Grey Owl: Canada’s great conservationist and imposter
One hundred and twenty five years ago, a great conservationist – and imposter – was born in East Sussex. Known as Grey Owl, he was one of Canada’s first conservationists and is said to have saved the Canadian beaver from extinction.
Two years later, after a long trapping season, he trapped a mother beaver and the kittens were left in the lodge to die but Anahareo convinced him to take the baby beavers home. The episode led him to stop trapping animals and begin his writing and conservation work, warning of the dangers of the logging and fur industries and how they threatened Canada’s native beavers with extinction.
There’s a nice new article from the BBC on Grey Owl which begins to have a sense of proportion about his relative accomplishments versus his completely unimportant ‘fraud’. Go read the whole thing and begin to appreciate what a remarkable man this was who understood so much of nature, ecology and beavers at a time when everyone else was thinking the ‘disposable forest box would never run out of tissues or trees’. Among my most treasured possessions is a book signed by Grey Owl. I came across his remarkable story when I found this picture when I was working on “The Sacred Center”. I was as intrigued as I could possibly be.
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For the record, I’ve yet to tempt a beaver into my canoe, although I haven’t given up hope. Here’s the best moment of the 1999 David Attenborough film on his life, who had attended one of his lectures as a boy.
Now for something to read on my Autumn Vacation at the coast where I had the strange fortune of seeing my very first beaver.
Paradise lost? Our memory of nature is in tatters
The Once and Future World, By J.B MacKinnon
Human beings are shortsighted by nature. We experience our brief lives as vast expanses of time, even with a knowledge of history measured in billions of years. Our attention spans are in tatters because of smartphones and tidbit media, and it’s harder and harder to find sustained moments to just look at the world beyond our screens.
The shortsightedness, and the bee thing: Both figure into Vancouver writer J.B. MacKinnon’s new book, The Once and Future World. MacKinnon likes to keep nature close. With Alisa Smith, he co-wrote the bestselling 100-Mile Diet, which helped to launch the local eating movement. He also wrote the narrative for the NFB’s online wildlife surveillance documentary, Bear 71.
Here, he advocates for an even deeper connection to the land we live on, and a longer knowledge of what we take from it. The Once and Future World argues that, when it comes to natural ecosystems, we are continuously forgetting what the Earth really looks like, and as such have forgotten what it is capable of. It is one of those rare reading experiences that can change the way you see everything around you, recommended for anyone interested in anything that lives and breathes.
MacKinnon’s book has a place in a wider movement called “rewilding.” The term is a slippery fish. It can refer to a conservation approach that favours restoring large-scale wilderness areas and connecting them, to protect the habitats of so-called keystone species – animals, like elephants or beaver, which play a role in engineering their ecosystems. It can mean the reintroduction of native species to an area from which they have disappeared, such the return of grey wolves to Yellowstone National Park.
It’s curious to think of Martinez beaver rally as a peoples quest for wilderness in their own neighborhoods, and interesting to consider what might have awoken in me when I began watching our beaver family closer. The book will be released on September 24th and you can pre ordered your copy here. You can bet I will be quoting the best bits for your enjoyment.
