Holdfast

Across twenty-one essays, naturalist and philosopher Kathleen Dean Moore reflects on how people stay tied to the world and how they drift from it. Her organizing image is the holdfast, the root-like anchor that keeps kelp fastened to stone through winter storms, and she uses it to ask what holds us to the ground we stand on. She opens with a warning: people who shut themselves indoors at night, sealing out the weather, can forget for years that they belong to the natural world.

The essays range widely in subject. Moore writes about the sense of kinship that comes from hearing wolves howl together, the painful but unavoidable process of watching children grow into lives of their own, and her wary affection for bears and for storms. She also turns to the vivid lives of sea creatures and to a difficult choice she faced while caring for her father through deep, chronic pain.

Moore moves between ideas and places, from the coast of Oregon to the islands of Alaska, and the book follows her thinking as much as her travels. Readers interested in nature writing, environmental philosophy, or personal essays that blend the two will find much to engage them.

A new afterword considers what nature writers owe their readers now that climate change is reshaping the world.