issue 11: fall 2006

Goodfellastanis
Dan Gawthrop compares two first novels about South Asian ganster life

issue 10: summer 2006

Feminist Fatales
John Moore reveals Livingston’s authorial bravado

issue 9: spring 2006

Blue Guide to the Apocalypse
John Valliant reconciles with Glavin’s global prognosis

issue 6: summer 2005

Strange Encounter
Terry Glavin brings more twists to the Golden Spruce saga

Blue Guide to the Apocalypse

John Valliant reconciles with Glavin’s global prognosis

Waiting for the Macaws (and other stories from the age of extinctions)
By Terry Glavin
Viking Canada, 2006
318 pages, $35

Terry Glavin’s latest book is a horrifying and illuminating journey across our imperiled planet. The result is what I imagine you’d get if David Quammen and Joseph Campbell had teamed up to write a Blue Guide (Guide Bleu) to the Apocalypse: It’s dark, it’s depressing, but it’s also fascinating as hell.

I have to admit that when faced with the kind of global prognosis Glavin gives us on page two-- "The destruction of 70 percent of the natural world in 30 years, mass extinction of species, and the collapse of human society in many countries..."--my first impulse was to throw either the book, or myself, out of the nearest window. Don’t do it!

Even as our home is becoming impoverished by what Glavin terms "the dark and gathering sameness in the world," he shows us hidden worlds within the one we think we know, worlds that are not only surviving but thriving in spite of all. And he shows us the creatures that are fighting their way back from the brink, tooth and nail. He also chronicles the losses we might have otherwise missed, like the crested mynah bird, which was imported to Vancouver by Chinese labourers and which went extinct here in 2003.

Waiting for the Macaws is neither litany nor eulogy; it is a fearless and eloquent attempt to demonstrate the ongoing interdependence between forests and languages, the wild and the tamed, Us and Them. Glavin accomplishes this daunting task through a series of journeys--lenses, if you will--that focus on, among other things, a village, a tiger, a fish, a flower, a world, and a god , and he does it the hard way: by going to where the village or the tiger is--or is no longer--and engaging deeply with what and whom he finds there. His physical, geographic and intellectual breadth are remarkable, and one has the sense that this may be the book he’s been training for all along as, over the years, he practiced his multi-dimensional craft on the people, places, histories, myths and languages of British Columbia.

The book opens in the rugged myth-world of western Ireland, and it is here that Glavin starts equipping us with a variety of tools with which to conceptualize and wrestle a thing that neither economics nor spirituality, anthropology, biology or art are able to encompass on their own. From here we visit the canned wilderness of Singapore’s Night Zoo, the visionary experiment that is Costa Rica’s Curu National Wildlife Refuge, and the Amur River in Russia’s Far East, the home of a seriously endangered uber-salmon called taimen that can attain weights of 200 kilograms. And that’s just the beginning. All the while he weaves in history, politics, folklore and biology--among other things--in a way that allows us to see what is really happening behind the collapses, disappearances and resurgences of a staggering variety of cultures, creatures and ecosystems.

It’s a lot to take in, and sometimes I had the feeling that Glavin was so enamoured of his formidable research that he felt he must include absolutely everything he’d learned. But most of the time he moves right along, and the payoff (his passage into Nagaland in the eastern Himalayas) is amazing; again and again I kept wondering how such an extraordinary place could (still) exist. But it does, and in so doing it inspires a fierce hope--the kind that makes you want to throw open the window and call the world in.

Copyright © John Valliant, 2006

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