Support for On Being with Christa Tippett comes from the Fetzer Institute, helping build the

spiritual foundation for a loving world. Fetzer envisions a world that embraces love as a guiding

principle and animating force for our lives, a powerful love that helps us live in sacred

relationship with ourselves, others, and the natural world. Learn more by visiting Fetzer.org.

I have rarely discovered a book that so delighted and galvanized me at once. The Moth Snowstorm,

Nature and Joy is written by the English naturalist and journalist Michael McCarthy.

The sudden passionate happiness which the natural world can occasionally trigger on us he writes,

may well be the most serious business of all. We could stop relying on the immobilizing

language of statistic and take up joy as a civilizational defensive nature. With a perspective

equally infused by science, reportage, and poetry, he reminds us that the natural world is where we

evolved, where we found our metaphors, and it is the resting place for our psyches.

There is a legacy, deep within us, a legacy of instinct, a legacy of inherited feelings,

which may lie very deep in the tissues, it may lie underneath all the parts of civilization,

which we are so familiar with on a daily basis, but it has not gone, that we might have left the

natural world, most of us, but the natural world has not left us. I'm Krista Tippett and this is on

Being. Michael McCarthy was longtime environment editor of the UK newspaper The Independent.

He was a driving force behind that paper's campaign to explain the disappearance of the

urban house sparrow in London. He also orchestrated the great British butterfly hunt. This

became intertwined with his mother's death and her mental breakdown when he was a child had first

led him to take solace and joy in birds and butterflies. I spoke with him in 2018.

I start most of my interviews with a question just wondering about the religious or spiritual

background of someone's childhood. I find that is a very fertile place in everybody's imagination,

...