The Moth Snowstorm

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.

From Asia to Africa, Oceania to Europe, the Americas and Antarctica, see the world through the eyes of 60 young people who are fighting for their homes and their futures in the face of climate change. The stories in this book are devastating, defiant, inspiring and moving - but, above all, they are full of hope. The climate crisis can feel overwhelming but, as this book shows, for every problem there are young voices raising awareness, creating solutions and demanding that things change. It's not too late to save the world. United we really are unstoppable. Aditya Mukarji (16) stopped 26 million straws from polluting the oceans. Cecilia La Rose (15) filed a lawsuit against the Canadian federal government for contributing to global warming. Delphin Kaze (19) founded a company that produces eco-charcoal from organic waste in Burundi. And more inspiring stories from . . . Htet Myet Min Tun; Tatyana Sin; Iman Dorri; Howey Ou; Theresa Rose Sebastian; Nasreen Sayed; Liyana Yamin; Albrecht Arthur N. Arevalo; Akari Tomita; Karel Lisbeth Miranda Mendoza; Emma-Jane Burian; Anya Sastry; Ricardo Andres Pineda Guzman; Cricket Guest; Lia Harel; Shannon Lisa; Khadija Usher; Brandon Nguyen; Vivianne Roc; Octavia Shay Muñoz-Barton; Payton Mitchell; Ashley Torres; Eyal Weintraub; Daniela Torres Perez; Catarina Lorenzo; Juan José Martín-Bravo; João Henrique Alves Cerqueira; Gilberto Cyril Morishaw; Holly Gillibrand; Stamatis Psaroudakis; Lilith Electra Platt; Anna Taylor; Raina Ivanova; Federica Gasbarro; Laura Lock; Agim Mazreku; Adrian Toth; Kaluki Paul Mutuku; Nche Tala; Sebenele Rodney Carval; Jeremy Raguain; Lesein Mathenge Mutunkei; Toiwiya Hassane; Koku Klutse; Tsiry Nantenaina Randrianavelo; Ruby Sampson; Tafadzwa Chando; Elizabeth Wanjiru Wathuti; Ndèye Marie Aida Ndieguene; Zoe Buckley Lennox; Lourdes Faith Auhura Parehuia; Alexander Whitebrook; Komal Narayan; Kailash Cook; Madeleine Keitilani Elceste Lavemai; Freya May Mimosa Brown; and Carlon Zackhras 25p from the sale of physical copies of the book will go to a charity advocating for the protection of children's rights.

"First published by Square Peg, an imprint of Vintage"--Title page verso.

The butterflies of Britain, in the words of one of their greatest championsMatthew Oates has led a butterflying life. Naturalist, conservationist and passionate lover of poetry, he has devoted himself to these exalted creatures: to their observation, to singing their praises, and to ensuring their survival. Based on fifty years of detailed diaries, In Pursuit of Butterflies is the chronicle of this life. Oates leads the reader through a lifetime of butterflying, across the mountain tops, the peat bogs, sea cliffs, meadows, heaths, the chalk downs and great forests of the British Isles. Full of humour, zeal, digression, expertise and anecdote, this book provides a profound encounter with one of our great butterfly lovers, and with a half-century of butterflies in Britain.

A great, rhapsodic, urgent book full of joy, grief, rage and love . . . A must-read' Helen Macdonald, author of H is for Hawk Nature has many gifts for us, but perhaps the greatest of them all is joy; the intense delight we can take in the natural world, in its beauty, in the wonder it can offer us, in the peace it can provide - feelings stemming ultimately from our own unbreakable links to nature, which mean that we cannot be fully human if we are separate from it. In The Moth Snowstorm Michael McCarthy, one of Britain's leading writers on the environment, proposes this joy as a defence of a natural world which is ever more threatened, and which, he argues, is inadequately served by the two defences put forward hitherto: sustainable development and the recognition of ecosystem services. Drawing on a wealth of memorable experiences from a lifetime of watching and thinking about wildlife and natural landscapes, The Moth Snowstorm not only presents a new way of looking at the world around us, but effortlessly blends with it a remarkable and moving memoir of childhood trauma from which love of the natural world emerged. It is a powerful, timely, and wholly original book which comes at a time when nature has never needed it more.

ONE OF THE GUARDIAN'S BEST NATURE BOOKS OF 2020 SHORTLISTED FOR THE RICHARD JEFFERIES SOCIETY & WHITE HORSE BOOKSHOP LITERARY PRIZE 'Lovely: full of fascinating detail and anecdote, but the undertow of the virus moving in real time beneath its sunlit surface gives it a unique emotional heft.' -The Times 'A literary window into the wonderful wild world during lockdown... a charming book.' -Daily Mail 'An entrancing testament to nature's power to restore us to ourselves.' -Ruth Padel Nature took on a new importance for many people when the coronavirus pandemic arrived, providing solace in a time of great anxiety - not least because the crisis struck at the beginning of spring, the season of light, growth, rebirth and renewal. Three writers, close friends but living in widely separated, contrasting parts of the country, resolved to record their experiences of this extraordinary spring in intimate detail, to share with others their sense of the wonder, inspiration and delight the natural world can offer. The Consolation of Nature is the story of what they discovered by literally walking out from their front doors.

Nature Prose seeks to explain the popularity and appeal of contemporary writing about nature. This book intervenes in key areas of contemporary debate about literature and the environment and explores the enduring appeal of writing about nature during an ecological crisis. Using a range of international examples, with a focus on late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century writing from Britain and the US, Dominic Head argues that nature writing contains formal effects which encapsulate our current ecological dilemma and offer a fresh resource for critical thinking. The environmental crisis has injected a fresh urgency into nature writing, along with a new piquancy for those readers seeking solace in the nonhuman, or for those looking to change their habits in the face of ecological catastrophe. However, behind this apparently strong match between the aims of nature writers and the desires of their readers, there is also a shared mood of radical uncertainty and insecurity. The treatment and construction of 'nature' in contemporary imaginative prose reveals some significant paradoxes beneath its dominant moods, moods which are usually earnest, sometimes celebratory, sometimes prophetic or cautionary. It is in these paradoxical moments that the contemporary ecological crisis is formally encoded, in a progressive development of ecological consciousness from the late 1950s onwards. Nature prose, fiction and nonfiction, is now contemporaneous with a defining time of crisis, while also being formally fashioned by that context. This is a mode of writing that emerges in a world in crisis, but which is also, in some ways, in crisis itself. With chapters on remoteness, exclusivity, abundance, and rarity, this book marks a turning point in how literary criticism engages with nature writing.

Climate change fiction to some extent is all about the imagination and representation of the dark Anthropocene, which demonstrates writers’ concerns and anxieties of the predicament humanity might face resulting from dramatic climate change. This book selects and delves into some most crucial climate change novels analyzing how climate change and its consequences are imagined and represented by Western writers from the perspective of risks, community, imagology in the phase of Anthropocene 3.0.