The Pine Island Paradox

"Sooner or later, you will face the island’s paradox.” Exploring the tide-washed shores of the pine island where her family regularly vacations, Kathleen Dean Moore writes about the idea of islands and the web of connections that lie beneath the visible surface.

A gifted storyteller with a sly sense of humor, Moore engages the reader with tales about her family and natural encounters on wilderness excursions or within the fences of her backyard. She writes about thousands of shrimp visible at the ebb tide, fungi her botanist father cultivated in the family refrigerator, her daughter’s night in jail, bad weather, grouse dancing on their lek, and the haunting note—the augmented fourth—heard in the call of a loon, the howl of a wolf, and sacred music. In essays full of rich surface detail, she weaves arguments about the hidden connections that bind the world. She speaks for an environmental ethic of caring that extends from our families to the special places we experience with them, a borderless zone of affection that embraces the human and natural world.

For Moore, the way we choose to live our lives speaks for a kinship that belies “the miserable, lonely world enlightenment philosophers have mapped out for us to live in.” Engaging thinkers past and present (among them Descartes, Hume, Mill, William James, Aldo Leopold, and Thoreau), she focuses on the way our world—the one we live in everyday—gives us opportunities to create moral synapses, to find the integrity that links our backyard garden to a wilderness area and everything in between.