Through a Green Lens ─ Fifty Years of Writing for Nature

By an early age, Bob Pyle discovered that he had a greater facility with words than with numbers. In school, he found he could get good grades and win essay contests by relying on those words alone. But he wasn't really moved to write until a powerful experience in the summer he graduated brought his pen together with his passion for the natural world, and his first heartfelt essay came out as a revelation.

Thus began a life path devoted to natural history, nature conservation, and the language, and how they all meet in the literature of the land. Working in a succession of far-flung jobs in biological conservation, teaching, and field research, Pyle eventually threw in a regular paycheck in favor of a freelance existence devoted to his mutual passions for nature study and writing.

All along, he wrote, and wrote: to date, twenty books and hundreds of essays, stories, papers, and poems. But it is the occasional prose--the deeply personal essays that explored and indulged his immediate fascinations--that make up this selection of never-before-collected testimonies. Beginning with that 1965 cri de coeur written on mountain motel stationery, Through a Green Lens ranges across broad territory of topic, vehicle, geography, populace, and politics, concluding with powerful forewords for two 2015 books, Earth and Eros and Nerves and Numbers. Pyle's half-century long view, acute and uncommonly attuned to the physical world, gives readers a remarkable window on the natural setting of our life and times.

Biologist, writer, and Guggenheim Fellow Robert Michael Pyle holds a Ph.D. in Ecology and Environmental Studies from Yale University . His twenty books include Wintergreen (John Burroughs Medal), The Thunder Tree, Sky Time in Gray's River (National Outdoor Book Award), two poetry collections, and standard works on butterflies. He has taught place-based writing workshops? from Tajikistan to Tasmania, and in many colleges, including the University of Montana as ?Kittredge Distinguished Visiting Writer. He founded the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, and has been named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Entomological Society. Pyle collaborates with musician Krist Novoselic on recordings of their own compositions for poet and acoustic guitar. He lives in rural southwest Washington.
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