Acadia Eddy, 13, stands beside the award-winning research project she did at Joseph Howe last term on BC professor Ian McTaggart-Cowan.
By Kathryn Stocks
This is the story of a Joseph Howe student’s award-winning English and history project. The student is Acadia Eddy, 13, and her assignment last winter and spring was to do a project on a Canadian born before 1914 who had enough historical significance to be on our $20 bill.
Acadia is interested in animals, nature and conservation, so she searched for someone who shared those interests, and chose to do her project on Ian McTaggart-Cowan. I didn’t recognize the name but he turned out to be a really good choice even though he was a challenging person to research. “Every website had like two short paragraphs about him,” Acadia said.
When she found out that Ian was a professor at the University of British Columbia, Acadia sent out emails to people he either taught or worked with there. She had an enthusiastic response to her queries and those who had worked with him were happy to share their knowledge with her.
Here are some of the things she discovered about an Ian McTaggart-Cowan:
- He was a pioneering biologist, educator, conservationist and television educator. He was born in Scotland in 1910, and moved to Vancouver at the age of 3. He was a professor at UBC and he created the zoology department and supervised over 100 PhD students. Ian wrote over 200 academic publications and contributed to a four-volume book of Birds of British Columbia. In honour of Ian’s contribution to environmental research and education, a trust fund was created for zoology students at UBC.
- Ian was the person behind bringing ecological content to television. He created three TV shows: Fur and Feathers (1955-56); The Living Sea (1957-58) and The Web of Life (1959-63). Fur and Feathers later became The Nature of Things, the long-running CBC program hosted by David Suzuki.
- Ian was a key voice in animal conservation and was involved in developing environmental organizations, government committees and led policy development, including the banning of animal bounty hunting in Canada. He made many discoveries in his career. He found the Vancouver Island Marmot that was thought to be extinct and discovered the Pacific Pallid Bat.
- His colleagues spoke warmly of him as a kind and generous man.
For this well-researched project on Ian McTaggart-Cowan, Acadia won several awards, including the Provincial and National Showcase Awards from the TDSB.
She summed up her project with these words: “I think Ian should be on the $20 bill. I think that he died with a story that needed to be told. He is known as the forgotten one, but he doesn’t need to be. So many people were so excited to tell me all about him the second I asked. He was never forgotten; he was just waiting for someone to tell his story.”