Profile | ‘I am terrified by what I see’: marine ecologist on a life devoted to coral reef conservation, and the unfolding biodiversity catastrophe
- Born in 1960 in Canberra, Australia, Laurence McCook was always an outdoors type; jailed three times for advocating conservation, he became a marine ecologist
- He tells Kate Whitehead about educating Hong Kong diners about sustainable fish consumption and his deep concern at the extent of the biodiversity catastrophe
I was born in 1960 in Canberra, Australia. My dad was a dentist and my mum a homemaker, and I had a safe, middle-class, white Australian upbringing. Our house was in the suburbs and it backed onto bushland in a place called Mount Ainslie. We had wallabies and kangaroos grazing in the back garden. I was always profoundly grounded in nature.
Canberra has a fantastic network of bike paths and I grew up riding a bike to school. Every weekend in the summer, Canberra moves to the coast and we went to Batemans Bay and spent a lot of time in a caravan 100 metres from the beach where my dad taught me body surfing and snorkelling. As I got older, I spent a lot of time hiking and camping, canyoning and rock climbing.
At school I had the opportunity to do a couple of study tours to Asia. In 1975, when I was 15, we went to Java, which seemed so exotic.
Agent of change
I studied science at school, I liked the logical structures and, in 1979, I went to the Australian National University, in Canberra, to study neuroscience. Canberra was a hotbed of radical feminism at the time and it helped me to think critically about issues of gender.