BOOKS, PUBLICATIONS & PRESENTATIONS

Thomas Urquhart’s first book, For the Beauty of the Earth: Birding, Opera and Other Journeys, creates an exhilarating portrait of Mother Nature. Using his own background as an example, the author describes how a stewardship ethic can be shaped by a love of art as well as nature. Both are passions that have defined his appreciation of the world all his adult life. Above all, he suggests that in the proper balance, human activity and nature combine to provide the most emotionally satisfying landscapes in which to live, and that they deserve as much protection as wilderness areas such as traditional wilderness areas.

For the Beauty of the Earth: Birding, Opera and Other Journeys By Thomas Urquhart Shoemaker & Hoard Cloth, 6 x 9 $26.00 ($38.95 Canada) 320 pages 1-59376-017-5 To order this book, click here.

Urquhart starts by exploring his boyhood through the prism of his interest in nature, history and music, and the way these experiences blended into a perspective that guided his career, first in the performing arts and subsequently as a conservationist. He writes: “Urquhart Castle, dominating one end of Loch Ness, is the romantic ruin par excellence, and the Monster has made Urquhart Cove its home. My grandfather was said to have had frequent social intercourse with it, and I have always like to attribute my dedication to protecting endangered species to this familial connection: Nessie is my kinsman.”

There are lively anecdotes of other ancestors—his grandmother, “a patron saint of lost causes” who cherished her signed photo of Robert E. Lee, his great aunt Catharine, arrested with Edna St. Vincent Millay while protesting what she considered the judicial murder of Sacco and Vanzetti, and even back to the great 17th-century translator of Rabelais, Sir Thomas Urquhart, who, it is said, died laughing.

Through the years, birding has provided Urquhart with his opportunities for travel, his practical education and his passionate place in the natural world. From the hills and fields of England – both olde and New – he pursues the interests inspired by his double exposure to nature and art, taking us to Italy for “birding through the Renaissance,” and from thence to the wild landscape of the Camargue in Provence, and the villages of Mali in West Africa. Always on the lookout for signs in the landscape of the relationship between man and nature, he concludes with a plea to recover our species’ original relationship with nature in the light of the wisdom we have gained in the course of our evolution.

Shoemaker & Hoard