- The "high ridge" in the title of this autobiographical statement of purpose by one of America's prominent nature writers is a metaphorical place where the upslope of scientific knowledge "joins the opposite slope of artistic imagination," as defined by Vladimir Nabokov.
- Robert Michael Pyle, a passionate lepidopterist as well as a versatile and creative writer, has spent most of his career somewhere along that ridge, following a course where his scientific training merged with a great love for and interest in the out-of-doors. But it is a path that few of Pyle's colleagues were able to follow:
- "People who began as naturalists, biologists, or at least nature lovers, who were moved to work in conservation out of the ideal to protect what they loved, with few exceptions became office and airplane bound, prisoners of committees, meeting-mired. They seldom went out-of-doors with any depth of penetration, and ultimately lost their motivation in favor of other rewards: salary, security, and power."
- This volume, part of the Milkweed Editions Credo Series of nature writers' reflections on their core beliefs, traces the author's evolution from a butterfly-chasing youth to a conservation professional and then a freelance writer and naturalist in emulation of Edwin Way Teale. The best way to be a naturalist, he concludes, is to have an open mind which "neither rejects nor limits itseld to the scientific method but considers it among other tools for palping the universe."
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Walking
the High Ridge: Life as a Field Trip
by Robert Michael Pyle Milkweed Editions, 2000 |
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