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savaging's review against another edition
I couldn't make it past the first chapter. Iconic boomer-generation nature writing. Instead of writing about the other species and ecosystems that bring him joy (I could read about that for days), he writes his Big Idea, which is that artists need to write about beauty and joy instead of the economic use of nature.
All nothing new, but he adds the arrogant assertion that loving nature is a uniquely human trait. He specifically insists that otters don't love their rivers. Michael McCarthy has somehow peered into the hearts of all other species and found only emptiness there. More human hubris toward other species, trying to turn around the damage done to other species by human hubris. The book also has a conservative bent that sees secular humanism as the main culprit of ecocide, rather than capitalist greed.
My conclusion is surely over-hasty, but it remains: might have been better to leave the trees unfelled, rather than pulp them to print this book.
All nothing new, but he adds the arrogant assertion that loving nature is a uniquely human trait. He specifically insists that otters don't love their rivers. Michael McCarthy has somehow peered into the hearts of all other species and found only emptiness there. More human hubris toward other species, trying to turn around the damage done to other species by human hubris. The book also has a conservative bent that sees secular humanism as the main culprit of ecocide, rather than capitalist greed.
My conclusion is surely over-hasty, but it remains: might have been better to leave the trees unfelled, rather than pulp them to print this book.
stinkyheronreads's review
hopeful
informative
reflective
medium-paced
2.75
I was attracted to the idea of an exploration of nature, our place in it, and the importance it brings. There were indeed moments of depth and beauty, especially in depictions of places the author loves. There was also a hearty dose of “explorer white guy” perspective that turned me off… the author mostly left out any indigenous knowledge or perspectives and instead opted for long and arm-wavey (colonial) “historical” lessons.
mariodias10's review against another edition
5.0
Awesome book, the author takes us on a trip throw beautiful scenarios and history, a must read if you care about environmental issues and nature
harryhas29's review against another edition
A future without beauty is what the liberals want
margaret21's review against another edition
5.0
How to describe this book? It's part nature writing, part memoire, part polemic, and a powerful and affecting read.
The book first got under my skin when defining 'joy', which is perhaps summed up as a moment of true happiness, with a spiritual, selfless, outward looking dimension. McCarthy's first experience of joy was as a boy, leaning to love the landscape and wildlife of the Dee Estuary. Later, it was bluebell woods, chalkland streams ... and so on.
Alongside this joy is anger, impotent anger, as he describes the pointless despoilation and destruction of Saemangeum in South Korea by the construction of a 23 mile long seawall which has annihilated the rich mudflats upon which countless thousands of migrating birds had depended.
McCarthy's nature writing is richly observed, pictorial, highly sensory. He is angry at the galloping pace of destruction of so many species and habitats. He demands that we observe too, and experience joy in our own ways as we explore the natural world.
Experiencing and observing however, is not enough. This is also a call to action.
A beautifully written book, often elegiac, and one which engaged me from the first to the last page.
The book first got under my skin when defining 'joy', which is perhaps summed up as a moment of true happiness, with a spiritual, selfless, outward looking dimension. McCarthy's first experience of joy was as a boy, leaning to love the landscape and wildlife of the Dee Estuary. Later, it was bluebell woods, chalkland streams ... and so on.
Alongside this joy is anger, impotent anger, as he describes the pointless despoilation and destruction of Saemangeum in South Korea by the construction of a 23 mile long seawall which has annihilated the rich mudflats upon which countless thousands of migrating birds had depended.
McCarthy's nature writing is richly observed, pictorial, highly sensory. He is angry at the galloping pace of destruction of so many species and habitats. He demands that we observe too, and experience joy in our own ways as we explore the natural world.
Experiencing and observing however, is not enough. This is also a call to action.
A beautifully written book, often elegiac, and one which engaged me from the first to the last page.
nyssahhhh's review
3.0
Grim, yet somehow hopeful. This book appeals to me on so many levels and I still feel that it's not enough. It's not enough to feel joy and experience wonder from nature--it is absolutely essential to our being, to our living. And, yet... those feelings of joy and wonder and amazement exist, are fanned by experiences in nature.
I do hope that beauty and joy are enough. That acknowledgment of those traits is enough to stop detrimental behavior. That we learn from our extinctions and protect what we have now, what we have left.
Meaningful Lines:
8: We have templates in our minds for human lives, how they should begin, come to maturity, and end; in short, how they should play out; and often we try to make sense of our own experience by aligning it with one template or another, and seeing how far it differs or corresponds. Yet in reality, of course, the forms of our experience are infinite.
16: It is extraordinary: we are wrecking the earth, 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.
19: Most ordinary individuals do not care, because the consequences are not yet visited upon them (although they will be), and also because people are quite naturally focused on their own concerns, which often seem harmless enough, and do not grasp that the essence of the trouble to come is their own individual choices, multiplied seven billion times.
29: ...it is time for a different, formal defence of nature. 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.
43: [Farming] fundamentally altered our relationship with nature, from one of partnership, more or less -- for even as hunter-gatherers we could be demanding partners -- to one of formalised mastery and domination.
46: The assumption was that doing things to the earth had no cost. It followed on inevitably from the Bible's declaration that the planet's resources were put there by God for our use, and thus by implication were boundless.
63: The natural world is not separate from us, it is part of us.It is as much a part of us as our capacity for language; we are bonded to it still, however hard it may be to perceive the union in the tumult of modern urban life. Yet the union can be found, the union of ourselves and nature, in the joy which nature can spark and fire in us...
76: [Gerard Manley Hopkins]:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
80: The country seemed obsessed with building things, with piling up more and more infrastructure; it had to be constructing new roads everywhere even though an extensive national highway system had been in place for years and it didn't seem to need them; it had to be not only putting up new bridges and dams and industrial complexes and ports left, right and centre, and block after block of office buildings, but to be tearing down what was there already and rebuilding it, whatever it was.
89: Some of my generation, the baby boomers, felt it in their bones, some of them sensed things were changing profoundly, but mostly their lives were too full, privileged, and enjoyable to stop and look closely, and anyway, they were approaching retirement before the full astonishing picture emerged of what had been destroyed.
94: The incorporation of the widespread use of deadly poison into everyday agricultural practice is what, above all else, has destroyed the wildlife abundance of my country and I curse it. You can say it's essential for the production of food. i say, no it isn't, not on the scale in which it has been used. It has dealt a mortal blow to half the life of the land in which I grew up.
107: When I asked the world expert on the bird and on sparrows in general, Denis Summers-Smith, what he liked most about them, he took me by surprise; he said: 'I greatly admire their ability to live with an enemy.' 'Who's the enemy?' I said. 'Man,' he said.
113: The problem, he [Max Nicholson] thought, was ultimately a psychological one: the birds [sparrows], which were so strongly social, felt that life in such low numbers was no longer worth living. [...] he stressed he was speculating, and fully accepted that what he was suggesting would be difficult to verify experimentally. 'I accept it's an element that can't be measured,' he said. "it's a psychological thing --there's no scientific way of measuring it.'
He smiled.
'But a lot of things that can't be measured, are real.'
122: Finding a tiny colony of house sparrows in central London does not make up for losing the whole population; but it does something. It's a smidgen of light, I suppose.
125: It would be foolish to underestimate, however, the obstacles in the way of finding and feeling our inherent bond with nature, which will grow substantially as the century progresses; that needs to be admitted. ... Henceforth, most people on the planet would live urban rather than rural lives, and for the first time would no longer be in close contact with the natural or even the semi-natural world (which farming represents); a majority and a rapidly expanding one, would no longer have direct access to the rhythms of the growth cycle, to the effects of seasonality, to quiet, to the visibility of he stars, to non-industrialized rivers and natural forest, and to wildlife -- to birds and wild mammals, to insects and wild flowers -- even where, as in more and more places, wildlife was impoverished. Nature in any form would no longer be part of most people's everyday experience.
127: And the loss of this,l the loss of familiarity with the cadences and pulses of nature which will extend to so many more of us int he two-thirds urban world of the years to come, seems to me to be sad beyond words, not least because it will go unmarked and unmourned, since for someone struggling for food and basic healthcare and education for their children in a megacity shantytown without sanitation or energy supplies, that will be the most minuscule of their concerns. The rhythms of nature? It will be no sort of concern at all.
129: Yet as I have got older, I have come to love it [winter solstice]. For whether or not in our flurry of living we lose touch with the rhythms and processes of the earth, behind everything they continue in all their power, and the solstice represents the start of the most powerful of them all: rebirth. The moment when the days begin to lengthen again is the moment when new life begins its approach, even at the darkest point, which is why it has been so widely celebrated in so many cultures right round the world--the miracle of rebirth never ceased to amaze.
131: The first two months of the year may be harsher in terms of weather but ticking in the background is the wondrous phenomenon, the unstoppable movement back towards the light...
157-158: [This part was troublesome to me... it seemed McCarthy was talking about the PC-ness of beauty, and whether we can appreciate beauty of its own accord. Beauty, to me, is part of a whole. I don't believe beauty is the only attribute we should cherish, which may be why I am so conflicted on his premise. There is a connectivity of beauty and utility and how these things work together... that connectedness has so much value.]
160: In fact, nature's ability to generate colours and colour combinations you have never seen before is endless, and that is part of the thrill, part of the joy of the beauty of the earth.
170: The beauty of the earth, of course, goes far beyond colour. It is found just as much in form, both in its landscapes and in the life it hosts: in the harmony of vistas, the majesty of mountains, the intimate charm of valleys, and the changing light of the sun upon them all; in the killer grace of leopards, the elegance of antelopes, the dash and fire of falcons, or the poise, as I have said, of wading birds.
188: 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.
216: But it is not in any way my contention that the love of nature is universal. What is universal, I believe, is the propensity to love it; the fact that loving it is possible for people. That propensity seems to me to be not an occasional trait to be found in certain individuals, but rather a part of being human, and a very powerful one: it is part of the legacy of the fifty thousand generations of the Pleistocene, our undying bond with the natural world, and it s no surprise that it lies buried in the genes, since it is covered over by the five hundred generations of civilization we have lived through since farming began and we ceased to be part of nature ourselves as hunter-gatherers; and it is covered more than ever now by the frenzy of modern urban living. Yet covered only; not destroyed. It's still there. IT can be uncovered; we can connect to it, all of us, and if we do, one realisation, one truth, may be illuminated for us more than any other: that the natural world is our natural home, it is the natural resting place for our psyches. And the most striking evidence of all for that is simple: it can bring us peace.
220: [Paragraph talking about evolutionary behaviors, hard-wired to process signals from a landscape that denote differences/changes and thus danger. This took a lot of mental energy for constant processing, but we adapted to it. Unable to do that in the city because of so much attacking our senses, so we shut them all out, which cause stress.] In the natural world, however, we could function once again as we have evolved to do.
221: Anyone who equates nature and paradise is missing the point. Nature can harm you and nature can kill you; nature indeed has dangers. But they are our dangers, as it were, and whatever they may be, they are part of the ecosystems to which, at the profoundest level of our personalities, we are all adapted.
228: 'Perhaps,' he said, 'once you know what it is, it doesn't control you any more.
238: That the natural world can bring us peace; that the natural world can give us joy: these are the confirmations of what many people may instinctively feel but have not been able to articulate; that nature is not an extra, a luxury, but on the contrary is indispensable, part of our essence. And now that knowledge needs to be brought to nature's defence.
240: But capitalism and the command economy share the blame for the despoliation of nature over the last century, and the natural world can be done down equally both by those after fast bucks for themselves or for shareholders and by those seeking the broader benefit of the commonwealth. Nature is not being destroyed just by a particular political or economic creed; it is being destroyed by the runaway scale of the human enterprise.
241: Yet creepy-crawlies don't only creep and crawl; these are 'the little things that run the world', playing key roles in a myriad ecosystems , and their disappearance has profound dangers...
245: That belief, that faith, is available: it is the belief in nature's worth.
I do hope that beauty and joy are enough. That acknowledgment of those traits is enough to stop detrimental behavior. That we learn from our extinctions and protect what we have now, what we have left.
Meaningful Lines:
8: We have templates in our minds for human lives, how they should begin, come to maturity, and end; in short, how they should play out; and often we try to make sense of our own experience by aligning it with one template or another, and seeing how far it differs or corresponds. Yet in reality, of course, the forms of our experience are infinite.
16: It is extraordinary: we are wrecking the earth, 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.
19: Most ordinary individuals do not care, because the consequences are not yet visited upon them (although they will be), and also because people are quite naturally focused on their own concerns, which often seem harmless enough, and do not grasp that the essence of the trouble to come is their own individual choices, multiplied seven billion times.
29: ...it is time for a different, formal defence of nature. 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.
43: [Farming] fundamentally altered our relationship with nature, from one of partnership, more or less -- for even as hunter-gatherers we could be demanding partners -- to one of formalised mastery and domination.
46: The assumption was that doing things to the earth had no cost. It followed on inevitably from the Bible's declaration that the planet's resources were put there by God for our use, and thus by implication were boundless.
63: The natural world is not separate from us, it is part of us.It is as much a part of us as our capacity for language; we are bonded to it still, however hard it may be to perceive the union in the tumult of modern urban life. Yet the union can be found, the union of ourselves and nature, in the joy which nature can spark and fire in us...
76: [Gerard Manley Hopkins]:
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
80: The country seemed obsessed with building things, with piling up more and more infrastructure; it had to be constructing new roads everywhere even though an extensive national highway system had been in place for years and it didn't seem to need them; it had to be not only putting up new bridges and dams and industrial complexes and ports left, right and centre, and block after block of office buildings, but to be tearing down what was there already and rebuilding it, whatever it was.
89: Some of my generation, the baby boomers, felt it in their bones, some of them sensed things were changing profoundly, but mostly their lives were too full, privileged, and enjoyable to stop and look closely, and anyway, they were approaching retirement before the full astonishing picture emerged of what had been destroyed.
94: The incorporation of the widespread use of deadly poison into everyday agricultural practice is what, above all else, has destroyed the wildlife abundance of my country and I curse it. You can say it's essential for the production of food. i say, no it isn't, not on the scale in which it has been used. It has dealt a mortal blow to half the life of the land in which I grew up.
107: When I asked the world expert on the bird and on sparrows in general, Denis Summers-Smith, what he liked most about them, he took me by surprise; he said: 'I greatly admire their ability to live with an enemy.' 'Who's the enemy?' I said. 'Man,' he said.
113: The problem, he [Max Nicholson] thought, was ultimately a psychological one: the birds [sparrows], which were so strongly social, felt that life in such low numbers was no longer worth living. [...] he stressed he was speculating, and fully accepted that what he was suggesting would be difficult to verify experimentally. 'I accept it's an element that can't be measured,' he said. "it's a psychological thing --there's no scientific way of measuring it.'
He smiled.
'But a lot of things that can't be measured, are real.'
122: Finding a tiny colony of house sparrows in central London does not make up for losing the whole population; but it does something. It's a smidgen of light, I suppose.
125: It would be foolish to underestimate, however, the obstacles in the way of finding and feeling our inherent bond with nature, which will grow substantially as the century progresses; that needs to be admitted. ... Henceforth, most people on the planet would live urban rather than rural lives, and for the first time would no longer be in close contact with the natural or even the semi-natural world (which farming represents); a majority and a rapidly expanding one, would no longer have direct access to the rhythms of the growth cycle, to the effects of seasonality, to quiet, to the visibility of he stars, to non-industrialized rivers and natural forest, and to wildlife -- to birds and wild mammals, to insects and wild flowers -- even where, as in more and more places, wildlife was impoverished. Nature in any form would no longer be part of most people's everyday experience.
127: And the loss of this,l the loss of familiarity with the cadences and pulses of nature which will extend to so many more of us int he two-thirds urban world of the years to come, seems to me to be sad beyond words, not least because it will go unmarked and unmourned, since for someone struggling for food and basic healthcare and education for their children in a megacity shantytown without sanitation or energy supplies, that will be the most minuscule of their concerns. The rhythms of nature? It will be no sort of concern at all.
129: Yet as I have got older, I have come to love it [winter solstice]. For whether or not in our flurry of living we lose touch with the rhythms and processes of the earth, behind everything they continue in all their power, and the solstice represents the start of the most powerful of them all: rebirth. The moment when the days begin to lengthen again is the moment when new life begins its approach, even at the darkest point, which is why it has been so widely celebrated in so many cultures right round the world--the miracle of rebirth never ceased to amaze.
131: The first two months of the year may be harsher in terms of weather but ticking in the background is the wondrous phenomenon, the unstoppable movement back towards the light...
157-158: [This part was troublesome to me... it seemed McCarthy was talking about the PC-ness of beauty, and whether we can appreciate beauty of its own accord. Beauty, to me, is part of a whole. I don't believe beauty is the only attribute we should cherish, which may be why I am so conflicted on his premise. There is a connectivity of beauty and utility and how these things work together... that connectedness has so much value.]
160: In fact, nature's ability to generate colours and colour combinations you have never seen before is endless, and that is part of the thrill, part of the joy of the beauty of the earth.
170: The beauty of the earth, of course, goes far beyond colour. It is found just as much in form, both in its landscapes and in the life it hosts: in the harmony of vistas, the majesty of mountains, the intimate charm of valleys, and the changing light of the sun upon them all; in the killer grace of leopards, the elegance of antelopes, the dash and fire of falcons, or the poise, as I have said, of wading birds.
188: 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.
216: But it is not in any way my contention that the love of nature is universal. What is universal, I believe, is the propensity to love it; the fact that loving it is possible for people. That propensity seems to me to be not an occasional trait to be found in certain individuals, but rather a part of being human, and a very powerful one: it is part of the legacy of the fifty thousand generations of the Pleistocene, our undying bond with the natural world, and it s no surprise that it lies buried in the genes, since it is covered over by the five hundred generations of civilization we have lived through since farming began and we ceased to be part of nature ourselves as hunter-gatherers; and it is covered more than ever now by the frenzy of modern urban living. Yet covered only; not destroyed. It's still there. IT can be uncovered; we can connect to it, all of us, and if we do, one realisation, one truth, may be illuminated for us more than any other: that the natural world is our natural home, it is the natural resting place for our psyches. And the most striking evidence of all for that is simple: it can bring us peace.
220: [Paragraph talking about evolutionary behaviors, hard-wired to process signals from a landscape that denote differences/changes and thus danger. This took a lot of mental energy for constant processing, but we adapted to it. Unable to do that in the city because of so much attacking our senses, so we shut them all out, which cause stress.] In the natural world, however, we could function once again as we have evolved to do.
221: Anyone who equates nature and paradise is missing the point. Nature can harm you and nature can kill you; nature indeed has dangers. But they are our dangers, as it were, and whatever they may be, they are part of the ecosystems to which, at the profoundest level of our personalities, we are all adapted.
228: 'Perhaps,' he said, 'once you know what it is, it doesn't control you any more.
238: That the natural world can bring us peace; that the natural world can give us joy: these are the confirmations of what many people may instinctively feel but have not been able to articulate; that nature is not an extra, a luxury, but on the contrary is indispensable, part of our essence. And now that knowledge needs to be brought to nature's defence.
240: But capitalism and the command economy share the blame for the despoliation of nature over the last century, and the natural world can be done down equally both by those after fast bucks for themselves or for shareholders and by those seeking the broader benefit of the commonwealth. Nature is not being destroyed just by a particular political or economic creed; it is being destroyed by the runaway scale of the human enterprise.
241: Yet creepy-crawlies don't only creep and crawl; these are 'the little things that run the world', playing key roles in a myriad ecosystems , and their disappearance has profound dangers...
245: That belief, that faith, is available: it is the belief in nature's worth.
mxmrow's review
1.0
This felt like a very long opinion piece. The bits I find strange are the idea that joy of beauty is not valued due to essentially HR rules against sexual harassment, the lack of how trade plays a part in environmental destruction so it is not as simple as pointing to individual countries economic growth and the really basic view about global population while not including changes in diets that would not rely on further intensive versions of the current mix of agriculture and kind of sounding like Native American nations did not exist, instead North America was a wilderness. Basically the portrait it creates feels like a view from a very specific perspective that does not cut across classes, ages, genders, cultures or even accurately portrays the current relationships with the natural world.
leonore_book's review against another edition
5.0
I am so shocked at the price nature is paying for humans being so greedy and wasteful. Humankind is going to destroy our world and everything in it. So sad.
lisaotto's review against another edition
2.0
As far as I can tell, the author is advocating for the romanticization of nature in order to improve conservation. I found the whole thing a little self-obsessed (for example, why is there a multi-page detour to discuss his repressed feelings about the death of his mother in the final pages of the conclusion!) Kolbert's The Sixth Extinction does a much better job of explaining and putting into context this current moment of biodiversity loss. This author, on the other hand, seems more concerned with waxing poetic about how great nature was when he was a child and bemoaning that it's different now. I found it particularly strange that while he kept mentioning how humans have fine-tuned our love of nature during our hunter-gather days, and now evil humans are ruining this connection, all his examples of what we're all missing out on now are times when nature was inextricably tied with human development (moths in car headlights, sparrows that thrive in urban areas). There are just too many strange asides. He appears to believe he’s the only person who appreciates nature ‘these days’; he can think of only one novelist who has ever “noticed” flowers (?!). He’s offended that we don’t (or can’t... not PC) praise “feminine beauty” which somehow tracks with our loss of appreciation for nature’s beauty more generally. This felt like a eulogy for peak nature, circa 1954.