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The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (New York Review Books Classics)
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About The Moth Snowstorm: Nature And Joy
Product Description Now available in paperback, The Moth Snowstorm is a one-of-a-kind environmental work that combines memoir, anecodotes, and hard facts to make a case for preserving an ever-dwindling natural world. 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. Review “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“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 "A heartfelt, lovely, and thoroughly lived-through meditation on the natural world and its central part in any civilized life.” —Kirkus “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 l
