The Moth Snowstorm

Starred review from July 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.

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. COPYRIGHT(1) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

October 1, 2016
Longtime environmental correspondent McCarthy does a lovely job of infusing his observations of the world's struggling ecosystems with his convictions about nature's saving grace. Opening with a heartbreaking reminiscence of his mother's mental illness and father's absence, he shares deeply personal memories of his devastated childhood and how he found solace. When McCarthy's journalistic impulse kicks in, he takes readers to points around the world where he witnesses man's cavalier treatment of the environment in places like South Korea, where an estuary critical to shorebirds has been destroyed for the construction of the world's longest sea wall, and London, where the scientific search to solve the mystery of the city's missing sparrows covers everything from gasoline pollutants to pesticide-related destruction of insects. As significant as this research is, however, it is McCarthy's poetic manner of combining literary references with hard science that will attract a broad range of readers. The likes of T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, Ted Hughes, and Christina Rossetti are quoted in a chronicle that is both bleak and achingly beautiful; a true treasure.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)