HOPE-GEO'S CARE-6 tour field-journal #6

Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE)’s

Global Emergency Operation (GEO)’s

Compassion for Animals Road Expedition #6 (CARE-6)’s

Field journal #6

August 12, 2008

Dear HOPE-GEO team and all friends in compassion:

This entry covers Ohio which was good to me and for the tour.

I left Indiana with fond memories and headed for Ohio on August 3 and drove to my long time friend Vicki Trachsel’s in Galena which is a satellite town of Columbus . She has a large trailer and a big GM truck to match, but due to rising fuel prices, she’s had the rig parked semi-permanently in a large gated trailer park, the best I’ve seen where trailer parks go. Vicki is a childhood buddy and close friend of soprano Sharon Christman, of whom I was guest of honor in the 2004 New Year’s Eve concert at the Kennedy Center , who is also the chair of the Music Department of the Catholic University in Washington DC . Vicki herself is a music major. When she sold her grand paino, she purchased a harp which I took to like fish to water. I was plucking fairly fluently through a Bach piece by nightfall, you know, the one that goes: 3123544655171531234565432317125724323123544… (1 = doe, 2 = ray, 3 = mee, etc., blue = higher octave, red = lower octave). Vicki said something about my genes.

After night had fallen, I went on a solo walk through the maze of unpaved, unlit and winding roads in the huge compound, with a flash light in my hand and a cell phone in my pocket. After a few turns, I found myself hopelessly lost. The trees were so thick all around that I could not even take a bearing from the stars. Since I’m a man, I did not deign to knock on any door for directions. Half an hour later, past 11 pm, I finally relented, and called Vicki on my cell, getting her out of bed in the process. Not just out of bed, but out of the trailer. After a bit, her truck appeared, and I climbed in meekly. She drove me back to the trailer, which happened to be only a couple of hundred yards from where I was. So much for the intrepid globe trotter.

On Aug. 4, Monday, I went to the nearest Starbucks by GPS first thing in the morning, but unlike other Starbucks outlets elsewhere which offer wireless internet access for free, this one charges $5 for 5 days, 2 hours max per day. I noticed a Caribou Coffee nearby, and drove over to see. They did offer the service for free, so I settled in for the day. I had so much internet work to catch up it took me until dinner time to get done with it.

On Aug. 5, Tuesday, I drove to Lane Ferrante’s in Bedford , to where Lightning Source was supposed to have shipped 150 copies of Homo Sapiens! SAVE YOUR EARTH. Lightning Source was supposed to call Lane at her work number upon delivery, but as of late Tuesday afternoon, still no call, and no notification card in Lane’s mail box either. I had a lecture to give at the Lancaster campus of Ohio University the next morning, so, after a quick dinner with Lane, I drove the three hours to Lancaster and arrived in the late evening at the place of Janice Kobi, who had generously taken on organizing events for me in Ohio .

Janice is all business by email and phone, but in person could not be warmer and friendlier. The next morning, she drove me to campus. In the audience was a bearded man name Fritz from the Parks Department, who paid laser-like attention to every word about RUNAWAY global heating and every picture of the Alberta tar sands. After the lecture, he said to me, “Very interesting. Too interesting.”

After the talk, Janice took me to meet a 98-years-old local environmental activist named Grace Ray Moon at the quality care home where she resides, where I also met Lancaster City Parks Director Mitch Overton. Subsequently, Janice wrote up a press release as follows:

International Speaker Raises Awareness of Global Warming

Anthony Marr, author, lecturer, environmentalist and founder of the organization HOPE – Healing Our Planet Earth, stopped by Carriage Court for a visit with one of Lancaster’s own environmentalist, Grace Ray Moon. At 93 years old, Moon was the recipient of the Floyd Wolf Community Service Award in 1993. Today, at 98, Moon continues to offer her services to make Lancaster a “Green” community. Joining Marr to recognize Moon for her years of service were Janice Kobi, Fairfield County CARES President and Mitch Overton, Lancaster City Parks Director.

Marr was in Lancaster to present a program on Global Warming. Kobi arranged for Marr to make a stop in Lancaster on his sixth cross country tour in an effort to raise awareness to climate change and how it affects all life on earth. He also has a new book just published entitled, Homo Sapiens! Save Your Earth.

This year’s tour is entitled, “Global Warming and Mass Extinction.” Marr presented his program at Ohio University- Lancaster Campus on Wednesday, August 6, 2008. During the program, Marr made the comparison that the earth is a living planet. He pointed out by taking a terrestrial view from space that earth has gone through many noticeable changes. He added that from a cosmic perspective, “the earth is sick.” He listed six planetary diseases. “Any one of them alone can kill you but they are all linked together”, he injected.

Marr stated, “The earth has a planetary fever…and it’s called Global Warming.”

During the presentation, Marr discussed the serious nature of high carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere but emphasized methane gas is a much more lethal gas. His concern is that as the permafrost melts around the world more methane gas will enter the atmosphere and increase the speed of global warming.

Trees take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen. Marr stresses that as man destroys the rain forest worldwide we not only destroy trees but many species that depend on each other for survival. Scientists warned for years that destroying the Amazon rainforest would have negative results. These scientists predicted these areas would dry up and become deserts. Recent droughts in these areas indicate this may be their fate.

Marr’s first book is entitled, Omni-Science and the Human Destiny.

For more information go to the website at www.HOPE-CARE.org.

Shortly after the lecture, I called Lane and asked her about the books, suggesting that perhaps she should call her apartment manager to see if the books had arrived anyway. She did, and got back to me saying that the books had arrived, and actually arrived on Monday, but had the wrong apartment number for them, and the notice of delivery had been placed into the wrong mail box. GRRRRRR. By then, it was past 2 pm, and the manager’s office in which the 5 boxes of books were stored would be closed at 5 pm, while the drive would take some 3 hours. I gave it a try anyway, but did not arrive till 5:30. So, I overnighted at Lane’s, and got the books the next morning. As it turned out, each box contained about 50 copies of the book, so 4.5 boxes equaled 225 copies, instead of the 150 as ordered. I left with Lane 1.5 boxes, all copies signed, and took away 3 boxes or 150 copies, and headed back to Janice’s for the evening, from where I would head for Athens where my next events were scheduled on Thursday.

Subsequently, Lane wrote me an email saying: “Yeaaaaaaaaaaaa!! I have tried to call you but your voice mail has been full. I wanted to tell you that your book is utterly fantastic and I think every human that inhabits this earth should be made to read it cover to cover. I actually cried. I have it at work and am really pushing people to read it. I have even gotten Reggie to start reading it…”

Janice said that she could distribute a number of copies of the book to her contacts, so I left her one box, for now and upon my planned return to Ohio Oct. 6-9. In the early afternoon, I drove south to Athens for my two events. The first was thought to be a radio interview at WOUB, which turned out to be a TV interview, which began with a discussion on animal rights and the AR Conference, which then moved on to global warming and mass extinction. My local hosts John and Kati Davis, who went into the TV room to watch the interview, later told me that I had received a compliment. There were two program directors present, one of whom said to the other, “This guy’s good. Looks like he’s done it all before.”

After the interview, we drove on to a lake, on the bank of which the local Sierra club was holding its annual meeting. There were about 20 people there. The meeting also double-duties as a vegetarian pot-puck. After the dinner, club president Loraine McCosker asked me to make a speech, which, judging by their questions and comments afterwards, seemed to have captured their attention and imagination. I said at one point that we should internalize environmental cost in fossil fuels extraction and charge it against the oil companies up front, and got many agreements in return, including one from Loraine. I gave each a copy of the book, and there were several $5-$20 donations without solicitation.

I was going to overnight in Athens , but received a dinner invitation in Columbus from Michelle Gatchell (Deputy Director of Communications for Nancy H. Rogers, Attorney General, State of Ohio ) for Friday evening, so I drove back to Vicki’s for the night. In the course of the day, Michelle called to inform me that more people are joining the dinner, including Ritchie Layman, who had hosted a tiger preservation presentation for me at the University of Ohio at Columbus a couple of years back.

On Friday, the 8^th, I spent all day at Caribou Coffee until the late afternoon when I drove to the Dragonfly restaurant in Columbus by 5:30. Participating in the dinner were six women including Michelle, Ritchie, Elizabeth Bonfield (Director of Capital Giving, Wittenberg University ) Linda Orenchuck, who had attended one of my talks before, Alita _____, Michelle’s mother, and myself. Upon my arrival, Alita, in a spiffy western cow-girl suit complete with hat, was saying something about Anthony being a Romeo. I sat down and said, “I didn’t know that Ohio women were so fast. I’ve hardly sat down and am already being called a Romeo.” HAHAs. As it happened, “Anthony” was Alita’s dog. At one point, Alita said that she had been single for 30 years. I said, “That’s nothing. I’ve been single for 64 years.” They looked at me as if I were Methuselah. I went back out to my car to get 6 copies of the book and gave them one each, all signed upon request. Without solicitation, Ritchie donated $25, and Linda wrote me a folded cheque, which of course I did not opened to look at. They talked and planned an event for my return to Columbus on Oct. 7. After the dinner had broken, and I back in the driver’s seat of my car, I then opened and looked at Linda’s cheque, and it said $500.

After the dinner, I drove back to Vicki’s place, ready to drive off to West Virginia for my next adventure.

More later.

Anthony Marr

Anthony Marr, founder
Heal Our Planet Earth (HOPE)
www.HOPE-CARE.org
www.MySpace.com/AnthonyMarr
www.ARConference.org

A Passionate Journey to Save India's Tigers

1999-05-14

Vancouver Sun

by Anthony Marr

VANCOUVER, British Columbia, Canada, May 14, 1999 (ENS) - The tigress was sleeping on her side in the undergrowth deep within Kanha National Park in Madhya Pradesh, the self-appointed "tiger state" of India. She was scarcely visible in the dense foliage with her camouflage of brown and white patches and shadowy black stripes. Within tail-flicking distance behind her was a half-eaten carcass of a wild boar. The tigress was not going anywhere, short of angrily bolting in fear of being stepped on by the elephant on which I was ensconced, which was indeed getting a little too close.

She tolerated our intrusion for awhile, but when the elephant ripped a
branch off the tree in whose shade she was resting, she finally had
enough, rolled on all fours, gave us a chilling glare and emitted a
hissing snarl that could not be ignored. I snapped the last of a string of
photos and instructed the mahout (elephant driver) to beat a prudent
retreat.

It was January this year, during my third expedition to India's Kanha and Bandhavgarh tiger reserves as Western Canada Wilderness Committee's (WCWC) tiger conservation program director. The program, with WCWC working in partnership with the Indian conservation group Tiger Trust (TT), is funded by the Canadian International Development Agency at $100,000 per year over
three years. WCWC also generates further tiger conservation funds from its own 25,000-strong membership, hundreds of donors, educational outreach slideshows and its annual Save-the-Tiger Walk.

Of the original 100,000 to 150,000 tigers worldwide, only 4,000 to 5,000 remain with only three of the original eight subspecies surviving. The Bali tiger was extinct as of the 1940s, the Caspian tiger died out in the 1970s and the Javan tiger in the 1980s. Of the remaining subspecies, the Indian Royal Bengal tiger has the best chance of survival because there are still about 2,500 remaining compared with 1,000 Indo-Chinese tigers, 300 Siberian tigers, 300 Sumatran tigers and 20 South China tigers.

Wild tigers are dying at the rate of about two each day worldwide due to the dual cause of direct killing and habitat loss. By the same token,
about one a day dies in India. At these rates, no wild tiger will be left anywhere in the world within a decade, and the Indian tiger's security is but that of the last carriage of a crashing train - unless tiger conservation projects everywhere succeed big time, and very quickly. This is what I'm betting on, starting with our Save-the-Tiger Campaign.

In 1973 when Project Tiger was launched, with founder Kailash Sankhala as the first director, tiger trophy-hunting was banned and about 25 tiger reserves were created. Meanwhile, however, consumer countries like Japan, Korea and China continue to demand for more tiger bone and penis to supply their traditional medicine markets, and India's human and cattle populations continue to sky-rocket - 980 million and 300 million today respectively.

These are the dual causes of tiger decline - habitat loss and direct
killing. Direct killing refers to poaching for medicinal bone and penis,
but also poisoning by villagers in retaliation for the occasional loss of
cattle as tiger prey. Habitat loss encompasses deforestation and
overgrazing. Currently, the biological contents of a miniscule three
percent of India's land mass are given any degree of protection, but even these "protected" areas are being eroded by government-condoned mining and logging, and by local villagers in desperate need of firewood for cooking and heating. Especially hard to solve is the overpopulation problem of India's cattle, caused by their being milk-producers, beasts of burden, and, most importantly, sacred cows.

For each of these problems there are long-term and short-term solutions. The long-term solution is to re-kindle citizen pride in the tiger as a national symbol throughout India and especially to motivate the villagers who live around tiger reserves to become tiger conservationists themselves.

This is easier said than done. While I was there, India was consumed by cricket fever. If Indian tiger conservation could captured but one percent of this enthusiasm, I could retire.

During my two-week stay in urban India, I gave our tiger conservation
slideshow, seen by more than 30,000 students in British Columbia, to 3,000 students of ten Delhi and Jaipur schools. The show did generate the same degree of enthusiasm, resulting in ten "tiger clubs," which I aim to link with environmental clubs in schools in Canada.

What does it take to turn villagers into tiger conservationists? Consider first the villagers. During my eight-week stay in rural India, our WCWC/TT team, made up of TT field worker Faiyaz Khudsar, Vancouver volunteer Anne Wittman and myself, held six hour meetings with the leaders of about 120 villages of the 178 in Kanha's Buffer Zone. The meetings included discussion, a slideshow and a two hour safari in the park - a place most of them have never seen.

A sub-species of the Swamp deer - the Barasingha (Cervus durauceli
branderi) in Kanha National Park.

Their most common concerns are crop plundering by park ungulates
especially the cheetal deer and the wild boar, loss of cattle to tiger,
insufficient compensation for both, the lack of irrigation, and, last but
not least, the lack of financial benefit from the park.

Underneath these external factors is the general undertone of abject
poverty that limits the villagers' mindset to the here and now at the
expense of tomorrow into which the path of conservation extends. The key to overcoming these difficulties is actually quite simple: to let long term conservation benefit them today.

One of the key components of this is to introduce alternative
technologies, such as biogas plants and solar cookers, to replace wood as fuel. Bearing in mind that village women currently spend their daylight hours gathering fuelwood from far afield, then walking kilometers back to their villages or to townships to sell their 50 pound headloads for 15 rupees (55 cents) each, they would welcome alternatives that could allow them to stay at home and work on financially more rewarding and more eco-friendly cottage industries.

Our team trekked long distances through thick jungle in Kanha's Buffer Zone to access remote villages with our demo solar oven on one of our backs. The demo cooker was designed and made in Canada, but units are modified in India so they can be constructed out of local materials. With nine months of solid sunshine a year, India is well suited to this technology. In a multi-village conference at Bandhavgarh where I was one of the speakers, we signed up 23 villages who wished to try out our solar cooker, and further, five villagers signed up to learn to make the cooker on a commercial basis.

To combat the cattle overpopulation and overgrazing problem, we bought a special hybrid Haryanna bull that local people had been hankering for - one whose offspring yield ten times the amount of milk as the usual breeds. We provided it on a trial basis to a village named Chichrunpur on the periphery of Kanha tiger reserve - one of the 22 villages translocated from the Core Area into the Buffer Zone during the creation of the park. The villagers agreed to stall-feed the new bull and his offspring with fodder that can be grown on part of the land or obtained commercially, while gradually retiring the existing low quality stock and neutering all their existing random-bred bulls. After a generation two, the bull will be rotated to another village and another installed in his place. Stall-feeding is important because it frees the land from free-range overgrazing, protects the higher-quality animals from tiger predation, and makes cattle dung readily available for biogas (methane) generation - another alternative fuel technology.
Tiger cub in Kanha National Park.

Regarding the tiger reserves, the general sentiment of the villagers is
that they are little more than rich peoples' playgrounds that provide
little financial benefit to them save a few jobs in the park service, and
worse, produce deer and wild boar that plunder half their crops without adequate compensation from the park authorities. In view of this, we recommended reforming the park system so that the reserves can at least compensate for themselves. Consider this: the world renowned Kruger National Park of South Africa charges $25 US per visit, Uganda charges US$180 for one hour of Mountain gorilla viewing. Neighbouring Nepal's Chitwan National Park grosses US$800,000 a year. Half goes to improve park services, including anti-poaching, and half goes to a benefit fund managed by the villages themselves, which helps to preserve the park as their benefactor.

In contrast, the Indian tiger reserves charge foreign tourists only
US$2.50 for a full day park visit. Indian visitors, mostly wealthy people from other states, pay just 25 cents. We advocate using Chitwan as a model by raising the park fee by a factor of ten for both foreign and out-of-state Indian tourists, while offering local villagers free park access on a limited basis. Half the increased revenue could go to park services which could generate more employment, and half could go to the villages to compensate for crop plundering and
finance cottage industry enterprises such as manfacturing solar cookers. This gives the villagers a real control over their own destiny.

The park officials, villagers and tourists we have spoken with at both
Kanha and Bandhavgarh by and large wholeheartedly embraced the proposal. We further pointed out that tigers are in fact their benefactors, since they keep the wild ungulate populations down by several thousand a year, and tigers are what tourists from around the world pay the park fee to see.

While at Bandhavgarh, we were dismayed to discovered that the tigress Sita, made world famous by the cover article in the December 1997 issue of National Geographic, had disappeared. Her loss is most likely due to poaching. More than five other tigers out of a supposed population of only 45 have also vanished, all within the last six months. The entire park was in a state of subdued uproar, with fingers pointed in various directions.

Worth more dead than alive

Only yesterday I heard from Faiyaz Khudsar that 10 tiger skins and four tiger skeletons were recently seized in the Kanha District capital
Balaghat. Some officials would deny it, but commercial poaching is alive and well at both tiger reserves. The proposed park reform should strengthen their anti-poaching measures.

During our visit, we maintained the medical clinic and free school we
installed at the Tiger Trust Conservation Centre at Kanha in 1997. The school and clinic services three nearby villages. In the whole of Kanha's Buffer Zone there are only four medical clinics including our own, all with similar effective ranges. Of the 178 Buffer Zone villages, no more than a dozen have access to any medical service.

For the rest, we introduce local medicinal plant cultivation and use by
means of our demonstration medicinal plant garden. We intend to establish a mobile clinic to benefit more villages in due course.
From their perspective we are a foreign adjunct to the park system, and they likely would give some credit to the tiger reserves for any benefit they receive from us.

Finally, we can all learn something from India's experience. Tiger trophy hunting was not banned until there were fewer than 2,000 tigers left, in spite of which the Indian tiger may still perish. Currently, most independent biologists agree that there may be as few as 4,000 Grizzly bears in British Columbia, regardless of how many more the prohunting BC government claims there are. If we do not ban the Grizzly bear hunt here in our own backyard immediately, our Grizzly bears may go the same way as the highly endangered Indian tiger, or worse, the extinct Bali, Caspian and Javan tigers.

{Anthony Marr is the tiger campaign director for the Western Canada
Wilderness Committee. His next expedition to India will depart from
Vancouver in October or November. Anyone interested in volunteering can contact the Wilderness Committee at 604-683-8220.}

@ Environment News Service (ENS) 1999. All Rights Reserved.

Bad Medicine

1997

New Internationalist magazine

Biodiversity Threat:
The traffic in endangered species for their skins,
organs, horns or as exotic pets is putting some of the
world's most vulnerable wildlife in dire peril.

Bad Medicine

Ross Crockford

tells the story of a man who has stepped on toes
from Campbell River to Hong Kong to stop a pernicious trade

Anthony Marr knows what it feels like to be endangered. Last summer the Vancouver environmentalist was touring small towns in British Columbia, gathering signatures to force a referendum outlawing the hunting of bears in this Canadian province. Often the reception he got was downright hostile. Many people in the countryside claimed he was trying to destroy their livelihood and their heritage. ‘In Campbell River,’ recalls Marr, ‘a hunter pointed at me and said: “I saw you on TV this morning. The price on your head just went up $10,000.”’

Pretty frightening, but Marr has heard similar threats before, and often made in defence of a culture that is much, much older. Marr’s referendum drive was part of a larger, ongoing campaign (acronymed as BET’R) he has been running since November 1995 to stop the worldwide slaughter of bears, elephants, tigers and rhinos – big-game animals whose body parts are frequently used in traditional Chinese medicine. Marr is convinced that as Asia prospers and trade becomes further deregulated the demand for these animal parts will skyrocket.

Fortunately he’s in a position to do something about it. Since he was born in China and raised in Hong Kong, Marr figures he’s entitled to criticize things he grew up with that strike him as mere superstition. One is the belief that consuming part of a powerful animal gives strength to a corresponding part of your body. ‘When I was a kid my parents would give me things like bear gall and tiger bone as if it was aspirin,’ says Marr, who’s now 52. ‘Endangered species wasn’t part of my vocabulary at all.’

Consequently Marr spends much of his time speaking at Vancouver schools with large numbers of Chinese students, many of whom are hearing about the problem for the first time. He also speaks on Chinese-language radio talk shows. Sometimes listeners accuse him of defaming the Chinese reputation. Marr replies that, on the contrary, he is trying to save it: if we drive a species to extinction, he says, we can never regain respect in the eyes of the world.

‘A white person saying these kinds of things might be called a racist,’ says Marr. ‘But when a Chinese person is pointing the finger at Chinese culture, it’s more like self-examination.’

If public education is the long-term ‘yin’ of the BET’R campaign, the aggressive ‘yang’ is law enforcement. Until recently it was common to find rhino-hide and tiger-bone pills on the shelves of apothecaries in Vancouver’s Chinatown, and many did a brisk trade in gall bladders taken from bears poached in British Columbia and smuggled by individuals to Asia to sell for as much as $18,000 apiece. After a report by the Washington DC-based Investigative Network revealed the extent of the problem (one dealer offered a discount for 50 galls or more), law officers raided six businesses and seized 191 bear galls. Citing cases like this, Marr persuaded the Canadian Government to proclaim a Wildlife Trade Act, with penalties for traffickers of up to $150,000 in fines and five years in prison.

‘Chinese people are very pragmatic,’ says Marr. ‘They do things to produce results. They will abide by the law if the law comes down on them. Besides, if I work on the law I can affect all of the stores instead of just one of them.’

Not content to stop there, Marr then began the drive for a referendum to outlaw all bear hunting in British Columbia. Though the North American black-bear population is considered ‘healthy’ and the grizzly is classified as ‘threatened’, Marr argues that instituting such a ban when both species are endangered will be too late.

Hunters replied with death threats and racial insults, and obstructed and photographed people who wanted to sign Marr’s petition. In the end his volunteers managed to collect over 90,000 signatures – half of what was needed to force a referendum, but enough to argue convincingly that many wanted bear hunting stopped. Marr called on the provincial government to set aside more wildlife reserves, increase the penalties for poaching and ban the spring hunt, when most poaching occurs.

Now Marr is taking his BET’R campaign around the world. He plans to speak in several North American cities with large Chinese communities and after that in several Chinese-speaking capitals of the Pacific Rim. ‘There have been many articles crying for help, saying that what is needed is a person of Chinese extraction to tackle this problem,’ he says. ‘So here I am.’

Marr knows there will be some risk; organized crime is directly involved in the six-billion-dollar annual trade in endangered species, and it’s certain those involved will threaten him if they they think he’s jeopardizing their business. But after tangling with British Columbia’s hunters, he should be ready.

Ross Crockford is a freelance journalist working out of Vancouver.

©Copyright: New Internationalist 1997

Bloody Superstition and New Cosmology

The Georgia Straight magazine

Vancouver, BC, Canada
by Shawn Blore

April 24, 1997

Pessimist give the world's tigers 5 years. Realists, 10.

They're the kind of numbers that make you want to quietly despair, to give up, to flip the channel and think about something more pleasant. Melrose Place maybe, or Roseanne. Anthony Marr, however, whether from a sense of conceit, ignorance, or a staggering sense of confidence, saw nothing impossible in the task of bringing the tiger back from the brink...

... To highlight the extent of Vancouver's tiger trade, Marr kicked off a media blitz in January 1996. Local journalists were invited on an endangered species tour through Chinatown's apothecaries. The tour began in the low-ceilinged warren that serves as Western Canada Wilderness Committee's headquarters. Marr upended his briefcase, spilling out 15-20 boxes of Chinese patent medicines: tiger plasters, tiger pills, tiger-based medicaments for rheumatism, tired blood, soft bones, and sexual impotence, all of them purchased in shops in Vancouver's Chinatown. Pointing to the ingredients lists on the diverse packages, Marr picked out the symbols, words, and phrases that in Latin, English and Chinese spelled out “tiger bone”.

The next part of the tour was a trip along Pender, Main and Keefer Streets, with Marr indicating here and there the shops and apothecaries dealing in tiger medicinals and inviting journalists to go in and check the shelves for themselves. Six shops out of 10 stocked a variety of boxes, cartons and bottles labeled with some variation of the word Os Tigris - tiger bone.

The media loved it. Marr made it on to TV news both locally and nationally, and stories appeared in city magazines and community papers. He used his pulpit to heap scorn upon Canadian wildlife regulations. “Canada's wildlife laws could use an aphrodisiac,' Marr said, “because right now, they're totally impotent.” He was equally hard-hitting in his presentations to Chinese community groups and at Eastside Vancouver high schools. Traditional Chinese medicine's use of parts of animals like tigers and rhinos, Marr said, and the cutting of many urban trees for that matter, were based on nothing but pure superstition. That superstition was destroying a magnificent species. The fact that the practice was tolerated by the Chinese-Canadian community only blackened their reputation in mainstream Canadian society.

Environmentalists heaved a sigh of relief. Here was someone tackling a problem they had long known about but dared not touch. “It's great that it's a Chinese person doing the work he's doing.” said Nathalie Chalifour, World Wildlife Fund Canada's tiger expert, “because when it's a person like me doing it, well, I'm white; I'm more likely to be accused to being racist, which is really unfortunate, but it does happen.”

Vancouver's Chinese media were as quick to jump on the story as their English counterparts. Marr's campaign was covered by both the Ming Pao and the Sing Tao newspapers, and he appeared on several Chinese language radio programs. According to Ming Pao columnist and CJVB radio host Gabriel Yiu, the Chinese community's reaction to Marr's campaign was mixed. His straight talk on superstition did offend some, but there was also those who took pride in the fact that a Chinese Canadian was working on environmental concerns. “For a long period of time when people are talking about monster homes, tree cutting, killing wild animals for some of their body parts,” Yiu said, “people do have the impression that the Chinese community is the cause of that. I think the work Anthony did set a very good example that we do have people in the Chinese community who are concerned about these issues.”...

According to Vancouver city councilor Don Lee, Marr's effectiveness was limited... “I don't know Anthony Marr that well. The Chinese Community doesn't know him well at all,” Lee said. “We don't know where he comes from. We don't know why he's doing all this.” As it turns out, those are two of the most interesting questions that could be asked about Anthony Marr.

Born in February 1944, in southern China, Anthony Seeu-Sung Marr fled to Hong Kong along with the rest of his family shortly after the Communist revolution. Family legend has Marr's father burning the deeds of the family's extensive land-holdings for a moment's warmth during the first refugee winter...

(In 1965), Marr came to Canada to study science at the University of Manitoba... At the same time, his relationship with a Hong Kong girl fell to bits when she dropped him on orders from her parents. Marr has never forgiven Chinese culture for the snub. “As a result of that incident, I have never dated a Chinese girl again,” Marr said. It's a decision that isolated him somewhat from the Chinese community, but, according to Marr, it also allowed him to integrate more fully into Canadian society than other Chinese immigrants of his generation.

In 1966, Marr switched over to the physics department of the University of British Columbia. His summers he spent in the bush in northern Manitoba and British Columbia, working as a geologist's assistant. It was work that can only be idealized by someone who has never done it. Marr said, “The student is the geologist's personal servant - more like slave, considering the pay, which was only $280 per month. I made and carried his lunch, and every few feet, the geologist would pick up a rock sample about twice the size of my fist and drop it into my knapsack. I had to carry that ever-heavier thing all day, wading into swamps that would sometimes come up to my chest or higher. Your shirt would be black with flies and mosquitoes. There could be a bear behind every tree. It was brutal, but also absolutely beautiful. And this was how I bonded with nature.”

After he graduated with a B.Sc. in 1970, Marr took a job as a live-in house-father for emotionally disturbed kids, then a career in real estate. He said he had a heavy student loan to pay off. One senses he also had a need to gain acceptance among the Vancouver business community. “I made rookie of the year, then Gold Club, Diamond Club, all that,” Marr said. “I bought a couple of horses - hunters-jumpers - and got involved with the high social elite you see down in Southlands.” Snap shots from the time show a short-haired Marr in boots and riding breeches, sitting atop a bay Thoroughbred gelding.

The real estate phased continued for several years. Marr bought a small acreage in the suburbs. He dated but never married. “The work first became routine, then boring, then irksome, then unbearable. I was still good at it, but the initial challenge was gone,” he said.

About this time, things took a strange turn. Whether from boredom, a need to be alone, or perhaps simple a desire to see the sights, he left his job and set off on a solo journey in East Africa, primarily in the Kilimanjaro, Serengeti, Ngorongoro Crater and Olduvai Gorge region of Tanzania. At some point during that three month sojourn, something happened that changed the whole focus of Marr's life. “If you want to be dramatic, you could say it came to me all at once in a blinding flash while I was camping on the savannah, but really, it developed very gradually.” What Marr was catching sight of was a completely new philosophical system, one that in Marr's view is comprehensive enough to explain the organization and development of life, society and the Cosmos itself.

The full tenet of this system came to him in dribs and drabs over a period of many months during and after his return. Marr collected each of these thoughts on a file card - more than 1,000 of them by the end - and worked at ordering, arranging, and reordering them, trying to assemble his thoughts into a coherent whole. The process took years. Marr's live-in girlfriend walked out. “I really shouldn't be living with someone at that point," Marr said. “I had to have my own room. I had to have a ‘DO NOT DISTURB’ sign on the door, and if anybody as much as knocked, my tenuous mental construct would fall down like a house of cards.” The net result of his shuffling and reshuffling, typing and retyping, was a manuscript more than 800 pages in length, describing a new and comprehensive philosophical and phenomenological system. Marr christened it OMNI-SCIENCE....

At first glance, OMNI-SCIENCE bears some resemblance to the ideas of the Jesuit philosopher-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Both suggest that the development of humanity must logically proceed in a converging upward spiral, which Marr calls Integrative Transcendence, towards ever-superior levels of organization and unity. Marr, however, is quick to point out how his system differs from those of other western philosophers. “No philosophical or religious system I’ve encountered is cosmic enough,” said Marr. “They're too anthropocentric, too narrowly focused.” Marr's system purportedly incorporates everything - inorganic and organic - throughout the Universe, from the Big Bang to whatever end, all participating in the multi-levelled Integrative Transcendence spiral towards universal life and consciousness.

Hogwash? Possibly. Even Marr himself had doubts (about the acceptability of his system in the eyes of high academia). In the late 80s, Marr tossed both manuscript and portable type-writer into his little green Toyota Celica and set off down the West Coast to test his system with the best academic minds he could find. One of the stops was the University of California at Berkeley, and another was Stanford. “This was when my sales training paid off. When I got to town, the first thing I'd do was find a course catalog and look up the professors who were teaching the courses I liked. Back in my hotel room, I'd crank out a dozen or so letters. ‘Dear Prof. so and so, I have a matter of philosophical interest that I'd like to discuss with you. The time required would be about two hours...’ Then I'd go back to campus and put the letters into the professors’ cubbyholes. The next day, I'd call and ask for an appointment. We'd talk for two hours, and at the end, I'd ask for a letter of critique.”

The good professors' reactions to this approach can be discerned from the letter written by William Kimbel, president of the Institute of Human Origins at Berkeley: “Owing to the large number of half-baked theories on cosmology currently in circulation, I admit that I faced the prospect of my meeting with Mr. Marr with some trepidation. From the outset, however, it was clear that Mr. Marr is no amateur populariser. On the contrary, he is a dedicated scholar whose theories, I believe, make a profound contribution to the fundamental definition of humankind in relation to the broader universe… implications of great depth and breadth for the future course of human actions… too important to ignore.”

Marr received similarly effusive letters from other professors at Berkeley, Stanford, and the Universities of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia...

Heady stuff. Yet, more than a decade later, the manuscript remains unpublished. Professor Braxton Alfred of Anthropology, UBC, said he even offered to help find a publisher, but Marr said his manuscript was not yet ready for publication. He did leave a copy of the then manuscript behind after his presentation, but due to professional pressures, Alfred didn't get around to looking at it until recently. Reading it now, Alfred said, only increases his respect for Marr. It also sheds light on what it was that set him on his current crusade.

“The presentation he gave me was hard science, very thoroughly presented. He was right on the numbers with everything in the presentation. I presumed likewise in these documents,” Alfred said, referring to the OMNI-SCIENCE manuscript, “but these are quite a different thing. That man had a revelation in Africa. There's no other way to characterize it. It's clear that he was experiencing some sort of emotional trauma, and something touched him, and what these documents record are the revealed truth of that contact.”

According to the manuscript, Alfred said, Marr had reached a crisis and was sitting in the snows of Kilimanjaro, pointing a gun at his head.

Then, as stated in Marr's text: “The sun went down, the moon came up, and more than my hand had begun trembling. It was then that this mysterious source of wisdom address me for the first time: ‘I am seeking a miracle worker, to work a miracle upon this Earth, on my behalf. Since you seem to have no further use of this body of yours, which seems to be in prime condition, will you surrender it to me?’”
“That's when the entity, or whatever it is, first made contact with him,” Alfred said, “but, apparently, the contact continues. It seems that there is no end to it. I would not be surprised if he has conversations with this entity still.”

Having read the manuscript, Alfred said he is no longer puzzled by Marr's decision to turn away from the task of perfecting his book to work on behalf of endangered species. “It was in Africa that this naturism force first came to the fore...” The manuscript also gives some indication of the source of Marr's willingness to take on seemingly hopeless causes. “He clearly came to a crisis point in his life,” Alfred said, “and the heavens opened up and truth was revealed, and he's been going strong eversince.”

Wherever his confidence came stems from, when the “‘19th-century scholar' decided to prove himself as an environmental saviour, he displayed a thoroughly 19th century sense of ambition...
… Although some conservationists predict the tiger will be extinct in five years, Anthony Marr is convinced he can reverse the prophecy…
… China imported the equivalent of 400 grown tigers and exported 27 million tiger derivative products from 1990 to 1993… About 39,000 individual tiger containing products were seized in BC in 1996, including everything from medicinals to tiger claws…

A Vancouver branch of Asian Conservation Awareness Program is planning to begin an ad blitz this June, timed to coincide with the dragon-boat festival. Ironically, Marr will likely not be invited to participate. According to ACAP's Vancouver organizer Ling Zheng, Marr's confrontational style doesn't fit in with ACAP's approach, which hinges on establishing partnerships with the Chinese community groups and obtaining sponsorship from prominent corporations. “We're trying to reach out to the Chinese community, so we try not to use his name,” Zheng said. “If we mention Anthony Marr, I will probably not get any help from organizations like SUCCESS or the Chinese Cultural Centre. He can be quite harsh towards certain Chinese people, and I've even heard that in the Chinese community he's considered like a traitor.”

Whether that’s true or not, Marr has shifted his efforts from reducing consumption into preserving tiger habitat. With the aid of a $75,000 grant from the Canadian International Development Agency, Marr has gone to India to work towards protecting two Indian tiger reserves from encroachment and poaching by local villagers. The plan is to take a traveling multi-media show to villages around the tiger reserves and convince the villagers that the tiger is worth more to them alive than dead.

“Do you think these women enjoy walking five miles every day into the bush to collect a bunch of twigs and carry it back to the village on top of their heads? They do it because they have no choice,” Marr said. “If we give them a choice and say, Look, we’re going to develop ecotourism, we’re going to organize tourist groups to come to your village, and maybe you can develop some native products to sell to them… Wouldn’t you rather stay at home and weave baskets with your kids than walk five miles to haul water?” Other conservationists from other groups have made these arguments before, often with little success, but with characteristic confidence, Marr is convinced he will succeed.