The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird
by Bruce Barcott
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Book Summary Information
Author: Bruce BarcottEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2008-02-05
ISBN: 1400062934
Number of pages: 336
Publisher: Random House
Book Reviews of The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird
Book Review: Portrait of a Fighter
Summary: 5 Stars
"At times the earth's fate seems so dire and inexorable that I'm tempted to throw up my hands and say to hell with it." The words are by Bruce Barcott, and they reflect what a lot of people feel when faced with global warming, the current destruction of species that many biologists think is a "sixth extinction crisis" (a previous one wiped out the dinosaurs), or the ruin of natural regions for profit. And yet, Barcott found a story of optimism and hope (even if they might have been eventually misplaced) when he heard about Sharon Matola, better known in her adopted country Belize as the "Zoo Lady". She has become an authority on the scarlet macaw, and led a remarkable effort against strong odds to keep the macaw's only known habitat in Belize from being flooded behind the proposed Chalillo Dam on the Macal River. Barcott tells Matola's amazing story in _The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird_ (Random House). It's a story that might have remained obscure, but it becomes an epic in the way it is told, and it is also a legal thriller as Matola and her cohorts pursue one effort after another within the Byzantine Belize legal and political system.
Matola has quite a history. After leaving a marriage by running away to the circus, she wound up in the early eighties helping to film a nature documentary in Belize. The movie featured orphaned animals, and when it was over, she had a jaguar, an ocelot, a puma, and some exotic birds, little money, and no job. What to do besides paint a sign on scrap wood saying "BELIZE ZOO"? As the nationally-known Zoo Lady, Matola has gotten the populace of Belize interested in its natural resources. There are only two hundred macaws on the Macal River where they make their nests, and a dam would not only destroy the macaws, of course, but drive out other animals like tapirs, pumas, river otters, and howler monkeys. Close evaluation of the economics of the dam indicate that it would result in higher energy rates, not lower. The geological analysis that preceded the dam's construction was full of lies. It claimed that there was granite upon which to build the dam, and there was none. The engineers even arranged to have a map of the site lose by eraser a geologic fault line that could endanger it. In Barcott's words, "the dam was a fiasco: environmentally devastating, economically unsound, geologically suspect and stinking of monopoly profiteering." In the middle of the campaign, the government released its vengeful plan to place a garbage dump adjacent to Matola's zoo, another battle she had to fight. She got the help of the Natural Resources Defense Council, the powerful environmental legal team in Washington, and the battle ranged through the local courts and even to the mysterious Privy Council in London. Barcott takes in each legal battle and financial tomfoolery, producing a book that has a great deal of suspense to it.
I won't spoil the suspense by telling the outcome. "The odds are against us", Matola says late in the book, and gets the answer from an environmental-law solicitor, "The odds are always against us." Matola continues at her zoo, and has taken up, among other battles, the protection and reinstatement into the wild of the endangered harpy eagle. Dams continue to be planned and built, many financed outside the nations that will hold them, and placed in third-world areas containing poor people who won't benefit, and politicians who will. Concentrating the story on Matola makes for a brilliant narrative, spangled with instructive thoughts on matters ecological, financial, and political. In summing up at the end, Barcott writes, "People like Sharon are rare and strange and sometimes aggravating... These people aren't perfect. They aren't simple heroes. They are complex human beings. And we need them. Because without them the world would be lost." Barcott's fine book gives us a deep portrait of Sharon Matola, and she gives us one more reason not to give up on humans and their interactions with their planet just yet.
Summary of The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird
“The first time we came here I didn’t know what to expect,” she told me as we paddled upstream. “What we found just blew me away. Jaguars, pumas, river otters, howler monkeys. The place was like a Noah’s Ark for all the endangered species driven out of the rest of Central America. There was so much life! That expedition was when I first saw the macaws.”As a young woman, Sharon Matola lived many lives. She was a mushroom expert, an Air Force survival specialist, and an Iowa housewife. She hopped freight trains for fun and starred as a tiger tamer in a traveling Mexican circus. Finally she found her one true calling: caring for orphaned animals at her own zoo in the Central American country of Belize.
Beloved as “the Zoo Lady” in her adopted land, Matola became one of Central America’s greatest wildlife defenders. And when powerful outside forces conspired with the local government to build a dam that would flood the nesting ground of the last scarlet macaws in Belize, Sharon Matola was drawn into the fight of her life.
In The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw, award-winning author Bruce Barcott chronicles Sharon Matola’s inspiring crusade to stop a multinational corporation in its tracks. Ferocious in her passion, she and her confederates–a ragtag army of courageous locals and eccentric expatriates–endure slander and reprisals and take the fight to the courtroom and the boardroom, from local village streets to protests around the world.
As the dramatic story unfolds, Barcott addresses the realities of economic survival in Third World countries, explores the tension between environmental conservation and human development, and puts a human face on the battle over globalization. In this marvelous and spirited book, Barcott shows us how one unwavering woman risked her life to save the most beautiful bird in the world.
"Barcott’s compelling narrative is suspenseful right up to the last moment." –Publisher's Weekly
"An engrossing but sad account of a brave and quirky champion of nature."–Kirkus
“…A riveting account of one woman’s fight to save one of the last bastions of an endangered
Species. . . Barcott writes of international politics, ecology and endangered species, and human relations with equal facility. This real page-turner of narrative nonfiction is hard to put down.”
–Booklist
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