“Waiting for the Macaws is a haunting reminder of the scale and breadth of what can only be described as a catastrophe of the human spirit and imagination.”—Wade Davis, author of Light at the Edge of the World and Explorer-in-Residence, National Geographic Society

Waiting for the Macaws is a haunting and beautifully written account of the age in which we live. Journeying around the world, Terry Glavin argues that all extinctions are related and that the language of environmentalism is inadequate to describing this great unravelling.

But Glavin discovers that there is hope, finding it in the most unlikely places—a macaw roost in Costa Rica, a Small village in Ireland, a community of Norse whalers on the Lofoten Islands in the North Atlantic, the vault beneath the Royal botanical Garden at Kew, and the throne room of the Angh of Longwa in the Patkai Range of the eastern Himalayas.

"What Glavin had to tell is urgent, important, and well said."
—Ronald Wright, author of A Short History of Progress

"Waiting for the Macaws asks us to care, deeply, about living in the midst of the greatest extinction rates of the past 65 million years. If there's room for hope, it can be found in a book like this."
— The Globe and Mail

"Glavin is an amiable companion on this around-the-world expedition ... The reader is fortunate to be joined on the voyage by so lyrical an essayist."
— Canadian Geographic

"One of the best in-depth journalists working outside the mainstream. His work reveals a formidable intellectual ability to discern the big picture in the smallest events."
—The Vancouver Sun