1997-04-24-
The Georgia Straight magazine, Vancouver,
BC by Shawn Blore
[Bloody Superstition –
Anthony Marr wants to stop the medicinal
use of tiger products before it destroys a magnificent species]
Pessimist
give the world's tigers 5 years. Realists, 10.
They're
the kind of numbers that make you want to quietly despair, to give up, to flip
the channel and think about something more pleasant. Melrose Place maybe,
or Roseanne. Marr, however, whether from a sense of conceit, ignorance,
or a staggering sense of confidence, saw nothing impossible in the task of
bringing the tiger back from the brink...
...
To highlight the extent of Vancouver's tiger trade, Marr kicked off a media
blitz in January 1996. Local journalists were invited on an endangered
species tour through Chinatown's apothecaries. The tour began in the
low-ceilinged warren that serves as WCWC's headquarters. Marr upended his
leather briefcase , spilling out 15-20 boxes of Chinese patent medicines: tiger
plasters, tiger pills, tiger-based medicaments for rheumatism, tired blood,
soft bones, and sexual impotence, all of them purchased in shops in Vancouver's
Chinatown. Pointing to the ingredients lists on the diverse packages,
Marr picked out the symbols, words, and phrases that in Latin, English and
Chinese spelled out “tiger bone”.
The
next part of the tour was a trip along Pender, Main and Keefer Streets, with
Marr indicating here and there the shops and apothecaries dealing in tiger
medicinals and inviting journalists to go in and check the shelves for
themselves. Six shops out of 10 stocked a variety of boxes, cartons and
bottles labelled with some variation of the word Os Tigris - tiger bone.
The
media loved it. Marr made it on to TV news both locally and nationally,
and stories appeared in city magazines and community papers. He used his
pulpit to heap scorn upon Canadian wildlife regulations. “Canada's
wildlife laws could use an aphrodisiac,” Marr said, “because right now, they're
totally impotent.” He was equally hard-hitting in his presentations to
Chinese community groups and at Eastside Vancouver high schools.
Traditional Chinese medicine's use of parts of animals like tigers and
rhinos, Marr said, and the cutting of many urban trees for that matter, were
based on nothing but pure superstition. That superstition was destroying
a magnificent species. The fact that the practice was tolerated by the
Chinese-Canadian community only blackened their reputation in mainstream
Canadian society.
Environmentalists
heaved a sigh of relief. Here was someone tackling a problem they had
long known about but dared not touch. “It's great that it's a Chinese
person doing the work he's doing.” said Nathalie Chalifour, World Wildlife Fund
Canada’s tiger expert, “because when it's a person like me doing it, well, I'm
white; I'm more likely to be accused to being racist, which is really
unfortunate, but it does happen.”
Vancouver's
Chinese media were as quick to jump on the story as their English
counterparts. Marr's campaign was covered by both the Ming Pao and the
Sing Tao newspapers, and he appeared on several Chinese language radio
programs. According to Ming Pao columnist and CJVB radio host
Gabriel Yiu, the Chinese community's reaction to Marr's campaign was mixed.
His straight talk on superstition did offend some, but there was also those who
took pride in the fact that a Chinese Canadian was working on environmental
concerns. “For a long period of time when people are talking about
monster homes, tree cutting, killing wild animals for some of their body
parts,” Yiu said, “people do have the impression that the Chinese community is
the cause of that. I think the work Anthony did set a very good example
that we do have people in the Chinese community who are concerned about these
issues.”...
According
to Vancouver city councillor Don Lee, Marr's effectiveness was limited... “I
don't know Anthony Marr that well. The Chinese Community doesn't know him
well at all,” Lee said. “We don't know where he comes from. We
don't know why he's doing all this.” As it turns out, those are two of
the most interesting questions that could be asked about Anthony Marr.
Born
in February 1944, in southern China, Anthony Shiu-Sang Marr fled to Hong Kong
along with the rest of his family shortly after the Communist revolution.
Family tradition has Marr’s father burning the deeds of the family's extensive
land-holdings for a moment's warmth during the first refugee winter...
(In
1965), Marr came to Canada to study science at the University of Manitoba... At
the same time, his relationship with a Hong Kong girl fell to bits when she
dropped him on orders from her parents. Marr has never forgiven Chinese
culture for the snub. “As a result of that incident, I have never dated a
Chinese girl again,” Marr said. It's a decision that isolated him
somewhat from the Chinese community, but, according to Marr, it also allowed
him to integrate more fully into Canadian society than other Chinese immigrants
of his generation.
In
1966, Marr switched over to the physics department of the University of British
Columbia. His summers he spent in the bush in northern Manitoba and
British Columbia, working as a geologist's assistant. It was work that
can only be idealized by someone who has never done it. Marr said, “The
student is the geologist’s personal servant - more like slave, considering the
pay, which was only $280 per month. I made and carried his lunch, and
every few feet, the geologist would pick up a rock sample about twice the
size of my fist and drop it into my knapsack. I had to carry that
ever-heavier thing all day, wading into swamps that would sometimes come up to
my chest or higher. Your shirt would be black with flies and
mosquitoes. There could be a bear behind every tree. It was brutal,
but also absolutely beautiful. And this was how I bonded with nature.
After
he graduated with a B.Sc. in 1970, Marr took a job as a live-in house-father
for emotionally disturbed kids, then a career in real estate. He said he
had a heavy student loan to pay off. One senses he also had a need to
gain acceptance among the Vancouver business community. “I made rookie of
the year, then Gold Club, Diamond Club, all that,” Marr said. “I bought a
couple of horses - hunters-jumpers - and got involved with the high social
elite you see down in Southlands.” Snap shots from the time show a
short-haired Marr in boots and riding breeches, sitting atop a tall bay
gelding.
The
real estate phased continued for several years. Marr bought a small acreage
in the suburbs. He dated but never married. “The work first became
routine, then boring, then irksome, then unbearable. I was still good at
it, but the initial challenge was gone,” he said.
About
this time, things took a strange turn. Whether from boredom, a need to be
alone, or perhaps simple a desire to see the sights, he left his job and set
off on a solo journey in East Africa, primarily in the Kilimanjaro, Serengeti,
Ngorongoro Crater and Olduvai Gorge region of Tanzania. At some point
during that three month sojourn, something happened that changed the whole
focus of Marr's life. “If you want to be dramatic, you can say it came to
me all at once in a blinding flash while I was camping on the savannah, but
really, it developed very gradually.” What Marr was catching sight
of was a completely new philosophical system, one that in Marr's view is
comprehensive enough to explain the organization and development of life,
society and the Cosmos itself.
The
full tenet of this system came to him in dribs and drabs over a period of many
months during and after his return. Marr collected each of these thoughts
on a file card - more than 1,000 of them by the end - and worked at ordering,
arranging, and reordering them, trying to assemble his thoughts into a coherent
whole. The process took years. Marr’s live-in girlfriend walk
out. “I really shouldn't be living with someone at that point,” Marr
said. “I had to have my own room. I had to have a ‘DO NOT DISTURB’
sign on the door, and if anybody as much as knocked, my tenuous mental
construct would fall down like a house of cards.” The net result of his
shuffling and reshuffling, typing and retyping, was a manuscript more than 800
pages in length, describing a new and comprehensive philosophical and phenomenological
system. Marr christened it OMNI-SCIENCE....
At
first glance, OMNI-SCIENCE bears some resemblance to the ideas of the Jesuit
philosopher-scientist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Both suggest that the
development of humanity must logically proceed in a converging upward spiral,
which Marr calls Integrative Transcendence, towards ever-superior levels of
organization and unity. Marr, however, is quick to point out how his
system differs from those of other western philosophers. “I've read Kant
and Schopenhauer and Russell and Nietzsche,” Marr said, “but they're not cosmic
enough. They're too anthropocentric, too narrowly focused.” Marr's system
purportedly incorporates everything - inorganic and organic - throughout the
Universe, from the Big Bang to whatever end, all participating in the
multi-leveled Integrative Transcendence spiral towards universal consciousness.
Hogwash?
Possibly. Even Marr himself had doubts (about the acceptability of his
system in the eyes of high academia). In the mid-80s, Marr tossed both
manuscript and portable type-writer into his little green Toyota Celica and set
off down the West Coast to test his ideas with the best academic minds he could
find. One of the stops was the University of California at Berkeley, and
another was Stanford. “This was when my sales training paid off.
When I got to campus, the first thing I’d do was find a course catalog and look
up the professors who were teaching the courses I liked. Back in my hotel
room, I'd crank out a dozen or so letters. ‘Dear Dr. so and so, I have a
matter of philosophical interest that I’d like to discuss with you. The
time required would be about two hours...’ Then I'd go back to campus and
put the letters into their cubbyholes. The next day, I'd call and ask for
an appointment. We'd talk for two hours, and at the end, I'd ask for a
letter of critique.”
The
good professors’ reactions to this approach can be discerned from the letter
written by William Kimbel, president of the Institute of Human Origins at
Berkeley: “Owing to the large number of half-baked theories on cosmology
currently in circulation, I admit that I faced the prospect of my meeting with
Mr. Marr with some trepidation. From the outset, however, it was clear
that Mr. Marr is no amateur populariser. On the contrary, he is a
dedicated scholar whose theories, I believe, make a profound contribution to
the fundamental definition of humankind in relation to the broader universe.”
Marr
received similarly effusive letters from other professors at Berkeley,
Stanford, and the Universities of Oregon, Washington and British Columbia..
Heady
stuff. Yet, more than a decade later, the manuscript remains
unpublished. Professor Braxton Alfred of Anthropology, UBC, said he even
offered to help find a publisher, but Marr said his manuscript was not yet
ready for publication. He did leave a copy of the then manuscript behind
after his presentation, but due to professional pressures, Alfred didn't get
around to looking at it until recently. Reading it now, Alfred said, only
increases his respect for Marr. It also sheds light on what it was that
set him on his current crusade.
“The
presentation he gave me was hard science, very thoroughly presented. He
was right on the numbers with everything in the presentation. I presumed
likewise in these documents,” Alfred said, referring to the OMNI-SCIENCE
manuscript, “but these are quite a different thing. That man had a
revelation in Africa. There's no other way to characterize it. It's
clear that he was experiencing some sort of emotional trauma, and something
touched him, and what these documents record are the revealed truth of that
contact.”
…
Having read the manuscript, Alfred said he is no longer puzzled by Marr’s
decision to turn away from the task of perfecting his book to work on behalf of
endangered species. “It was in Africa that this naturism force first came
to the fore...” The manuscript also
gives some indication of the source of Marr's willingness to take on seemingly
hopeless causes. “He clearly came to a crisis point in his life,” Alfred
said, “and the heavens opened up and truth was revealed, and he's been going
strong eversince.”
Wherever
his confidence came stems from, when the “19th-century scholar” decided to
prove himself as an environmental saviour, he displayed a thoroughly 19th
century sense of ambition...
…
Although some conservationists predict the tiger will be extinct in five years,
Anthony Marr is convinced he can reverse the prophecy…
…
China imported the equivalent of 400 grown tigers and exported 27 million tiger
derivative products from 1990 to 1993…
…
About 39,000 individual tiger containing products were seized in BC in 1996,
including everything from medicinals to tiger claws…
A
Vancouver branch of Asian Conservation Awareness Program is planning to begin
an ad blitz this June, timed to coincide with the dragon-boat festival.
Ironically, Marr will likely not be invited to participate. According to
ACAP's Vancouver organizer Ling Zheng, Marr's confrontational style doesn't fit
in with ACAP's approach, which hinges on establishing partnerships with the
Chinese community groups and obtaining sponsorship from prominent
corporations. “We're trying to reach out to the Chinese community, so we
try not to use his name,” Zheng said. “If we mention Anthony Marr, I will
probably not get any help from organizations like SUCCESS or the Chinese
Cultural Centre. He can be quite harsh towards certain Chinese people,
and I've even heard that in the Chinese community he’s considered like a
traitor.”
“I
just do what I have to do in the most effective way I can,” says Anthony Marr.