When a book like this comes recommended, book reviews from a decade earlier are as fresh and relevant as ever:

…When McPhee wrote “Encounters With the Archdruid,” the American conservation movement was a religious and mystical force. It may still be so today, but the movement now employs nearly as many big-city lawyers and consultants as any corporation hoping to develop a mine, oil field or… dam. They’re out in force in Bruce Barcott’s new book, “The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw: One Woman’s Fight to Save the World’s Most Beautiful Bird,” the story of a bitter fight against a dam in western Belize. No, it doesn’t sound thrilling (which is doubtless why the publisher kept the word “dam” out of the title), but Barcott, a contributing editor at Outside magazine and the author of “The Measure of a Mountain: Beauty and Terror on Mount Rainier,” makes it so, mashing up adventure travel, biography and nature writing in a steamy climate of corruption and intrigue…

It is not the first time this book has been recommended to me, but yesterday a fellow hotelier in Belize mentioned it when describing his getting to know someone central to the book’s story, and this  reminded me that I still had not touched the book. It is, I am told, a must read.  Bruce Barcott provided an excerpt of his book back when it first came out, so I have just started.