbert won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for her book by this very name.) But “The Moth Snowstorm” is far more personal. As one of the 7 billion-plus stakeholders in the planet’s fate, Mr. McCarthy is clearly desperate, anguished, overcome. Absent having a specific chief executive to write to, he’s writing to us, hoping we’ll look beyond the dun-colored conventions of conservationist arguments — statistics, abstractions — when we consider our despoiled planet.
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“If loss of nature becomes a sort of essay subject,” he writes, “we miss its immediacy; we may lose sight of its sadness and its nastiness, its sharp and bitter taste, the great wounding it really is.”
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Michael McCarthy Credit via New York Review Books
So what’s his case for defending the Earth? Something he admits is frankly corny: Nature offers us joy, wonder, the chance to feel the electrostatic charge of being alive — “it still holds its magnetism for countless unpolemical minds.” Five hundred generations of sedentary life may have us believe we’re inured to nature’s charms, he writes, but we are all, secretly, creatures of the veldt, and as we raze, pave and puff our way around the planet, “we are destroying not only our home, which is dreadful enough, but also a fundamental part of ourselves.”
I take no issue with this emotional — and at times, unabashedly spiritual — line of appeal. I do, however, take issue with Mr. McCarthy’s pecking this same note with the assiduousness of the Chinatown chicken. There are only so many times we can read that “50,000 generations” of hunting and gathering is more critical to our psychology than 500 generations of civilization. (I counted eight, and this was after I started to grow frustrated.) There are only so many times we can read that our appreciation of nature is lodged “in our tissues,” or our genes, or our psyches. The idea that we’re buttoned-up moderns with atavistic needs does not become more persuasive through repetition alone.
And while I appreciate Mr. McCarthy’s attempts to show us the transcendent beauty of the world as he sees it, I’m afraid I do not always respond in the same ways that he does. I was reminded of the scene in David Mamet’s “The Old Neighborhood” when one of the characters, Deeny, mentions how others react if you show them the house where you grew up.
“It means something to you, you see, as it should,” she says. “But the other person, they feel lonely.”
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Every time Mr. McCarthy’s heart turned a cartwheel that mine did not — every time he’d write something like “the rational part of me couldn’t cope,” for instance — I wished he’d simply described what he’d seen and left it at that.
Because his book is filled with beautiful writing, especially when it comes to birds. The stonechat is “the very acme of alertness.” Shorebirds are “spindly-legged, nervy, refined.” Sandpipers fly in swarms so dense, he writes, “that when I first saw them in a shape-shifting dark murmuration, far in the distance, I thought I was looking at a billowing cloud of smoke.”
And Mr. McCarthy is certainly a personable companion, prone to bursts of eccentric charm. Here he is, recalling the moment he realized how unusual his fondness for estuaries was: “I had fallen in love with an anomaly. Most people saw the mouths of rivers as neither one thing nor another; they were the poor relations among landscape features, not remotely figuring in popular culture.” It’s all so unfashionable: “I mean, know any estuary songs?”
I read these passages and so many others with unqualified enjoyment. Maybe, for some readers, they will be enough.
You can understand, too, why Mr. McCarthy feels the beauty of the natural world so keenly, and why he has such a personal investment in its preservation. He had the good fortune to come of age when the British countryside was ecstatic with wildlife — half of which has since been wiped out — and when he was 7, the bountiful hares, larks, thrushes, butterflies and moths of his surroundings were the source of his salvation: It was at this point that his mother’s mind unraveled and she moved, for a time, into an asylum. As she lost her internal moorings, Mr. McCarthy found his outdoors.
Mr. McCarthy has more than enough descriptive power to drive this book. It’s only when the engine overheats that his readers start to squirm. And while he may claim that statistics are too impersonal, too lifeless, to convey the magnitude of the sickening troubles we face, he repeatedly disproves himself by presenting them in innovative ways. How can you forget that more than 14,000 dead pigs were found in China’s Huangpu river in 2013? Or that the volume of garbage from China in 2020 is expected to equal the world’s entire output from 1997? Or that Britain has lost half its birds since the Beatles broke up?
You can’t. To quote — as he does — the rat-a-tat conversation of house sparrows:
Hey!
What?
You!
What?
You!
It’s on us. Message heard.
Rainbow Dust; The Moth Snowstorm; and In Pursuit of Butterflies review – three tributes to the humble Lepidoptera
The Greeks gave butterflies and souls the same name: psyche. So what does the ever more parlous state of the creatures say about us?
A Filipino tree nymph butterfly
A Filipino tree nymph butterfly. Photograph: Joe Cavaretta/AP
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Patrick Barkham
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Thursday 16 July 2015 06.00 EDT Last modified on Monday 6 February 2017 09.58 EST
The chronicles of the 14th-century French writer Jean Froissart provide a rare glimpse into a medieval childhood. As a boy, Froissart built dams across streams and made mud pies. He also constructed living kites from butterflies, fastening a fine flaxen thread to their tiny bodies and tying the other end to his hat, the captured insects fluttering around his smiling face like “tethered elves”, as Peter Marren writes in Rainbow Dust.
Our long relationship with Lepidoptera, the order of insects (moths and butterflies) with scaly, intricately patterned wings, is often representative of the state of nature and the state of our relationship to it. Butterflies appear on Minoan artefacts, while Pyrenean cave paintings depict eyed hawkmoths. The ancient Greeks gave butterflies and souls the same name: psyche.
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The influence of these insects on our souls is the subject of three new books. Although this welcome trio are all written by men of late middle age and will all be filed under “nature writing”, they are as different as the flamboyant swallowtail and the humble brown argus.
Marren, the highly respected author of Bugs Britannica, is the least personally revealing narrator, offering only self-effacing fragments of memoir in an elegantly written and superbly researched account of how the human bond with butterflies has changed over centuries. Like many small boys growing up in the 1950s, Marren collected butterflies as an uncomplicated hobby. For him and others, this intimacy with small creatures (and complicity in their deaths) inspired a lifelong passion for conservation. Such children were also the final incarnation of the butterfly collector, who is now “as dead as his specimens”.
Rainbow Dust
Rainbow Dust tells the rich story of the cultural evolution of butterflies. The Georgian enthusiasts who first named species were not scientists but artists and poets who romantically arranged their collections in kaleidoscopic patterns (prefiguring Damien Hirst’s butterfly pieces). In the 19th century, a passion for butterflies was taken up by amateur scientists who collected on an industrial scale and displayed their finds with mathematical precision.
Sir Walter Rothschild represented the apotheosis of the Victorian and Edwardian mania for collecting. His niece, Miriam Rothschild, an eminent naturalist, described how 6ft 3in, 22-stone Uncle Walter would bowl across the marble hall of his home, breathing heavily, “like a grand piano on castors”. He claimed there were no “duplicates” among his 2.25 million butterflies and moths. “To him the world’s largest collection was the bare minimum necessary,” observes Marren.
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Another Victorian collector once travelled to the Isle of Wight to catch 800 of the very rare pale clouded yellow, a species that also appears on the dust-jacket of The Collector, the debut novel by John Fowles that helped to push collectors towards extinction. This claustrophobic thriller about a loner who graduates from imprisoning beautiful butterflies to kidnapping a young woman was published in 1963. Just as sex was invented in 1963 (Philip Larkin also wrote: “The case of butterflies so rich it looks / As if all summer settled there and died”), so collecting began to be condemned.
Marren does not want to bring it back but quietly argues for a less judgmental view. It was farmers, foresters and urban planners who caused butterflies to disappear, not collectors. And today, old collections produce new science – providing evidence of climate change, for instance. But Marren worries about conservationists identifying “uses” for butterflies. As 17th-century enthusiast John Ray wrote: “You ask what is the use of butterflies? I reply to adorn the world and delight the eyes of men: to brighten the countryside like so many golden jewels.”
Moth Snowstorm
The dilemma posed by ecosystem services – an approach to conservation that seeks to put a price on nature to persuade politicians it is worth saving – lies at the heart of The Moth Snowstorm, Mike McCarthy’s impassioned case for nature, told through his adventures as a long-serving environmental correspondent. Its subtitle is Nature and Joy, but this is a profoundly troubling book.
McCarthy discovered butterflies in the garden of his aunt, to whom he was dispatched without explanation, aged seven, when his mother was incarcerated in a psychiatric institution. McCarthy disappeared too – within himself, finding solace in nature: “Butterflies entered my soul.”
They flit through his lucid explanation of the environmental catastrophe that has unfolded in his lifetime. Rather than vaguely criticising global capitalism, McCarthy takes aim at “liberal secular humanism’s” notion that humans are fundamentally good. Today’s most elevated quality is to be “humane” – a “human human” – and so “our morality now is entirely anthropocentric”. He prefers the Greeks, who recognised people’s limitations. We need to recognise, he argues, that humans are Earth’s “problem child”.
His most powerful chapter reveals the awful scale of “the great thinning”. If we are asked to describe changing Britain, McCarthy writes, we might say it is wealthier or more tolerant and “yet hardly anyone would instinctively think of it as a country which … has annihilated half its biodiversity”. Since the Beatles broke up, the number of birds has halved. Insects too – hence the disappearance of the “moth snowstorms” that once materialised before car headlights on summer nights. He explains with panache how this has happened – through the hidden intensification of lowland farming.
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No one deliberately plots to destroy nature but nevertheless we do so, mercilessly. The problems are systemic, the protections only piecemeal. Sustainable development has failed and McCarthy is suspicious of defending nature through ecosystem services. Insects’ crop pollination services in the US, for instance, have been priced at $3.07bn. But to suggest that nature can be commodified, and therefore owned, is sinister; humans could seek to replicate such services, creating self-pollinating plants; if butterflies have no practical value, why protect them?
So McCarthy wants to defend nature not through self-centred gratification but rather something that “looks outwards, to another person, another purpose, another power”. His wild joys include the winter solstice, chalk streams, the first butterfly of the year (a brimstone – me too) and blue in nature, from bluebells and kingfishers to cornflowers. It is fiendishly difficult to make readers feel joy but McCarthy finds authors who can. When discussing the evolution of flowers, he quotes Iris Murdoch: “People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
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. He perfectly describes their sociable, atonal chirpings as: “Hey! What? You! What? You! Eh? Who? Him. Him? Nah. Her.” Despite his best efforts, it remains a mystery why these conversations are no longer heard in the capital.
In Pursuit of Butterflies
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. Grief is part of a naturalist’s everyday life, admits Matthew Oates, a conservationist for the National Trust. In Pursuit of Butterflies is his long memoir of 50 years of butterflying. Somehow, Oates has clung to a great capacity for joy, despite witnessing butterflies being driven to extinction in so many places.
I should declare an interest, having written a foreword for Oates after he became an inspiration for my book, The Butterfly Isles. Unlike some nature writers, accused of being urban daytrippers into the wild, Oates is unquestionably authentic and his voice is vivid, witty and unapologetic.
He grew up in the town of Crewkerne in Somerset, which we learn specialised in the manufacture of pyjamas, and became obsessed with butterflies during his confinement at a boarding school surrounded by butterfly-filled woodlands. But he never collected them. “In effect, the butterflies had collected me, having infiltrated my soul.”
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Eccentric can be a belittling word, but how many people sell their record collection to fund a summer seeking the purple emperor? Or hoist a 15lb salmon into a tree to attract the same charismatic but elusive species? Or forget they have taken their two young daughters up a mountain, leaving them in tears while seeking the rare mountain ringlet?
There is a danger that 50 years of butterflying could become repetitive, but as we travel through the summers – including an evocative account of 1976, when clouds disappeared, tarmac became viscous and drought caused butterflies to hatch out in weird colours – Oates leavens his chronology with digressions into butterfly names, seasons and hotspots, such as Rodborough Common in the Cotswolds.
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Unlike McCarthy, Oates shies away from polemic but still criticises bureaucratic modern conservation and highlights the paradox of conservationists seeking to manage “small isolated places for whole suites of species with diverse and even conflicting ecological requirements, and ... continually trying to arrest successional change and freeze a place into a time capsule”.
For Oates, butterflies are a conduit into a natural world that is too wondrous to grasp in totality. They “take us into the living pulse of spring” and profoundly deepen our rapport with places and a higher power. Here, he reveals himself to be more Romantic than scientist: his heroes are Wordsworth, John Clare and Edward Thomas, and his writing is suffused with a love for the spirit of the English countryside, in particular such places as the delightfully named Dogbarking Wood.
Environmentalists desperately need poets and storytellers, Oates contends, because ultimately conservation is concerned with “mending the relationship between people and Nature”. Science may clarify priorities “but the whole show is essentially about Love”.
• To order Rainbow Dust for £11.99 (RRP £14.99), The Moth Snowstorm for £16 (RRP £20) or In Pursuit of Butterflies for £15.19 (RRP £18.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
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QUOTED: "a heartfelt, lovely, and thoroughly lived-through meditation on the natural world and its central part in any civilized life."
KIRKUS REVIEW
It is not enough that we rush to stanch the wounds our kind has inflicted on the world, writes British environmental journalist McCarthy (Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo: Migratory Birds and the Impending Ecological Catastrophe, 2010, etc.). More than that, “we should offer up its joy.”
Part of this book is a memoir of a life spent seeking nature in a time when nature is on the run, particularly on the too-populous, too–automobile overrun island of Britain. “It is only through specific personal experience,” writes the author, “that the case can be made, which is why I will offer mine.” Some of those experiences are luminous, as with a long-ago flurry of moths that yields his title and a sort of cri de guerre for his life as a champion of wild things. Part of his book, too, is a carefully elaborated meditation on what has happened to a world in which suburban gardens and rural woodlots are carpeted over with asphalt. What happens to people who live in such environs and to children whose worlds are constricted to the driveway and perhaps the driveway next door? McCarthy brings his experience as an activist and advocate to bear; writing of an effort to reintroduce the salmon to the Thames River, he admits the possibility that the world may be too far gone for our weak efforts at making up: “The principal lesson of the Thames salmon story, for me, is that we can sometimes damage the natural world too severely for it to be repaired.” That glumness is not the usual stuff of nature writing, which tends to be more celebratory, but McCarthy’s view is cleareyed, and this book extends a newly revived British literary naturalist tradition lately spearheaded by the likes of Robert Macfarlane, Roger Deakin, Adam Nicolson, and other wanderers along the hedgerows.
A heartfelt, lovely, and thoroughly lived-through meditation on the natural world and its central part in any civilized life.
QUOTED: "His empathy and appreciation for the great pageant of nonhuman life radiates from every page."
'The Moth Snowstorm'
A World of Wounds
By Philip Connors
November 30, 2016
Books Environment
New York Review Books
In 1954, when Michael McCarthy was seven, his mother was institutionalized for mental illness. With his father absent as a radio officer on the Queen Mary and his family life shattered, he and his brother were sent to live with their aunt and her husband on a cul-de-sac in the English suburbs. It was there, at their home in Sunny Bank, where he was privy to a vision that changed his life: a blooming buddleia bush swarmed by butterflies.
In that moment began a lifetime of engagement with the natural world, an engagement fueled by joy and wonder and charmingly recounted in this book of memoir, reportage, and natural history, which opens with that vision and ends with a tribute to his mother and a call to action. Among the species that would captivate him over a life spent writing as an environmental journalist were not only butterflies but moths, sparrows, kingfishers, cuckoos, hares, and dolphins, as well as tree blossoms, early wildflowers, and the crystal-clear chalk streams of southern England. Each of them is given its lyrical due in the course of The Moth Snowstorm, but it is the metaphor expressed in the title that gives the book its poignancy and its pathos.
There was a time in postwar England when an evening automobile journey in summertime would reveal “moths...in such numbers that they would pack a car’s headlight beams like snowflakes in a blizzard” and “at the end of your journey you would have to wash your windscreen, you would have to sponge away the astounding richness of life.” Others of McCarthy’s generation recall it fondly, although such a spectacle is essentially unavailable in England today, thanks to agricultural poisons and habitat loss. McCarthy cites authorities who estimate that half the wildlife of his native country has been wiped out by human activity since he was a boy, and moths have been especially hard hit. Nonetheless, McCarthy writes, “It was to this world, the world of the moth snowstorm, that I pledged my youthful allegiance.”
For students of the American conservation movement, McCarthy’s story—early trauma and confusion assuaged by devotion to nature—will sound familiar. Consider the four leading lights of the American conservation movement from around a century ago: John Muir, Teddy Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and Aldo Leopold. Muir suffered a bout of temporary blindness from a stray metal shaving when he was a young man. Soon after he recovered, he set out on a journey during which he slept outdoors for weeks at a time, seeing up close the glorious beauty and diversity of wild flora and fauna in America, an experience he recounted in A Thousand Mile Walk to the Gulf. That journey ignited his love for landscapes, which found its highest expression in his defense of Yosemite. Roosevelt’s mother and young bride died on the same day. He came back to the living world on his ranch in the Dakota Badlands and later became our greatest presidential champion of national parks and forests, creating at the stroke of his pen many millions of acres of public land. Roosevelt’s most devoted adviser in conservation matters, Pinchot, who founded the modern Forest Service, lost the one great love of his life at age twenty-six and spent the next four decades attempting to commune with her ghost via séances. He was the scion of a timber baron, an American aristocrat of sorts, but he craved time in the woods for the peace it brought his tumultuous soul. And Leopold, widely considered the father of modern ecological thinking, and undeniably the founder of the discipline of wildlife management, was struck by a kidney ailment on a long horseback trip in northern New Mexico, when he was in his twenties. He nearly died of organ failure; he spent years recuperating. Afterward he almost immediately made a proposal to create the world’s first wilderness area, off limits to roads and human machines, in the Gila River headwaters country of New Mexico.
What accounts for these transformations, the fruits of which offered subsequent generations ample protected landscapes on which to encounter the wild in America? McCarthy offers one possible explanation: that the natural world, despite our increasing estrangement from it, still offers the human imagination an unequaled experience of wonder and joy, of the sort capable of assuaging the pain of loss.
There is an irony at the heart of the book, and it lies in the fact that the pain of loss is now a planetary phenomenon, felt by all who care about nonhuman life. But the losses are of the very things McCarthy points to as capable of soothing our sorrow. The magnitude of the human enterprise and the immensity of our appetites have put wildlife at risk of a die-off poised to dwarf anything seen in our recorded history as “fellow voyageurs...in the odyssey of evolution,” to use Leopold’s resonant phrase. Global warming, deforestation, ocean acidification, agrochemicals, and other forms of pollution, collectively gathered under the banner of the Anthropocene: these threats place the very life of the planet as we have known it in peril.
McCarthy does not flinch when assessing the scale of the devastation. He visits a tidal estuary in South Korea now severed from the sea by a great wall for the purpose of “reclamation,” with incalculable effects on migratory shorebirds. He travels back in time to tell the story of the great Thames River salmon run, which was severed by shipping locks and suffocated on a tide of human sewage. He investigates the decimation of London’s sparrow population, which underwent precipitous decline for unknown reasons, although reasonable scientific minds speculate that the chemicals in non-leaded gasoline may have wiped out their food sources to the point where the birds—highly social creatures—chose species suicide over an impoverished community life due to radically dwindling numbers.
Confronted with these casualties of the human enterprise on planet Earth, McCarthy argues that “sustainable development” and “ecosystem services” economics—essentially, placing a dollar amount on fundamental life processes performed for millennia by forests and rivers and such—are insufficient to save us from our excesses. What we need is a reawakening of human delight with the natural world, “defence through joy,” as he puts it. His “new kind of love” for the beauty of nature would be one that recognizes “that there is an ancient bond with the natural world surviving deep within us, which makes it not a luxury, not an optional extra, not even just an enchantment, but part of our essence—the natural home for our psyches where we can find not only joy but also peace, and to destroy which, is to destroy a fundamental part of ourselves.” It is difficult to see what makes this attitude new, though. It was felt, for instance, in many indigenous cultures, including among Native Americans of various tribes, whose rituals expressing joy in nature were deemed primitive by the so-called civilized world, and whom we largely exterminated, losing in the process a vast cultural memory of how to live in some semblance of harmony with the land.
Instead of trumpeting his argument’s novelty, McCarthy would be better served by admitting its revivalist nature. Leopold touched on many of the same issues seventy years ago in his classic A Sand County Almanac, whose first part is one long paean to the delights of phenology—the study of plant and animal life cycles. Later in the book he defines a “land ethic”: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” We did too little to heed him then, and we mostly continue to ignore him now. We have come some distance in extending the fruits of human rights—call it the “human ethic”—to women, people of color, and those whose gender and sexual orientations fall outside the dominant paradigm, although there is much work still to be done in each case. We have done appallingly little in extending a similar system of ethics to the nonhuman world.
McCarthy writes beautifully of certain of his loves, perhaps none more so than what the English call waders and Americans call shorebirds: “Spindly-legged, nervy, refined, they epitomize elegance on the one hand, and on the other, wildness; they will not come to your garden, sit on your fence, hop on your lawn or sing for their supper; they remain in their own wild places, eternally untameable.” His empathy and appreciation for the great pageant of nonhuman life radiates from every page, which is why it stopped me short to read the following early on: “I will explore why, remarkably, we as humans may love the natural world from which we have emerged, when the otter does not love its river, as far as we know.”
I will spare readers the barnyard epithet I scribbled in the margin next to that passage, but I will hazard a guess that the otter does indeed love its river, and were we privy to the precise qualities of that love, its depth and its varieties of feeling and expression, we might be less inclined to dam or pollute that river. Less inclined, perhaps, but by no means universally averse: for some among us, the feelings of an otter are as nothing compared to the imperatives of economic growth and human wants. But that is different from saying the otter has no feelings at all for its environment.
“One of the penalties of an ecological education is to live alone in a world of wounds,” Leopold once wrote. The intervening decades have offered an ecological education to a much wider range of the human population, such that the penalty is no longer to live alone with the weight of bitter knowledge. The penalty now is to feel helpless to forestall the damage everywhere evident from actions taken by our species decades and centuries ago, actions still ongoing, even accelerating. Perhaps McCarthy is right, and joy and wonder channeled into political will can stave off preventable violations of cherished rivers, mammals, birds, insects, and plants. Maybe a universal apprehension of peace and love and harmony among creatures will do what the environmental movement has so far failed to do: curb our anthropocentric greed.
I would not bet a dollar on it. To paraphrase Charles Bowden, we have not figured out how we might have less but be more, and with 11 billion of us slated to occupy the planet before long, we are going to have to get by with less if we want to avoid reverting to Noah’s Ark: two of everything saved for the purpose of memorializing what was lost. What will remain of our natural inheritance once the last drop of oil is burned, the last wisp of gas is fracked? There are those who would just as soon see the possibility of a joyful encounter with wild nature extinguished forever. They have great wealth and great power—and they may yet get their wish. The rest of us can whistle past the graveyard, or stand and fight.
What’s Happening to the Bees and Butterflies?
Verlyn Klinkenborg DECEMBER 22, 2016 ISSUE
The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy
by Michael McCarthy
New York Review Books, 262 pp., $24.95
Emmet Gowin: Mariposas Nocturnas Index #44, Bolivia, 2011; from ‘Hidden Likeness: Photographer Emmet Gowin at the Morgan,’ a recent exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum. Gowin’s new book, Mariposas Nocturnas: A Study of Diversity and Beauty, collects fifty-one of his moth grids and will be published by Princeton University Press in September 2017.
Emmet and Edith Gowin/Pace-MacGill Gallery
Emmet Gowin: Mariposas Nocturnas Index #44, Bolivia, 2011; from ‘Hidden Likeness: Photographer Emmet Gowin at the Morgan,’ a recent exhibition at the Morgan Library and Museum. Gowin’s new book, Mariposas Nocturnas: A Study of Diversity and Beauty, collects fifty-one of his moth grids and will be published by Princeton University Press in September 2017.
Early last May, I sold my old farm and moved about ten miles west. Both places, old and new, belong to what appears to be the same New York landscape: gravel roads, rolling hills, masses of trees—the usual, you might say. But ten miles make more difference than I thought. I live on a glacial drumlin now, not an outcropping of ledge. The soil is heavy with clay, not porous with river rock. There are oaks and ashes and tall black cherry trees instead of beeches and hickories and hemlocks.
Singing in the hedgerows in May were birds I’d never heard before—prairie warblers, for instance, whose song sounds like an upward laddering descant. And fluttering over the fields in June, were those bobolinks? As fall came, I watched a few chimney swifts stuttering and banking in insectivorous flight nearly out of sight overhead.
Most of the birds here are the same ones found at the old farm—the catbird low in the hedgerow, the pileated woodpecker haunting the woods. That is, the species remain the same, but not the individuals. For most of us, a bird’s identity is summed up at the level of species—we see the type as much as the specimen. We clamor endlessly about our own identities and happily attribute individuality to mammals of a certain size—a fox roaming the pasture or a black bear crossing the road at dusk. But the identity of wild birds as individuals is concealed within their identity as members of a species.
I wonder if the concept of “species” doesn’t sometimes get in the way of understanding the effect humans are having on the natural world. After all, a species endures even as the individuals that make it up come and go. But sometimes the word implies that the collective whole—the generality of goldfinches, say—matters more than the individual. Only when a species dwindles to its final numbers do the individuals seem to become, well, individual. Perhaps the only passenger pigeon ever to bear a name was Martha, the very last one.
Finding unfamiliar species at the new farm gave me a momentary sense of avian abundance. But then I remembered that it’s only an illusion.
These thoughts came to me thanks to Michael McCarthy’s powerful, sensitive new book, The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, a book about the wonders of the natural world and about its decline. In a chapter called “The Great Thinning,” McCarthy, a highly regarded British environmental journalist, notes the difference between extinction at the national level and extinction at the local level. He observes that among birds “there were only two national extinctions in Britain in the post-war period,” the red-backed shrike and the wryneck. “But the number of birds which have declined so much as to be locally extinct, over great swathes of the land, is hugely higher.”
The same is true of wildflowers and butterflies, especially butterflies, which are dear to McCarthy’s heart. In the postwar years, there have been three national extinctions, he writes, “but since the butterfly recording schemes first started, nearly three-quarters of our fifty-eight remaining species have declined and disappeared over much of the country.” In other words, counting the number of species lost doesn’t even begin to reflect the number of individuals lost. Between 1970 and 2013, “the combined population of nineteen farmland bird species” in Great Britain dropped by 56 percent. And since they were declining well before that, “the real figure is obviously much larger; and so with the insects; and so with the flowers.”
The picture is no different in North America. According to a new report from Partners in Flight, a coalition of organizations including the National Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, forty-six common land-bird species have lost “half or more of their populations—a net loss of 1.5 billion breeding birds” since 1970. (This is to say nothing of waterfowl, shorebirds, seabirds, and rare or threatened species.) Twenty-four of those species have lost between 50 and 90 percent of their 1970 populations. These are astonishing numbers and, like most astonishing numbers, it’s hard to know how to feel their weight. We’ve grown sadly accustomed to the tragedy of the few—to seeing a rare species on the cusp of disappearance, like the black rhino or the lowland gorilla. But this is the tragedy of the common.
As species crash and vanish, the world loses diversity, something it’s been doing for centuries. But the loss of abundance is even more startling. Nature is simply not as full as it once was. Consider the creatures in my own fields. Bobolinks have declined in the US by 74 percent since 1966. Chimney swifts have declined by 72 percent in the same period. As for the solitary monarch butterfly I saw making its way over the goldenrod a couple of weeks ago, that species is declining as well, especially its western population. Something similar has happened to many species: they continue to exist but in greatly diminished numbers, which means that the species itself has a far more tenuous hold on existence. But it also means that the numerical robustness, the plenitude within nature, has dwindled. It’s like looking into the sky and discovering that thunderheads are no longer dark and towering but only faint wisps of themselves.
The Moth Snowstorm is one of the few books I know that tries to grasp how the thinning of nature changes our experience of the natural world. The book takes its name from a visual illusion that has disappeared in England: the way the headlights of a speeding car on a summer night turned moths flying above the roadway into a blizzard of insects. When that happened, McCarthy notes, “the true startling scale of their numbers was suddenly apparent.” People in their fifties and older remember the moth snowstorm vividly, once they’re reminded of it, “as if it were locked away in a corner of their minds.”
The memory of the insect whiteouts seems extraordinary now, but in those days “it just seemed part of the way things were.” This is the trick that time and human nature always play on us. The way things are—no matter how they are—quickly comes to seem normal. It’s as unremarkable not to see moth snowstorms now as it once was to see them. As a species, we too are passing through the bottleneck of the present. It’s stunning to realize that the ampleness of nature in 1970, however you measure it, isn’t even a memory for most Americans. For every generation, nature seems full enough no matter how empty it becomes.
“Even more than the single species,” McCarthy writes, “it’s the loss of abundance itself I mourn.” But it’s a mistake to think of this lost abundance happening only in the past, beyond the memory of youth, as ancient as the plight of the American bison. We are losing it at this moment. McCarthy learned his birding as a boy on the estuary of the Dee, near Birkenhead, England, where he was born. As a result, he has a special fondness for wetland birds, the ones he calls “the gift to us of mud,” whose wildness seems “eternally untameable.”
In 2014 he visited one of the greatest of the world’s estuaries, called Saemangeum in South Korea. Its incredible wealth of birds was first surveyed only in 1998, and it was destroyed—“reclaimed” is the word in development circles—in 2006 when South Korea completed the Saemangeum Seawall Project, which blocked the sea from entering the tidal flats. What McCarthy witnessed in 2014 was a “deadscape.” The completion of the Saemangeum Seawall was “the biggest destruction of an estuary that has ever taken place.”
Snowy owl; photograph by Yamamoto Masao from his book Tori, which will be published by Radius in January 2017
Yamamoto Masao
Snowy owl; photograph by Yamamoto Masao from his book Tori, which will be published by Radius in January 2017
Yet the death of this major bird-ground is only part of the massive reclamation work going on all around the Yellow Sea, especially in China. Its ancestral mudflats lie at the heart of the East Asia/Australasia Flyway—“older than history, as big as the weather, and something we are only now able to comprehend and visualize.” On that flyway and the Yellow Sea’s rare intertidal zones depend the lives of some fifty million birds, global travelers every one of them. Their habitat is rapidly being engineered out of existence in the name of reclamation, though what is being reclaimed is almost impossible to say. Perhaps the best answer is nationalistic pride. The word itself—“reclaim”—is a misnomer. It is more honest, and more damning, to say that the rich avian habitat of the Saemangeum estuary has now been claimed by humans, the way a miner stakes a claim. Nature will eventually make its counterclaim, but not for many generations to come.
It might have been enough, in The Moth Snowstorm, to survey the destruction of nature in the past half-century—with worse to come, thanks to global warming—and to rail, Lear-like, against it. But McCarthy is stoic in his effort to understand the complexity of how we got where we are and what faces us now. Sometimes the villains are obvious—like overpopulation, industrial farming, and unchecked reclamation—and sometimes they aren’t. There are stories to be told of witless destruction and stories like the one McCarthy tells about the apparent psychological surrender of house sparrows—a once-ubiquitous species that has nearly vanished in London. The sparrows, one scientist thought, “were so strongly social” that they “felt that life in such low numbers was no longer worth living.”
McCarthy wrestles mightily with himself trying to understand who we are and the meaning of “the losses which are making us seem, as a species, like a curse.” Like so many of us, he feels an ambivalence that can’t be resolved. “Sometimes I think there is no light,” he says, “but sometimes I think there is.”
Half of his book contributes movingly to the literature of environmental despair. The problems are too deep and systemic for anything more than the most cautious hope. “There were lots of many things then,” McCarthy says wistfully about his boyhood. And there were lots of many things then because there weren’t so terribly many of us. The natural losses McCarthy chronicles are the result of our going about our business as we’ve defined it since the Industrial Revolution. It seems nearly impossible, for some reason, to make nature count in the minds of humans—count enough, that is, to make mindlessly killing the other organisms on earth even a little harder than it is.
Seeded throughout The Moth Snowstorm is the other half of the book—a study of joy, not loss. McCarthy has set out to write what is, in essence, an environmental theodicy—to account for the existence and purpose of the joy and beauty we feel in the midst of so much loss and despair. “It is clear,” he notes, “that the earth did not have to be beautiful for humans to evolve.” But it is beautiful, and our species has lived in the midst of the planet’s natural beauty for almost the whole of its evolution:
We have been operators of computers for a single generation and workers in neon-lit offices for three or four, but we were farmers for five hundred generations, and before that hunter-gatherers for perhaps fifty thousand or more, living with the natural world as part of it as we evolved, and the legacy cannot be done away with.
McCarthy suggests, as Wordsworth did, that there is an organic correspondence—a radical fittedness—between the human mind and nature itself. “Something dwells already in our minds; and I believe it is the bond, the bond of fifty thousand generations with the natural world, which can make aspects of nature affect us so powerfully.” Love of nature isn’t universal in our species, he admits, but the propensity to love nature is. On this propensity—which flickers in and out of our awareness—rests the whole of McCarthy’s ode to joy.
McCarthy acknowledges that The Moth Snowstorm isn’t really offering an argument. “I am not going to present any evidence for the bond,” he says. Instead, he offers a series of personal epiphanies, moments when he was engulfed by the wonder of nature and found himself uplifted with joy. Again and again writers have tried to do this and failed because they’ve been mainly interested in trying to capture—“express” is always the word—the intensity of their emotions.
But McCarthy has a relatively dry eye, and he trusts his premise. If there’s an evolutionary bond between humans and nature—if the natural world “is as much a part of us as our capacity for language”—then he can lead us into the woods or the wetlands, urge us to look outward, and hope that we’ll find something in our own experience that is proportional to his feelings. To his credit, he never lets his joy in nature overwhelm his descriptions of the natural phenomena that caused it—the snowdrops, the mad March hares, the butterflies clustering on a buddleia, which gave him his originating sense of wonder as a child. McCarthy’s particular skill is to show vividly how intertwined the worlds of the observer and the observed really are.
Black-necked stilts; photograph by Yamamoto Masao from Tori
Yamamoto Masao
Black-necked stilts; photograph by Yamamoto Masao from Tori
The trouble comes when McCarthy tries to marshal our joy in nature—our ancient inherited propensity to love it—as a defense of nature. Almost since it began, the environmental movement has tried to perform a kind of psychological jujitsu against human nature—to use our other inborn propensities as a way of tripping up our natural destructiveness. As McCarthy explains, there have been two major strategies for doing this over the past couple of decades. Both are economic. One is sustainable development—the idea that we can go about our usual business while changing its emphasis to include the protection of ecosystems.
More recent—and possibly more powerful—is the “ecosystems services model,” which is an attempt to cost out all the various services that nature provides, as if nature were a giant utility in charge of cleaning the water and freshening the air and sheltering coastlines from damaging storms but incapable of presenting us with a bill we can understand. The point of commodifying nature in this way is to give us a means of putting our actions—destroying mangroves, for instance—in perspective, showing us the hidden costs of what would otherwise look like rational economic behavior. The flaw here is that we can only value the ecosystems services that bear some resemblance to the things we’re used to assessing. Or as McCarthy puts it, “Worth is attributed only to services whose usefulness to us can be directly measured.” But what value, he asks, “do we give to butterflies which, when I was seven, captured my soul? What value do we give, for that matter, to birdsong?”
This is the goal of The Moth Snowstorm, to find “a third way, something different entirely: we should offer up what [nature] means to our spirits; the love of it. We should offer up its joy.” How would this work? What McCarthy proposes is proclaiming the value nature has in our individual lives. Although birdsong can’t be valued in economic terms, we can at least declare that “at this moment and at this place, it was worth everything to me.” We need, he argues, to “proclaim these worths through our own experiences in the coming century of destruction, and proclaim them loudly, as the reason why nature must not go down.” He is proposing a Tiananmen Square protest—the individual against the machine—but without the confrontation: a protest rising from every nature lover in the form of song and celebration.
The vision McCarthy offers is spiritually and emotionally uplifting. He is calling, really, for a heightened state of awareness and the kind of testimony that almost anyone can offer. His proposal is also in keeping with a long history of artistic and philosophical attempts to help us grasp the incomprehensible wonder of the world we live in. He quotes Emerson’s lovely line: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore!” And Iris Murdoch’s: “People from a planet without flowers would think we must be mad with joy the whole time to have such things about us.”
But I find “defense through joy” insufficient. Like sustainable development and the commodification inherent in ecosystems services models, it values nature mostly for what it offers us. Ultimately, it’s not radical enough, either as a form of protest or as a philosophical statement. As a species, we repeatedly fail to acknowledge the equal and inherent right of all other species to exist, a right implicit in existence itself and in no way subordinate to our own. We ignore, as if instinctively, nature’s right to itself—its autonomy, if you like. No matter how we feel or act as individuals, what matters when it comes to saving nature is how we feel and act as a species. The news on that score is very grim.
There is one potential practical benefit in McCarthy’s notion of defense through joy. All that testimony—each of us offering our own moments of delight—might turn out to extend human memory of the natural world. It might help keep moments like the moth snowstorms, half a century ago, fresh in our minds, keep them from being so locked away that we doubt our own perceptions. For all our propensity to love nature, we seem to have no collective memory of nature’s fullness—not the fullness of our hunter-gatherer days, not the fullness of 1970, not even the fullness of last year. Nature is only what it is for us here and now. Perhaps if we speak out as McCarthy has done in The Moth Snowstorm—eloquently weaving together the pattern of our lives with the joy, and the crushing, of the natural world—it will be easier to remember how much we’ve lost and how much we have to protect. Perhaps that will make it easier to reclaim nature one day as it should be reclaimed: for nature’s sake.
QUOTED: "Michael McCarthy is a professional journalist and an accomplished and experienced writer who handles his themes skillfully."
"This is an extremely interesting book. Unfortunately, for a book that’s supposed to be about joy, it is also profoundly depressing."
Book Review: The Moth Snowstorm Nature and Joy
12
Saturday, April 18, 2015By Dick Warner
What is the economic value of birdsong, butterflies spring wild flowers, or a rising trout? These are some questions posed in a riveting new book on nature, writes Dick Warner.
* The Moth Snowstorm Nature and Joy
* Michael McCarthy
* John Murray, €29.50; ebook, €14.99
THE moth storm is an odd title. It refers to the fact that if you were in a car in England (or Ireland, for that matter) 50 years ago and driving down a country road on a summer’s night the moths in the headlight beams would be in such dense numbers they resembled a snowstorm.
Quite often you would have to stop to clean the headlights and windscreen. This doesn’t happen any more. In other words, the moth snowstorm is a symbol for biodiversity loss. So this is 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. It’s a capacity hard-wired into our genes as a legacy from 50,000 generations when we were part of nature, living in it and with it as hunter-gatherers. The sense of joy is something of inestimable value that we stand to lose and a possible motivation for avoidance of that loss.
These are weighty themes but Michael McCarthy is a professional journalist and an accomplished and experienced writer who handles his themes skilfully. The arguments are loosely hung around a personal memoir. It is the memoir of a small boy, an English boy of Irish extraction living on Merseyside, who has a stressful and unhappy childhood.
He escapes his unhappiness by discovering joy in nature. First, at the age of seven, he is entranced by a suburban buddleia shrub covered in butterflies. This develops into a passion for birds and, as an adolescent, he becomes an obsessional and solitary birdwatcher. His joy in nature continues throughout his life and, when he becomes an environmental and wildlife journalist, it also becomes his profession.
However nowadays, as a man of mature years, the joy is tinged with sadness and anger at the ferocity with which humankind is destroying nature.
The book is not over-burdened with gloomy statistics but one telling one is that the English countryside that he loves has, in his lifetime, lost 50% of its biodiversity. Only a very small number of species have become extinct but the overall abundance of wild plants and animals has halved. We know this because the English have a long history of keeping accurate records of their wildlife, in particular of wild-flowers, birds and butterflies, and this gives them a unique ability to assess this decline in numbers.
McCarthy is well travelled. This is not a parochial book about English nature. The story of joy and loss takes us from South Korea to the Amazon basin and eventually his frustration about what is happening, and what will happen in the remainder of the 21st century, takes on a planetary scale.
There is a key moment when he encounters a black rhino in the Namibian bush. It causes awe and terror but also joy and helps him reconnect with the primordial link with nature he claims we all have.
“We need constant reminding that we have been operators of computers for a single generation and workers in neon-lit offices for three or four, but we were farmers for 500 generations, and before that hunter-gatherers for perhaps 50,000 or more, living with the natural world as part of it as we evolved, and the legacy cannot be done away with.”
The point is emphasised later in the book by the announcement by the UN that at some date in 2006 or 2007 50% of human beings moved to live in cities — today the figure is 54% and rising. Elsewhere in the book it’s emphasised in a completely different way by the statistics for the decline in the world’s wild rhino populations as a result of poaching. One species, the Vietnamese rhino, was only discovered by science in 2008 in the dense Indo-Chinese rainforests, and was extinct by 2012.
There are two current theories about how the decline in the world’s biodiversity could be reversed, and McCarthy dismisses both of them as ineffective.
The first is ‘sustainable development’. It was born in 1987 at the UN conference on ‘Our Common Future’ and its midwife was Gro Harlem Brundtland. It is dismissed because it relies on the goodwill of people and governments and people and governments are not essentially good. “You might as well ask cats to stop chasing birds,” says McCarthy.
A more recent theory is that of ‘ecosystem services’. It works by putting a price tag, an actual figure, on the value of ecosystems to the world economy and demonstrating that destroying them is not a cost-effective exercise. Examples would be the cost of coastal defence systems if mangrove forests are destroyed or the loss of agricultural production if pollinating insects are wiped out.
The value of pollinating insects to the US economy has, for example, been published recently as €2.9bn annually. One of the main reasons that McCarthy doesn’t like this theory either is that it fails to protect those parts of the natural world that do not have any obvious economic value — what is the economic value of bird song, butterflies, spring wild flowers or a rising trout?
His answer? “We should offer up not just the notion of being sensible and responsible about it, which is sustainable development, nor the notion of its mammoth utilitarian and financial value, which is ecosystem services, but a third way, something different entirely: we should offer up what it means to our spirits; the love of it. We should offer up its joy.”
This is an extremely interesting book. Unfortunately, for a book that’s supposed to be about joy, it is also profoundly depressing.
Our Contributors Pick Their Favorite Books of the Year
By The Paris Review
FROM SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE.
This was a year of path-breaking books of poems—the taut intensity of Ishion Hutchinson’s House of Lords and Commons, the striking diction and bitter tenderness of Monica Youn’s Blackacre. It was also a year of culminating ones—John Koethe’s wise, prescient The Swimmer and John Kinsella’s Drowning in Wheat, which gathers thirty years of his work. Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees jolted my sense of the forest and the trees—and parts and wholes everywhere. Finally, Michael McCarthy’s The Moth Snowstorm, a meditation on species plenitude and extinction, sent me back to Audubon on passenger pigeons, “obscuring the light of noon as by an eclipse.” Chased by a single hawk, “they darted forward in undulating and angular lines, descended and swept close over the earth with inconceivable velocity, mounted perpendicularly so as to resemble a vast column, and, when high, were seen wheeling and twisting within their continued lines, which then resembled the coils of a gigantic serpent.” —Susan Stewart (“Channel”)
QUOTED: "The various elements in this book don’t always sit comfortably together, and McCarthy’s style can become a tad overexcited and insistent. But this is a book full of joy and wonder and luminous moments – not to mention well-chosen quotations from the poets."
"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.
Review – The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy
Posted by Nige in Dabbler Review May, 12 2015 2 Comments
moth snowstorm
Nige reviews The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy, published this month, and finds a book ‘full of joy and wonder and luminous moments’…
If you’re of a certain age – I guess 50s and upwards – you’ll remember this: driving in the country at night (well, being driven – you were too young), you’d see caught in the headlights a great swirling cloud of moths and other flying insects, many of which would subsequently have to be wiped, in a spattered state, from the windscreen and headlights. That swirling cloud of life is the ‘moth snowstorm’. It used to be commonplace and now you scarcely ever see it, even deep in the country. And that is the overarching theme of Michael McCarthy’s book – the loss, in the past few decades, of the ‘blessed, unregarded abundance’ of nature that used to surround us and no longer does. What has happened McCarthy describes, aptly enough, as ‘the Great Thinning’, and he lays the blame for most of it – particularly the loss of songbirds and insect life – fairly and squarely on ‘Farmer Giles’, and on the successive governments that encouraged him to wreak such devastation on the countryside and its abundance of life in the name of maximising food production. Which is fine, and essentially true, though McCarthy does, like many writers on these matters, have an apocalyptic strain that leads him, I think, to over-simplify and overstate his wider case against Man – the ‘problem child’ of the planet – and his self-destructive, planet-destructive ways (needless to say, McCarthy buys into ‘catastrophic anthropogenic climate change’ without question).
This is a fascinating and very readable book that follows three strands more or less in parallel. One is the exploration of natural abundance and its loss; this includes, among much else, an excellent account of the unsolved mystery of House Sparrow disappearance in London and the sad tale of the return and loss of Thames salmon. McCarthy’s second strand is an argument proposing a novel answer to the question, What is to be done? How is the Great Thinning to be halted, how can we save Nature from the human forces of destruction? What he proposes is that the intense pleasure we take in the natural world – a joy that is, he believes, hardwired into humanity by the ‘50,000 generations’ that preceded agriculture – might be a ‘better defence’ than any other that’s been thought of (sustainability, monetisation of the environment, etc).
He’s surely right that there is something deep in our nature that can find expression as joy in Nature, and that joy can lead to a deeper understanding of Nature and our place in it. It may well be, too, that this joy is at some level the most important and ultimately real thing about our relationship with Nature. But, in the big bad world of realpolitik, is Joy going to cut it? McCarthy himself acknowledges that this defence of Nature through Joy might just be ‘a hopeless idea, like some hippie in 1969, saying we must win over the skinheads’. I fear he may be right there.
However, in exploring this joy – and its concomitant feelings of wonder and love – through his own experiences, McCarthy is eloquent and hugely sympathetic, especially to someone like me whose joy in nature is always near the surface (as readers of my blog will know). McCarthy describes how once, hearing a blackcap singing from a plum tree in full blossom, he was so overwhelmed that all he could do was to burst out laughing – I know that feeling, and that laughter. Also, like me, McCarthy is above all a butterfly man (and like me too in his affinity with the colour blue). He talks of his intense feeling for butterflies as ‘lepi-empathy’ – a word that’s unlikely to catch on, but what he describes is certainly real. His love affair with butterflies began in boyhood when he felt a great surge of joy and wonder at the sight of a Buddleia bush jewelled with tortoiseshells, peacocks, red admirals and painted ladies. He vividly describes the special exaltation of a butterfly encounter – or, on occasion, a moth encounter: on seeing the rare and spectacular Clifden Nonpareil, he talks of an ‘astonishment at the world, that it can contain such a thing’. Exactly.
The other strand in the book, closely related to the author’s account of his feelings for Nature, is the story of his mother, who, in the book’s arresting opening pages, is taken off to what was then known as the lunatic asylum – this when McCarthy is seven years old, in 1954. Amazingly for those times, she came out again and eventually got better. At the time, all this left McCarthy apparently unaffected; he calmly got on with his life, and part of his getting on with it, part of his coping with this unacknowledged calamity, was taking off to the Dee estuary to watch birds (which became his ruling passion for some years)… His mother falls out of the picture for the bulk of the book, but reappears towards the end, when the author finally gets in touch with his buried feelings through therapy and achieves a long-deferred crisis of grief.
The various elements in this book don’t always sit comfortably together, and McCarthy’s style can become a tad overexcited and insistent. But this is a book full of joy and wonder and luminous moments – not to mention well-chosen quotations from the poets (including the whole of Edmund Blunden’s The Recovery). 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.
QUOTED: "All campaigners for Nature should read The Moth Snowstorm. The title refers to an experience which few young people have ever known, if they live in a country subject to industrial farm chemicals. It’s both a warning and a benchmark: it should help re-set our ambition to safeguard Nature where it remains, and shows the abundance and quality of Nature that we should recover, where it has been lost."
The Great Thinning and The Moth Snowstorm
Posted on May 19, 2015 by
Book Review of The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, Michael McCarthy, pub John Murray, May 2015 (reviewer: Chris Rose)
“it’s the loss of abundance itself I mourn … people over the age of fifty can remember springtime lapwings crying and swooping over every field, corn buntings alert on each hedge and telegraph wire, swallow aerobatics in every farmyard and clouds of finches on the autumn stubbles; they remember nettle beds swarming with small tortoiseshell and peacock caterpillars, the sparking pointillist palette of the hay meadows, ditches crawling and croaking with frogs and toads and even in the suburbs, song-bird speckled lawns and congregations of house martins in their dashing navy-blue elegance … but most vividly of all, some of them remember the moth snowstorm” (p 100)
moth snowstorm pic
All campaigners for Nature should read The Moth Snowstorm. The title refers to an experience which few young people have ever known, if they live in a country subject to industrial farm chemicals. It’s both a warning and a benchmark: it should help re-set our ambition to safeguard Nature where it remains, and shows the abundance and quality of Nature that we should recover, where it has been lost.
It used to be that people had to stop their cars at night to clean the windscreen of squashed ‘bugs’. Likewise moths used to gather around lights at night or beat their wings on the windows of lit rooms. Now that is rarely seen by most children in a country like the UK. It still happens in the movies.
‘The Moth Snowstorm’ refers to the way that at night on a dark road, you sometimes saw so many moths caught in car headlights that it resembled driving into a snowstorm. No longer.
As Michael McCarthy recounts, this ‘Great Thinning’ of nature took place gradually, and hardly anyone noticed how bad it was, or at least nobody counted it.
I was a Countryside Campaigner in the early 1980s, and we were fighting the outright ripping-up of old meadows and ancient woods by farmers backed by government subsidies. Then as a Pesticides Campaigner, I could see that the countryside was bathed in poisons that had to be damaging but there were no surveys to draw on. Next our most pressing concerns became tropical deforestation, ozone depletion, acid rain and climate change: such happy days. As a result I have several of what my partner calls ‘the Suicide Bookshelves’.
McCarthy has not written one of those doom laden prophecies but as he says, it was not until around the turn of the century, when scientists at Rothamstead Research Station in Hertfordshire published data from a long running survey, that it became obvious that something horrible was happening. That survey showed 80 species of moths had declined 70 percent or more between 1968 and 2002, and 20 of these had declined by over 90 percent.
Since then we have become aware that this is all part of the same massive decline in insects that includes bees, butterflies and many other creatures. The main cause is undoubtedly pesticides (including herbicides which kill ‘weeds’ that insects, and thus birds, depend upon). Could factors like car pollution play a part ? Possibly, though there is no data I know of but we know for sure that insecticides kill insects (and though most people don’t realize it, so do many herbicides, fungicides and other -cides).
In 2004, in perhaps it’s best ever public engagement project, the RSPB ran a ‘splatometer’ survey. 40,000 people British drove around with a cardboard grid on their car number plate on a routine journey in June, and recorded the number of insects killed and distance traveled. The result was an average one dead insect every 8km. A similar project in the Netherlands found one insect every 5km. That’s a long way to fly for a mouthful if you are an insect eating bird trying to feed the family.
‘Rare’ Becoming the New ‘Common’
Thus many birds, flowers and insects still described in book as ‘common’ are now ‘scarce’ or ‘rare’. Indeed, ‘Rare’ is becoming the new ‘Common’, and if allowed to continue, Nature as our parents knew it, is finished. Like Nightingales: declined over 90% since the late 1960s, and even Song Thrushes, declined 51% from 1980 – 2009.
McCarthy’s book should be a wake-up call for anyone who cares about Nature, and a warning for those in European countries like the Baltic States where an inadvertent side-effect of decades under Communism meant the onslaught of agrochemicals was delayed, and more nature survives, or for brave little Slovenia which is something of a European role model in restricting farm chemicals. Even more, should it ring alarm bells in the less developed world, the current big market for the agro-chemical companies selling substances like Neonicotinoids.
Environmental Journalist
Michael McCarthy is a working class boy from Birkenhead, the town across the River Mersey from Liverpool. There he discovered wildlife and wildness, and this book is part autobiography, peppered with references to the Beatles, the Rolling Stones and contemporary events like the ‘Earthrise’ photo taken from Apollo 8, that marked the emergence of environmentalism, and indirectly led to M J McCarthy, a leading environmental journalist at The Times and The Independent.
The sub-title is ‘Nature and Joy’ and McCarthy describes how at the age of fifteen, at a very troubled time of his life, he encountered Joy through discovering nature. It is he says, ‘a wholly appropriate name for the sudden passionate happiness which the natural world can occasionally trigger in us, which may well be the most serious business of all’.
bluebells foxley wide
‘Each time I stopped at the gate, “I said to myself I know what is in there …”
It was a blue.
It was a blue that shocked you.
It was a blue that made you giddy.
It was a blue that flowed like smoke over the woodland floor …’ (p159)
Three Books
If I have a criticism of this book it is that he has rolled three into one, and thus not had time to develop any of them to their full potential.
The McCarthy autobiography would be all the more interesting if there was more ‘inside track’ from his decades around the news system and politics.
The idea – and that is an inadequate term – of ‘Joy’ as a launch experience or launch-pad for campaigning for Nature, he has a good go at but is a big idea in itself that could be explored much further.
Finally, ‘The Great Thinning’ would not be so depressing or so ‘over-50’ for those under 50, if there was more on what can be done, and is being done.
The remarkable 3,500 acre re-wilding project at Knepp for example, described in a recent Ecologist article.
But McCarthy has done conservation and the environment movement a favour by writing this book, which deserves to be widely read, and acted upon.
traditional norfolk hay meadow at fritton common - Copy
QUOTED: "In the hands of a lesser writer, such a diversity of content and direction might be difficult to control and structure but McCarthy pulls off a difficult task with aplomb. The writing is of high quality too, each sentence carefully crafted both in its precise vocabulary and in its balance and rhythm."
he Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy
Michael McCarthy
5% from every sale will be donated to Birdlife's
Spoon-billed Sandpiper campaign
This new book from the author of ‘Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo’ is a complex interweaving of personal experience, environmental history, psychology, philosophy, aesthetics and advocacy.
It begins with the author’s account of a difficult, and at times traumatising, childhood moderated by a discovery of the natural world on the wide expanses of the Dee Estuary. From here it lurches off in a multiplicity of directions, including a study of landscape appreciation, a history of the conservation movement and a critique of the post-war agricultural assault on the countryside. Interleaved into these contexts are personal insights into the crisis facing the natural world both abroad and at home - a trip to South Korea to witness the devastating reclamation project at Saemangeum and, closer to home, a search for London’s House Sparrows. In the hands of a lesser writer, such a diversity of content and direction might be difficult to control and structure but McCarthy pulls off a difficult task with aplomb. The writing is of high quality too, each sentence carefully crafted both in its precise vocabulary and in its balance and rhythm.
The book’s message is clear - the planet is experiencing an unprecedented human assault from which it seems unlikely to recover, an assault measured not just in extinctions (the traditional reckoning of loss) but in a great ‘thinning out’, the disappearance of huge numbers of what were until recently common species. In terms of birds, the list of casualties - Corn Buntings, Tree Sparrows, Turtle Doves, Skylarks and all the rest - is a long and familiar one but the phenomenon which illustrates most dramatically the extent of loss is that of the book’s title - the ‘moth snowstorm’ which once accompanied any night-time drive in the countryside and which is now no more. McCarthy pulls no punches in his analysis of the challenges we now face, invoking the increasingly familiar notions of the ‘Anthropocene’ (a new age defined by the dominance of humans) and the ‘Sixth Great Extinction Event’ (though the first one to be caused by us). We live in momentous times indeed.
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What then, is the solution? McCarthy is clear that the concept of ‘sustainable development’, whilst worthy and well-meaning, is flawed, powerless in the face of the sheer scale of the human enterprise. His other target is the concept of ‘ecosystem services’, the attempt to quantify the planet’s contribution to our lives in cash terms. The author argues that not only is this task doomed but, more importantly, it is morally and spiritually bereft, a surrendering of our place in nature to the accountants.
In their place, McCarthy explores the notions of joy and wonder, examining what they mean to him and what they might mean to all of us. His analysis is based on encounters with such diverse subjects as bluebells, the Adonis blue, snowdrops, brimstones, whales and dolphins, hares, blossom and the chalk streams of southern England, a disparate list but all conjuring up in the author a sense not just of joy or wonder but of mystery, spirituality and love. These responses, argues McCarthy, represent our only hope of returning to a more benign relationship with nature and achieving a personal and collective redemption. “Let this new love be expressed”, he concludes, “let it be articulated; let it be proclaimed.”
Andy Stoddart
20 Jul 2015
New ways to destroy the world
The more we know about environmental damage, according to Michael McCarthy’s The Moth Snowstorm, the more of it we seem to do
Mark Cocker
Mark Cocker
6 June 2015
9:00 AM
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The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy
Michael McCarthy
John Murray, pp.262, £20
Despite the offer of joy proposed in the subtitle, this is a deeply troubling book by one of Britain’s foremost journalists on the politics of nature. Michael McCarthy was the Independent’s environmental editor for 15 years, and his new work is really a summation of a career spent pondering the impacts of humankind on the world’s ecosystems.
The case he lays bare with moving clarity 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 as a consequence of what he calls ‘the human project’.
The cultural response to the various well-documented losses inflicted over the 20th century by industrial capitalism and socialist command economies alike has been two basic environmental arguments. The first is sustainable development, which is an optimistic vision of growth but managed within the safe boundaries of the Earth’s natural systems.
More recently environmentalists have presented a harder-headed set of arguments under the heading ‘ecosystems services’. The argument runs that nature provides a suite of crucial benefits and functions. If we were to manufacture these artificially, they would cost us eye-watering sums of money. Pollination, for instance, is a prerequisite for the entire human diet, but is performed for us free of charge by hosts of insects. It is calculated that if we had to stump up for the work of the bumblebee or pollen beetle we’d have to find €153 billion annually. By placing monetary values on parts of nature we’ll come to appreciate what is at stake and, theoretically, work to sustain them.
McCarthy suggests that for many reasons, centred on the fundamental short-term selfishness of us all, both philosophies are doomed. In two case studies he maps out how we are eroding the very basis of life on Earth. His first took him to the shores of China and Korea’s Yellow Sea, which is host to one of the wonders of the avian world, known technically as the East Asia/Australia Flyway — a river of 50 million wading birds that crosses the Pacific twice annually during migration. This astonishing flow of life converges in a small area of the Yellow Sea shoreline for a vital stopover and one Korean spot called Saemangeum was at the epicentre.
Not any more, however. The Koreans out of almost wilful destructiveness built the world’s longest concrete barrage and obliterated the entire estuary. Eight years after its construction they still haven’t even used the reclaimed land.
Before there is time for any kind of smug recoil from the vanity of foreigners,
McCarthy outlines how the British too have fouled their nest. Building on statistics acquired over decades by bodies such as the British Trust for Ornithology, Plantlife and the Rothamsted Institute, he shows how we have lost half of all our wildlife in the last third of the 20th century.
His best illustration of this involves the moth snowstorm of the book’s title.
McCarthy asks those of us over 50 to recall our evening car journeys of the 1960s and earlier. During nocturnal drives one would frequently have to stop to remove the veritable blizzard of chitin as dead moths accumulated on the car’s windscreen and headlights. Not any more. That strangely wonderful indicator of abundance has been sprayed out of our lives by agricultural addiction to what the author calls ‘-cides’ — the herbicides, fungicides and insecticide that are applied on average 20 times to every conventional arable crop.
What is to be done? In the rest of the book McCarthy charts the transformative impact of his own encounters with nature. Sometimes the joys are simple, like the sight of snowdrops in late winter or the first brimstone butterfly of spring or the gorgeous marine haze of bluebells in April. Sometimes they are more private pleasures, such as fishing for brown trout in the gin-clear chalk streams of southern England.
At the heart of all these encounters is deep fulfilment, which McCarthy attempts to elevate to a kind of principle that should shape and govern our relations with nature. The author’s joy looks and sounds very similar to ‘biophilia’, a proposition made by the internationally celebrated naturalist E. O. Wilson that all humanity at its core is nourished and dependent upon contact with the other parts of life — wild plants, ancient trees, beautiful birds, delicate butterflies etc.
Alas, neither joy nor biophilia is making too much head way in altering our relations with nature. One wonders if shock and shame might be necessary for us to undergo a collective change of heart. Either way, McCarthy gives us both barrels in this powerful, heartfelt and compelling book.
QUOTED: "Whether the book’s ultimately hopeful message can survive the sobering accounts of losses ... will depend on the temperament, or even mood, of the reader."
"This is a thoughtful, engaging and deeply moving book and is highly recommended."
By Michael McCarthy
John Murray, 2015; hbk, 262pp; no illustrations
ISBN 978-1-4447-9277-5, £20.00
The title of this book might be lost on younger readers but those in middle age or beyond will remember the blizzard of moths, picked out by car headlights, on warm summer evenings in the countryside. This was taken for granted a few decades ago but it doesn’t happen anymore and this book is, in part, a eulogy for all that has been lost through recent drastic declines in our wildlife. At the same time, it is a celebration of the wildlife and wild places that remain and a passionate argument for their defence – not, primarily, on the grounds of ‘sustainable development’ or to provide ‘ecosystem services’, which he argues are unlikely to succeed, but simply for the pure joy that the natural world can bring us.
Although it was butterflies that first sparked his interest in wildlife, birds feature prominently throughout. There are evocative descriptions of childhood visits to remote parts of the Dee Estuary (armed with The Observer’s Book of Birds), and of his later experiences as a national journalist covering stories about declines in farmland birds, the demise of London’s House Sparrows Passer domesticus and the loss of the moth snowstorm itself – the ‘great thinning’ as he calls it. Farther afield, there is the depressing tale of the Saemangeum Estuary in South Korea, which he witnessed at first hand. Once three times the size of the Dee Estuary and a magnet for migrating waterbirds, it has now been consigned to history.
The author’s views about the natural world have clearly been heavily influenced by his own experiences, including some challenging times when wildlife was a sustaining force in his life. While joy in the natural world is a recurring theme, there is certainly no shortage of sadness and anger. This is something of a delicate balancing act and whether the book’s ultimately hopeful message can survive the sobering accounts of losses (and the knowledge that more are inevitable) will depend on the temperament, or even mood, of the reader. The book, I think, poses an interesting question. When thinking about the current state of the natural world, do you focus primarily on all the amazing wildlife that we have lost, or on all the amazing wildlife that we have yet to lose? Either way, this is a thoughtful, engaging and deeply moving book and is highly recommended.
Ian Carter
Book Review: Say Goodbye To The Cuckoo, By Michael McCarthy
Reviewed By Stephen J. Bodio
October 15, 2010
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Book Review: Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, by Michael McCarthy
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Michael McCarthy’s Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo combines an exploration of the crisis that temperate-zone migrant birds are now facing with a celebration of Europe’s birds—their beauty, their haunts, their symbolic and cultural value in our civilization and traditions. Some species have obvious importance even to an American: the Nightingale and its song (his eloquent description reminds me of my reaction to the song of a Hermit Thrush); the Swallow (identical to our Barn Swallow); the Cuckoo; their slightly different Swift. Other birds are obscure and nondescript by American standards: Eurasian flycatchers and warblers form an endless assemblage of what birders call “LBBs”—little brown birds—though McCarthy gives them individual character.
The Swift is his symbol of what has always been. He quotes poet Ted Hughes:
They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come —
But it’s not working anymore. There are many possible explanations: warming, which causes many insects to emerge before the migrants arrive; a decline in moths—caterpillars are a main food staple for Cuckoos. But the biggest culprit is habitat destruction in sub-Saharan Africa, particularly ominous because Eurasian birds have much larger potential wintering grounds than American ones do and are still in worse shape.
An American chapter, mostly devoted to our colorful wood warblers, may be a relief to those easily confused by the endless procession of LBBs in England. We too have seen large declines because of the cutting up of the eastern forest into biological “islands,” by parasitization of nests by cowbirds, and even because of the curious fact that the potential wintering area for temperate species in Latin America has only one-eighth the area of the forest in which they breed. But although American songbirds are declining, they are not on a plunging vector toward extinction, as many of the English birds seem to be. Take the Cuckoo, which has declined by 59 percent since 1967. Says McCarthy, “the slope is getting steeper; just since the BBS [Breeding Bird Survey] was introduced, in 1994, the number has declined to thirty-seven per cent…over a third of the population that was left in 1994, gone in thirteen years.”
McCarthy’s descriptions are glorious but his conclusions are grim. He quotes a birder: “People don’t listen to their parents who used to see thousands of Skylarks. They see twenty. Their children will see one. And each generation grows up to see the natural world and thinks that is how it is.” He leaves us with a melancholy thought: “Forest perhaps we can regrow; tigers perhaps we can save in captivity; but how will we mend the loss of springbringers? How can we restore their coming once they go? And they are going, now.”
QUOTED: "lyrical, poignant, fascinating book."
Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo, By Michael McCarthy
Christopher Hirst Thursday 1 April 2010 23:00 BST0 comments
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Celebrated by talents as various as Keats and Eric Maschwitz ("'There were angels dining at the Ritz, And...' You know what's coming," adds McCarthy), the nightingale is one of the 50 bird species that fly from Africa to spend the summer in Britain.
Over 16 million in total, they include swallows, swifts, nightjars, thrushes, wagtails and the stone curlew, "one of the weirdest-looking British birds with bulging eyes."
In this lyrical, poignant, fascinating book, The Independent's acclaimed environment editor seeks out these welcome visitors. Mark Cocker introduces him to the mimicry of the marsh warbler: "That's blue tit. That's linnet. That's swallow. Hear the greenshank." It rends the heart to learn that avian immigrants are in precipitous decline due to environmental change both here and in Africa.
QUOTED: "At heart this is a joyful book."
Michael McCarthy: Say Goodbye To The Cuckoo
OVER the next few weeks 16 million birds will pour into Britain from Africa – swallows, warblers, even a falcon, heralding the coming of summer – and many of us will barely notice.
By JOHN INGHAM, ENVIRONMENT EDITOR
PUBLISHED: 00:00, Fri, Apr 10, 2009
CUCKOO McCarthy says we must savour our feathered summer visitors
CUCKOO: McCarthy says we must savour our feathered summer visitors
But, if Michael McCarthy is right, we should savour every one of these summer visitors or “spring-bringers” as he poetically calls them.
–– ADVERTISEMENT ––
For they are dwindling at a dramatic rate and nobody really knows why.
Foremost among them is the cuckoo, one of the few birds whose song everybody knows.
McCarthy, an environment journalist, spent last spring in search of Britain’s African visitors and the people whose lives are intimately linked with them.
They include writer Julia Jeffries, whose daughter Harriet was born in 1992 as the first cuckoos of spring began calling in Ashdown Forest in Sussex.
In a charming ritual the cuckoos marked Harriet’s birthday every year – until 2007 when they stopped returning. They have not come back.
This symbol of spring has declined by 59 per cent in 40 years and by 37 per cent between 1994 and 2007.
But cuckoos are not alone. Since the mid-Nineties yellow wagtail numbers have plunged 47 per cent, pied flycatchers 54 per cent, spotted flycatchers 59 per cent, nightingales 60 per cent, turtle doves 66 per cent and wood warblers 67 per cent. The trends are repeated across Europe.
McCarthy explores the potential causes – intensive farming and development in Britain, global warming putting the arrival of the migrants out of sync with the earlier emergence of their insect food, drought and habitat destruction on their African wintering grounds and flying the gauntlet of hunting on their journeys north across jungle, Sahara and Mediterranean.
But at heart this is a joyful book. It is about McCarthy’s personal crusade to see all our summer visitors in one glorious spring.
He revels in finding nightingales on a Surrey heath at night as the commuters slumber, the pretty green, yellow and white wood warbler whose song is as timeless as the Welsh oakwoods it inhabits and the soothing purr of the turtle dove redolent of lazy summer days.
He explores the close relationship between the swallow and man and the mystery of the master of the skies, the screaming swift, which feeds, sleeps and even mates on the wing, only landing to nest before slicing through the skies back to Africa.
All the while McCarthy puts the birds into their cultural context, with references from Ancient Greece, the Bible and European literature.
For him the birds are both inspiring and the sign of a deeply sick planet. He concludes: “During my quest for them they were not all gone, the summer migrant birds.
“Some of them had made it back from Africa and for that unforgettable springtime the world was still working.
“But for how much longer?”
UK bird red list: Goodbye cuckoo, hello bullfinch
Latest figures showing the rapid decline of the cuckoo and the rise of other species in the UK is certainly reflected in my local Somerset patch
European cuckoo (Cuculus Canorus) juvenile calling on a post in Buckinghamshire.
A juvenile European cuckoo (Cuculus canorus). Latest figures have recorded a "shocking" 37% decline in the species since the mid-1990s. Photograph: David Kjaer/ Nature Picture Library/Rex Features
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Stephen Moss
@stephenmoss_tv
Thursday 28 May 2009 07.15 EDT
The latest annual audit of how our bird populations are doing has prompted me to consider what's going on in my own parish – the village of Mark, on the Somerset Levels.
I've been out and about on my bike lately, combing the fields and droves for the sight and sound of breeding birds. This is my small, but hopefully significant, contribution to the British Trust for Ornithology (BTO)'s latest atlas survey of our birdlife.
The headlines about the rapid decline of the cuckoo certainly ring true. I've lived here for almost three years now, and although each successive spring that I expect to hear that iconic call, I have yet to do so. A couple of weeks ago our neighbour Eric wound down the window of his car as he passed, and mentioned that he had heard a single cuckoo call that morning – perhaps a bird heading rapidly north to breed in Scotland, where they still seem to be doing okay.
Curious about the former status of this classic harbinger of spring, I asked Mick, who has lived in the village all his life, whether they were once more common. "Cuckoos?" he exclaimed. "They used to drive us barmy with their noise!"
Bear in mind that our village is hardly prime cuckoo habitat, so they must have been very common indeed. "I expect they're all down the road at Shapwick," Mick opined, referring to the vast area of reedbeds a few miles south of here, which indeed should be teeming with cuckoos. I had to disappoint him with the news that this year I have only heard a single bird down there.
Journalist and environmental writer Mike McCarthy has noticed this too, and produced a timely warning in his book Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo. He notes that many of the rapidly disappearing birds are long-distance migrants, often wintering in the area just south of the Sahara known as the Sahel zone.
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When I first started birding back in the late 1960s this region was in the news, when 90% of our whitethroats failed to return one spring. The whitethroat population appears to have bounced back, but other species such as spotted flycatcher and turtle dove have not. I've never seen either of those in our village – and indeed I've never seen turtle dove anywhere in Somerset, where it is now only a very rare migrant.
So what about the other new arrivals on the red list: the lapwing, yellow wagtail, wood warbler and herring gull? Herring gulls are still quite common around here, loafing about in the fields like surly teenagers. Wood warblers are in the nearby Quantocks and Exmoor, though in lower numbers than before. But I do still see lapwings and yellow wagtails locally – both breed (though only very low numbers of yellow wagtails) on nearby Tealham Moor. As I cycle past I often hear the lapwing's evocative display call.
There is some good news: five species have been downgraded from the red to the amber list – still in trouble, but a move in the right direction. During my BTO atlas surveys I have seen a surprising number of reed buntings, which breed in good numbers along the rhynes (local word for dykes) which criss-cross our watery landscape. My birding friend Nigel also had good numbers of reed buntings in his garden in Wedmore throughout this past winter.
I've also seen another good news species, the bullfinch, a few times – which is a vast improvement on the years when I didn't see this handsome and gaudy bird at all. At my wife's parents' home, on the edge of Ashdown forest in east Sussex, bullfinches are regular visitors to the bird feeders – something I would give my eye-teeth for.
In the meantime, I still have two more atlas surveys to do before this year's deadline at the end of May. If you'd like to get involved you haven't missed the boat – the atlas continues for another couple of years. I can honestly say that despite the missing cuckoos, checking out your local patch for this national survey is one of the most satisfying forms of birding I know.
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