Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

Kathleen Moore is many things: an academic, a philosopher, an amateur naturalist, and a subtle observer of such things as tides and lightning. From her haunts on the coast of Oregon she borrows a useful term, "holdfast," to knit together her many interests into an ethic for life. A holdfast, she writes, is a "fist of knobby fingers" that allows bullwhip kelp to cling to the wave-washed ocean floor; it is also a metaphor for her charged view that humans need to stick a little closer to home in all matters. "We professors, who should be studying connection, study distinctions instead," she writes. "When people lock themselves in their houses at night and seal the windows shut to keep out storms, it is possible to forget, sometimes for years and years, that human beings are part of the natural world." The finely honed essays in this collection speak to reclaiming that awareness, taking the life of marshes and tidal estuaries, the silence of the prairie, and the song of the canyon wren as subjects, but also paying attention to such things as baking bread with loved ones and making time to look at the world for oneself. --Gregory McNamee