Book Review
The Moth Snowstorm by Michael McCarthy
by Andrea Wulf
The time of natural abundance is over, Michael McCarthy declares in his compelling book “The Moth Snowstorm.”Gone are the times when carpets of poppies washed English meadows red or when cornflowers, marigolds and corn buttercups brightened crops with their brilliant colors. Butterfies, huge flocks of birds and choirs of croaking frogs are vanishing, but Mr. McCarthy is not just mourning the loss of individual species - it's the disappearance of plenty he is most concerned about.
The title of his book recalls one of those phenomena of abundance, but if you're younger than 50, you've probably never encountered it：the moth snowstorm. Those who can remember talk of such staggering numbers of moths on summer nights in the English countryside that the headlights of a car would turn them into a whirling blizzard of snowflakes - enthralling, hypnotizing and also blinding. I've never seen a moth snowstorm, but Mr. McCarthy's book reminded me again and again of the seemingly unspectacular profusion that I took for granted as a child：from the constant flapping of moths against the windows of our cottage at night to regular stops on long car journeys to clean the insect debris from the windshield.
Mr. MaCarthy is British environmental journalist, and his book is an impassioned plea that we celebrate the joy of nature. His own moment of revelation came in August 1954 when he and his brother were taken in by his aunt after “my mother's mind fell apart,” as he writes. Here, in a suburb of Liverpool, in a neighbor's front garden, he fell to love. A tall bush was alive with butterflies in a kaleidoscopic display of color：“How could there be such living gems? And every morning in that hot but fading summer, as my mother suffered slightly and my brother cried out, I ran to check on them, never tiring of watching these free-flying spirits with wings as bright as flags.” Later he becomes a passionate bird-watcher, and his accounts of visiting the River Dee estuary are heartfelt and wonderful - a teenage boy with cheap binoculars finding himself in a wild and untamed place six miles from his home near a big industrial city but where he sees tens of
thousands of birds that shade the sky like “a billowing cloud of smoke.”
But before he can speak of joy, he writes of destruction and loss, and visits another estuary, a place where everything is dead：Saemangeum in South Korea. Here a huge sea wall of more than 20 miles cuts off the double estuary from the Yellow Sea. It's the biggest reclamation project of its kind and has destroyed the vast tidal mud flats causing one of the greatest environmental catastrophes for the wildlife in the 21st century. The Yellow Sea mud flats are the most important resting post along the East Asia/Australasia Flyway, one of the world's great migratory routes for shorebirds from 22 countries. A whopping 50 million birds are at risk.
Closer to home, Mr. McCarthy reports that Britain has lost half its biodiversity in only 50 years, and the reason for much of this destruction is farming. Unlike in the United States, where agriculture and wilderness have long been separated, in Britain wildlife coexisted for centuries with farmland - hedgerows, meadows and ponds, for example, provided habitats. Then after the Second World War came new technology, modern farming techniques and chemicals - combined with the knowledge that Germany had almost cut off Britain's food supplies during the war. Never again, the British thought, and farmers were given price guarantees to encourage home production. Suddenly even the most marginal land was considered arable, and chemicals were dumped on the fields. Birds, insects, otters, wildflowers - all gone. This was the “great thinning,” as Mr. McCarthy calls it, and the end of abundance.
