Return to Warden's Grove
Science, Desire, and the Lives of Sparrows
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- $34.99
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- $34.99
Publisher Description
Based on three seasons of field research in the Canadian Arctic, Christopher Norment’s exquisitely crafted meditation on science and nature, wildness and civilization, is marked by bottomless prose, reflection on timeless questions, and keen observations of the world and our place in it. In an era increasingly marked by cutting-edge research at the cellular and molecular level, what is the role for scientists of sympathetic observation? What can patient waiting tell us about ourselves and our place in the world?
His family at home in the American Midwest, Norment spends months on end living in isolation in the Northwest Territories, studying the ecology of the Harris’s Sparrow. Although the fourteenth-century German mystic Meister Eckhardt wrote, “God is at home, we are in the far country,” Norment argues that an intellectual, emotional, and spiritual “far country” can be found in the lives of animals and arctic wilderness. For Norment, “doing science” can lead to an enriched aesthetic and emotional connection to something beyond the self and a way to develop a sacred sense of place in a world that feels increasingly less welcoming, certain, and familiar.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
For three summers, field biologist Norment (In the North of Our Lives) lived in a stand of spruce called Warden's Grove in the Canadian Northwest Territories, studying the breeding habits of a songbird known as Harris's sparrow. In this affecting book, he meditates on the desire for wilderness and solitude that drew him to such a remote place, and he tells what it's like to be alone for hours in a silent, forbidding environment observing an animal in its natural habitat. For him, scientific research can "contribute as much to an emotional, subjective relationship with the natural world as do art, literature, music, and poetry"; even taxonomy, often considered nothing more than the prosaic science of naming and classifying living things, has poetry. The official Latin name for Harris's sparrow, for example, means "the banded thrush with the whistle-like song," which beautifully evokes the essence of this little bird. As he reports on what he learned from his patient observation and reflects on the months he spent attempting to understand the birds' minds as well as his own, Norment eloquently affirms the beauty of biological fieldwork as a vital way "to pay attention to the world" and be connected with something outside the self.
