Rogue Naturalist

In after-dinner conversation at the table of a friend in Toronto, novelist and naturalist Graeme Gibson remarked that he thought Canada’s four most important thinkers of the 20th century were Marshall McLuhan, George Grant, Northrop Frye and John Livingston. Someone said, “Who the hell is John Livingston?”

I was taken aback because I had long placed him, along with the other three, high up in my pantheon of originals. Only at that moment did it occur to me to ask how it was that the other three still shone so brightly and John Livingston’s star had grown so dim.

Returning from the navy after World War Two, Livingston became a leading voice for the Nature Conservancy of Canada, advocating in his writing and broadcasting the need to combat unregulated industrial expansion if we were to have anything left of the wildlife we claimed to love and the natural world that sustained it. By the time Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring appeared in 1962, he was widely...