Place is what takes me out of myself, out of
the limited scope of human activity,
but this is not misanthropic. A sense of
place is a way of embracing humanity
among all of its neighbors. It is an entry
into the larger world.
-- Robert M. Pyle (from an interview in Pearson, 1996)
Bob has worked as an assistant curator at Yale's Peabody Museum, as a butterfly conservation consultant for Papua New Guinea, Northwest Land Steward for The Nature Conservancy, and guest professor or writer at Portland State, University of Alaska, Evergreen State, and Lewis & Clark College. He has lectured for scientific, literary, and general audiences in many cities and countries, taught numerous field courses and creative writing seminars, been on the faculties of Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory and the Port Townsend, Pacific Northwest, Sitka, and Desert writing conferences, and appeared on NPR's E-Town. He received a 1997 Distinguished Service Award from the Society for Conservation Biology.
In 1979, Pyle moved from Portland, Oregon to the rural community of Gray's River, on a tributary of the Lower Columbia in far southwest Washington. It was a deliberate migration, in the Thoreauvian sense, toward the requisite setting for confronting life's bare essentials and to see what effect that may have on the creative act of writing. As Michael Pearson has commented: "For a man trained in natural history, science, and conservation much more than in literature, the transformation from scientist into full-time writer was a daring step into terra incognita, a metamorphosis reminiscent of the butterflies he studies."
As a professional writer, Pyle has published hundreds of papers, essays, stories, and poems, in many journals. His dozen books include the The Thunder Tree, Wintergreen (winner of the 1987 John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Nature Writing), Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide (1995), the subject of a Guggenheim Fellowship; and Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage, as well as the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, Handbook for Butterfly Watchers,The Butterflies of Cascadia, and Walking the High Ridge: Life as Field Trip (in the Milkweed Credo Series). A novel, Magdalena Mountain,and a book about the home he shares with with botanist and silkscreen artist Thea Linnaea Pyle are in progress.
The Butterflies of Cascadia: A Field Guide to All the Species
of Washington, Oregon, and Surrounding Territories.
2002. Seattle Audubon Society.
Nabokov’s Butterflies.Edited and annotated by Pyle and
Brian Boyd, with new translations from the Russian by Dmitri Nabokov.
2000. Beacon Press.
Walking the High Ridge: Life As Field Trip. 2000. Milkweed Editions.
Chasing Monarchs: A Migration with the Butterflies of Passage. 1999. Houghton Mifflin.
The Thunder Tree: Lessons from An Urban Wildland. 1998. Lyons Press.
Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide. 1995. Houghton Mifflin.
Insects: A Peterson Field Guide Coloring Book. 1993. Houghton Mifflin.
Handbook for Butterfly Watchers. 1992. Houghton Mifflin.
Wintergreen: Listening to the Land's Heart. 1987. Houghton Mifflin.
Butterflies: A Peterson Field Guide Coloring Book. (With Sarah Anne Hughes and Roger Tory Peterson). 1983. Houghton Mifflin.
The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies.
1981. Knopf.
Chapters or other contributions in books:
Wild in the City (2000). Oregon Historical Society.
(Introduction, "No vacancy," and chapter, "Bright Butterflies, Big
City.")
Nature's
Fading Chorus: Classic and Contemporary Writings on Amphibians
(2000). Island Press. (Prologue, "Reflections in a Golden Eye,"
and chapter, "Waterproof Wildlife.")
Facing the Lion: Writers on Life and Craft (1996). Beacon
Press.
(essay "Secrets of the Talking Leaf")
Words From the Land, Volume II (1995). University of Nevada
Press.
(essay "A Grand Surprise")
The Norton Book of Nature Writing (1990).
Ed. J. Elder, R. Finch. Norton.
(essay "And the Coyotes Will Lift A Leg")
Butterfly Gardening: Creating Summer Magic in Your Garden
(1990; new edition, 1998). Xerces Society/Sierra Club Books.
(Afterword and chapter "Butterfly Watching Tips")
The Art of the Butterfly (1990).
Chronicle/Marquand. (Afterword)
Kuhlken, Robert. 2002. Robert Michael Pyle.
In Roger Thompson and J. Scott Bryson, eds., Dictionary of Literary
Biography, Volume
275, Twentieth-Century American Nature Writers: Prose,
pp. 261-270. Detroit: Gale.
Pearson, Michael. 1996. Robert Michael Pyle. In John
Elder, ed., American Nature Writers, Volume2, pp. 733-39.
New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.
Slovic, Scott. 2000. Robert Michael Pyle: A Portrait.
In Pyle, Walking the High Ridge: Life as a Field Trip, pp.
119-146. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions.
Scientific studies and field guides of butterflies have alternated with literary ramblings over such hallowed ground. Wintergreen is at once an elegy and a celebration of the ravaged landscapes of southwest Washington's Willapa Hills. Received with widespread crtical acclaim, this book prompted Sierra magazine reviewer Christopher Camuto to write: "The clear, complex topography of his language pays homage at every turn to the land he describes." In the industrial view of things, this place never had the ghost of a chance. Larger mountains and those ethereal snowcapped peaks just a crow's flight away have captured the attention of the preservationist's agenda in this neck of the woods. But even after logging has transformed his countryside, Pyle seeks solace in its indelible presence. There is a message for all of us here: We must come to understand and to cherish the places we call home. In Where Bigfoot Walks, he turns his attention not so much to the mythical critter of the title, but to its alleged favored haunt and habitat, to a forgotten corner of forest tucked in between the volcanoes of the Pacific Northwest, a place called the Dark Divide. In searching for sign or spoor of Sasquatch, Pyle introduces us to the kind of debate that has become all too common in modern resource management circles where everyone has a "stake" in the decision, and the integrity and the reality and the potential of the place simply falls off the map. In The Thunder Tree: Lessons from an Urban Wildland, he returns to the site of earlier ramblings, and urges connection with nature wherever we may find it, in this case, along a Colorado Front Range irrigation canal. As Michael Pearson has written, "This canal was his place of initiation, the spot that taught him to explore the world, to examine it closely, and to take care of it."
In his rare combination of scientific observation merged with poetic appreciation, Bob Pyle hearkens back to the writings of William Bartram. More immediate predecessors include Rachel Carson. He should most of all be considered as Aldo Leopold's direct heir. In Pyle's work, intimate knowledge of ecosystems, habitats, and environments becomes the irrefutable foundation for more lyrical ponderings of humanity's place in nature, and an unabashed advocacy for treading lightly on the planet.
Nightlife with Insects a short story by Robert Michael Pyle
The Way of the Monarch a natural history essay by Robert Michael Pyle
The Local Connection an essay by Pyle from Defenders magazine
A
war of ideologies, with endangered species as weapons
a High Country News
op-ed piece by Pyle, reprinted from Illahee, Journal for the Northwest
Environment
A brief on-line review of Where Bigfoot Walks
Review of Where Bigfoot Walks from New Scientist
Review of Where Bigfoot Walks from Hungry Mind Review
Brief review of Where Bigfoot Walks from Outside
Terrell
Dixon's research on environmental literature includes photos
of Pyle
Web page first compiled and composed by
Robert Kuhlken, for ENST
455, Environmental Literature seminar,
Central Washington University, Winter Quarter 2000. Updated September
2003.
