Kathleen Dean Moore - Earths Wild Music

Contents

More Praise for Earths Wild Music

Awakening our listening faculty may be the saving grace of our wayward and visually inebriated species. Kathleen Dean Moore is an ambassador for listening, and Earths Wild Music is a guidebook for how this untapped sense can lead us to falling in love with our true home: the world of nature.

PAUL WINTER , saxophonist and composer of Wolf Eyes

In this hugely intelligent and captivating collection of essays, Kathleen Dean Moore makes clear what is at stake in the world: What we do now will change everything forever. Through her clarity of voice and wise vision of coexistence, she reminds us that we still have a choice as to the path we choose into the future.

JULIAN HOFFMAN , author of Irreplaceable: The Fight to Save Our Wild Places

Earths Wild Music

OTHER BOOKS BY KATHLEEN DEAN MOORE

Pardons: Justice, Mercy, and the Public Interest

Riverwalking: Reflections on Moving Water

Rachel Carson: Legacy and Challenge

Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

The Pine Island Paradox: Making Connections in a Disconnected World

How It Is: The Native American Philosophy of V. F. Cordova

Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature

Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril

Great Tide Rising: Toward Clarity and Moral Courage in a Time of Planetary Change

Piano Tide: A Novel

EARTHS
WILD
MUSIC

Celebrating and Defending the Songs
of the Natural World

NEW AND SELECTED ESSAYS

Kathleen Dean Moore

COUNTERPOINT

Berkeley, California

For Frank,
who knows the world by the songs it sings.

Someone will say: you care about birds. Why not worry about people? I worry about both birds and people. We are in the world and part of it, and we are destroying everything because we are destroying ourselves spiritually, morally, and in every way. It is all part of the same sickness.

THOMAS MERTON

Contents

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 owls 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 wont 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 Earths life-sustaining systems, we will lose its soul-sustaining systemthe Earths wild musicand 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 dont have something nice to say, my mother insisted, then dont 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. Im 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 dont 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 dont we have to try?

In Earths Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World, I tell stories about the planets imperiled music, one consequence of our civilizations 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 worlds deep need. This is surely true for the nature writer. So I write from that place where my deep love for the worlds musicthe birdsong, the frog song, the crickets and toads, the whales and wolves, even old hymns and Girl Scout songsmeets the terrible facts of onrushing extinction.

MY NEIGHBOR TO THE WEST WAS CONFUSED WHEN I SAID I WAS writing about the extinction of Earths wild music. Wait, she said. Is that a thing? Dear god, yes. Extinction of the worlds species is in fact a thing, and with the species will go their songs. To the extent that people dont 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-deckand sometimes, weeping, to write the condolence letters.