“Nothing repels me,” she says, “because I understand everything’s got a place and I’ve got a real curiosity about how things are connected to one another.” We were talking about why she had a praying mantis, a tortoise and some cockroaches as a child, when she could have had, I don’t know, a cat. What teenage girl wouldn’t want to play with tigers? Which of us wouldn’t rescue a bear? But her fascination is much more dispassionate and respectful than “animal lover” really captures. A lot of things about her – the teenage years volunteering in a big cat sanctuary on the Isle of Wight, her months spent in China rescuing bears, which turned into her first TV break with an investigative piece – sound pretty understandable.
Part of what enables her to engage as meaningfully with a freshwater pearl mussel as with an African wild dog is that she doesn’t require animals to be cute, or emotionally responsive, to pique her interest. If the small army of scientists, rangers and conservationists dedicating their lives to the species in her book can make the gains she describes, well, the rest of us might actually achieve something if we would just get a move on. If this sounds stark – and, yes, it is stark – the message is more practical. In her new book, An Atlas of Endangered Species, which is illustrated by Emily Robertson, McCubbin alights on 20 species (10 from each hemisphere) that are in danger of extinction, ending with humans. In fact, she’s thinking about glow-worms and tarantulas, the great expanse of the universe and frogs.
McCubbin is indoors with two crazy miniature poodles, and she looks so normal, with her calm, symmetrical face that lights up a TV screen, that you assume she’s thinking about normal things – lunch, weather, mascara. An illustration of a pangolin by Emily Robertson from An Atlas of Endangered Species by Megan McCubbin.
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