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]
Born in Hamilton, Ontario, 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] 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 an occasional contributor of documentary films to The Nature of Things,[3] most notably the Canadian Film Award-winning Wild Africa in 1970.[5] He then formed LDL: 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 was the author of several books, including The Fallacy of Wildlife Conservation (1981) and the Governor General's Award-winning Rogue Primate (1994).[6] In his later years, he was a professor emeritus of environmental studies at York University.[3]