Synopses & Reviews
At once joyous and somber, this thoughtful gathering of new and selected essays spans Kathleen Dean Moore’s distinguished career as a tireless advocate for environmental activism in the face of climate change.
In this meditation on the music of the natural world, Moore celebrates the call of loons, howl of wolves, bellow of whales, laughter of children, and shriek of frogs, even as she warns of the threats against them. Each group of essays moves, as Moore herself has been moved, from celebration to lamentation to bewilderment and finally to the determination to act in defense of wild songs and the creatures who sing them.
Music is the shivering urgency and exuberance of life ongoing. In a time of terrible silencing, Moore asks, who will forgive us if we do not save nature’s songs?
Review
“Kathleen Dean Moore rings the bell ’for every sacred emptiness,’ and the result is at once heartbreaking and uplifting. Earth’s WIld Music is a love song to a vanishing world.” Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction
Review
“These pages contain an almost magical combination of superlatively fine-eyed observation, heartbreakingly deep-felt love, and joyous exaltation. Kathleen Dean Moore is a wild-hearted, clear-eyed poet, a voice of the living world, who urges us into caring, dares us to fall in love.” Carl Safina, author of Becoming Wild
Review
“Kathleen Dean Moore is a celebrant of life, a philosopher in love with the world and enraged by destruction of its bounty. She brings her fierce attention and generosity of spirit to the varieties of kinship that enjoy Earth’s astonishing soundtrack. Loon, wolf, meadowlark, bear, canyon wren, Beethoven, Puccini, and Leonard Bernstein all assist her in this paean and plea for awakening the moral imagination and getting real about facing up to and transforming human destructiveness.” Alison Hawthorne Deming, author of Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit
About the Author
Kathleen Dean Moore is the author or co-editor of many books about our moral and emotional bonds to the wild, reeling world, including Wild Comfort, Moral Ground, and Great Tide Rising. She is the recipient of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers’ Association Award and the Oregon Book Award, along with the WILLA Literary Award for her novel Piano Tide. A philosopher and activist, Moore writes from Corvallis, Oregon and Chichagof Island, Alaska.