Robert Michael Pyle - Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays

More Advance Praise for Nature Matrix

Robert Michael Pyles essays pace the fraught ground between our need for the wild and our growing neglect of it. Filled with his signature mix of insight, wit, and immersive description, this career-spanning collection is a master class in nature writing from one of its finest practitioners. Highly recommended.

T HOR H ANSON , author of Buzz, Feathers , and The Triumph of Seeds

Robert Michael Pyles Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays adds to his long list of books that take the reader on a literary journey of observation and discovery, or even rediscovery, as the case may be. Pyles detail and specificity with language detail both the mundane and the mythic in the nonhuman world as a way to shake readers out of their too-familiar ways of engaging. Nature Matrix , like others of Pyles works, leads me from the page to place so that I want to immerse myself in nature with something of his keen eye and passion.

D R . D AVID T AYLOR , author of An Island in the Stream: Ecocritical and Literary Responses to Cuban Environmental Culture

Written across a span of many years, these essays by Robert Michael Pyle, one of Americas great literary naturalists, make for engaging reading throughoutpeppered with wit and humor, threaded through with genuine insight.

T HOMAS L OWE F LEISCHNER , executive director of the Natural History Institute and editor of Nature, Love, Medicine: Essays on Wildness and Wellness

Robert Michael Pyles Nature Matrix: New and Selected Essays is a fascinating weave of ecology, history, and ethics. Decades of close observation of lifes community yield gripping narratives, each one sparkling with insight.

D AVID G EORGE H ASKELL , author of John Burroughs Medal winner The Songs of Trees and Pulitzer Prize finalist The Forest Unseen

There is a particular ridgeline that the naturalist-writer walks above two watershedsthat of science and that of what C. P. Snow called the realm of the literary intellectual. Robert Michael Pyle has been hiking that ridge for decades now, and maybe he charts that territory better than any. I go to him often for knowledge of the natural world and for beautyof language, of voice, of quest, of clear mission. It is so good to have such a range of his essays collected in one place.

J OHN L ANE , author of Coyote Settles the South

This collection tracks the career of a fine naturalist who is a celebrant of overlooked and damaged placesirrigation ditches, vacant lots, urban campuses, and the suburban jungleas sites for natural history observation. Pyle lends his attentive eye to finding wonders in unlikely places and cultivating an ethos of care for the creaturely world wherever he takes his readers.

A LISON H AWTHORNE D EMING , author of Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit

Many are given to write; few, to really Write. In so declaring, Robert Michael Pyle presages his own craft, really writing to beautiful effect in Nature Matrix . As he weaves through groves of prose and near verse to scale grand mountains, then rounds the next bend and descends to revel in small beautiesbird, blossom, and butterflyPyle opines eloquently to awaken us to wildness and the necessity of its care. Rich stories are loosely stitched together with a life lived in quest. As drops of memoir seep in to nurture wonder, strong opinions make clear this writers favor of a more feral path. Savor the slow read, as Nature Matrix is a master noticers lifework. Robert Michael Pyles work merits the sauntering wander.

J. D REW L ANHAM , author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Mans Love Affair with Nature

A remarkably observant, perceptive, and provocative writer, Robert Michael Pyle is among our most eloquent literary interpreters of nature. In prose at once grounded in science and luminous as poetry, Pyle reminds us that a complex and beautiful web of relations is not only where we find ourselves but also who we are. Nature Matrix is a brilliant book that inspires a necessary rethinking of our deeply nourishing but increasingly strained relationship with the more-than-human world.

M ICHAEL P. B RANCH , author of Rants from the Hill

No living American so creatively and competently combines fine literary writing with equally fine contributions to the natural sciences in service to conservation as does Robert Michael Pyle. In Nature Matrix , it is abundantly clear that art and science are crafted with equal talent and a glorious sense of inquisitiveness about the other-than-world.

G ARY P AUL N ABHAN , Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, conservation biologist, and author of Mesquite: An Arboreal Love Affair

ALSO BY ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE

PROSE

Wintergreen: Rambles in a Ravaged Land

The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland

Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide

Nabokovs Butterflies (Editor, with Brian Boyd and Dmitri Nabokov)

Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage

Walking the High Ridge: Life as Field Trip

Sky Time in Grays River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten Place

Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year

The Tangled Bank: Essays from Orion

Through a Green Lens: Fifty Years of Writing for Nature

Magdalena Mountain: A Novel

POETRY

Letting the Flies Out (chapbook)

Evolution of the Genus Iris

Chinook & Chanterelle

The Tidewater Reach

ON ENTOMOLOGY

Watching Washington Butterflies

The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies

The IUCN Invertebrate Red Data Book (with S. M. Wells and N. M. Collins)

Handbook for Butterfly Watchers

Butterflies: A Peterson Field Guide Coloring Book (with Roger Tory Peterson and Sarah Anne Hughes)

Insects: A Peterson Field Guide Coloring Book (with Kristin Kest)

The Butterflies of Cascadia

Butterflies of the Pacific Northwest (with Caitlin LaBar)

NATURE MATRIX

New and Selected Essays

ROBERT MICHAEL PYLE

COUNTERPOINT

Berkeley, California

Nature Matrix

Copyright 2020 by Robert Michael Pyle

First paperback edition: 2020

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Permission is gratefully acknowledged from Oregon State University Press, Columbia River Reader Press, Beacon Press, and Counterpoint Press for excerpts on , for all of which the author holds or shares copyright.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Pyle, Robert Michael, author.

Title: Nature matrix : new and selected essays / Robert Michael Pyle.

Description: First paperback edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2020.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019017872 | ISBN 9781640092761

Subjects: LCSH: Pyle, Robert Michael,Prose. | Natural history.

Classification: LCC QH45.2 .P95 2020 | DDC 508dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019017872

Cover design by Sarah Brody

Book design by Jordan Koluch

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For my grandchildren, and for theirs

Nothing prevents us from exercising our powers of autonomy and rationality in bringing the world as it is gradually closer to the world as it ought to be.