Before the Echo: Essays on Nature

"The natural world is a lot like a game of musical chairs," observes Pete Dunne. "Everywhere you turn, everywhere you go, there are places where living things sit down, niches that support their specific needs. But just as in musical chairs, there aren't enough places to go around. Our species keeps removing them--forcing other creatures to leave the game."

In these twenty-nine essays, one of America's top nature writers trains his sights on the beauties and the vulnerabilities of the natural world. Writing to infuse others with a sense of the richness and diversity that nature holds, Pete Dunne ranges over topics from the wonder of the year's first snowfall to the lost art of stargazing to the mysterious forces that impel people to hunt--and not to hunt. Running like a thread through all the essays is Dunne's desire to preserve all that is "natural" in nature, to stop our unthinking destruction of wild places and wild creatures before we humans find ourselves with "the last chair, in an empty room" on an impoverished earth.

Author: Pete Dunne
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Published: 02/01/2011
Pages: 156
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.46lbs
Size: 8.50h x 5.50w x 0.37d
ISBN: 9780292735644

About the Author
Pete Dunne is a regular columnist for the New Jersey edition of the Sunday New York Times, where most of these essays first appeared. He is Director of the New Jersey Audubon Society's Cape May Bird Observatory in Cape May Point, New Jersey. A widely pub