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 lives around us, and shows how their loss lessens us all. A must-read.” —Helen Macdonald, author of H Is for Hawk "[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 beautifully lyrical work, dealing with one of the most urgent problems of our age." —Tim Flannery, author of The Weather Makers and Atmosphere of Hope “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. "—The Times (UK) Best Nature Books of 2015 “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 “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 “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 “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
…compelling…[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. He writes about his delight of the dawn chorus or dolphins dancing in the water but also about the Romantics, agricultural devastation, the magnificent color range of American warblers and London's Victorian sewage system…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 joyto imagination and emotion.
The New York Times Book Review - Andrea Wulf
Mr. McCarthy…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…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…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 argumentsstatistics, abstractionswhen we consider our despoiled planet.
The New York Times - Jennifer Senior
★ 07/11/2016 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.)
2016-08-25 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.