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 as well as participating in the Port Townsend, Pacific Northwest, Sitka, and Desert writing conferences, and has 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 magazines and journals. His fourteen books include the The Thunder Tree (soon to be re-issued by Oregon State University Press), 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; Chasing Monarchs: Migrating with the Butterflies of Passage; the Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Butterflies, Handbook for Butterfly Watchers; The Butterflies of Cascadia; Walking the High Ridge: Life as Field Trip (in the Milkweed Credo Series), and Sky Time in Gray's River, a book about the local landscapes of the home he shares with botanist and silkscreen artist Thea Linnaea Pyle. Mariposa Road, a chronicle of adventures that took place during what he calls his "Butterfly Big Year" is due out in the fall of 2010, while a long-promised and eagerly awaited novel, Magdalena Mountain, is still in progress.
Mariposa Road: The First Butterfly Big Year.
2010. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,
Sky Time in Gray's River: Living for Keeps in a Forgotten
Place.
2008. Mariner Books, Boston.
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. (Soon to be
re-issued from Oregon State University 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.
Selected chapters or other contributions in books or journals:
"The
World
at
our Doorsteps"
essay in the Gray's River Grange
Newsletter, May 2010.
Place-based
Education in the Global Age: Local Diversity (2008). Eds.
D. Gruenewald, G. Smith. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
(essay "No child left inside: nature study as a radical act")
Children and
Nature: Psychological, Sociocultural, and Evolutionary Investigations
(2002). Eds. P. Kahn; S. Kellert. MIT Press.
(essay "Eden in a vacant lot: special places, species, and kids
in the neighborhood of life")
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).
Eds. 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.
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.
Pearson, Michael. 1996. Robert Michael Pyle.
In
John
Elder, ed., American Nature Writers, Volume 2, pp.
733-39.
New York : Charles Scribner's Sons.
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
Review of Where Bigfoot Walks from New Scientist
Brief review of Where Bigfoot Walks from Outside
New
Links !
The First Butterfly Big Year: RMP's recent travels in search of
species diversity and habitat is documented first-hand in two places:
The Xerces Society: Notes From The Road
Orion
Magazine: Reports From the Road
And, will wonders never cease?: RMP's Facebook Page
Web page first compiled and composed by
Robert Kuhlken, for ENST
455, Environmental Literature seminar,
Central Washington University, Winter Quarter 2000. Updated July
2010.
RMP & RK along Naneum Creek, Kittitas County WA.
