"THE LAST FLIGHT OF THE SCARLET MACAW," by Bruce Barcott; Random House; 315 pages; $25.95

As the reality of waning natural resources, rising seas and other climate changes set in, many people likely echo Outside magazine contributing editor Bruce Barcott's admission that at "times the earth's fate seems so dire and inexorable that I'm tempted to throw up my hands and say to hell with it."

Though we will, of course, persevere, in his new book "The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw," Barcott reminds us that there are still too few people with the courage of Sharon Matola, an American expatriate who risked her livelihood in an effort to save Belize's vanishing population of scarlet macaws.

Matola, the eccentric, often divisive director of the Belize Zoo, spent six years attempting to stop the Belize government from building the Chalillo Dam and flooding the Macal Valley, a scarlet macaw nesting place that Matola describes as "a Noah's Ark for all the endangered species driven out of the rest of Central America."

Her fight began with a simple letter of protest (where most people would have stopped), led to the government labeling her an enemy of the people, and ended with a rare appeal to the London Privy Council (Belize's head of state is still Queen Elizabeth II).

Buoyed by a dynamic cast of characters and a plot so many-layered and dramatic that readers will need to remind themselves it's a true account, Barcott's narrative achieves the depth of a case study and the accessible intimacy of a short feature. Throughout, his relaxed, lucid writing and vivid, inventive descriptions — such as rendering the macaw as a colorful chicken that "sounds like one of nature's chain-smokers, their cry a throaty, blaring rrrra" — keeps readers on the side of Matola and the birds.

The book weaves back and forth between the chronology of Matola's story and uncovering the intricate plait of issues surrounding it, including Belize's increasing electricity needs, extinction, the history and evolution of dams, environmental impact statements, and utility privatization, while deftly integrating implications of the political history between Belize, Britain and Guatemala, current corruption, colonial grudges and citizen apathy. Though some sections suffer from repetition, Barcott's reminders may aid some in navigating the web of this protracted battle, which he explicitly supports.

The fight to stop the Chalillo Dam is just one of the increasingly difficult choices people everywhere have to make as we learn that preserving the environment for other species, such as the Hawaiian crow, may actually be a tactical choice for sustaining human life as well. And though in the end the dam was completed in 2005, Matola's story proves that individuals — even by writing just one letter — can indeed make a difference, engendering action and change.

Christine Thomas is a Honolulu writer. Read more of her reviews at www.literarylotus.com.