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For me, reading the East African portions of this book has been a very pleasant walk down memory lane. Barry Turner had many of the same friends and did a lot of the same things there as me. The difference is that he has taken the trouble to write about them and I haven’t. I am a little envious of the fine job he has done of evoking les neiges d’antan, although snow is perhaps not the best metaphor for all the hot dry miles and miles of bloody Africa!

People who have concerns for the conservation of the natural world have tended to polarize into two groups, often in opposition; those who are somewhat easy going and frivolous and those who earnestly believe people are inescapablely part of nature and have the ability to understand the consequences of their actions on the natural world and behave responsibly.

The first group, most of us, usually comes from a heavily urbanized or suburbanized environment and are apt to look at the less densely populated regions of the world in the arctic, antarctic and tropical regions as similar to urban parks where real people take time out to refresh themselves with sandwiches, bottles of beer, sitting on the grass, with shade trees, squirrels, pigeons and sparrows as relief to the every day tasks of earning a living. This group regards the tropics as a Club Med medley of bikinis, rum drinks, sandy beaches and sex tourism and the polar regions as cross country and downhill ski resorts and polar bear viewing tours, while the second group sees events like the annual burning of the Sahel in Africa and the dry fog it produces as important as the fall of a parliamentary government, the election campaign of a presidential candidate, or the current stock exchange statistics. The people who run things have to contend with both these groups. Barry understands this well, like Shakespeare did long ago: “Dost thou think, because thou are virtuous, that there will be no more cakes and ale.”

I am about to enter my eighty forth year and as an “old Africa hand” Barry’s book is a delight for me, but it is not to the old, and perhaps in some respects, burnt out “old Africa hands” that I recommend From the Plains of Africa To the Jungles of Parliament, but to Youth, as Joseph Conrad understood that word.

Young people today in the developed world, most certainly in Canada and the States as they have grown up have been the unrelenting targets of commercial entertainment hungry for the dollars of their parents’ disposable incomes as the outer ring of a chlorine atom for electrons. Lost in a world of cute and loveable dinosaurs, Barbie dolls and video games they have to shake off the chains of what they can buy and get a hold on what they can do. They can learn marketable skills in school. They can choose and attract friends and mentors of their own liking. They can be hammers, not nails. Above all they must grasp that human beings, like wolves and African wild dogs are social animals. They will cooperate, test and rank. Coming of age Youth can learn a great deal from Barry’s book.

Patrick Hemingway,

Bozeman, Montana, 2012

To my remarkable Mom and Dad who provided

everything to me, and without whom my life would

never have been so fulfilling.