Earth's Wild Music: Celebrating and Defending the Songs of the Natural World

"I added this book late—replacing The Great Derangement by Amitav Ghosh , which is also a fantastic book—because it has what I think is a very interesting perspective. Kathy is a great writer. She’s a philosopher and has written many books. She’s a climate activist and has been on the front lines of climate activism in the Pacific Northwest. What she’s accomplished in this book, about as well as anyone I’ve read, is she’s balanced the intrinsic grief we often experience when we internalize the ecological prospects—habitat destruction, species extinction, the loss of biodiversity and the threats of climate change —but she also fills the book with celebration. She is able to experience joy in the natural world in the present moment. And she does it through sound and through music. I’m a musician—I taught a course called music and ecology some years ago—and I love the idea of using sound as a means of amplifying your perceptual depth in understanding human nature relations. She chooses the sounds of the natural world to celebrate and she still has space in her heart for that celebration, while also acknowledging and feeling the grief—and she writes about it in such a way that you feel those things, too. It’s a lovely book, it’s one of her best I think, and it very nicely balances all of these questions and issues. She also writes about her family, multiple generations of grandparents and grandchildren. She writes about other creatures as if they are part of her family as well, which is, by the way, something that Robin does, too. Full disclosure: I should say that I’ve worked with both Kathy and Robin over the years. I’m always biased towards writers that I know because you know what great people they are and what great hearts they have. Yes. I wrote a book some 20 years ago now, with the MIT Press, called Bringing the Biosphere Home. I look at the existential challenges of perceiving global environmental change. I cover the issue of balancing hope and despair, indifference and wonder, creation and extinction, faith and doubt. Anyone who’s been in this field deals with these ubiquitous challenges all the time, but they are not discussed as much as they ought to be. These are real feelings that people have. It’s better to discuss, understand, share those feelings rather than deny them or stay silent. Right now, we’re in a very complicated phase of denial in relationship to a whole range of Earth phenomena, from the pandemic and communicable disease to the challenges of climate change and species extinction. There are many reasons for this. Many folks are struggling with basic issues of emotional and material survival. However, these environmental challenges are the most profound questions of all because they are about our planet and our future as a species. That’s a great question. And I have a two-fold response to it. First I will address my role as a teacher and my philosophy of education in general and second I will discuss my personal responses. My teaching is primarily based on personal experience and memory, expressed through art and writing. I typically design learning experiences and activities for adults. I only work with graduate students at this point, and have for most of my career, although I have worked with undergraduates too. I focus on narrative experience. So, for example, if I teach about migration, which I think is a seminal issue—which we’ll get to in a moment with Sonia Shah’s great book—I ask students to create migration maps of their own family’s movement and to create migration maps of the various species that live where they live. I use memory quite a bit in asking people to understand their lives. I encourage them to share their experiences. Then, a text in a class becomes their text. When they read material, the reading is much more alert and alive, because they’ve experienced it in their own words. When I teach, I use those as the basis of how we proceed. Then I create improvisational lectures based on what I think will most engage the group and where I need to fill in some substantive relationships or knowledge. I’ve been doing this long enough that I never have prepared notes, I just think about where they are and what they need, and what I can give them. That’s how I teach. My new book reflects this pedagogy: To Know the World contains a dozen activities of this sort, not just for the classroom, but for anyone who wants to engage in important environmental challenges. For example, I have a chapter called “Is the Anthropocene Blowing your Mind?” where I talk about screens and their impact on how we perceive the world. I suggest what I call a ‘deliberate pause’, taking various moments during the day to get away from the screen and focus on the natural world. In a class, I’ll ask people to engage in such deliberate pauses, and then to write about what they experience. That is really important because it empowers the folks who you’re working with to practice the exercise on their own, while applying and adapting the exercise in whatever learning environments are relevant as teachers or practitioners. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In terms of myself, I’m in my own head way too much. It’s amazing to me how much I don’t see when I’m walking through the woods. Any opportunity I have, I try to remind myself to get out of my head and look at the world. Writing, interestingly, is one way to accomplish this. I often ask myself, when I’m thinking about my next book project, ‘Why do I want to do it? It’s so consuming, and you never know how many readers you’re going to get.’ Ultimately, when I look back at my work—and I don’t want to sound too egotistical here—I’m amazed that I got my act together enough to write it down, to write a book that I still believe in. When you’re just going through your normal day, you don’t have that discipline. Writing (and teaching too) takes you to places that you didn’t know you had inside you. It brings a depth of experience and an enrichment that challenges you to go deeper into your own world, what you see and what you observe and what your own memories are. I find that the writing process deepens my awareness of what I’m looking at and what I’m observing. It sharpens my focus: that is ultimately the best reason to engage in the writing process."