Like so many of the best books, The Moth Snowstorm comes as a surprise. It combines an evocation of the author’s childhood with a passionate, indeed ferocious, attack on what mankind is doing to nature, and the resultant loss of bio-diversity.
Admittedly the combination of personal circumstances and a concern for nature has many precedents. Wordsworth’s Prelude, Thoreau’s Walden and Hudson’s Far Away and Long Ago all make the same connection, albeit about England, the US and Argentina respectively. But Michael McCarthy, a British journalist concentrating on ecological and conservation affairs, is nonetheless very much his own man.
McCarthy was brought up in the UK in the Wirral, situated on the opposite bank of the Mersey from Liverpool. It’s somewhere affluent Liverpudlians aspire to move to — Paul McCartney bought his mother a house there. But McCarthy’s childhood was far from untroubled. His mother, to whom this book is dedicated, was committed to an asylum following a period of apparent mental disturbance, and his father was working in the US and unable to be of help. By the time Mrs McCarthy was discharged the children had moved in with a relative, and room had to be made for the newly-freed mother. Violent rows erupted until the reunited family moved again, this time again in their own home.
Michael, however, felt untouched by these changes. Instead of looking inwards, he looked outwards, to nature. Butterflies, and later birds, became his obsession, and they have remained so to this day. The Wirral (where, as it happens, I too was born) is partly suburban and partly rural, but Michael found his true paradise when he discovered the estuary of the River Dee, which separates the Wirral from North Wales to the west.
The personal and the polemical remain intertwined throughout this remarkable book. In the opening chapter, however, we have first one and then the other, the author collecting illustrated cards showing British birds given out with packets of tea, then a veritable diatribe on man’s inhumanity to just about every other species on the planet.
You might think the assault on nature began with the Industrial Revolution, but McCarthy’s telling and oft-repeated thesis is that much of the most serious damage has been done in the last few decades. Of every 10 places where nightingales could be heard in the UK at the time the Beatles were splitting up, he writes, only one now remains. From 1970 to today, in other words, this particular songbird, never very common, has suffered a 90 percent loss of habitat.
The villain is unambiguous — pesticides. Organochlorine and organophosphate, McCarthy says, burn the land like acids burn a body. And it was only last month that the UK government allowed the use in some circumstances of neonicotinoids, lethal to bees and restricted across the rest of Europe.
Yet for many in the world’s media, development is the buzz-word. Economies are growing, more vehicles are being produced, the world’s rapidly increasing population is making greater and greater demands on resources — some of them satisfied — and the fight against poverty is being urged on us from all sides. So who are these conservationists to deny people their needs? Aren’t they (in McCarthy’s phrase) just a set of middle-class bird-watchers?
Evolutionary psychology, the Sixth Great Extinction (now), the destruction of the Saemangeum Estuary in South Korea (formerly a major migration staging-post), the miracle of migration itself, China’s demand for the parts of large mammals are all considered in this wide-ranging book.
During his lifetime — he was born in 1947 — McCarthy says that half of British wildlife has disappeared. From “natural abundance” the country went to intensively-farmed landscapes in which hedges, copses, woods, ponds and ditches were obliterated, and with them the wildlife they sustained. Other agricultural changes, such as autumn sowing and price subsidies (which made it profitable for farmers to try to cultivate wildlife-rich land previously considered marginal), added to the devastation.
The threats to the UK’s bees has received some publicity, but McCarthy says that this is part of a decline in British insects generally. The “moth snowstorms” of the title refers to moths so abundant you had to stop your car to clean the windscreen. No such phenomenon exists today, he writes.
And then there are London’s sparrows, once prolific, now almost gone. McCarthy’s newspaper, The Independent, offered a prize of 5,000 British pounds for the best analysis of why this had happened (while sparrows in Paris and New York were still flourishing). To date the prize hasn’t been awarded.
He also, after describing watching hares “boxing” in March, re-visits the cuckoo whose alarming decline he described in his whistle-blowing 2010 book Say Goodbye to the Cuckoo. It has been finally proved, through the tagging of five birds with signal-emitting tags that can be followed on Google Earth, that British cuckoos over-winter in the Congo. Watching them caused joy to erupt in Michael McCarthy, the joy of his subtitle, and the ultimate reason, he believes, why we humans should be concerned about, and attempt to reverse, the devastation of all wild species.
I’ve no space to go into the author’s speculations on the place of an appreciation of natural beauty in human evolution, his admiration for British bluebells and harebells, for rivers in general and southern English downs (chalk hills), or the attempts to re-introduce salmon into the Thames, or how dolphins seem to put on displays for the benefit of humans in a passing boat. Suffice it to say that his concluding venture, to see all 58 species of British butterfly in a single summer for The Independent, ends the book very strongly.
In 1962 the publication in the US of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring led to the banning of the pesticide DDT. Other lethal pesticides have, tragically, taken its place. But maybe The Moth Snowstorm will have something of the same effect in leading to an eventual ban on their production and use.
The year was 1991. A Toyota Land Cruiser set out on a 67km journey up the Junda Forest Road (郡大林道) toward an old loggers’ camp, at which point the hikers inside would get out and begin their ascent of Jade Mountain (玉山). Little did they know, they would be the last group of hikers to ever enjoy this shortcut into the mountains. An approaching typhoon soon wiped out the road behind them, trapping the vehicle on the mountain and forever changing the approach to Jade Mountain. THE CONTEMPORARY ROUTE Nowadays, the approach to Jade Mountain from the north side takes an
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and