Conservationist from the heart

By Dan Hilborn
Published May 13, 2006


The statistics are grim.

Roughly 34,000 varieties of plants are threatened with extinction. One in eight bird species is expected to go the way of the dodo during the next few decades, as are one in four mammal species, one in three amphibians and half of the world's fish species.

But there is a silver lining in all that bad news, according to Burnaby native and noted conservation writer Terry Glavin. A longtime reporter at The Columbian and later the Vancouver Sun newspapers, Glavin knows the importance of putting the bad news first. And that's exactly what he's done with his sixth book, Waiting for the Macaws and other stories from the age of extinctions.

"The funny thing about this book - I ended up with a much higher regard for my fellow man than I had when I began," Glavin told the Burnaby NOW during a telephone interview from his home in the southern Gulf Islands earlier this month.

"And I think part of that is because there is a great and spectacular human history - a remarkable and noble history of struggling to strengthen the things that remain."

Elegantly written, with his conservationist's heart shining throughout, Waiting for the Macaws is already turning heads in the world of Canadian literature. It is also a natural evolution from his earlier writings, such as his 1999 book Dead Reckoning, which begins with a description of a devastating fish kill on Byrne Creek, the South Burnaby waterway that served as Glavin's boyhood playground.

"If there's room for hope, it can be found in a book like this, a book suffused with an urgency that is never haranguing," writes Lorraine Johnson, a reviewer in the Globe and Mail.

B.C.'s best known conservation writer, Stephen Hume, has even greater praise. "This guy (Glavin) is one of the best in-depth journalists working outside the mainstream. His work reveals a formidable intellectual ability to discern the big picture in the smallest events."

Such comments are not surprising, given the lengths Glavin went to while researching this book. Waiting for the Macaws opens at his mother's family farm in Ireland, stops at the Singapore Zoological Gardens and takes its title from his sojourn into the Curu National Wildlife Refuge in Costa Rica.

He meanders through the slums of Calcutta, describes the joy of his children 'stealing apples' from their neighbour's tree and then visits the most inaccessible and tenacious pockets of humanity in the world in the deepest recesses of the Himalayan mountains.

What is surprising is Glavin's often-expressed belief that many of the people involved in the environmental movement have misdiagnosed the problem.

"I think it's a terrible mistake to imagine that people only recently became concerned about this thing we so incoherently describe as the environment," Glavin said. "We have this idea - and I think it is very wrong - that we are separate and apart from nature; that there is the wild and then there is the tamed."

For instance, while Glavin does not get terribly upset about the proliferation of genetically modified foods, he does express concern about the ownership and control of the patenting of plant species by private corporations.

"The last thing we want to see is any winnowing of the diversity of food crops," he said. "We have to protect that, especially now when the earth is going through cataclysmic climate change. We have to figure out which crops we can grow in which environments.

"Pretending that we can rely on some guys in lab coats to replicate that kind of resilience is dreaming," Glavin said. "Sure, let them do their work, but we cannot surrender this legacy of diversity."

And while Glavin does believe that humanity is being propelled toward a precipice of sorts, he still has a sense of hope and optimism grounded in the faith that humanity has survived many other similar catastrophic changes in the past. That hope comes from working together.

"What we need to do is talk to one another as neighbours, friends and fellow citizens. To use the language of common speech and avoid the jargon-rich speech of ecologists and environmentalists. We need to start talking about what matters and reclaiming our rights and entitlements as citizens.

"It's absolutely remarkable how people have lost in a very short period of time - 30 or 40 years - people have lost a sense of ownership to the water, air, trees and fish around them. People have become inured to so much of this ecological destruction because they don't see it as stuff that belongs to them.

"But it does belong to us, and we are entitled to decide. And I think it begins there," he said. "One thing I've learned is that the local really does matter. For all the terrain I've traversed geographically while writing this book, at the end of the day it confirmed in me the opinion that there is great virtue in focusing on the local and in being good citizens of your neighbourhood, city, province and country."

And during a reading at the Simon Fraser University's Harbour Centre campus on April 10, Glavin also offered another piece of advice for anyone interested in making the world a better place. "You do everything you possibly can," he said.

Waiting for the Macaws is published by Viking Canada, a division of the Penguin Group, and retails for $35.