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“It is interesting to contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent upon each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us…” —Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species

Robert Michael Pyle’s popular “Tangled Bank” column appeared in fifty-two consecutive issues of Orion and Orion Afield magazines over eleven years. Each essay collected in The Tangled Bank explores Charles Darwin’s contention that the elements of such a bank, and by extension all the living world, are endlessly interesting and ever evolving.

Pyle’s thoughtful and concise narratives range in subject from hops and those who love them to independent bookstores to the monarchs of Mexico. In each piece, Pyle refutes “the idea that the world is a boring place,” sharing his meticulous observations of the endless and fascinating details of the living earth.

By an early age, Bob Pyle discovered that he had a greater facility with words than with numbers. In school, he found he could get good grades and win essay contests by relying on those words alone. But he wasn't really moved to write until a powerful experience in the summer he graduated brought his pen together with his passion for the natural world, and his first heartfelt essay came out as a revelation.

Thus began a life path devoted to natural history, nature conservation, and the language, and how they all meet in the literature of the land. Working in a succession of far-flung jobs in biological conservation, teaching, and field research, Pyle eventually threw in a regular paycheck in favor of a freelance existence devoted to his mutual passions for nature study and writing.

All along, he wrote, and wrote: to date, twenty books and hundreds of essays, stories, papers, and poems. But it is the occasional prose--the deeply personal essays that explored and indulged his immediate fascinations--that make up this selection of never-before-collected testimonies. Beginning with that 1965 cri de coeur written on mountain motel stationery, Through a Green Lens  ranges across broad territory of topic, vehicle, geography, populace, and politics, concluding with powerful forewords for two 2015 books, Earth and Eros and Nerves and Numbers.  Pyle's half-century long view, acute and uncommonly attuned to the physical world, gives readers a remarkable window on the natural setting of our life and times.