Past Winners of the Gene E. & Adele R. Malott Prize for Recording Community Activism

 
For the Years 2007-2008

The Langum Charitable Trust announces the first winner of the newly created and unique Malott Prize for Recording Community Activism.

Bruce Barcott, The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird (New York: Random House, 2008).

Bruce Barcott has managed to write an environmental thriller, well, certainly a page-turner. His book is a highly-readable account of a crusade to block a dam over the Macal River in the west of the Central American country of Belize. The backwaters created would destroy the habitat of that country’s Scarlet Macaws.

Barcott writes tightly and takes the reader with clarity and suspense through the minutia of the environment factors, construction details, political fights, and legal battles that move from the Belize courts all the way to the Privy Council in London. His task of building an interesting book was made easier by the rich stew of factions and factors engaged in the struggle. On one side is Sharon Matola, a somewhat quirky American expatriate living in Belize, head of the privately-run Belize Zoo, and the protagonist in a long, tiring crusade to block construction of the dam. Opposing her are corrupt Belizean officials who attempted to stop her efforts by threatening to put a national dump next to her zoo, and, after that threat was blocked, painted her as an outsider, an environmental imperialist, a tool for former white masters who would deprive the black man of his own country’s electric power. Lurking in the background are incompetent scientists and also corrupted scientists silenced by lucrative consultation contracts, avaricious private power companies, eager construction companies, and a largely uninformed and apathetic public.

Barcott moves the reader with clarity, step-by-step through years of public opinion struggles, political wrangles, and legal maneuvers. He builds suspense by not revealing the denouement, the outcome, until the very end. I think, in that regard, that I will follow his lead.

This book is a good read. The Langum Charitable Trust is proud to designate it as the first winner of the Gene E. and Renee R. Malott Prize for Recording Community Activism, for the years 2007-2008. DJL, Sr.

Please see publicist’s release at http://bookbuzz.com/langumtrust.htm.

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