Waiting for the Macaws: And Other Stories from the Age of Extinctions
By Terry Glavin
Viking Canada, 318 pages, $35
Of all the questions we could ask ourselves, one of the most pressing is: What will make us care? Forget the maudlin baggage that adheres to the word: Care carries with it concern for and attention to how things are, and the desire to make things better. It's about all that's ever changed anything for the good.
Waiting for the Macaws asks us to care, deeply, about living in the midst of the greatest extinction rates of the past 65 million years. 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, with an approach immersed in the human need to connect and transform through story.
That thousands of species are at risk, globally, of extinction should not be news to anyone, and Terry Glavin wisely chooses to keep the tabulations of loss to a minimum. Anyway, statistics have proved to be spectacularly unsuccessful as a galvanizing force for change. The numbers are readily available: 12.5 per cent of the world's known plant species threatened with extinction; one in eight bird species; one in four mammals; one in three known amphibians; and on and on.
Numbing numerical assaults aren't Glavin's approach, though he includes just enough to alarm even skeptics and discomfort doubters. Instead, his accounting takes the form of tales from wide-ranging frontiers in the struggle to make sense of what humans are doing to the planet.
Glavin's storytelling traverses the globe, from his home on Mayne Island in British Columbia to places as diverse as the Lofoten archipelago off the coast of Norway, the Amur River in Russia's Far East and the Patkai Range of the eastern Himalayas. Deceptively simple chapter subtitles — "A tiger," "A bird," "A flower" — serve as springboards for his roaming narrative.
Deceptively simple, too, is Glavin's description of his quest: "At a time when the world is filled with dread and foreboding, and when the great master narratives we've relied on to understand things are collapsing all around us, there should be some virtue in going for a walk through the hills and coming back at the end of the day with an account — a story — of what's out there."
One of the master narratives Glavin rejects is the one you'd expect to find in a book about extinctions: the language of environmentalism, which he characterizes as "wholly inadequate to the task" of describing the world's withering diversity. The key here, central to the book and the source of its exhilarating expansiveness, is that Glavin is talking not only of diversity lost at the level of wild plants and animals, but also at the cultural level of domesticated species, languages, traditions, human societies and local knowledge — in short, all the ways of seeing, knowing and being in the world.
Which explains something you would not expect in a book about extinctions — the author's casual reference to enjoying a meal of roasted minke whale ("not at all fishy"). In the chapter titled Drifting in the Maelstrom, Glavin dives fearlessly into the stormy waters of the whaling debate, exposing the hypocrisies of the International Whaling Commission and the paradoxes of global conservation politics. If the relatively small-scale and, Glavin says, sustainable Norwegian harvest of minke whales is shut down, it will be at the cultural expense of Norway's Lofoten Island whalers: "Eventually, their old stories would die."
In a later chapter, half a globe away on the border of India and Burma, the king of the Konyak people says essentially the same thing: "Our spirits reside in the tiger ..... if the tiger vanishes, our souls, too, will vanish."
