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The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird

Natural History, April, 2008 by Laurence A. Marschall

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

By Bruce Barcott

Random House, 2008: $26.00

To readers jaded by the deluge of nonfiction about vanishing species, the title Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw portends one more tale of woe, even as One Woman's Fight in the subtitle promises a hopeful glimmer of human interest. Nature writer Bruce Barcott's book is a sympathetic saga of eco-activism with a cast of unforgettable characters. Yet it is also an instructive account of the dilemmas faced by environmentalists in developing nations, where competing social, political, and commercial interests turn otherwise clear-cut issues of right and wrong into a rat's nest of difficult choices.

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Barcott's book manages to cover so much territory because it takes place in an extremely small place, Belize, a sliver of land about the size of Massachusetts, just south of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. Belize City, home to about a quarter of the nation's 300,000 inhabitants, has the air of a seedy beach colony, with stilt houses lining a maze of narrow streets. Beyond the coastal swampland, two-thirds of the country is jungle, overgrown and undeveloped since Great Britain exhausted most of its usable timber and turned the place (then called British Honduras) back to the local residents. Novelist Aldous Huxley, who visited in the 1930s, described it as the ultimate backwater: "If the world had any ends, British Honduras would certainly be one of them." Except for a name change at independence in 1981, Belize hasn't changed significantly since then.

One avenue for development might be the tourist trade, of course. Belize has two advantages in this regard: proximity to the United States and vast tracts of wild country in which macaws, jaguars, tapirs, and monkeys flourish. What stands in the way, however, is the lack of a reliable source of electricity, which Belize currently purchases from neighboring Mexico. The country has no coal, no refineries to process its small deposits of oil and natural gas, no capital to construct nuclear generating plants. But it does have plenty of rivers and streams in the interior. And so the local electric company, Belize Electricity Limited (BEL), looks primarily to hydroelectric generation to provide power.

In the late 1990s, BEL began making plans to build a dam across Belize's Macal River. The 150-foot-tall structure would create a reservoir to provide a steady year-round flow of water, dry season or wet, to an existing generating plant downstream, while adding another six megawatts to the nation's power grid. If the power company's figures were to be believed, it was a commendable project that would provide cheap electricity to a poor country without consuming fossil fuels or adding to global warming.

But to Sharon Matola, the director of the Belize Zoo and the protagonist of Barcott's fast-paced narrative, the dam spelled disaster. It would flood one of the largest remaining stretches of wild country in Central America and destroy the only local breeding ground of the scarlet macaw. A single letter of protest she wrote to the prime minister in 1999 blossomed into a strident campaign, a polarizing national debate, the involvement of international environmental groups, and a series of lawsuits that eventually wound up before Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council in London. As the central character in this book, Matola is a journalist's dream: straight-talking, thoughtful, and full of lovable quirks. She's been an Air Force survival specialist and a tiger tamer in a circus, and she commutes through the jungle on a motorcycle. It's not giving anything away to say that Matola comes across as eccentric but often admirable, that the power companies and politicians come across as deceitful and greedy but occasionally well-intentioned, and that the scarlet macaw is still in plenty of trouble. Beyond that, I can only say to jaded souls, this is a book well worth reading.

LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL is W.K.T. Sahm Professor of Physics at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, and director of Project CLEA, which produces widely used simulation software for education in astronomy.

The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird

Natural History, April, 2008 by Laurence A. Marschall

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