Founding editor of Green Living, Gardening Life, Owl and Chickadee dies suddenly

Mary Anne Brinckman, founding editor and editor-in-chief of Green Living magazine, died on December 31 of a heart attack while snorkelling in the Dominican Republic. Her friend of 60 years, Michael de Pencier,chairman of Key Publishers Co. Ltd. and director of Green Living Enterprises, wrote a touching and revealing tribute on the Green Living website which we thought was worth reprinting:

I thought you might like to know a bit more about this beautiful-in-every-way woman, who was also on the Green Living Show screening committee, a director of the Natural Burial Association and a shareholder in Investeco.

Mary Anne Brinckman was an exceptionally knowledgeable and passionate environmentalist. She credited her father with giving her a conservationist’s outlook, decades before green was a topic of focus and concern, but it was her intelligent insights into the connectedness of nature that made her vision special.

An extraordinary practical result of her environmental mission was her creative role in establishing three green magazines: she was the co-founding editor of Owl and Chickadee, the co-founding editor of Toronto Life Gardens (subsequently Gardening Life) and the founding editor of Green Living magazine. Has anyone else in Canada launched three important planet-saving publications!?

Mary Anne was the green conscience for a great many friends, one of the original advocates for local food, a constant worker in the cause of green burial, a wise standard-setter for the Green Living Show and generally an irrepressible source of ideas to help a healthier planet. At the time of her death, she was researching the best ways to give young people a deeper appreciation of the natural world.

All this she did with good humour and with self-deprecating comments on the paradoxes of being a good/responsible environmentalist. Mangoes are good for you, she’d say, but a lot of gas is burned up getting them from the tropics to Canada - but on the other hand, what else will poor nations sell us if we don’t buy their food? She would slurp gleefully on a fine bottle of Lynch-Bages while declaring she knew she was being naughty since it had come from so far away.

Above all, Mary Anne believed it was better to be engaged with the question than to worry about finding the perfect answer.