FROM THE TIME I BEGAN WRITING ESSAYS, I HAVE CALLED MYSELF a “nature writer,” although I have not always been sure what that sort of work entails. The poet Mary Oliver wrote, “My work is loving the world . . . which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished . . . which is mostly rejoicing . . . which is gratitude . . .” and that seemed about right. Because I was so in love with the world, writing the love songs was simple and straightforward. You just go to some place wonderful, open your heart and your notebook, and tell the truth.
But then? After a time, loving the world became more complicated, and rejoicing got harder. Even as I was celebrating this splendid world, it was slipping away. I was midway through an essay on frog song when developers bulldozed the frog marsh for condominiums. I had just published an essay about an owl’s nest in a favorite lodgepole pine forest when the forest, and the nest, burned to ashes and spars. As I celebrated their songs, humpback whales grew thin, starving in a warming, souring ocean. And all the while, executives of multinational extractive industries were gathering around mahogany tables to devise business plans that they knew would take down the great systems that sustain human life and all the other lives on Earth. Oh, the peril. The ecological peril. The moral peril.
In the fifty years that I have been writing about nature, roughly 60 percent of all individual mammals have been erased from the face of the Earth. The total population of North American birds, the red-winged blackbirds and robins, has been cut by a third. Half of grassland birds have been lost. Butterflies and moths have declined by similar percentages. As individual numbers decrease, species are being lost too. As many as one out of five species of organisms may be on the verge of extinction now, and twice that number could be lost by the end of the century. Two-thirds of the species of primates, our closest relatives, are endangered. Unless the world acts to stop extinctions, I will write my last nature essay on a planet that is less than half as song-graced and life-drenched as the one where I began to write. My grandchildren will tear out half the pages in their field guides. They won’t need them.
The loss of species scares me. The loss of their music breaks my heart. Each time a creature dies, a song dies. Every time a species goes extinct, its songs die forever. How will we live under the terrible silence of the empty sky? My nightmare is that before we lose the Earth’s life-sustaining systems, we will lose its soul-sustaining system—the Earth’s wild music—and all that will be left will be the immortal Dolly Parton and methane burps.
Now, in the shadow of the Sixth Great Extinction, a pandemic has spread a terrible new silence over the world. What does a nature writer do? What does she write?
One ordinary temptation is to give up and become something other than a nature writer, turning to polemics, ethical treatises, signboards, and lots of nasty letters. But how can a writer leave the leafy world for the marble halls of politics? Another temptation is to stop writing altogether. “If you don’t have something nice to say,” my mother insisted, “then don’t say anything at all.” But how could she ever have anticipated the drenching grief in the stories now asking to be told? The temptation in ordinary times would be simply to lie by omission, continuing to tell only the happy stories, ignoring the difficult fact that the world is being assaulted and ravaged at exponentially accelerating rates.
But we do not have the luxury of writing in ordinary times. I’m convinced that writers are therefore called to efforts that are out of the ordinary. “We need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply,” novelist Franz Kafka wrote. “A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us.”
So. How exactly does a disaster affect us? We know the answer from experience, having been cruelly tutored by world wars, hurricanes, and a pandemic. Disasters call us to action. They call us to levels of compassion and courage we did not know we could reach. They smash us with sorrow and lift us with determination and moral resolve, the way a wave both smashes and lifts us in the same wild movement. Disaster transforms sorrowful love into a force strong enough to change the trajectory of history. I don’t know if any book can do what Kafka asked. But dear Mary Oliver, do you think this might now be how we do the work of loving a weary, reeling world? And don’t we have to try?
In Earth’s Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World, I tell stories about the planet’s imperiled music, one consequence of our civilization’s having lost its way. Why music? Because I love it. I often tell audiences what Frederick Buechner wrote: that “you will find your calling at the intersection of your deep love and the world’s deep need.” This is surely true for the nature writer. So I write from that place where my deep love for the world’s music—the birdsong, the frog song, the crickets and toads, the whales and wolves, even old hymns and Girl Scout songs—meets the terrible facts of onrushing extinction.
MY NEIGHBOR TO THE WEST WAS CONFUSED WHEN I SAID I WAS writing about the extinction of Earth’s wild music. “Wait,” she said. “Is that a thing?” Dear god, yes. Extinction of the world’s species is in fact a thing, and with the species will go their songs. To the extent that people don’t know this, it is the responsibility of the nature writer to tell them: to bear witness, ring the church bell, trip the alarm, beat the warning drum, send the telegram, blow the whistle, call all-hands-on-deck—and sometimes, weeping, to write the condolence letters.
MY NEIGHBOR TO THE NORTH WAS WORRIED. “WAIT,” SHE SAID. “Why would anybody read such a sad book?” We need to talk about the need to face sorrow straight-on, I tell my neighbor. Oh, she knows grief. It has not been her friend. She has more than once followed the five stages of grief, traditionally listed as Anger, Denial, Bargaining, Depression, and ultimately Acceptance.
In my experience, the extinction and climate-change catastrophes have led the world’s defenders through the five stages of grief to arrive at the worst possible place. At first, we seethed with fury, but what enemy could we identify, back then? Then, we refused to believe that we stood to lose it all, but the evidence was sound and only the ideologically ignorant are still in denial. We tried to bargain with the forces of destruction, but when a CEO is making a killing, why would he settle for making a living? We fell into depression. And now, who among us is not fighting with every ounce of her strength to resist falling into acceptance, abdicating all resistance and believing that there is no hope of recovering a singing, surging, life-sustaining planet? But acceptance is defeat. It is morally impossible.
So this book draws a new map through sorrow to something more powerful.
Part One. The essays begin with Tremble. We tremble with joy and wonder when we open our hearts to the music that comes to us out of thin air, the astonishing and mysterious gift of the tremulous universe.
Part Two. Then, as nature’s voices fall away, the essays call us to Weep. The silence of morning and marsh is unbearably lonely and sad. How will the children dance without wild music? How will they live without rustling birch trees and chickadees?
Part Three. Weeping is the start of grieving, not the end. It invites—no, it morally requires—movement toward Awaken. Our grief is not only a measure of our love but a measure of our obligation. It is therefore our responsibility to awake to the work of saving what we can of the songs.
Part Four. Sing Out. I can’t think of any other morally possible place to go. By resolute effort, maybe we can save some of the endangered beings. And if we can’t, then by that effort, we perhaps will save some of our moral integrity, which is consistency between what we believe is right and the actions we choose to take.
Epilogue. When the book is over, we will talk about what we can do and how we will do it.
MY NEIGHBOR TO THE EAST, A WRITER HIMSELF, WANTED TO know how I was going to compose the book: contents, characters, setting, etc.
I explained that the thirty-two essays in the book are drawn from a lifetime of loving the world. The majority are new essays written in response to the extinction crisis. When I felt the book needed celebration, I pulled in familiar essays, or parts of them, that I had published in early books, when loving the world seemed pure and simple. Some of the essays are mosaics that gather fragments of old and new essays and arrange them to portray something unforeseen.
The main character is my husband Frank, to whom the book is dedicated. He is a tall, square-jawed guy, handy around tools and boats, as Alaskans must be, strong and smart—but you’ll see. He is also a behavioral neuroendocrinologist, retired from Oregon State University after having studied, in the rough-skinned newt, how external cues, like the presence of a potential sex partner, register in the chemicals of the brain and change the behavior of males.
The book is set in a variety of the seasons and places we have traveled in Minnesota, Manitoba, California, Arizona, and especially Oregon, which is our home. But most of the essays are set in the place where my husband and I spend the summers, a little cabin on a hill where two creeks and a bear trail meet a tidal cove on one of Alaska’s ABC Islands. We keep a small fishing boat there and a couple of kayaks, so we can range up and down the inlet. A waterwheel about the size of a birthday cake powers light bulbs and our laptops, unless the stream level falls and the hydropower fails, which is why we carry flashlights and ballpoint pens during droughts.
But right now, I am at the desk that looks into our tiny backyard, here on College Hill in Corvallis. A gale poured over the Coast Range this morning, so the Douglas-fir limbs are luffing in unpredictable winds. The chickadees and juncos have fled the birdfeeders as evening comes on, and a gray squirrel is now pirating the feed. Rain pounding on the deck is the music I hear. The garden is green and wet and primevally alive. It’s the end of a long day of loving the world.
KDM
Corvallis, Oregon