Earth's Wild Music

December 1, 2020

You have to just listen. Philosopher Moore (Great Tide Rising) invites focused attention in a collection of her essays that mourn the loss of natural songs and urge others to save the remaining ones for future generations. ("Song" isn't necessarily a bird's trill, but water flowing over rocks or the wind cutting through the trees.) As she explains, each song is part of a larger, beautiful harmony. With the damage or loss of one voice, there is discord. Moore's writing is an interesting mixture of wonder and reality. She details her observations in nature, such as lying next to an eagle's carcass to capture his last glance on earth, then ends each essay with a gut-punching paragraph of the dangers these animals or settings are facing. Some essays are quite poignant and will be relevant to readers, such as "Living Like Birds," which talks about the COVID-19 pandemic. However, readers might question some of her musings. For example, the acerbic list on the definition of hope may discourage potential readers--as well as those who are looking for inspiration to help save nature's songs. VERDICT Fans of Moore will appreciate this collection. For others, it's an optional purchase.--Elissa Cooper, Helen Plum Memorial Lib., Lombard, IL

Copyright 2020 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

December 15, 2020
A heartfelt plea to save nature's cacophony. In a series of essays, many previously published, nature writer and environmentalist Moore offers an ardent warning against the perils of climate change and species endangerment. Writing mostly from Alaska and the Sonoran Desert, the author focuses on sound, which she evokes in sensuous prose that reflects her "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." The peril of extinction means that "each time a creature dies, a song dies." Moore hears sonority throughout nature, from the operatic plaints of humpback whales to the relentless drumbeat of sapsuckers. Even the saguaro cactus emits music: "When the wind blows across the spines, they sing like violin strings." Dinosaurs, too, the author speculates, sang, much like their descendants, the birds. Each essay ends with a sidebar detailing threats to creatures such as grizzly bears, red-legged frogs, and monarch butterflies; providing evidence of pollution; and noting the rise of eco-anxiety. Although Moore shares that anxiety, she also encourages "active hope" that comes from listening to nature "with thoughtful attention" and making a decision to change the course of natural degradation by taking three steps: "Stop the killing. Defend everything that is left. Create new lifeways in harmony with the Earth." She regrets that during the pandemic, humans have been forced to live like birds: "we flutter across the street or around bushes to avoid people, knowing that we are vulnerable to every miasmic wind, that a human touch could kill us. Now and then, we sing from high or hidden places, but mostly we are quiet." That silence is dangerous. "What we need," she writes, "is strength--strength in numbers and strength in moral conviction. What we need is shrieking, roaring courage." The author's passion is evident, though the prose sometimes ascends into rapture. An enthusiastic argument that love, care, and defiance may still save the Earth.

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Starred review from January 1, 2021
With nature in peril, nature writers, Moore avers, must "bear witness, beat the warning drum . . . blow the whistle, call all-hands-on-deck," and she does so with authority and conviction in her newest, gracefully structured gathering of 32 essays "drawn from a lifetime of loving the world." She writes of family and friends, camping and hiking, and celebrates "evolutionary marvels" small and large. Exceedingly knowledgeable, experienced, and expressive, this former philosophy professor shares tales of her adventures in the far north, prairies, woods, and beyond, all while emphasizing Earth's gloriously varied soundscape: the songs of birds, frogs, and whales; the calls of bats and wolves. A grand symphony that is being overwhelmed by human cacophony, while the planet's vital orchestra is being decimated by mass extinctions. Moore details all that we're losing to climate change, spiking gorgeously precise descriptions and dramatic tales of wildlife encounters with grim statistics about the escalating die-off of birds and other species, the "great starving" underway in the oceans, and the ongoing destruction of forests and wetlands. Her "nightmare" for our planet is that "we will lose its soul-sustaining system--the Earth's wild music." We must prevent the looming silence, Moore asserts, by forming a chorus of voices raised in solidarity with all of Earth's wondrous and essential life forms.

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