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Today “Earth Day” is celebrated every year around the world on April 22.  The day itself sprawls into celebrations of earth week, even earth month.  From pre-schools to senior-citizen centers, as many as one billion people spend the day thinking about and acting on behalf of a sustainable environment.  It started out much more simply.

Gaylord Nelson, liberal senator from Wisconsin, deserves the credit (learn more about Gaylord Nelson).  As governor of Wisconsin and then as one of the state’s senators, Nelson was committed to conservation.  Throughout the 1960s, he worried because “the state of our environment was simply a non-issue in the politics of the country.”  Making it an issue became Nelson’s passion.  He convinced President Kennedy to conduct a five-day “conservation tour” in 1963, to put the environment on reporters’ agendas.  The result was modest and fleeting, so Nelson searched for a better strategy.

The idea of a massive “teach-in” about the environment occurred to him in 1969.  He said, “…anti-Vietnam War demonstrations … had spread to college campuses all across the nation.  Why not organize a huge, grass-roots protest about what was happening to our environment?”  At a conference in Seattle that September, he announced the plan for an Earth Day the following spring.  He chose April 22 because public schools would still be in session and colleges wouldn’t yet be in final exams.

The response, Nelson said “was electric; it took off like gangbusters.”  He set up an office and hired a young man from Harvard, Denis Hayes, as national coordinator.  Nelson and Hayes built a larger staff, raised money (the whole event cost less than $200,000) and spread materials and publicity.  But this was obviously an idea whose time had come.  The grassroots were sprouting.  As Nelson wrote later, “It organized itself.”

On April 22, 1970, an estimated 20 million people rallied for the environment.  Thousands of colleges held teach-ins and marches to protest the state of our environment.  Similar events occurred in public schools and local communities.  Everyone was on board.  Congress suspended work for the day because so many members were participating in their home districts.  It accomplished a rare victory—bi-partisanship.  As the New York Times reported, “Conservatives were for it.  Liberals were for it.  Democrats, Republicans and independents were for it.  So were the ins, the outs, the Executive and Legislative branches of government.”

The first Earth Day is heralded as the start of the “environmental decade” of the 1970s.  Dozens of major laws at federal and state levels were established to protect air, water, soil, endangered species, wildlife habitat, parks and open space.  In Nelson’s mind, though, the environment wasn’t just about wilderness and pretty scenery.  He wrote, “Environment is all of America and its problems.  It is rats in the ghetto.  It is a hungry child in a land of affluence.  It is housing not worthy of the name; neighborhoods not fit to inhabit.”

On the twentieth anniversary of Earth Day, in 1990, Denis Hayes organized another earth day, global this time.  An estimated 200 million people in 141 countries participated.  Since then, Earth Day has become an annual affair.  The Earth Day Network estimates that now more than a billion people participate every year.

Senator Nelson never imagined it would be more than a one-time event.  But he would be pleased.  “The goal of Earth Day,” he wrote, “was to inspire a public demonstration so big it would shake the political establishment out of its lethargy and force the environmental issue onto the national political agenda.”  It worked.

References:

Earth Day Network.  The History of Earth Day.  Available at:  https://www.earthday.org/about/the-history-of-earth-day/.  Accessed April 20, 2018.

Nelson, Gaylord.  2002.  Beyond Earth Day; Fulfilling the Promise.  University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.  201 pages.

Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies.  Gaylord Nelson and Earth Day—the making of the modern environmental movement.  University of Wisconsin, Madison.  Available at:  http://www.nelsonearthday.net/about/index.php.  Accessed April 20, 2018.

Think about your image of John Muir.  Probably a thin old man with a long scraggly beard, walking by himself in the wilderness, as far from polite society as he could get.  True, but certainly not the whole truth.  John Muir, the Father of American Conservation, was much more than a hermit.

John Muir was born in Dunbar, Scotland, on April 21, 1838 (died 1914).  He was raised in a strict home by a fervently religious and strict father.  Muir, however, disobeyed as often as possible, sneaking off to the forbidden seaport or out into the fields.  He was all boy, and his behavior elicited one response by an observer:  “The verra Deevil’s in that boy.”

When he was 11, Muir moved with his family to Wisconsin to start life as pioneer farmers.  It was a hard life, but Muir loved it.  Hard work and physical discomfort never bothered him, and he loved the near-wilderness of rural Wisconsin.  He read books smuggled into the house from neighbors, dreaming to follow the South American adventures of explorer Alexander von Humboldt.

He was a clever young man, figuring out ways to do the farm work more efficiently and inventing machines to help ease the labor.  He built a mechanical bed fitted with an alarm clock; when the alarm triggered, the bed tilted up and slid the sleeper onto the floor.  When he displayed this and other inventions at the Wisconsin State Fair in Madison, people declared that Muir was not a devil, but a genius.

He tried college for a couple of years, but never completed a degree.  A pacifist, he walked to Canada to avoid the draft during the Civil War—starting his practice of walking wherever he needed to go.  After the war, he returned to the U.S., working in a wheel factory in Indianapolis.  Again, his genius for mechanics and logistics made him a success, and he was on track to marry and become a rich industrialist.

But one day an accident at the factory left him temporarily blinded.  He decided then to change his life:  “I might have become a millionaire,” he wrote, “but I chose to become a tramp.”  And tramp he did, walking a thousand miles from the Midwest to Florida.  He boarded a ship to take him to South America, but changed his mind and headed to California.

In California, he walked east to the Yosemite Valley, and his fate was sealed.  He fell in love with the mountains and valleys of the Sierra Nevada, living in the Yosemite Valley for several years.  He began to write, and his style of describing manly wilderness adventures in popular magazines captured America’s imagination.  He became famous and wealthy.

Muir was a complex man.  He was deeply spiritual, but hated organized religion.  He loved people individually and was the life of the party wherever he went, but he distrusted organizations of all kinds. He never considered himself a citizen of anything but the earth.  He loved hiking in the wilderness alone, but craved the company of those he loved.

He married and had two daughters, a happy man in a happy family.  For a decade, Muir ran his father-in-law’s farm and vineyards, never writing and seldom hiking.  But his wife knew that he still needed the chance to roam the wilderness, and she encouraged him to re-balance his life.  He again picked up his walking stick and his pen.

Along the way he grew increasingly concerned about what was happening to his beloved mountains.  Excessive logging, over-grazing and shabby tourism were destroying the beauty and productivity of nature.  In cahoots with his publishing colleague, Robert Underwood Johnson, Muir mounted a movement to protect the Yosemite ecosystem.  With Muir writing and Johnson lobbying, they succeeded—Yosemite National Park was created in October, 1890.

From then on, Muir became a conservationist first and a writer and hiker second.  He traveled more widely, up to Alaska and down to the desert southwest.  He became close friends with Teddy Roosevelt, and persuaded him to protect other precious landscapes that were being overrun, including the Grand Canyon.  For once overcoming his reluctance for organizations, he helped found The Sierra Club and served as its president until the end of his life.

His victories for conservation are legion, but one failure plagued him.  He considered the Hetch Hetchy Valley in Yosemite National Park as beautiful as the Yosemite Valley itself.  When a proposal arose to flood the valley to supply water to San Francisco, Muir fought what he considered a mortal sin:  “Dam Hetch Hetchy!  As well dam for water-tanks the people’s cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the heart of man.”  But Muir lost, and that disappointment, added to his revulsion at the start of World War 1, broke his spirit.  He died the day before Christmas, 1914.

Reference:

Nielsen, Larry A.  2017.  Nature’s Allies:  Eight Conservationists Who Changed Our World.  Island Press, Washington, DC  255 pages.

Ever wonder where the term “sustainability” came from?  Well, wonder no more.  It was the creation of Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland, the world leader who set us on a path to recognize that prosperity, human health and environmental sustainability were not three things, but one.

Gro Harlem Brundtland was born in Oslo, Norway, on April 20, 1939 (“Gro” is pronounced “grew”).  Her parents were activists for social welfare in Norway, and when Norway fell to Hitler and things got dangerous for families like theirs, she was secreted to Sweden to wait out the war with her grandmother.  After the war, she returned and her family picked up where they left off.  Brundtland remembered, “On the bookshelves at home, classics like Marx stood next to Karl Evang’s Sexual Education and the Workers’ Lexcion.”

Her father, a physician, was an active part of the Norwegian political sphere, serving as doctor to the king and prime minister.  Later he became the country’s Secretary of Defense.  Brundtland followed in his footsteps, also becoming a physician, in her case specializing in public health.  With her MD in hand, she worked with the poor and especially with women needing information and services about their reproductive health.  She was a leading advocate for the right of women to choose the course of their pregnancies, including the availability of abortion.

So, when the prime minister asked to meet with her in 1974, she expected it was about her father’s work or her position on abortion.  No, the prime minister said, nothing about that.  He wanted her to become Norway’s Minister of the Environment.  Initially shocked, she accepted, at 35 becoming the first woman environmental minister in the world.

She went to work with enthusiasm.  Too much enthusiasm, some thought.  She rankled the industrial community with new regulations and pollution fines, put more land into national parks than some thought advisable, and generally positioned the environment into the very center of the political landscape.  When cajoled to moderate her views, she replied, “Nature could not afford any indifference.”

The Norwegian government in the 1980s was in a state of flux, with ruling parties changing regularly.  Brundtland was a member of the Labour Party, and when it came to power in 1981, she became Prime Minister.  The job lasted only eight months before another change in ruling party ousted her.  But twice more she returned as Prime Minister, both for much longer terms than her first.

Between posts as prime minister, she took on another monumental task, the one which made her name a household word.  The Secretary-General of the United Nations asked her to chair a new independent commission to look at the environment.  Once assured that she would have free reign to lead as she thought best, she agreed, and the work of the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) began at Christmas, 1983.

She insisted that WCED view the goals of prosperity, health and environment as a comprehensive topic.  Before that time, environmental quality had been considered an afterthought—something to be cleaned up after economic development had worked some sort of magic.  Along with the full-time executive director of the commission, Jim MacNeill, a Canadian diplomat, Brundtland set out to convince the world that a prosperous and healthy world could only occur if the environment was healthy as well.

She and the members of the commission—chosen equally from developed and developing countries—went around the world holding hearings and tours in places where poverty and environmental degradation were living together.  They issued their report in March, 1987, as the book Our Common Future (see the calendar entry for March 20).  Under Brundtland’s leadership, WCED coined a new term:  Sustainability.   Today we would say that the term and its underlying premise went viral.

The vision of Gro Harlem Brundtland brought her nearly universal approval.  She began earning nicknames—the Green Goddess, Earth Mother, Mrs. Green and Godmother of Sustainable Development.  Norwegians called her Landsmoderen, Mother of the Nation.  She was the most popular Norwegian Prime Minister in history.

Although her work with WCED ended officially in the late 1980s and her last term as prime minister ended in 1996, she did not slow down.  She led the World Health Organization from 1998-2003, bringing the program back from the brink of disrepute to renewed respectability and effectiveness.  She continues to serve on organizations and speak about the need for an integrated approach to prosperity, health and environment.  As she has said,

“Let us fight the indifference which has prevailed in the past and move towards that equilibrium between people, consumption, and the carrying capacity of our earth which we call sustainable development.  Let us listen to the voice of unborn generations and make the earth the hospitable place that any human being deserves.”

Reference:

Nielsen, Larry A.  2017.  Nature’s Allies:  Eight Conservationists Who Changed Our World.  Island Press, Washington, DC.  255 pages.

Pioneers are people who create paths through unknown places.  Lucy Braun did so, figuratively and literally.

Emma Lucy Braun was born on April 19, 1889, in Cincinnati, Ohio, which would be her home for her entire life (she died at age 81 in 1971).  She roamed the local woodlands as a young girl with her family.  Her parents quizzed her and her sister, Annette, on the names of the plants and animals they encountered, sparking an intense interest in natural history.  In high school, she began pressing and drying plants, building a reference collection that eventually contained 11,891 specimens (now held by the Smithsonian Institution).  She first studied geology at the University of Cincinnati, earning BS and MS degrees.  She then turned to botany, earning her PhD degrees there in 1914, the second woman to receive a doctorate from the university.  The first was her sister Annette, who beat Lucy by two years, with a doctorate specializing in the study of moths.

After finishing her degrees, she began working as a teacher and researcher for the University of Cincinnati, advancing stepwise to full professor in 1946.  She retired from the university two years later, determined to escape the demands of teaching so she could concentrate on her research.  In fact, her pre-eminent work, the book Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America, was published two years after retirement, in 1950.

She was a pioneer in the understanding of hardwood forest ecology.  And she did it the hard way, by hiking through the forests she sought to understand.  She walked an estimated 65,000 miles through the forests of the southern Appalachians, at a time when women seldom performed such extensive or demanding field work.  And by her side for most of those miles walked her sister Annette.  Braun continued exploring throughout her life, leading hikes until she was 80 years old.

That work made her the singular expert on the plant ecology of the eastern deciduous forest.  With her background in geology, she was able to relate plant communities to site conditions, and supplementing her own field work with survey records from earlier times, she was able to reconstruct the changes in forest composition over hundreds of years.  Her book on deciduous forests and her other work, published in more than 180 papers, remain among the seminal foundations of modern forest ecology.

She was also a pioneer for the role of women in ecology and conservation.  She advised mostly female graduate students.  In 1917, she founded the Wildflower Preservation Society of North America (now known as the Cincinnati Wildflower Preservation Society), which recently celebrated its centenary.  She was the first woman elected president of the Ohio Academy of Science (1933-1934) and the first woman president of the Ecological Society of America, elected in 1950 (the society established the E. Lucy Braun Award for outstanding student poster presentations in 1987).  Just before her death in 1971, she was the first woman inducted into the Ohio Conservation Hall of Fame.

As well as being a pioneering scientist and role model for women, Braun was a staunch conservationist.  She fought for the protection of intact forest ecosystems for their biodiversity and scientific values.  The Nature Conservancy’s first property in Ohio is named for her—the E. Lucy Braun-Lynx Prairie Preserve.  It is part of an 18,000-acre tract that comprises the Edge of Appalachia Preserve.  Braun loved this area, which her research showed was particularly high in biodiversity in mixtures of open prairies and woodlands.  Braun was responsible for several other land conservation projects throughout the midwest.

At a speech to the Kentucky Garden Club in 1935, Braun explained her passion for preserving the forest:

“Nowhere in the whole world is there the equal in beauty and magnificence of our eastern deciduous forest.  It is unexcelled.  And in Kentucky and Tennessee this deciduous forest reached its superlative development….Why not save a piece of your native country, your native state, in its original condition as a monument to the original beauty and grandeur of your forests, just as you save an historical shrine?”

Just as the pioneers worked their ways westward through the eastern deciduous forest, using the wood and clearing the land for farms, pastures and towns, so Lucy Braun pioneered the work of keeping some of that land around for people like her—men and women—to learn, perhaps, how to keep the broader environment intact as well.

References:

Pine Mountain Settlement School Collections.  Emma Lucy Braun.  Available at:  https://pinemountainsettlement.net/?page_id=15577.  Accessed April 18, 2018.

Rafferty, John P.  2018.  Emma Lucy Braun, American Botanist and Ecologist.  Encyclopedia Britannica, 4-12-2018.  Available at:  https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emma-Lucy-Braun.  Accessed April 18, 2018.

The Nature Conservancy.  Edge of Appalachia Preserve, The E. Lucy Braun Lynx Prairie Preserve.  Available at:  https://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/northamerica/unitedstates/ohio/placesweprotect/tnc-eoa-buzzardroost-rock-trail-map-and-guide-1.pdf.  Accessed April 18, 2018.

Yes, the official opening date of the Natural History Museum in London was April 18, 1881, when the iconic building it still occupies saw its first visitors.  But the exhibits in the museum have a history that starts considerably before the official opening.

The famed British Museum opened in 1753 when the eclectic collections of Sir Hans Sloane were transferred to the British government upon his death.  Sloane’s collection included a little more than 70,000 items, from architectural remnants to fossils to biological specimens.  It was a broad and idiosyncratic compilation, but suited well to the appetites of curious aristocrats at the time.

But as time went on and the British Museum’s collections grew in scope and scientific value, space became tight and an organizing rationale was needed.  In 1856, Richard Owen, a renowned paleontologist, signed on to curate the natural history portion of the museum.  He quickly convinced the directors that a separate natural history building would relieve the space crunch and provide a proper status for exploring the natural world.

A few years later, architect Alfred Waterhouse took up the project, designing the building that became the Natural History Museum.  When the new museum opened on April 18, 1881, it was an architectural and exhibition masterpiece.  The sprawling building is covered in terra cotta tiles, used because they were resistant to the harsh air quality of Victorian London.  The Romanesque structure dominates the landscape, with blocky spires at the corners and a soaring central tower.  Waterhouse designed “a cathedral for nature,” as revealed by the interior.  The central hall rises to a dizzying height, with walls of windows at the ends that resemble those of a church nave.  Arched galleries like chapels line the side walls, topped by a higher floor of more intricate three-arched openings.  At the end of the building, where an altar or statue of Jesus would adorn a cathedral, a broad staircase rises to an out-sized alabaster statue of Charles Darwin.

But then come the natural history details.  The columns that border doorways to adjacent hallways are sculpted to resemble the main stems of both living and fossil plants. The columns are inhabited with climbing monkeys, perching birds, crouching frogs  and trailing flowers.  The ceiling is covered with tiles showing 162 plants representing the world’s flora—many of which were imported to England through the great voyages of exploration of that time.

The museum remained part of the British Museum until 1963, when it was separately chartered.  The current name—the Natural History Museum, without a “British” or “London” modifier—arrived in 1992.  From those early specimens has grown one of the largest natural history museums in the world.  Today the museum houses 80 million specimens, representing the flora and fauna, both living and prehistoric, of the entire globe, along with mineral and other geological specimens.

Most museums in Victorian times were expensive to visit, but Owen insisted that the Natural History Museum be free and open to all.  It remains so to this day, along with its parent, the British Museum.  Consequently, it is the third most visited attraction in London, hosting more than 4.6 million enthralled visitors in the past year (the record was 5.6 million in 2013-2014).

They go to see astounding displays.  For four decades, the central hall held a Diplodocus skeleton that visitors fondly named “Dippy.”  It has been replaced by a hanging blue whale skeleton to represent the living biodiversity of the earth.  A wildlife garden adjoins the west side of the museum, a quiet refuge from the crowds. The newest addition is the Darwin Centre, which holds glass-walled laboratories for the museum’s 200 scientists where visitors can watch and participate in scientific work.  The dinosaur displays are considered the finest in the world.  My favorite area, however, is the “Treasures of the Museum” exhibit that shows a series of remarkable objects—an original copy of The Origin of Species, a collection of butterflies made by Alfred Russel Wallace, and many other priceless specimens.

References:

Pavid, Katie.  2018.  Indexing Earth’s wonders:  a history of the Museum.  Natural History Museum, 17 April 2018.  Available at:  http://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/indexing-earths-wonders.html.  Accessed April 17, 2018.

Natural History Museum.  History and architecture.  Available at:  http://www.nhm.ac.uk/about-us/history-and-architecture.html.  Accessed April 17, 2018.

If April 16, 1972, was a day on which Panda-Monium broke out in the U.S. because of the appearance of giant pandas, April 17 was a day of pandemonium  for another kind of beast—the Ford Mustang.

The 1964 ½ Ford Mustang could be purchased for the first time on April 17, 1964.  Car fans awaited the day with great anticipation.  Simultaneous ads ran on April 16 on the three major television networks, and the car was officially introduced at the New York World’s Fair.   Although we think of it as being named after a wild horse, the name actually comes from the World War II “Mustang” fighter plane.

The Ford Mustang was the “working man’s Thunderbird,” a sports car that could seat four and cost a modest $2300.  It could be plain and minimally powered, using parts re-tooled from the economy Ford Falcon, or it could be souped up in style and power.  A buying frenzy broke out on April 17—22,000 Mustangs were bought on that one day.  More than 400,000 were bought in the first year, and more than 9 million have been bought since then.

A friend during my freshman year at the University of Illinois in 1966 brought his Mustang down to school one weekend (freshmen couldn’t have cars on campus in those days).  He let me drive the cherry red convertible around campus.  Heads turned as I cruised up and down Green Street, and for the one and only time I felt like the BMOC.

And that’s the way Americans have always felt about their cars.  When I speak around the country about the BP oil spill, I tell audiences that the cause of the spill wasn’t the greed or disregard of the oil companies.  No, it is American addiction to oil.  We love our cars and, so, we have organized our society around driving the wonderful, beautiful things.  Around the neighborhood, around town, around the country.  From gas station to gas station.

Consequently, America—along with Canada, which also loves its cars—uses more oil than anywhere in the world.  With 4.5% of the world’s population, the U.S. uses 20% of the world’s petroleum.  With about 18% of the world’s population, China uses about 12% of its petroleum.  On a per person basis, the U.S. uses about 12 gallons per person per day, while China uses about 2 gallons per person per day—so, each American uses 6 times more petroleum each day to get by than a Chinese person does.

And where do we get that fuel for our cars?   From everywhere is the answer.  The U.S. produces about 80% of the oil we consume, a recent turn-around from decades of large and increasing oil imports.  That percentage of domestic production—the highest since 1964—has  grown recently with technologies that allow the exploitation of so-called “tight oil” (technologies like fracking, horizontal drilling and seismic imaging).  The U.S. imports the remainder from 84 different countries.  Most comes from Canada (40%), Saudia Arabia (9%), Mexico (9%), Venezuela (7%) and Iraq (6%).

Oil consumption in the U.S. peaked in 2004, after a rising trend that has lasted, except for short disruptions, since oil became widely available at the start of the 20^th Century.  Projections used to anticipate much higher oil consumption, but now projections suggest a stable consumption well into the future.  The lack of increasing consumption has occurred for two reasons.  First, people are driving less—vehicle miles traveled has declined, because fuel prices have risen and because the baby-boomers are driving less.  Second, rising fuel economy—getting more miles per gallon—has made driving more efficient.

So, there is good news for our oil addiction.  We seem to be laying off the sauce, at least a little bit.  If we keep it going, perhaps we might just have a chance to save the atmosphere and assure a sustainable planet.

And if we can convert all those classic Ford Mustangs into electric cars, what a wonderful world it will be!

References:

Classic Pony Cars.  History of the Ford Mustang.  Available at:  http://classicponycars.com/history.html.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

Cox, Lydia.  2015.  The surprising decline in US petroleum consumption.  World Economic Forum, 10 Jul 2015.  Available at:  https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2015/07/the-surprising-decline-in-us-petroleum-consumption/.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

Energy Information Administration.  How much oil consumed by the United States comes from foreign countries?  Available at:  https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=32&t=6.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

History.com.  Ford Mustang debuts at World’s Fair.  This Day In History, April 17.  Available at:  https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/ford-mustang-debuts-at-worlds-fair.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

When President Richard Nixon met with Mao Zedong in Beijing in February, 1972, the summit opened up relations between the countries that had been closed since just after the end of World War Two.  But the real détente began when two much more cuddly ambassadors from China hit America’s shores.

Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, two juvenile giant pandas, arrived in Washington, DC, on April 16, 1972.  Reportedly, at a dinner during the Chinese meeting, Mrs. Nixon told the Chinese premier how much she loved giant pandas.  He replied, “I’ll give you some.”  The two pandas were flow to the U.S. in their own plane and transported secretly at dawn to the National Zoo in Washington “under security measures as tight as if they had been Chairman Mao,” according to the New York Times.

Americans instantly adopted them in an outpouring of affection called “Panda-Monium!”  On the animals first day at the zoo, 20,000 admirers visited them.  The next Sunday, 75,000 people came, lined up for over a quarter-mile to glimpse something they had never seen—live giant pandas.   President Nixon reciprocated for the gift by sending China a pair of musk ox, named Milton and Mathilda (reports indicate that visitors to the Peking Zoo were disappointed by the animals, especially because a skin infection had caused them to shed their woolly coats; one died in 1975, the other by 1980).

The gift of pandas to the U.S. continued a long tradition of “panda diplomacy” by China.  Reports go back to the 600s, when the Tang Dynasty sent pandas to Japan.  China actually sent a pair of giant pandas to the Bronx Zoo in 1941, thanking the U.S. for humanitarian aid.  In the 1950s, China sent one panda, named Ping Ping, to Moscow and another to North Korea.  England got theirs in 1974.

Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing delighted American zoo visitors for many years.  But they frustrated zoo scientists who hoped to breed the pair (Ling-Ling was a female, and Hsing-Hsing a male).  Through many breeding cycles, both natural and artificial, Ling-Ling gave birth five times, but all five cubs died almost immediately after birth.  Ling-Ling died of heart failure in 1992, at age 23.  Hsing-Hsing, however, set the longevity record for a captive panda, living to the ripe old age of 28 (he died in 1999).

In more recent years, China has been spreading giant pandas around the world with greater frequency—but with one difference from the earlier gifts.  Since 1982, China has loaned giant pandas for a limited amount of time, usually 10-15 years, at a cost of $1 million per year.  Any cubs born of the loaned animals belong to China.  The National Zoo in Washington got its second pair in 2000, named Mei Xiang and Tian Tian.  They remain at the National Zoo, their loan periods having been re-negotiated twice.  They produced a male cub successfully in 2015, named Bei Bei, that returned to China in 2017.

But along with the joy that seeing giant pandas has brought to the American public, the conservation benefit has been exceptional.  Since 1972, Smithsonian scientists have been able to study all aspects of panda biology, including their behavior, reproduction and general health.  More recently, zoo scientists have worked collaboratively with the China Wildlife Conservation Association on projects related to habitat conservation in China, including creating corridors between isolated populations.

The consequence of these studies and other conservation initiatives undertaken in China has been improving trends for giant pandas.  Previously listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, the status was upgraded in 2016 to vulnerable.  The earlier decline in abundance has been halted, and population numbers are increasing.  The latest estimate is that about 2,000 giant pandas now live in the wild, all within habitat preserves in the mountains of south central China.

So, it is true:  Diplomacy works!

References:

Bihanil, Shipra.  2017.  China’s ‘panda diplomacy’:  All you need to know.  Times of India, Jul 10, 2017.  Available at:  https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/chinas-panda-diplomacy-all-you-need-to-know/articleshow/59522759.cms.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

Burns, Alexander.  2016.  When Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing Arrived in the U.S.  The New York Times, Feb. 4, 2016.  Available at:  https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/nyregion/the-pandas-richard-nixon-obtained-for-the-us.html.  Accessed April 15, 2018.

Holland, Brynn.  2017.  Panda Diplomacy:  The World’s Cutest Ambassaddors.  History.com, March 16, 2017.  Available at:  https://www.history.com/news/panda-diplomacy-the-worlds-cutest-ambassadors.  Accessed April 15, 2018.

IUCN.  Red List:  Ailuropoda melanoleuca.  Available at:  http://www.iucnredlist.org/details/712/0.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

Jorgensen, Dolly.  2014.  Panda for muskox.  The Return of Native Nordic Fauna, March 1, 2014.  Available at:  http://dolly.jorgensenweb.net/nordicnature/?p=1466.  Accessed April 16, 2018.

Smithsonian’s National Zoo & Conservation Biology Institute.  A Brief History of Giant Pandas at the Zoo.  Available at:  https://nationalzoo.si.edu/animals/brief-history-giant-pandas-zoo.  Accessed April 15, 2018.

Calling Nikolaas Tinbergen an animal behaviorist is a little like calling the Grand Canyon a little hole in the ground.  Tinbergen, along with his colleague Konrad Lorenz, established the modern field of animal ethology, now an essential element of ecology and conservation.

Niko Tinbergen was born in The Hague, Netherlands, on April 15, 1907 (died 1988).  The son of two school teachers, he would have been expected to be an academically talented student himself.  But that wasn’t the case.  “I was not much interest in school,” he wrote in his Nobel Prize biography.  “…Wise teachers allowed me plenty of freedom to engage in my hobbies of camping, bird watching, skating and games….”

Nature was Tinbergen’s muse.  He spent his free time observing birds, insects and fish.  He tended aquariums in his backyard and school room, noting the next building and guarding behavior of sticklebacks.  He watched Herring Gulls along the shore, and carefully observed the comings and goings of solitary wasps on the beach.  He took careful notes and drew illustrations of what he saw.

His immersion in nature and the behavior of animals in their natural habitats became the trademark of his academic pursuit of ethology.  At school, he “scraped through, with as little effort as I judged possible without failing.”  But he kept moving forward in school, eventually receiving a doctorate with a 32-page dissertation on the behavior of the bee wolf, a solitary tunnel-making wasp with remarkable homing capabilities.  It is one of the shortest dissertations of its kind, finished in a rush.  He graduated on April 12, 1932, was married on April 14 and within a few weeks began his first great adventure.

He finished his dissertation fast because he was eager to begin an assignment in Greenland as part of the 1932-1933 International Polar Year.  He and his new wife, Lies, spent two summers and a winter living with Eskimos in an isolated settlement, chronicling their culture and amassing anthropological objects for the national museum.  While there, he continued his behavioral observations of birds.

He returned to begin a career as a university lecturer and researcher at the University of Leiden, Netherlands.  There he began to establish himself as a leading experimentalist in animal behavior, developing elegant experiments with animals in field conditions.  In 1936, he met Konrad Lorenz at a conference, and a lifelong friendship and collaboration began.  Lorenz was the brilliant and effervescent idea-man, developing broad theories of why and how animals behaved.  Tinbergen took those ideas into the field and laboratory, testing them in experiments that lent ecological veracity to Lorenz’s theories

Their work was interrupted during World War II when Tinbergen was interred in a Nazi camp for most of the war.  Lorenz was captured and detained as a prisoner of war by the Russians.   After the war, Tinbergen became a full professor and pursued his leadership of the emerging field of animal ethology.  He held to the idea that the science of ethology should stick to examing the physiology of behavior and avoid the psychology of it, refusing to ascribe human-like motivations to birds and insects.  In 1952, he published The Study of Instinct, the first ethology textbook and often considered the birth of the discipline.

Tinbergen moved to Oxford University in England in 1949, where he worked for the remainder of his career.  He established a large field-based team, mentoring many students who became the second-generation of experimental ethologists.  He published the book, The Herring Gull’s World, in 1953, the work that he always considered his best.  He began moving to more popular works after that, including Bird Life in 1954 and Curious Naturalists in 1958.  Later, he turned to filmmaking, producing the award-winning documentary, Signals for Survival, about Herring Gull behavior.

But his impact on biology and conservation had been cemented by that time.  He shared the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1973 with Konrad Lorenz and Karl von Frisch, all for their work in animal behavior, and he received myriad other awards around the world.

His role in conservation is also momentous.  Understanding how animals act in nature is crucial to assuring their survival in a world where wild animals must increasingly interact with humans.  For examples, methods for raising animals in captivity and then releasing them into the wild are based largely around the foundational ideas of Tinbergen and Lorenz.  He helped found the Serengeti Research Institute (now the Tanzania Wildlife Research Institute), which conducts research aimed at understanding and conserving the great wildlife populations and their migrations across the Serengeti Plains.

References:

Encyclopedia.com.  Tinbergen, Nikolaas (Niko).  Available at:  https://www.encyclopedia.com/people/science-and-technology/zoology-biographies/nikolaas-tinbergen.  Accessed April 14, 2018.

Tinbergen, Nikolaas.  1973.  Nikolaas Tinbergen – Biographical.  Nobel Prize, authobriography by the recipient.  Available at:  https://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1973/tinbergen-bio.html.  Accessed April 14, 2018.

For the drought-stricken residents of the Great Plains, Palm Sunday of 1935 seemed like a fresh start.  The winds had stopped, the temperature had warmed and the sun was out.  It was spring, and perhaps the start of a year when rains would return and life could be normal again.

But by late afternoon, everything had changed.  The temperature started falling, 30 degrees in some places. The sun was covered in thick clouds.  The wind began blowing, growing in fury by the minute, steady at 60 miles per hour in some locales.  And the dust began to blow.  A huge dust cloud, hundreds of feet high, hundreds of miles long and black as night descended from the Dakotas to the panhandles of Oklahoma and Texas.

Residents thought the world was ending.  Literally.  They thought the biblical prediction of Armageddon was upon them.  In minutes, the daylight turned to darkness as though it were midnight.  You couldn’t see your hand in front of your face.  People went blind from the blown dirt.  In time, the day—April 14, 1935—became known as Black Sunday, the day of the worst dust storm in the history of the country, perhaps the world.  The next day, a reporter wrote an article in which he referred to the area as the “dust bowl,” the name we now associate with a decade-long natural resource disaster.

Black Sunday was the result of a particular set of weather conditions that made it extraordinarily bad, but the general situation had become commonplace.  Similar storms, but never as bad, had occurred often—14 in 1932, and 38 in 1933. The cause?  The Great Plains had been suffering since 1930 in the longest extended drought in its history.  Poor farming practices, spurred on by needs to grow more wheat to support the war effort during WW1 and later by land speculation, had reduced the formerly lush prairie to dry, dusty, barren fields.

The result was soil erosion on an unprecedented scale.  On Black Sunday alone, 300,000 tons of soil were picked up and blown across the continent.  By the end of the decade, 35 million acres of farmland had been totally destroyed and another 125 million acres had been severely impaired.  The landscape and its economy were in shreds.  More than 2.5 million residents of the Great Plains states abandoned their homes, farms and businesses.

Less than two weeks after Black Sunday, on April 27, 1935, Congress acted to counteract the damage.  Congress established the Soil Conservation Service, noting that “the wastage of soil and moisture resources on farm, grazing, and forest lands … is a menace to the national welfare.”  Since then, the agency, now called the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), has implemented programs designed to protect soil and retain moisture through restoration programs, watershed management projects and technical assistance and cost-sharing to landowners (see the entry for April 27 for more on the NRCS).

The Dust Bowl had a profound effect on the character of the United States.  One of the nation’s greatest novels, The Grapes of Wrath, by John Steinbeck, chronicled the story of farmers displaced by the disaster and the Great Depression.  His novel was published on April 14, 1939, exactly four years after Black Sunday.  Steinbeck felt his book would not be widely popular, saying, “I’ve done by damndest to rip a reader’s nerves to rags.”

Dorothea Lange was hired as a photographer to chronicle the devastation of the region, a now famous portfolio of documentary photographic art. The great folk song writer and singer, Woody Gutherie, was 22 when the Black Sunday storm rolled through his home in Pampa, Texas.  He wrote the song, “So Long, It’s Been Good To Know Yuh,’” about the storm.  His lyrics include the following:

“A dust storm hit, an’ it hit like thunder;
It dusted us over, an’ it covered us under;
Blocked out the traffic an’ blocked out the sun,
Straight for home all the people did run,
Singin’:

So long, it’s been good to know yuh;
So long, it’s been good to know yuh;
So long, it’s been good to know yuh.
This dusty old dust is a-getting’ my home,
And I got to be driftin’ along.”

References:

Blakemore, Erin.  2017.  Black Sunday:  The Storm That Gave Us the Dust Bowl.  Mental Floss, January 18, 2017.  Available at:  http://mentalfloss.com/article/63098/black-sunday-storm-gave-us-dust-bowl.  Accessed April 11, 2018.

DeMott, Robert.  2009.  Grapes of Wrath, a classic for today?  BBC News, 14 April 2009.  Available at:  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7992942.stm.  Accessed April 11, 2018.

Greenspan, Jesse.  2015.  Remembering Black Sunday, 80 Years Later.  History.com, April 14, 2009.  Available at:  https://www.history.com/news/remembering-black-sunday-80-years-later.

National Weather Service.  The Black Sunday Dust Storm of April 14, 1935.  Available at:  https://www.weather.gov/oun/events-19350414.  Accessed April 11, 2018.

Natural Resources Conservation Service.  More Than 80 Years Helping People Help the Land:  A Brief History of NRCS.  Available at:  https://www.nrcs.usda.gov/wps/portal/nrcs/detail/national/about/history/?cid=nrcs143_021392.  Accessed April 11, 2018.

We often talk about the elephant in the room—or not talk about it, as the saying goes.  But what about the elephant in the country, the first one in the country?

It had to happen sometime, and that time was April 13, 1796.  America’s first elephant arrived from Asia, aboard the merchant ship America!  She was a two-year old female.  The ship’s captain, Jacob Crowninshield, bought the elephant in Calcutta, India, for $450, expecting to be able to sell it for $5000 in New York.  He underestimated the value—the sale brought $10,000.

The new owner (and no one is quite sure who that was) displayed his prize possession throughout the east coast, as far south as Asheboro, North Carolina, over the next several years.  Then the story gets even hazier.  Perhaps this first elephant, but perhaps a second elephant, ended up in the ownership of Hackaliah Bailey, who named her “Old Bet” and toured around the country with her for several years.  His troupe include four wagons, a trained dog, a horse, pigs and one elephant!  And, yes this is the first of a line of Bailey’s that became part of the famous Barnum and Bailey Circus.

Old Bet died when she was about 20 years old, murdered by a farmer in New England who didn’t think people should pay to see an animal displayed.  Bailey returned to his hometown in Somers, New York, built a hotel called The Elephant Hotel and erected a statue to its namesake.  The Elephant Hotel eventually became the town hall, but it still sports the elephant memorial on a tall column on the front lawn.

I write about the first elephant imported into the U.S. partially because nothing else of note seems to have happened in conservation on April 13.  But I also write to explore the market in importing and exporting live wild animals.  Well before the first elephant made it to U.S. shores, animals and plants were transported around the world, for many reasons.  Explorers sought and brought back species to establish farms for new crops of food and fiber.  Colonists brought animals and plants with them to make their exotic new homes more like their old environs.

We often talk about poaching and other illegal trade in wild organisms, but there is also a worldwide legal trade.  The legal market for wild organisms is monitored by a group called TRAFFIC.  TRAFFIC’s mission “is to ensure that trade in wild plants and animals is not a threat to the conservation of nature.”  They have a big job.

Trade in wild organisms is big business.  People buy and sell wild plants and animals for food, fuel, clothing and ornaments, sport, medicine, religion, research, exhibition and plain old collecting.  We all participate when we eat seafood captured from the wild or use wood taken from natural forests.  Thousands of species are involved.  Trade that flows between countries—that is, exports and imports—was valued at $323 billion in 2009; it probably exceeds $400 billion annually by now.

Then there is the illegal component.  Poaching and black market trade in wild organisms is a major element of international crime—only trades in illegal drugs and arms are larger.  The value is hard to estimate, obviously, but TRAFFIC suggests that illegal fishing is valued at up to $23 billion per year, illegal timber trade at $7 billion and illegal wildlife trade at up to 10 billion.  Of course, the rarer the species, the higher the value, making illegal trade a fundamental danger to endangered species and, hence, ecosystems.

And that’s the real elephant in the room.

References:

American Heritage.  1974.  Setting The Record Straight On Old Bet.  American Heritage, volume25, issue 3.  Available at:  http://www.americanheritage.com/content/setting-record-straight-old-bet.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

Atlas Obscura.  Memorial to America’s First Circus Elephant.  Available at:  https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/memorial-to-americas-first-circus-elephant.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

Goodwin, George G.  1951.  The Crowninshield Elephant.  Natural History, October 1951.  Available at:  http://www.naturalhistorymag.com/editors_pick/1928_05-06_pick.html?page=2.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

The Daily Dose.  April 13, 1976:  First Elephant Arrives in America.  Available at:  http://www.awb.com/dailydose/?p=1097.  Accessed April 10, 2018.

TRAFFIC.  Wildlife trade:  what is it?  Available at:  http://www.traffic.org/trade/.  Accessed April 10, 2018.