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The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw
One Woman's Fight to Save the World's Most Beautiful Bird
1 of 1 copy available
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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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
January 13, 2009 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9781588368003
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9781588368003
- File size: 2267 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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November 26, 2007
Barcott (The Measure of a Mountain
) relates the dramatic and heart-rending story of one woman’s struggle to save the scarlet macaw in the tiny country of Belize. Sharon Matola, an eccentric American who directs the Belize Zoo, learned in 1999 that a Canadian power company planned to build a dam that would destroy the habitat of the 200 scarlet macaws remaining in Belize. Helped by native Belizeans and the Natural Resources Defense Council, Matola mounted a six-year campaign against the dam, undaunted by government officials who branded her an enemy of the state and threatened to destroy her zoo by locating a new national garbage dump next to it—a vindictive act halted only when Princess Anne of Great Britain, which gives Belize millions in aid, planned to speak out against it. But the combined forces of a determined corporation and a corrupt government were unrelenting, even after it was revealed that the power company’s geological studies of the site were faulty and the dam could put human lives at stake. Barcott’s compelling narrative is suspenseful right up to the last moment.
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