Blog

President Theodore Roosevelt declared the creation of Muir Woods National Monument on January 9, 1908.  The 1906 Antiquities Act provided the legal authority for establishment of national monuments by the president.  Muir Woods became just the seventh national monument created in the United States.

Muir Woods lies just north of San Francisco, adjacent to Golden Gate National Recreation Area and surrounded by Mt. Tamalpais State Park.  The monument was established by a gift from wealthy California businessman and conservationist, William Kent.  In 1905, Kent purchased one of the few remaining stands of coastal redwoods, a 600+ acre tract that wound its way along Redwood Creek,  for $45,000.  The tract had escaped the logging that had downed most redwoods because the valley of Redwood Creek was nearly inaccessible.  When his wife wondered if they had the money to spare, he told her, “If we lost all the money we have and saved these trees, it would be worthwhile, wouldn’t it?”

Muir Woods is famous for its grove of coastal redwood trees (Sequoia sempervirens), the world’s largest living tree.  The tallest tree in Muir Woods is 250+ feet, but larger specimens exist farther north in California and southern Oregon.  Most trees in Muir Woods are 600-800 years old; the oldest is around 1200 years old.  Muir loved the fact that this grove was preserved, as he wrote to William Kent:  “Saving these woods from the axe & saw, from money-changers and water-changers & giving them to our country & the world is in many ways the most notable service to God & man I’ve heard of since my forest wanderings began.”

When a downstream developer announced plans to flood Redwood Creek, the grove faced the threat of destruction.  Kent acted quickly by donating 295 acres of his land to the federal government in 1907 for the purpose of creating a national monument.  This action trumped local laws, effectively protecting the redwoods.  President Roosevelt acted quickly to create the Muir Woods National Monument.

However, Roosevelt thought it would be more fitting to name the grove after the donor, William Kent, and wrote to seek his permission for the naming.  Kent objected, writing to Roosevelt, “Your kind suggestion of a change of name is not one that I can accept. So many millions of better people have died forgotten, that to stencil one’s own name on a benefaction, seems to carry with it an implication of mandate immortality, as being something purchasable.”

Kent later became a U.S. congressman.  While in congress, he introduced the legislation that created the National Park Service in 1916.

Muir Woods has received more than 1 million visitors annually since 2014, putting it in the top 20% of all national park units by visitation.  Because of its popularity, parking is a major headache for visitors and for nearby residents.  A reservation system is now in place to both limit access and assure visitors that they will get to see the redwood groves.

References:

National Park Service.  Muir Woods.  Available at:  https://www.nps.gov/muwo/index.htm.  Accessed January 8, 2017.

The great 19^th Century naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace was born on January 8, 1823 (died 1913).  Today, Wallace is known mostly as a footnote—the other originator of the idea of evolution and natural selection, aside the much more famous Charles Darwin.  His prolific career as a naturalist and social commentator, however, made Wallace one of the most famous and honored men of England during his life.

Wallace was born to a working-class family in Gwent, Wales, and was forced to quit school at age 14 to take up work with his brother as a surveyor.  As they roamed southern England and Wales surveying, Wallace took an interest in the landscapes they charted.  He bought a book about botany and began to identify the plants along his surveying transects.  A naturalist was born!  When the surveying business went bust, he joined a local school as a drafting teacher.  His interest expanded to beetles, and he never looked back.

With a fellow teacher, he left for a multiple-year expedition to Brazil in 1848, at the age of 25.  There, he collected specimens of all kinds, with the goal of selling them to collectors back home.  After four years in Brazil, he boarded a ship along with his treasure of new and exotic specimens and many live animals.  A few days out from port, the ship caught fire and sank.  Along with it sank Wallace’s specimens and fortune.  The survivors, including Wallace, floated in leaky lifeboats for ten days before being rescued.

Undaunted, Wallace started a second major expedition in 1854, this time to what we now call Indonesia.  Collecting was again his agenda, but this time he also planned to investigate an idea that had captured his thinking—evolution.  He spent a total of eight years exploring the region, collecting and sending home more than 125,000 specimens and in the process discovering 1000 new species. His most spectacular find was the golden birdwing butterfly; he described the moment he found it:

“None but a naturalist can understand the intense excitement I experienced when I at length captured it.  On taking it out of my net and opening the glorious wings, my heart began to beat, violently, the blood rushed to my head, and I felt much more like fainting than I have done when in apprehension of immediate death.”

His subsequent book, The Malay Archipelago, was considered the foremost scientific travel book of the period and remains in print today.

While in Indonesia, he began writing extensively about his collections and ideas, including sending his thoughts about evolution to leading scientists in England.  When Charles Darwin saw Wallace’s work, Darwin rushed to finish his own writing on evolution.  Together they published a paper on the subject in August of 1858, thereby rightfully establishing Wallace as the co-creator of the theory of natural selection.  Darwin, however, gets the lion’s share of the credit for these ideas, while Wallace’s stature has continued to shrink.

At the time, however, Wallace was widely acknowledged for his work and became a more famous figure than Darwin.  Wallace wrote more than 1000 papers and 22 books during his life, many about the natural world, but others branching into realms of social reform and politics.

The plight of the two figures—Darwin and Wallace—is in evidence today in the London Museum of Natural History.  A marble sculpture of Darwin sits atop the grand staircase leading to the upper floors of the museum; Wallace, however, merits only a portrait on the adjacent wall, hung there many decades after Darwin’s statue.  In compensation, perhaps, a relatively new bronze statue of Wallace graces a gallery on the second floor.  The statue depicts a moment on his collecting expedition to the Malay, and his gaze extends to the ceiling of the cathedral-like central hall of the museum.  Follow his gaze, and you will see a golden birdwing butterfly painted on the distant ceiling.

References:

Smith, Charles H.  The Alfred Russel Wallace Page.  Western Kentucky University.  Available at:  http://people.wku.edu/charles.smith/wallace/BIOG.htm. Accessed January 7, 2017.

Today in Science History.  Quotes by Alfred Russel Wallace.  Available at:  https://todayinsci.com/W/Wallace_Alfred/WallaceAlfred-Quotations.htm.  Accessed January 7, 2017.

Wallace Fund.  The Alfred Russel Wallace website.  Available at:  http://wallacefund.info/  Accessed January 7, 2017.

The first word he spoke, according to his mother, was “zoo.”  As a child, whenever he was asked where he wanted to go, he said, “Zoo.”  If he didn’t get taken there, he threw a fit. And eventually, not content with what others did with zoos, he created his own. Gerald Durrell learned early to love animals, domestic and wild, a love that led to a lifetime of conservation efforts to prevent their extinction.

Gerald Durrell was born on January 7, 1925, in Jamshedpur, India, the youngest child of a prosperous British family (died 1995).  When his father died, the family moved first to England and then to Corfu, where Durrell spent his formative years (“The Durrells of Corfu” may sound familiar, as it is a popular public-television series). The outbreak of the Second World War brought the family back to England, where Durrell began work as an assistant at a pet shop and a local zoo.  He also began writing, becoming a successful book author in his early twenties.

As soon as he could, Durrell began a lifetime of travel and adventure in pursuit of his passion—animals and their conservation.  He realized, long before most others, that many species were in peril and that zoos could help keep them from going extinct.  He bought an estate on the Island of Jersey and set up his personal zoo in 1959.  There he accumulated the remnants of endangered species from around the world, breeding species in captivity to provide a stock of individuals to be restored to their habitats when conditions improved.  A stationary ark, he called it.  He understood the entertainment and education value of zoos, but Durrell had a bigger purpose:  “People think I’m just trying to look after nice fluffy animals.  What I’m actually trying to do is stop the human race form committing suicide.”

Durrell’s vision took hold, and what is now called the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust has thrived for more than a half century.  The Trust has three main functions.  First, the Durrell Wildlife Park on Jersey is home to more than 120 endangered species. Visitors flock to the site, and the income supports the trust’s other programs. Second, the trust engages in field projects around the world to protect species.  Third, and the part that Durrell might have appreciated the most, is the Durrell Conservation Academy, which teaches biodiversity management to students from around the world.  In 25 years, the academy boasts 5,000 graduates from 139 countries.

Durrell funded his work by writing books, forty in all.  He often said that he wrote books only to pay for his passion for protecting biodiversity, but his talent as an author is unquestioned.  His most famous book, “My Family and Other Animals,” is considered a classic of modern literature.  As critic Simon Barnes observed, “Here is a book that celebrates the wild world more thoroughly and more vividly than anything else ever written. It is at the same time funny and deeply serious; and it is a poor person who believes that humour compromises seriousness. It has reached people and moved them to laughter and other emotions, all them deep, powerful and packed with meaning.”

Gerald Durrell has moved many people to act on their love and concern for animals.  He received the Order of the British Empire and many other international prizes for animal conservation.  Eight species have been named for him.  David Attenborough talked about Durrell and his work at the fiftieth anniversary of the trust:

“This institution, Durrell, has never been more important. There has never been more endangered species in the world than there are right now. And neither has there been such an accomplished, admirable and wonderful institution as Durrell, before, in the history of the world. Nobody else has accumulated such expertise in how to breed endangered species….I wish it every success and may it go on for another fifty years, and more, because I do assure you that the world needs Durrell.”

References:

Barnes, Simon.  2015.  My Family and Other Animals 60^th anniversary:  Gerald Durrell’s book is a triump of conscious craft.  The Independent, 26 December 2015.  Available at:  http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/features/my-family-and-other-animals-60th-anniversary-gerald-durrells-book-is-a-triumph-of-conscious-craft-a6782496.html.  Accessed January 5, 2018.

Botting, Douglas.  1999.  Gerald Durrell, The Authorized Biography.  The New York Times.  Available at:  http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/botting-durrell.html.  Accessed January 5, 2018.

Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.  Gerald Durrell.  Available at:  https://www.durrell.org/wildlife/about/gerald-durrell/.  Accessed January 5, 2018.

Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust.  The world needs Durrell—Sir David Attenborough.  Available at:  http://wildlife.durrell.org/latest/news/the-world-needs-durrell–sir-david-attenborough/.  Accessed January 5, 2018.

Huntman, Ruth.  2016.  Gerald Durrell was my hero…I married him for his zoo.  The Guardian, 26 Mar 2016.  Available at:  https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/mar/26/gerald-durrell-was-my-hero-i-married-him-for-his-zoo.  Accessed January 5, 2018.

The most successful wildlife television series in history, Wild Kingdom, first aired on Sunday, January 6, 1963.  Anyone interested in animals and nature growing up in the 1960s and 1970s watched faithfully each week as host Marlin Perkins and naturalist Jim Fowler traversed the world exploring the lives of wild creatures—and usually ending up wrestling with them in the water, chasing them up trees, or wallowing with them in mud holes.

Insurance company Mutual of Omaha sponsored the program from the beginning and throughout its run.  The program ran for 22 years, from 1963 through 1985, producing hundreds of original episodes.    It aired first on Sunday evenings on NBC and later on syndication. The show’s legacy continues in various media formats, including a web series.

The show’s originator and its long-time host was Marlin Perkins.  Perkins came to the show with national prominence as a zoo professional, having served as Director of the Buffalo Zoo, Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo and the St. Louis Zoo.  Marlin’s main sidekick on the show, and his successor as host, was Jim Fowler—the person who generally ended up in the water, trees or mud.  Along with his appearance on Wild Kingdom, Fowler became a national celebrity through more than 100 appearances—with animals—on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson.  Fowler continues to represent Mutual of Omaha and Wild Kingdom as an animal and environmental advocate.

The show owed its popularity to a combination of factors.  The grandfatherly Perkins narrated with a gentle demeanor, while the mountain-sized Fowler dove into action, often dangerous, with an array of beautiful wild creatures.  The shows brought exotic locales and animals into viewers’ homes at a time when such programming did not exist.  Wild Kingdom was the perfect family-friendly program.

But the show did more—it brought the need for conservation of nature into our living rooms, just as the nation’s environmental conscience was awakening.  As Fowler reflected later, “….you don’t often see a spokesman for the natural world….The biggest challenge is how to affect public attitudes and make people care.”   Wild Kingdom did just that.  It was nominated for more than 40 broadcast awards, winning 4 Emmys.  Many consider Wild Kingdom to be the precursor and inspiration for the entire networks, like Animal Planet, that are so popular today.

References:

Gilbert, Debbie.  1997.  TV’s Wild Man.  Memphis Weekly Flyer, September 2, 1997.  Available at:  http://www.weeklywire.com/ww/09-02-97/memphis_afea.html.  Accessed January 5, 2017.

Mutual of Omaha.  Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom fact sheet.  Available at:  http://www.wildkingdom.com/documents/pdf/fact-sheet.pdf.   Accessed January 5, 2017.

Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom website.  Available at:  http://wildkingdom.com/index.  Accessed January 5, 2017.

Who doesn’t love birds (other than Sheldon Cooper)?  We are attracted by their beauty and diversity, their songs, the graceful freedom of their flight and their companionship, at the bird feeder or in our homes as pets.  January 5 honors that love as National Bird Day.  The day was created in 2002 by a collaboration of the Born Free USA Foundation and the Avian Welfare Coalition.  National Bird Day is celebrated on January 5 because the annual Christmas bird count ends on this date.  The annual bird count focuses our attention on the conservation of wild native birds.  National Bird Day adds a focus on the care of captive birds, most of which are from other countries than the United States and imported to this country as pets.

Understanding how to care for captive birds requires more than providing food, water and cleaning cages.  Birds are complex creatures, with elaborate and diverse social relationships with other birds, both in their species and among species.  National Bird Day helps bird owners and admirers create the right environments for their pets and the right expectations for the bond between birds and their owners.

Perhaps more importantly, however, National Bird Day emphasizes that wild birds should remain wild.  Most exotic bird species are not domesticated, but captured from the wild.  Hence, their needs are associated with their instincts and learned behavior in the wild, not based on a history of being carefully bred to live in cages or human homes.  Also, many bird species from tropical areas are threatened by extinction because of illegal capture and trade, and many birds die cruel deaths while being smuggled across national borders.  One estimate is that 60% of wild-caught birds die in the process of being transported to markets.

About  one-quarter of the known 9,600 bird species are traded in the global wild bird market.  The largest exporters of wild birds are African countries, led by Senegal.  The largest importers of wild birds are the countries in Europe.  The U.S. once was the largest importer of wild birds, but this has fallen dramatically because of regulations enacted in the Wild Bird Conservation Act of 1992.

According to the National Bird Day website, about 12% of the world’s bird species are in danger of extinction.  Parrots are especially susceptible—nearly one-third of the globe’s 330 parrot species are in trouble.

References:

Avian Welfare Coalition.  January 5^th, National Bird Day, More Beautiful Wild.  Available at:   http://www.avianwelfare.org/nationalbirdday/index.htm.  Accessed January 4, 2018.

UN Food and Agriculture Organization.  2011.  International trade in wild birds, and related bird movement, in Latin America and the Caribbean.  Available at:  http://www.fao.org/docrep/013/i0708e/i0708e00.pdf.  Accessed January 4, 2018

“Bond.  James Bond.”  Those words are now immortal among the fans of Ian Fleming’s super-spy.  James Bond has been played by Sean Connery, Roger Moore, Daniel Craig and a number of others.  But who was the real James Bond?  Not a spy, not a dapper man-about-town.  No, the real James Bond was an ornithologist.

James Bond was born on January 4, 1900, in Philadelphia (died in 1989). He later moved to England with his father and studied at Trinity College, Cambridge University.  Returning to Philadelphia, he soon gave up a career in banking to focus on his first love—natural history.  He followed in his father’s footsteps by sailing on a collecting expedition to the lower Amazon River in 1925 on behalf of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.  Now completely hooked, he became a volunteer curator there—one of “the last of a traditional museum breed, the independently wealthy, non-salaried curator, who lacked advanced university degrees.”

Bond was intrigued especially with the bird fauna of the Caribbean.  He explored more than 100 Caribbean islands during his career.  His most influential work is the definitive guide to the birds of the region, first published in 1936 as The Birds of the West Indies. Bond is credited with discovering that the birds of the Caribbean are related to those of North America, not South America, as had been previously assumed.  He also published books about the birds of Maine and Bolivia, along with dozens of other scientific papers.  Bond received many honors and awards for his work, including the Brewster Medal in 1954, the highest honor of the American Ornithologists’ Union.

But it was The Birds of the West Indies that earned him fame as the namesake for the world’s favorite spy.  Ian Fleming, the creator of the fictional James Bond, spent months at a time at his Jamaican home (Goldeneye) and was an amateur bird-watcher.  When he was writing his first spy novel, Casino Royale, in 1952, he was casting around for a name for the hero that would be unremarkable.  Fleming later wrote:

“I was determined that my secret agent should be as anonymous as possible….At that time one of my bibles was, and still is, Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, and it struck me that this name, brief, unromantic and yet very masculine, was just what I needed and so James Bond II was born…”

The real James Bond—JB authenticus, as his wife referred to him—wasn’t amused by the appropriation of his name.  He never played up the connection, even when offered $100 to land in a helicopter on the roof of a movie theater.  Ian Fleming appreciated the couple, however, and, at their only meeting, gave them a pre-publication copy of his novel, You Only Live Twice, inscribed “To the real James Bond, from the Thief of his identity, Ian Fleming, Feb. 5, 1964—a great day!”  That book sold recently at auction for $84,000.

Next time you watch the Bond film, Die Another Day, pay attention to the early scenes.  As usual, Bond is pretending to be something other than a spy.  This time, he claims to be an ornithologist and holds a copy of The Birds of the West Indies.

References:

Blakely, Julia.  2016.  Bond, James Bond:  The birds, the books, the bond.  Unbound, blog of the Smithsonian Libraries.  Available at:  https://blog.library.si.edu/2016/06/bond-james-bond-birds-books-bond/#.WG0aeVMrKpp .  Accessed January 3, 2017.

New York Times.  1989.  James Bond, ornithologist, 89; Fleming adopted name for 007.  New York Times, February 17, 1989.  Available at:  http://www.nytimes.com/1989/02/17/obituaries/james-bond-ornithologist-89-fleming-adopted-name-for-007.html.  Accessed January 3, 2017.

Parkes, Kenneth C.  1989.  In memoriam:  James Bond. The Auk, 106:718-720.  Available at:  http://sora.unm.edu/sites/default/files/journals/auk/v106n04/p0718-p0720.pdf.  Accessed January 3, 2017.

A long barrier island on Florida’s Atlantic Coast, just west of Orlando and south of Daytona, is notable for two reasons.  One is the presence of NASA’s Kennedy Space Center rocket launching site.  The other is Canaveral National Seashore, signed into existence on January 3, 1975, by President Gerald Ford.

Even without being adjacent to Kennedy Space Center, Canaveral deserves recognition as an area of outstanding ecological value.  The seashore includes 58,000 acres of barrier island, including a 24-mile stretch of undeveloped beach—the longest on Florida’s East Coast.  But its proximity to the space center gives it special cache.  Formerly part of a missile-testing facility, it was declared a national seashore to provide a natural buffer to the adjacent NASA rocket-launching sites.  That rationale has meant no development in the park, aside from a few parking lots dotted along the beach.  There are virtually no facilities, for recreational users or anyone else.  Day use only is allowed, and visitors must be gone by sundown.

Consequently, the area is a haven for wildlife, with only natural light—and dark—and sounds of wind and surf.

The park includes habitat for 15 threatened or endangered species, more than all but one other National Park Service property.  Three species of sea turtles nest there, building up to 7,000 nests every year.  As many as 250 species of birds are present, either resident or using the habitat for refuge on annual migrations.  It may be the ultimate paradox—a site created to preserve untouched nature is neighbor to a site where humankind’s most advanced technologies are launched into outer space!

The area seems untouched now, but it has been inhabited by humans for a long time.  Archeological sites within the seashore demonstrate that Native Americans of the Timucua and Ais peoples were well established before Spanish explorers, including Ponce de Leon, landed in the vicinity around 1500.  The Indians built Turtle Mound, a hill of oyster shells that long provided a navigation landmark and is still more than 30 feet high. Spansh and French explorers frequented the area for centuries, and the role of the lagoon behind the beach was significant for water transportation through the late 1800s.

Visitation is high.  More than 1.6 million people enjoyed the park in 2016, and visitation has been over 1 million annually since soon after the park’s opening in 1975.  The park is open very day of the year, but the southern beach area is so close to one NASA launching pad that it is closed when launches are scheduled.

References;

Duckett, Maryellen Kennedy.  Florida’a Pristine Parks:  Canaveral National Seashore.  National Geographic.  Available at:  https://www.nationalgeographic.com/travel/florida-pristine-parks/canaveral-national-seashore/.  Accessed January 3, 2018.

National Park Service.  2007.  First Annual Centennial Strategy for Canaveral National Seashore.  Available at:  http://npshistory.com/publications/future-americas-parks-2007/centennial-strategies/cana.pdf,  Accessed January 3, 2018.

National Park Service.  Canaveral National Seashore, Florida.  Available at:  https://www.nps.gov/cana/learn/nature/index.htm.  Accessed January 3, 2018.

Orlando Sentinel.  2013.  Florida Beach Guide:  Canaveral National Seashore.  Available at:  http://www.orlandosentinel.com/travel/beach/orl-canaveralbeach-story-story.html.  Accessed January 3, 2018.

The father of wilderness preservation, Bob Marshall, was born on January 2, 1901 (died 1939).  Almost single-handedly, Bob Marshall convinced the world that preserving some wild lands, untouched by the works of humans, was an essential part of civilization.  Although he lived for only 39 years, his impact has been immortal.

Robert Marshall was a product of his upbringing.  He was born into a wealthy Jewish family in New York City.  Both his parents were social activists, believing that the disadvantaged deserved a chance at a better life.  Marshall himself grew to be an avowed socialist, committed to fight for the rights of the unrepresented (in later life, he was persecuted by the federal government for his communist leanings).  But his father, especially, also loved the forest and the solitude it brought; he was a founder of the New York College of Forestry and Environmental Science (known today as SUNY-ESF in Syracuse).  The family spent summers in the New York mountains, and young Marshall adopted that love of the outdoors.

He determined early that he would become a forester rather than a city dweller.  He studied at the school established by his father, graduating with high honors in 1924.  While a student, he established his lifelong practice of hiking and mountain climbing—20, 30, 40 miles per day.  A day lasted 24 hours, he liked to say, so a day-hike should last 24 hours as well.  By the time he was a junior in college, he had hiked to the top of the 42 highest peaks in the Adirondack Mountains, the first to do so.  He set many other records for hiking and climbing, including climbing 9 Adirondack high peaks in one day.

Upon graduation, he began work in Washington State with the U.S. Forest Service.  He worked for that agency on and off throughout his life.  Along the way, he earned both Master’s (Harvard) and doctoral (Johns Hopkins) degrees.  He traveled extensively throughout the West.   He spent 15 months in Alaska’s Brooks Range living in a remote Native American village and exploring the region more extensively than anyone before (and perhaps since).  His commitment to both wilderness and social causes emerged during that stay.  He later wrote a book about his time in Alaska, devoting half his royalties to the Native Americans among whom he lived.

He lobbied actively for wilderness preservation throughout his career.  As the head forester in the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he recommended nearly 5 million acres of Indian lands as wilderness areas.  He was instrumental in writing prescriptions for roadless and wild lands for the Forest Service that eventually became the standards for their management.

He wrote what is considered the seminal treatise on wilderness—“The Problem of the Wilderness”—in 1930.  “There is just one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche on the whole earth,” he wrote.  “That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of wilderness.”  Marshall was true to his mission.  In 1935, he co-founded The Wilderness Society, which quickly became—and remains to this day—the primary non-governmental group advocating for wilderness.  A bachelor made wealthy by inheritance from his parents, he devoted his entire fortune to social and wilderness causes, including leaving one-quarter of his estate to The Wilderness Society.

Marshall died unexpectedly on a train trip from Washington, DC, to New York City on November 11, 1939. The cause of death was listed as heart failure, which might have been brought on by his secret bout with leukemia.

His influence had been well established by then, however, and his legacy continues.  In 1964, The Wilderness Act became law, establishing the category of wilderness as a specific use for federal lands.  Today, the U.S. has 765 areas classified as wilderness, covering nearly 110 million acres—about 5% of the U.S. land surface.  Some are large, like the 9-million-acre Wrangell-Saint Elias Wilderness in Alaska; some are small, like the 5.5-acre Pelican Island Wilderness in Florida.  The Bob Marshall Wilderness Area was established in Montana, an area of 1.5 million acres generally considered to be one of the best preserved ecosystems in the world.

But all are meaningful, as Marshall himself said:

“Any one who has stood upon a lofty summit and gazed over an inchoate tangle of deep canyons and cragged mountains, of sunlit lakelets and black expanses of forest, has become aware of a certain giddy sensation that there are no distances, no measures, simply unrelated matter rising and falling without any analogy to the banal geometry of breadth, thickness, and height.”

References:

Madison, Erin. 2014.  Marshall left a legacy in Montana’s largest wilderness.  Great Falls Tribune.  Available at:  http://www.greatfallstribune.com/story/outdoors/2014/07/30/marshall-left-legacy-montanas-largest-wilderness/13388321/.  Accessed January 2, 2018.

OurMed.  Bob Marshall (wilderness activist).  Available at:  http://www.ourmed.org/wiki/Bob_Marshall_(wilderness_activist).  Accessed January 2, 2018.

Wilderness Connect.  Bob Marshall.  Available at:  http://www.wilderness.net/NWPS/Marshall.  Accessed January 2, 2018.

Wilderness Connect.  The Beginnings of the National Wilderness Preservation System.  Available at:  http://www.wilderness.net/NWPS/fastfacts.  Accessed January 2, 2018.

On January 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed into law the National Environmental Policy Act, now known universally by its acronym—NEPA.  NEPA is considered Magna Carta for the  environment in the United States.

NEPA is a remarkably short law—only 7 pages—considering the major impact that it has had on government actions.  When passed, the law accomplished three things.  First, it established “a national policy which will encourage productive and enjoyable harmony between man and his environment.”  Second, it established a Council on Environmental Quality in the White House to oversee all environmental matters; this was intended to be the major action item in the law.  Third, it required every significant government action to be accompanied by a statement of the impacts of that action; in practice, this has turned out to be the overwhelmingly most significant part of the law.

The law was the brainchild of Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson, a Democrat from the state of Washington.  Jackson served in Congress for 43 years, first in the House of Representatives and later in the Senate.  During the 1960s, Jackson joined with others in the developing environmental movement.  Distressed particularly over conflicting government actions in the Everglades—Interior trying to protect the area as a national park while the Army Corps of Engineers tried to drain it—Jackson decided the nation needed a formal declaration of its intent to protect the environment and a mechanism to make sure government projects weren’t working at cross purposes.  The Council on Environmental Quality was to perform that role.

When first proposed in Congress, Jackson’s act did not include the idea of environmental impact statements.  But after passing with almost unanimous consent in both houses, the reconciliation process added the requirement for reviewing every major action for its environmental consequences.  Later observers have suggested that the act would never have passed had Jackson or other legislators understood what the environmental impact statement would become.  Nonetheless, it passed overwhelmingly.

President Nixon signed the bill with great fanfare.  He noted on signing that it was “particularly fitting that my first official act in this new decade is to approve the National Environmental Policy Act.”  Casting the law as an anti-pollution measure, Nixon said, “The 1970s must absolutely be the years when America pays its debt to the past by reclaiming the purity of its air, its waters and our living environment.  It is literally now or never.”

Indeed, the time was now.  NEPA had immediate far-ranging impacts.  It spawned a series of environmental organizations, like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council, that began to sue the government for its failure to comply with the law.  These lawsuits established that environmental impact statements needed to be serious, comprehensive and expertly performed analyses, not back-of-the-envelope bureaucratic paperwork.  Consequently, hundreds of federal projects in the initial years were stopped or stalled.  The Army Corps of Engineers estimated that in the first five years of NEPA, 350 of its projects had been stopped, delayed or changed because of the law.  Today, of course, federal agencies take environmental impacts seriously, and have incorporated them as core elements of their planning.

Initially, the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) also played a major role in establishing and directing federal environmental policy.  The large series of environmental laws passed during the 1970s were often led by the CEQ.  Since then, however, as new agencies, programs and staffs were established to implement those laws (notably the Environmental Protection Agency itself), the CEQ has become peripheral to the nation’s overall environmental programming.

References:

Alm, Alvin L.  1988.  NEPA:  Past, Present, and Future.  EPA Web Archive.  Available at:  https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/1988-article-nepa-past-present-and-future.html.  Accessed January 2, 2018.

Energy.gov.  The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.  Available at:  https://energy.gov/nepa/downloads/national-environmental-policy-act-1969.  Accessed January 2, 2018.

Kershner, Jim.  2011.  NEPA, the National Environmental Policy Act.  History Link, 8/272011.  Available at:  http://www.historylink.org/File/9903.  Accessed January 2, 2018.

Trevor Kincaid called himself an “omnologist,” a biologist interested in everything.  His legacy proves out his assertion, as he made enormous contributions to entomology and fisheries, both in taxonomy and practical applications.

Trevor Kincaid was born in Ontario in 1872 (died 1970).  His family fell on hard times and moved west to find better fortune in Olympia, Washington, when he was 17.  He worked a variety of jobs before eventually enrolling at the University of Washington in 1894, at the age of 22.  He proved to be an exceptional student, studying entomology and discovering several insect species before he graduated.  He gained a regional and national reputation while still an undergraduate.

In fact, it took him some time to graduate.  Before he could complete his degree, he was invited to accompany Stanford University President David Starr Jordan in 1897 on an expedition to Alaska as part of the American Fur Seal Commission.  There he studied the conditions of the fur seal of the Pribilof Islands.  Jordan was so impressed by Kincaid that he tried to convince him to transfer to Stanford.  But the University of Washington intervened, doubling his salary as a research assistant.

Two years later, Kincaid was again tempted by an Alaskan expedition.  He was invited as one of 23 scientists to be part of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, the youngest person to accompany the likes of John Muir (learn more about Muir here) and John Burroughs .  He later remarked that as the expedition was leaving the dock, “my classmates were lining up to receive their diplomas.”  He chose well, however, studying the rich insect life of glaciers in Alaska for two months.  “The presence of a glacier,” he observed, “does not necessarily mean the absence of life.” In the succeeding years, he described and named 344 new insect species from that expedition.

In 1901, he became a faculty member at the University of Washington, where he stayed throughout his career, retiring as head of the Department of Zoology in 1937 at the mandatory age of 65.  His “Adventures of an Omnologist,” as he termed his informal autobiography, began in earnest at the university.  In 1903, he established what is now known as the Friday Harbor Laboratories, a research and teaching station on Puget Sound that has become synonymous with world-class field education.  On behalf of the government, in 1908, he was sent to Russia and Japan to identify and bring back a natural enemy of the invasive gypsy moth that was eating the forests and crops of New England.  He succeeded, and the parasite was bred and used for decades by the U.S. government to control gypsy moths.

In 1911, he transferred his interests to fisheries.  Specifically, he was charged with bringing the declining Puget Sound oyster fisheries back to profitability.  Attempts to farm Atlantic oysters failed in Washington, so Kincaid went again to Japan and returned with specimens of Pacific oysters.  These thrived in Puget Sound and became the basis for a renewed oyster farming industry.  After his retirement from the university, Kincaid invested in these fisheries, so that he thrived as well!  His ongoing work in fisheries formed the basis of the University of Washington’s College of Fisheries, one of the world’s leaders in both theoretical and applied research.

Kincaid’s influence on entomology and fisheries were substantial.  Many insect species are named after him, as is the building housing the University of Washington’s Department of Biology.

References:

Archives West.  Trevor Kincaid papers, 1890-1975.  Available at:  http://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv55081.  Accessed December 20, 2017.

Public Broadcasting Service.  Trevor Kincaid, 1872-1970.  Available at:  http://www.pbs.org/harriman/1899/1899_part/participantkincaid.html.  Accessed December 20, 2017