By Matthew Oates
Matthew Oates has led a butterflying lifestyles. Naturalist, conservationist and passionate lover of poetry, he has committed himself to those exalted creatures: to their remark, to making a song their praises, and to making sure their survival. according to fifty years of designated diaries, In Pursuit of Butterflies is the chronicle of this life.
Oates leads the reader via a life of butterflying, around the mountain tops, the peat bathrooms, sea cliffs, meadows, heaths, the chalk downs and nice forests of the British Isles. choked with humour, zeal, digression, services and anecdote, this ebook offers a profound come upon with certainly one of our nice butterfly fanatics, and with a half-century of butterflies in Britain.
Read Online or Download In Pursuit of Butterflies: A Fifty-year Affair PDF
Similar nature books
A number one determine within the rising box of extinction stories, Thom van Dooren places philosophy into dialog with the ordinary sciences and his personal ethnographic encounters to vivify the cultural and moral importance of modern day extinctions. not like different meditations at the topic, Flight methods contains the particularities of genuine animals and their worlds, drawing philosophers, common scientists, and basic readers into the event of dwelling between and wasting biodiversity.
Even supposing the time period "poaching" has now come to consult hunters and anglers who intentionally flout video game rules, famed outdoorsman John Watson makes use of those words in a broader, much less pejorative experience during this assortment, which brings jointly a sequence of looking articles he released in numerous periodicals during the process his profession.
The Big Marsh: The Story of a Lost Landscape
A rural group is modified eternally while moneyed pursuits conspire to remodel a precious wetland.
Information and the Nature of Reality
Many scientists regard mass and effort because the basic foreign money of nature. lately, even if, the idea that of knowledge has received value. Why? during this publication, eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians chart a number of elements of knowledge, from quantum details to organic and electronic info, so that it will know how nature works.
- Hare (Animal)
- Elephant (Animal)
- Rats: Observations on the History and Habitat of the City's Most Unwanted Inhabitants
- Lucretius: On the Nature of Things (1873 press)
Extra info for In Pursuit of Butterflies: A Fifty-year Affair
Sample text
15 THE CHALLENGE TO SCIENCE A confrontation between these views has become unavoid able. For a long time this confrontation was postponed by con sidering irreversibility as an illusion, as an approximation; it was man who introduced time into a timeless universe. How ever, this solution in which irreversibility is reduced to an illu sion or to approximations can no longer be accepted, since we know that irreversibility may be a source of order, of co herence, of organization. We can no longer avoid this confrontation.
Isaiah Berlin has rightly seen in this question the beginning of the schism be tween the sciences and the humanities: The specific and unique versus the repetitive and the uni versal, the concrete versus the abstract, perpetual move ment versus rest, the inner versus the outer, quality versus quantity, culture-bound versus timeless principles, mental strife and self-transformation as a permanent con dition of man versus the possibility (and desirability) of peace, order, final harmony and the satisfaction of all ra- tional human wishes-these are some of the aspects of the contrast.
We believe that to some extent ever y language provides a different way of describing the common reality in which we are embedded. Some of these characteristics will survive even the most careful translation. In any case, we are most grateful to Joseph Ear ly, Ian MacG il vray, C arol Thurston, and especially to Carl Rubino for their help in the preparation of this English-language version. We would also like to express our deep thanks to Pamela Pape for the careful typing of the successive versions of the manuscript.