John Allen Livingston (November 10, 1923 – January 17, 2006) was a Canadian naturalist, broadcaster, author, and teacher.^[1] He was most known as the voice-over of the Hinterland Who's Who series of television zoological shorts in the 1960s.^[2]

Born in Hamilton, Ontario, he enlisted in the Royal Canadian Navy at the beginning of World War II and earned a degree in English literature in 1943 while on active service.^[3] He joined the Audubon Society of Canada in 1955 as managing director and editor of its newsletter.^[3] He later became head of the science unit at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), most notably serving as the first executive producer of the long-running documentary series The Nature of Things.^[4] He left the CBC in 1968, but remained an occasional contributor of documentary films to The Nature of Things,^[3] most notably the Canadian Film Award-winning Wild Africa in 1970.^[5] He then formed LDL: Environmental Research Associates, an environmental consulting company, with Aird Lewis and Bill Gunn of the Nature Conservancy of Canada; the firm became most noted for their work on the Mackenzie Valley Pipeline Inquiry.^[3]

Livingston was the author of several books, including The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation (1981) and the Governor General's Award-winning Rogue Primate (1994).^[6] In his later years, he was a professor emeritus of environmental studies at York University.^[3]

Selected bibliography

• Darwin and the Galapagos (1966) (with Lister Sinclair)
• Birds of the Northern Forest (1966) (with J. F. Lansdowne)
• Arctic Oil (1981)
• The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation (1981)
• Canada: A Natural History (1988)
• Rogue Primate: An Exploration of Human Domestication (1994)
• One Cosmic Instant (1968)

References