https://www.japantimes.co.jp/life/2020/04/04/environment/c-w-nicol-uncompromising-environmentalist-possessed-deep-humanity/#.Xog6tC_COMI
Author and environmentalist C.W. Nicol died on Monday after being diagnosed with cancer in 2016. As a long-standing contributor to The Japan Times, we asked his editor throughout, Andrew Kershaw, to write a few words in memory of the award-winning conservationist
lready quite a celebrity in Japan by the time our paths crossed, he had been a familiar face on television through the nature and travel programs he had made. He’d even had five minutes of fame as a popular singer, though nothing could compare with him in full voice, or caressing a lament, in the company of family and friends.
He was an accomplished artist and chef, too, and he really did love writing.
Not content with joining the first of his Arctic research expeditions while still in his teens, as a wildlife ranger he set up Ethiopia’s first national park a few years later. Then he was off conducting fisheries research for the government in Canada, sailing on a Japanese whaling ship in Antarctic waters,and all the while honing his black belt skills in karate
was most delighted to have battled through the thickets of bureaucracy and the undergrowth of vested interests as the driving force behind the brand-new, all-wood Miyanomori Elementary School in Higashi-Matsushima, Miyagi Prefecture, which finally opened in January 2017.
The genesis for that lay in the long-standing programs the Afan Trust runs giving traumatized or disadvantaged children from that area a taste of freedom in nature.
safely on a hillside with woods nestled behind it.