Autorentext

Jim Crumley has written more than forty books, mostly on the wildlife and wild landscape of his native Scotland, the impact of human activity on the natural world, species reintroduction, and climate change. His work has been shortlisted for prestigious national awards such as the Wainwright Prize and has been honored in Scotland’s National Book Awards. Jim is a widely published journalist and has published more than a thousand columns in The Scots Magazine and The Dundee Courier, as well as being a poet and occasional broadcaster. He lives in Stirlingshire, in central Scotland.

Klappentext

Renowned nature writer Jim Crumley draws on more than six decades immersed in wild landscapes to illuminate the deep, resonant harmony that shapes the living world-and why protecting it has never been more urgent.

With the clarity, lyricism, and passionate advocacy that have made him Scotland's foremost voice in nature writing, Crumley blends vivid observation, intimate encounters, and seasoned ecological insight to reveal nature as a vast, interwoven symphony . From witnessing grizzly bears on Alaska's Kodiak Island to migrating Icelandic whooper swans, or the rare sight of capercaillie in the Cairngorm Mountains, his eyes and ears record the smallest of details. He hears flutes in the wind through an aspen grove and the deep tones of the piobaireachd-highland pipes-in a Scots pinewood as naturally as the flight of swans in Finland evokes Sibelius. And silence, too, plays its part. For him, our future depends on recovering the long-forgotten skill of truly listening to the land-of recognizing ourselves as part of life's great orchestration rather than standing outside it.

Both a celebration of our planet's great beauty and a call to defend it, Symphonic distills a lifetime of knowledge, care, and commitment from one of the most authoritative champions of the living world.

Zusammenfassung
A lyrical and personal account of Jim Crumley's lifelong quest to find harmony in nature and to hold nature at the centre of his thoughts, writing and actions as he celebrates our precious planet.

Inhalt

Prologue: A Quest for Harmony

1. A Dream of Everest

2. To Have Faith Is to Have Wings

3. Listening to Alaska

4. It Was Not God Who Made the World but Raven

5. To Live Purposefully in This Place

6. The Ridiculous Miracle

7. An Unbedevilled Place

8. The Moon Place

9. Nature and Culture Together

10. Nature's Capacity to Forgive

11. The Symphony

12. Sound Dovetailed with Spectacle

13. Big Tree

14. The Crucial Quality of Silence

15. Essential Harmonies

16. Small Tree

17. Wolf Music

18. Black Sunrise

19. Capercaillie Emergency

20. Wildness and Wet

21. Ring of Black Water

22. The Flow of Swans

23. The Path to the Mountain

24. Sometimes the Path

25. Harmonising with Whales

Epilogue: A Dream of Schiehallion