From Rwanda to Honduras to Belize to Kenya, and many places in between, writer and naturalist Neil Griffin went in search of the world’s dying species. He found it most depressing closest to home in North America. “We kind of live in this animal mausoleum in North America,” Griffin told CTV News. Griffin, originally from Calgary and now an instructor at the University of Victoria, says over the past 150 to 200 years, North America has lost so much wildlife with so many salmon, whales, buffalo and caribou disappearing from our plains, rivers and oceans. Griffin’s new book is Endings: Encounters with Extinction, and, despite the title, he managed to find some reasons for optimism. “In all of these endings, there’s always this new beginning; all of our cultural myths and stories about extinction, about cataclysm and catastrophe, they have fresh, new beginnings in them,” Griffin said. “The buffalo almost went extinct, but now we have wild buffalo again in Banff for the first time in a hundred years,” Griffin said. He’ll be in Calgary for two Wordfest events in October.
