Farewell to Farley

Outspoken, original and passionate in his defence of mother earth and all her creatures, Farley Mowat never shied away from controversy. He died yesterday at the age of 92 at his Port Hope home. He will be missed. 

Statement from Elizabeeth May 

“When someone you love dies, it is not possible to begin to express the love and loss. Farley Mowat was one of my dearest friends. His 93rd birthday would have been this coming Monday and — as always — I was looking forward to talking to him.

“Farley Mowat was a champion for the wild things. He spoke with unflinching courage against humanity’s destruction of each other and of the other species with whom we share this planet.

“He raised public consciousness of the famine that laid siege to the Inuit. Farley spoke for whales and seabirds, for tadpoles and mosses. He was possessed of a ferocious talent, able to write stories that provoked laughter, tears and action.

“We owe him more than I can say.”

The following profile was published in the Vancouver Sun in 1995. 

“Life is confusing, but love is clear enough”

By DOUGLAS TODD

 — River Bourgeois, Nova Scotia — It’s fitting that Millicent, a black Labrador, is the first to gambol out to greet me, while Farley Mowat, with a smile, walks a few paces behind his dog.

At Mowat’s Nova Scotia cottage, it quickly becomes clear that Mowat puts animals at the forefront of his life. They shape the complex ethical and spiritual world view behind his more-than 30 best-selling books.

Mowat tends to see the world through animals’ eyes; whether it’s the owls and white rats he kept as a child on the Prairies, the injured birds and gophers he and his wife, Claire, have nursed back to health, or the deer and blue herons that surround his rocky, forested Cape Breton property.

In the living room of his white house, which is perched above a grey Atlantic Ocean, Millicent slumps contentedly on an oval rug near the wood stove, while Claire, also an author, pops in and out of the book-filled room.

Over coffee, as Mowat discusses the lessons of war, ecological catastrophe, goodness, the centrality of love, the role of religion, his admiration for Jesus, his attitude to death, his belief in the paranormal and the nature of God, he admits he nearly always first considers how an animal might view each subject.

He has studied and written about animals for 50 years in children’s books, hard-hitting essays and fact-based adventures such as Never Cry Wolf. Mowat generally prefers animals to humans, which makes him an exaggerated example of those contemporary mystics and artists who deem nature, not book-based religion, their greatest source of spiritual teaching.

He believes he discovered the extent of humans’ capacity for depravity during his participation in the Second World War, which is the subject of a memoir he released this fall, Aftermath: Travels in a Post-War World (Key Porter).

In their rural Nova Scotia home near Bourgeois River, Mowat kept many animals, including dogs. Animals appear to communicate through a form of ESP, he says. Most humans have lost it because they’ve become too civilized. “But primitive people certainly do have it.” There’s no question about it.”

“The war certainly had an enormous impact on me. It opened my eyes. It stripped away the scales and gave me a clarity I might never have had. The raw reality of what my own species was like and could do was a black revelation.”

Mowat believes the human animal could soon destroy itself. During bouts of pessimism, which he would simply call “neutralism,” he sometimes thinks the best thing the human species could to for the globe’s plants and animals is immediately self-destruct.

Humans have become megalomaniacs. “We’ve come to believe we can do anything. We are the masters. We have the power,” he says, in typically punchy, short sentences. At age 74, his small, broad-shouldered, tough-looking body echoes his blunt, prophetic style.

Mowat is furious about “witless consumption.” Humans have lost touch with the need for restraint, to live within the limits of their environment, he says. Witness, among many catastrophes, the ravaged fish stocks of Canada’s East and West coasts.

Mowat calls himself a small-c conservative — not, perish the thought, a political Conservative, which he defines as the rich looking out for the rich — because he thinks our species needs to conserve and respect nature’s order.

He believes nature and animals are essentially good. “I see almost nothing that can be described as evil in the natural world.” There is no blood-letting or killing in nature except for a vital purpose, usually for preservation.

“If something is overtly engineered by another entity, then it’s a bad thing. That’s the way humans do it. We kill people without rhyme or reason. We wage wars. It’s abnormal. It’s unnatural, because it doesn’t occur in nature.”

Unlike humans, animals respect nature’s built-in restraints. So did the Inuit, about whom Mowat wrote his first book in 1952, The People of the Deer. Readers have since bought more than 14 million of his books, which have been translated into 52 languages, making him arguably Canada’s most widely read author.

“The Inuit are going to hate me for this,” he says, taking a drag from his cigarette. “But I believe they lived as natural animals in a natural world. And they obeyed the restraints and restrictions that nature imposed. They were good animals. Once you escape from those constraints, as we have escaped, you begin to degenerate.”

Mowat’s old-fashioned preachy style, full of judgment and warning, may come honestly. Two of his great-grandfathers were Presbyterian clergymen.

“I am a very religious man,” he insists. In another era, he thinks he would have been a preacher. But now, as a renowned storyteller, he knows he has a mighty big pulpit from which he can admonish, lampoon and exhort.

About once a month, he attends with Claire a small Anglican church, called St. Mark’s, in their winter home of Port Hope in Ontario. They don’t usually go to church during their summer months at their 50-hectare Cape Breton property, which they intend to leave for posterity as a nature trust.

Claire make clear her husband is more “spiritual” than religious, because he doesn’t conform to institutional beliefs. Mowat certainly doesn’t talk about God in a traditional way. “I believe in God in probably the same way my dog does.”

At church, Mowat even recites the Lord’s prayer. He doesn’t do it because he buys orthodox Christian doctrine. He goes to church because he believes that every animal, including humans, needs rituals, to be reminded of their interconnectedness to their tribe and world. He thinks ceremonies tie us to each other.

Claire tries to make clear that her husband is more “spiritual” than religious, because he doesn’t conform to institutional beliefs. In that way, Mowat is like many searchers today.

Mowat certainly doesn’t talk about God in a traditional way. “I believe in God in probably the same way my dog does, or the seagull flying there does,” he says, taking in Millicent and the birds riding the foggy Atlantic air currents.

Mowat doesn’t like to try to define God because he thinks it’s human arrogance to try. What people call God, he says, is a motivation, a cause, a condition of existence, for all things.

“Somewhere some thing, or some combination of things, seems to be providing direction. It’s so difficult to grasp. And I think our tiny minds, which we think are so wonderful, are quite incapable of grasping this. I can live with an amorphous awareness that this whole universe cannot possibly be an accident. I can live in the void of simply recognizing there is a force, without trying to define it.”

Likewise, Mowat doesn’t believe Jesus was divine, whatever that might mean. Instead, he admires Jesus as a “prophet, an individual with great perceptivity, and a socialist revolutionary, of course.” Jesus understood what it was to be a good animal; that all the earth’s creatures are linked, belong to and rely on each other.

“Jesus said it all. He said we’re all in the same boat. He said throw out the moneylenders, we must look after each other, we have to be decent, we have to be relatively honest– all first-rate philosophical concepts.”

The trouble is, he says, humans now think they control their own destiny. So they’re taking too many liberties with nature’s laws. The only reason he can feel equanimity about pending doom for humans, and even about his own death, is he feels sustained by his connections with all of nature, especially other animals.

Since the advent of the steam engine, perhaps earlier, technology is causing our species to lose its basic functions, he says. To keep in touch with these physical functions, Mowat travels to this Cape Breton home during deepest winter by himself to do manual household repairs, including carpentry.

“The [extra-sensory] perception of calamity seems to be universal. Most animals have it. And we had it too when we were good animals. It’s one of the attributes we had, which has atrophied.”

However, he doesn’t think we’ve just lost physical function. Through over-specialization, Mowat believes humans have lost the power to communicate at an extra-sensory level.

Animals appear to communicate through a form of ESP, he says. Most humans have lost it because they’ve become too civilized. “But primitive people certainly do have it. There’s no question about it.”

In the late 1940s, just after the war, Mowat was in a cabin with an Inuit man who suddenly became paralysed with overpowering emotion. “He was receiving a startling piece of information that somebody close to him in the camp had just died an accidental and dramatic death.” At the time, the man’s friend was 25 kilometres away.

“The [extra-sensory] perception of calamity seems to be universal. Most animals have it. And we had it too when we were good animals. It’s one of the attributes we had, which has atrophied. It’s been replaced with technical invention, like the telephone, but we don’t realize it. It’s like hearing. A guy whose born deaf doesn’t realize he’s deaf.”

Despite his dwindling hope for the future, however, Mowat still holds a big place in his heart for the cosmic centrality of love.

“Love is the vital ingredient. It’s the glue that may or may not hold us together. It’s ingrained. It’s not a human attribute alone. You can see it in almost every form of life. There’s `mother love’ with practically every so-called higher animal.”

The capacity for love is a matter of degree, he says. An earthworm is not going to be as loving a partner as the whale in A Whale for the Killing. In that book, Mowat describes how a whale expressed love by staying close for six days to its captured partner, until it died.

Every dog he and Claire have owned enjoyed affectionate, compassionate relationships with humans and other animals. Leaning over to Millicent, Mowat puts two embracing hands around her ears and says: “And you. You’re a sucker for love.”