Moth Snowstorm: Joy and Nature
I first read Moth Snowstorm almost two years ago after listening to an interview on “On Being” between Krista Tippett and the author. In Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy (2015), British naturalist writer Michael McCarthy mixes memoir and nature writing to present a stimulating, beautiful expose on the link between human joy and the natural world. The book evolves from McCarthy’s environmental argument that nature is the one place in which humans may truly find joy. Looking back at his 1950’s childhood in northern England and the ways communing with nature soothed the traumas and chaos of human existence, McCarthy begins this work of nonfiction through memory and memoir. Within the first few passage McCarthy’s philosophical, existential queries about the nature of human joy and its connection with the natural world surface and over the course of the book he presents an impressive and moving argument that I wish more humans would consider.
I found this book both thought-provoking and inspiring, and also troubling. Once he has established humans as wildlife for the vast majority of human evolution (he compares the 500 generations we have lived as farmers to the 50,0000 generations in which we were hunter-gatherers) and the implications on our psychology of such evolutionary truths, McCarthy firmly argues we are emotionally linked to nature. He goes on to explore some of the mass extinctions and mass thinning in biodiversity that have occurred over the last century. As the human population has exponentially exploded (within his lifetime), McCarthy examines several examples of the ways other life forms and habitats have been negatively impacted. The titular reference to what he recalls as the “moth snowstorm” experienced in his childhood when driving at dark along country roads is an experience no longer possible as a massive (and global) thinning of winged insects has occurred. He looks back on his childhood and realizes,
“I was immensely lucky: I discovered it [love of nature] right at the end of what one might call the time of natural abundance (at least, in my own country of England). [. . .] sometimes the moths were in such numbers that they would pack a car’s headlight beams like snowflakes in a blizzard, there would be a veritable snowstorm of moths, and at the end of your journey you would have to wash your windscreen, you would have to sponge away the astounding richness of life” (12-13).
And it is from this place, nearing the end of his life, that McCarthy crafts his thesis, evidenced by his personal experience alongside evolutionary psychology and juxtaposed with the stark reality that we are killing that which gives us fundamental joy.
McCarthy contrasts the world of his childhood with the world of today, and examines the math at the heart of human population and its impacts on nature: “This is the sudden headlong rush of exponential growth. It took us all by surprise. After the long unfolding of the human story, after all the millennia of history and of prehistory, it happened in a mere four decades, well within a single human lifetime, indeed within my own: between my teenage years and my middle years, between 1960 and 2000, the world’s population doubled, from 3 to 6 billion” (14). As McCarthy faces this crisis of numbers and the ensuing catastrophic destruction of the planet, he investigates the legitimacy of the liberal secular humanism, the “creed, which has held sway since Second World War” which has at its heart “a single, honourable aim: to advance human welfare” (19). He finds “a gap at its core: the failure to acknowledge that humans are not necessarily good” (19). In fact, he suggests, liberal secular humanism fails to recognize that “Homo sapiens may be the earth’s problem child” (19). And yet, I do not want to misrepresent McCarthy’s writing style nor his thesis: this is not a book that demonizes human achievement and condemns the modern age. His prose vacillate between philosophical considerations such as this one, memoir as he recalls childhood lived in the shadow of his mother’s lifelong battle with mental illness, and his intimate and beautifully expressed relationship with the natural world.
He also contemplates the fate of nature as human population, and urban centers (where, as he notes, the majority of people now reside), continue to grow at exponential rates: “[N]ature may come to represent for billions – for two-thirds the world, by mid century – merely what the city is not: a folk memory of clean air rather than smog, of clean rivers rather than polluted ones, of grass and trees rather than concrete and cars, of wild creatures freely existing, not seen merely in / visual representations” (126-127). As a human most at home in the natural world who craves constant interaction with trees and sky and mountains, I found McCarthy’s writing about urban populations illuminating. And I found myself thinking about this book when I recently traveled to two of the three biggest urban centers in the Americas (Mexico City and Lima, Peru); like McCarthy the reality of so many people who are raised in, live with, and die among such population-dense surrounding saddened me, largely because I realized many of them would never experience joy in nature. It is easy for those of us who live outside of the megalopolis of the world to forget how many humans live within them; McCarthy’s project is to consider not only the negative impact of such mega-cities on nature, but also on the human psyche. In Moth Snowstorm, he identifies something beyond direct contact with nature that humans will lose as we continue to flock to large cities that inevitably make nature a distant memory:
“It is the intimate feel for the natural calendar, for the earth’s great annual cycle of birth and death and rebirth, a feel which was one of the key attributes of our prehistoric ancestors and which has persisted among people living in the countryside long after city dwellers lost the conscious sense of it [. . .] I mean the feel for the switches and the transformations, for the tiny signs, easily stifled by traffic noise and electronic music or submerged by pollutions, that great changes are under way with the earth; the feel for the hints of the journey starting, rather than the trumpeted proclamation of the arrival. These signals, above all of the world’s reawakening after winter, have produced intense pleasure and excitement and indeed reverence in us since we began to be human, they have produced the most powerful emotions, and not infrequently in my own case, they have produced joy” (127).
This connection between joy and observing the first shoots of crocus or snowdrop sent up in earliest spring/late winter, if you are anything like myself (or McCarthy, for that matter), is something tangibly familiar. Thus, “the loss of this. The loss of familiarity with the cadences and pulses of nature which will extend to so many more of us in the two-thirds urban world of the years to come, seems to me to be sad beyond words, not least because it will go unmarked and unmourned, since for someone struggling for food and basic healthcare and education for their children in a megacity shanty-town without sanitation or energy supplies, that will be the most minuscule of their concerns. The rhythms of nature? It will be no sort of concern at all. Of course. And yet it is a great loss nonetheless, as I increasingly feel looking over the joy I have indeed encountered there, the joy I have found in the calendar and in the signals of the awakening world, beginning with the winter solstice. [. . .] The moment when the days stop shortening and start getting longer again, celebrated for millennia” (127-128).
If you, like me, appreciate your relationship with the natural world or enjoy considering implications of evolutionary psychology or the mass extinctions and endangerments our world currently faces, this book will likely charm you. It will be a book from which you copy out passages so you can revisit them a different day. McCarthy’s prose, sprinkled through with excerpts from Philip Larkin or William Wordsworth poetry (among others) will likely haunt you in your daily life, and it is a book you will want to discuss with others. Or so it was with me. I read this book for the first time two winters ago and re-read it this fall, happy to sort out the details of his argument once again. It is a book, I will likely re-read again and again, reveling in some of the beautiful ode-to-nature passages, and reminding myself of the key arguments in McCarthy’s thesis. In the end, Moth Snowstorm presents an environmentalist argument based on the tenants of evolutionary psychology and evidenced by memory-driven memoir and a naturalist writer’s observations of a planet under threat.
A Few Great Passages:
“That we might love the natural world, as opposed to being wary of it, or instinctively conscious of its utility, may be thought of as a commonplace; but over the years it has increasingly seemed to me a remarkable phenomenon. For after all, it is only our background, our context, the milieu from which, like all other creatures, we have emerged. Why should it evoke in us any emotion beyond those, such as fear and hunger, that are needed for survival? Can an otter love its river? And yet it is the case, that the natural world can offer us more than the means to survive, on the one hand, or mortal risks to be avoided, on the other: it can offer us joy” (5-6).
“Our world is under threat, as it has never been before, from a malady previous generations did not anticipate: the scale of human enterprise. Down the centuries, in considering human affairs, our attention has been fixed on their direction, on the implausible, wondrous journey from the flint hand-axe to the moon, via literacy and medicine and the rule of law; gripped by the exhilarating course of the venture, we have not noticed its sheer dimensions creeping up on us. We have been the casual watchers of the waterlily pond, that celebrated pond where the lilies, barely noticeable at first, double in extent every day; they may take fifty days to cover half the surface, but we have not grasped the fact that to cover the remaining half, of course, then takes but a single day only” (14).
“It is only through specific personal experience that the case can be made, which is why I will offer mine. I will explore why, remarkably, we as humans may love the natural world from which we have emerged, when the otter does not love its river, as far as we know, and I will explore how it can offer us joy, through my own encounters with it over many years, touching on the ways it has touched me, just as it may have touched you, and I will do so, not just as a celebration of it, but as a conscious, engaged act of defence. Defence through joy, if you like. For nature, as human society takes its wrecking ball to the plane, has never needed more defending” (30).
“[T]he fifty thousand generations through which we evolved as hunter-gatherers are more important to our psychological make-up, even today, than the five hundred generations we have spent since agriculture began and with it, civilization. We possess the culture of the farmers, the subduers of nature, and the citizens wo came after with their settled lives and their writing and law and architecture and money, yes, of course we do, but deep down, beneath the culture in the realms of instinct, at the profoundest levels of our psyche – the new vision [evolutionary psychology] has it – we remain the children of the Pleistocene, the million years-plus of the great glaciations, when the natural world was not subdued and we lived as an integral part of it, in coming to be what we are. The legacy inside us has not been lost, and in many ways it is controlling” (58).
“The notion that we are part of nature, and nature is part of us, is of course not new; numerous pre-industrial societies, from Native Americans to Australian aborigines, have seen the world in this way (with their ways of imagining taken up by the modern Green movement), and many, many individuals have felt it, and often given it expression. But such notions of our unity with the biosphere have by no means entered mainstream thought, certainly among those people who administer the modern world, who make its decisions and run its governments and its corporation, and the countless millions who take their cue from them: rather, whatever their intrinsic value may be, such concepts have been largely ghettoized as anthropological or spiritual curios. The point about the idea of our bond with the natural world which comes out of evolutionary psychology – call it the bond of the fifty thousand generations, if you like – is that it is of a different order, for if it is true, as I believe it is, then it is not just spiritually true, it is also empirically true. It actually exists. It is a matter of fact” (60).
“It has been well said, that science gives us knowledge but takes away meaning. Certainly, since it began to explain the world in rational terms in the seventeenth century, it has subverted or done away with many parts of our imagination, and there are numerous non-rational ways of looking at the world, once widespread, once resonant traditional beliefs, which we have now ceased to engage with, such as alchemy, or magic, or the power of curses, or the story of Adam and Eve. All of these provided fertile ground for the imagination to flourish, and with their inevitable suppression I think –as with the conquest of the moon, with Neil Armstrong and his great fat boot – that something has been lost” (134).
