Waterton's World: The First Environmentalist
| Author | Oliver Houck |
| Pages | 190-193 |
190 Best of the Books: Reflections on Recent Literature
Water ton’s World :
The First Environmentalist
By Oliver Houck
Charles Waterton 1782-1865: Traveller and Conser vationist, by
Julia Blackburn. B odley Head Ltd., 243 pages.
From the March/ April 2013 issue of The Environmental Forum.
The rst environmentalist in t he mod-
ern world was a man few of us have
ever heard of, perhaps because he was
born in the 1700s. I discovered him at a ea
market in England one rainy day last summer
on a table littered with secondhand books,
ashtrays, and other items one step away from
the trash bin. e cover showed a giant dressed
in high suit pants and a billowing white shirt,
no shoes or socks, being hauled ashore on top
of a large crocodile. Peeking from the jungle
around him was an assortment of tropical
birds that would be the env y of any ornitho-
logical museum.
He, in fact, would go on to create his own
museum in England, innovate ta xidermy to
preserve his specimens, create a large wildlife pa rk open to the public with-
out charge (and to inmates of a local asylum, for whom he mounted a tele-
scope to view waterfowl on the lake), launch tenacious litigation to save the
park from factory em issions, write t reatises on nature, write passionately
in defense of all creatures, and challenge the leading intellects of his day.
Darwin read him. eodore Roosevelt loved reading him. His name was
Charles Waterton.
e fact that Waterton is so little known today is pa rtly his own fault. A
contrarian by nature and an eccentric by a ny mea sure (he once scaled St.
Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, leaving his glove on top, which the Pope then
ordered him to remove), Waterton shunned publicity and rejected oers to
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