John Livingston (naturalist)

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]

He was born in Hamilton, Ontario, the son of Harold Arthur Livingston, who was in the construction business, and Vera Allen Livingston.^[3] 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] After the war, he worked at the accounting firm of Clarkson Gordon from 1946 to 1949 while engaging in free-lance writing and speaking on environmental issues.^[3] He married Constance Margaret ("Peggy") Ellis in 1948, and they had three children: Sally, Zeke and Least.^[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 a regular contributor of documentary films to The Nature of Things,^[5] most notably the Canadian Film Award-winning Wild Africa in 1970.^[6] He then formed LGL Limited: 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 helped found York University's Faculty of Environmental Studies (FES) in 1971^[1] and taught there until he retired in 1993, becoming a professor emeritus.^[3]

In1985 he married his second wife, Ursula Moller Jolin, a former graduate student.^[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).^[7]