Best Field Guide to the Real Belize. Ever.

books:


	• The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird Bruce Barcott Random House, 2008 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 12 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

An Introduction to Belize

Well written and highly informative, especially regarding the politics of the delightful new country that is Belize. Great background reading if you're planning a trip there - and while there, be sure in include a visit to the Belize Zoo - absolutely amazing!

Portrait of a Fighter

"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.

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Best Field Guide to the Real Belize. Ever.

THE BEST FIELD GUIDE TO BELIZE.
EVER.

You probably won't find Bruce Barcott's The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw in the travel book or nature guide sections of your local bookstore or of Amazon.com, but it just may be the best field guide to Belize you'll ever read.

Ostensibly the story of Sharon Matola, founder of the amazing Belize Zoo, and her campaign to defeat the Chalillo Dam on the Macal River in Western Belize and to save the nesting ground of what are believed to be the last 200 Scarlet Macaws in Belize, it's actually a 313-page crash course on Belizean culture, society and politics.

It's also the most riveting, gossipy and entertaining book on the country since Richard Timothy Conroy's 1997 memoir of British Honduras in the 1950s, Our Man in Belize.

Barcott names names. He pulls no punches. As an American writer - he's a contributing editor to Outside Magazine and the author of a book on Mount Rainier, among other things - he doesn't have to worry about making a living in Belize or raising a family there. He points to the high-level corruption that Lord Michael Ashcroft, the British-Belizean politician and entrepreneur, helped introduce in Belize and who "turned the sovereign nation of Belize into his own tax-free holding company," to the fast-buck shenanigans of the second generation of People's United Party politicians, to the seamy Dark Side of the PUP's "Minister of Everything" Ralph Fonseca, to the shrill shilling of party spokesman Norris Hall, to the fellow-traveling of the Belize Audubon Society and even to the bumbling efforts of some well-intended but barely competent Belizeans.

I've been banging around Belize for more than 17 years, but Barcott's book is full of insights I've missed or didn't understand. It took Barcott to tell to me why so many Belizean politicians wear guayaberas and other open-neck shirts (to set themselves apart from their English colonial masters who slaved in the heat in coats and ties). Barcott explained why and how the Belize Audubon Society, which one would think would be on the side of the at-risk Scarlet Macao, helped get the Chalillo Dam approved (the Belize Audubon Society, under President José Pepe Garcia, at that time a quasi-arm of the Belize government, claimed the Scarlet Macao subspecies wasn't really endangered in Belize and that the habitat of the Macal River Valley was duplicated elsewhere in Belize.)

If there's a fault to Barcott's approach, it's that he relies heavily on the gringo side of the outsider-local divide so common in post-colonial countries, including Belize. Many of his primary sources - Matola, ex-Fleet Street newspaperman Meb Cutlack, Lodge at Chaa Creek co-owner Mick Fleming, butterfly expert Jan Meerman, geologist/dolomite miner Brian Holland and others -while long-time residents of Belize and in many cases Belize citizens -- will always be viewed by some Belizeans as expat, white perpetual tourists. Barcott tried twice to interview George Price, Belize's ascetic, incorruptible George Washington, but was turned away: "He's too busy," the retired Price's sister told him. We hear little or nothing directly from Said Musa, King Ralph or Lord Ashcroft.

It also bugs me that Barcott's publisher, Random House, didn't do a bloody index.

Sharon Matola comes across as a complex and sometimes exasperating woman, neither Joan of Arc nor Wangari Maathai. A fluent Russian speaker, a fungi expert, a former bikini-clad circus tiger trainer, the founder and miracle worker of "the best little zoo in the world," Matola, at the height of the anti-dam, pro-Scarlet Macao effort, almost forsake the battle. She became depressed and for a while, as a long-time Rolling Stones fan, turned her focus to a new campaign to get the city fathers of Dartford, a small working class town near London, to build a shrine to native sons Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.

Even with Matola at her passionate best, the campaign to stop the dam failed, of course. With most of the economic and political power structures of Belize supporting the pork project, and the giant Canadian utility Fortis dead set on damming as much of the world as possible, there was never much chance it would succeed.

Tellingly, however, Matola did win the Battle of the Garbage Dump. Vindictive members of the government allegedly planned to put Matola in her place by building a dump at Mile 27 of the Western Highway, virtually next door to the Belize Zoo. After some clever maneuvering, some of it involving Britain's Princess Anne, the government backed down and decided to locate the egregious dump elsewhere.

One irony came too late for Barcott to include in his book. The environmental consulting company, Tunich-Nah Consultants, headed by José Pepe Garcia, the former Belize Audubon Society president, conducted the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) for Ara Macao, the overblown planned development on the Placencia peninsula. Ara Macao, Spanish for Scarlet Macaw, received approval to build nearly 800 condos and villas, a marina, casino, 18-hole golf course and 400,000 sq. ft. commercial center, all this on a peninsula with no paved road access and a population of about 2,000. The beautiful, smart red parrots must have shuddered, as they searched for new nesting grounds in their fast-disappearing habitat.

In the end, though, Belize is Belize.

With a population of just 315,000, about that of a small provincial Canadian, U.S. or British city, everybody who is anybody knows everybody else, and it's hard to stay mad. As Barcott visits Belize for the last time in researching this book, in 2005, Matola is getting ready to attend a party at Beer Baron Barry Bowen's Belikin headquarters. Bowen, one of Belize's wealthiest men and the country's political check writer extraordinaire, had helped kick Matola's butt. Now, Barcott learned, it was time to kiss-kiss and make up. That's Belize for you.

..............

Review and Opinion by Lan Sluder

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Downhill spiral

Barcott does a marvelous job of weaving the diverse elements and characters involved in this story into a comprehensive narrative. Better than that, he makes what could be very tedious legal proceedings a stimulating read. Well, the reading is stimulating, as is the subject matter. The situation itself, an instance of convergence on Belize of global forces enacting the doom of another unique wildlife habitat, is less than edifying.

Barcott obviously sides with the environmental forces that ally themselves to fight the erection of a dam that will flood the nesting site of the largest scarlet macaw population in Central America, estimated at less than 200 birds. At times his partiality causes blindness to perspectives he does not share, but overall he does an excellent job of presenting the reasoning of all major stake holders.

Barcott chose his subject well. The story is almost like a novel, with corrupt colonialism-playing politicians, heroic but flawed ex-patriot Americans, big international environmental players and corporations, local businessmen caught in the middle, and even the Law Lords of the British Privy Council. The combatants on both sides are committed, highly motivated, and adept at working the system.

All told, this is a very well-written and enlightening telling of one of many current battles being waged over our planet's last remaining wild lands - what's at risk and what's being done to both exploit and to preserve the remaining pockets of natural diversity.

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As great as any mystery novel I've read!

First, a disclaimer -- I'm related to Bruce Barcott, and so was preinclined to like this book because of family and locale references I would recognize. However, this book was much much more than I expected. I'll mention just two things I especially liked about this book. First, it is a true page-turner. I didn't know how the dam project would end, and Bruce's non-fiction story-telling kept me on the edge of my couch throughout. Secondly, I really liked the amount of somewhat tangential information Bruce wove into the main story. He would veer off on some interesting and helpful side road, but always bring the reader back quickly to the fascinating main story and players in the drama. I look forward to the next explanatory journalism that Bruce undertakes.

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3

?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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