During his lifetime Charles Waterton was famous for his eccentricities, but also for his achievements and his opinions. A Yorkshire landowner, he turned his park into a sanctuary for animals and birds. As an explorer he learned to survive in the tropical rain forests of South America without a gun or the society of other white men. He was an authority on the poisons used by South American Indians and a taxidermist of note. The huge public that read his books included Charles Dickens, Charles Darwin and Theodore Roosevelt. Above all, he was a conservationist who fought to protect wild nature against the destruction and pollution of Victorian industrialization. Since his death the memory of Waterton's personal eccentricities has flourished, while the originality of his ideas and work has often suffered. Using his surviving papers, the author has redressed the balance in a biography that restores Waterton to his place as the first conservationist of the modern age.
- ISBN10 0712647465
- ISBN13 9780712647465
- Publish Date 28 March 1991 (first published 2 February 1989)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 12 February 1993
- Publish Country GB
- Publisher Vintage Publishing
- Imprint Pimlico
- Edition New edition
- Pages 256
- Language English