Free The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy by Michael McCarthy

John Muir, the Scots-born writer who emigrated to the United States aged eleven, in 1849. Muir spent his adolescence on his father’s farm in the wilds of the Wisconsin frontier, and after an accident in which he nearly lost his sight, he realised that the wilds were where he wanted to spend his life. In 1868 he moved to California and discovered the mountains of the Sierra Nevada, a wilderness supreme, and for the next forty years and more he informed a growing audience of their transcendental qualities and why they mattered, in lyrical and sometimes quasi-mystical terms: undisturbed nature, he said, was ‘a window opening into heaven, a mirror reflecting the Creator’.
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    By the end of the nineteenth century, then, the value of wilderness, something barely recognised in any other society, was in America formally and widely acknowledged, and the word itself, for long in use disparagingly – think of Jesus in the wilderness – was for the first time being used in a positive way. Thoreau, Marsh, and Muir had all seen something in wholly wild land which made the most powerful appeal to the human spirit, and their perception was increasingly shared. Muir became a national celebrity, not only for his writings but also for his wilderness activism, helping to bring about the creation of California’s Yosemite National Park in 1890 and becoming the founding president of the United States’ first major conservation body, the Sierra Club. By the time of his death, in 1914, the love of wilderness was becoming ineradicably established in the American mind, and as the new century went on it only grew, supported by thinkers such as the lyrical forester-philosopher Aldo Leopold, who called for a new ‘land ethic’ of ecological responsibility. It reached its climax in 1964 when President Lyndon Johnson signed the Wilderness Act, a piece of legislation establishing a National Wilderness Preservation System for America, a gigantic protection scheme for vast areas of untouched, unhumanised country, quite unlike anything else in the world.
    But that was America. They could love their wilderness, because they had it. In Britain, although we cherish our countryside and its gentle beauty, and strive to protect it just as much, it is a landscape which has been farmed time out of mind; there is little that can justly be given the wilderness label, at least in its southern half, in the English lowlands. After leaving King Arthur’s round table in his quest for the mysterious Green Knight, Sir Gawain might have ridden through ‘the wilderness of Wirral’ – few thereabouts that either God or man with good heart loved – yet that was written some six hundred years ago, and by the time I came along, Gawain’s godless Arthurian wildernesswas industrial town and suburb: it was Sunny Bank and Norbury Close. It was long tamed. On the Wirral’s eastern side, anyway.
    The Mersey side.
    Where I grew up.
    But the western side, the Dee side . . . well. Funny. It was not quite so clear-cut. I don’t mean the gentle farmland with its oak-dotted hedges and red-brown sandstone walls, the pretty villages of Caldy and Parkgate and Burton, but the estuary . . . when you first see it, when you come round the corner on to the Parkgate promenade, say, and it’s there smack bang in front of you, mile after mile of empty marshland stretching away uninterrupted to the Welsh mountains on its far edge and the sea at the far end . . . you are given pause. There’s a definite feeling of immensity facing you, of nature untouched on the grand scale, which is hard to ignore.
    Not that I registered it, when I walked out on to the Dee that summer with my new bins slung proudly around my neck and my spirit still in thrall to the scintillating images of Charles Tunnicliffe: I saw it simply as a bird area, an ornithological extension of the Wirral itself. The bottom, southern half of it was saltmarsh; the top, northern half, where the estuary met the sea,