Customer Reviews:
 Solving real-life environmental puzzles May 11, 2008
Before Al Gore became the spokesperson for the health of the planet, Anne LaBastille had not only saved a few species from certain extinction but had also won awards for her work in international conservation. This book, released in 1980, details her work in Central and South America in the 1960s and early 1970s. If you know LaBastille only for her four "Woodswoman" volumes on Adirondack life, then you are in for some interesting reading here.
Her outreach began in the mid-1960s, when she found herself in Guatemala, studying the flightless giant pied-billed grebes ("pocs," to the natives) that lived on Lake Atitlan. What began as simple research on a little-known species soon became a detective story. Why could she and her makeshift native team find only 80 birds, when the region should have been able to support 200? Were the reed-cutters removing too much nesting material? Were hunters guilty of poaching? Were too many new vacation homes carving up the shoreline? Readers tag along as Anne explores each possibility and poses still more questions. The culprits eventually turned out to be the bass that had been introduced to the lake for sport fishing purposes a few years earlier. Those fish gobbled up the grebes' food supply before the birds could get to it. Anne's discovery led to the establishment of the first national wildlife refuge in Guatemala in 1968. (I haven't read it, but I'm sure her book "Mama Poc" tells the same story, but in more detail.)
Anne's apparent success with the grebes led her to work on behalf of the national bird of Guatemala, the quetzal. From there, even more research took her to sites on Anegada Island and in Panama, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Brazil, and along the Amazon River. We go along for the ride. She networked with colleagues and saw even more intriguing sights when she attended professional conferences in India, Venezuela, and Costa Rica. And in 1974, Anne LaBastille trekked (in spite of a newly-healing broken pelvis) to Geneva, Switzerland, to accept 1974 Gold Medal for Conservationist of the Year. The woman gets around!
And as the chapters progress, and she enters each new region and takes a look around, a theme begins to emerge: "Save the habitat in order to save the species." Over and over again, that's the enduring lesson. (It's a no-brainer NOW, but back in the 1960s, that wasn't entirely the case.) As a scientist, Anne also models good behavior for any scientist planning on intruding on another culture for field work. A collateral message is to include the native people. Ask them what's been happening, and you'll get clues about the health of the habitat. Ask them to get involved, and they'll take ownership of the project. As well they should.
One wonders about the status of these initiatives today. Are conservation / preservation efforts still in place? Or have human greed and overpopulation encroached and overtaken the habitats needed for the survival of the creatures mentioned here? Readers will want to know ... but, like me, they might be afraid of ferreting out current information and learning the cold, hard truth. And so they might be apt to just close this particular book on the subject. Or, perhaps Anne herself will give us an update someday. We'll stay tuned.
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