Category: Uncategorized

The public is fascinated by sharks today—Shark Week, Sharknado, and the rest.  The person who did the most to bring sharks to such popularity is the woman known to the world as “The Shark Lady,” Dr. Eugenie Clark.

Eugenie Clark was born on May 4, 1922, in New York City, daughter of a Japanese mother and American father (died in 2015).  Her father died when she was an infant, and her mother married a Japanese man; consequently, Clark was brought up in the sea-loving Japanese culture, which she later said nurtured her interest in oceans and fish.  She made frequent trips to the New York Aquarium as a child, imagining what it would be like to be inside the aquarium swimming with the sharks.

She followed her passion for the living sea, earning an undergraduate degree at Hunter College in zoology and masters and doctoral degrees at New York University in ichthyology.  It was an uncomfortable world for women at the time, with restrictions on travel on research vessels and to distant field sites.  But it didn’t stop Clark, who said later, “I never let being a woman—even as a young girl—stop me from trying to do something I really wanted to do, especially if it concerned fishes or the underwater world.”

And she went places and did things that others, including men, didn’t.  She learned to dive in the 1940s, first using helmets and air hoses, later using scuba equipment.  She studied fishes in Micronesia, learning to free dive from the local fishermen.  She took more than 70 dives in deep-sea submersibles.

She went to study the fishes of the Red Sea in 1950, an area that had been ignored by scientists.  She called it a “virgin sea.”  She discovered several fish species while there, and the Red Sea became one of her passions.  Her continuing efforts to protect unique reef areas in the Red Sea led to their preservation as Egypt’s first national park in 1983.  She published a memoir of her 1950s work in the Red Sea, entitled Lady With a Spear, that became an international best seller.

But through it all, sharks remained Clark’s primary interest.   She thought sharks were misunderstood, saying “After some study, I began to realize that these ‘gangsters of the deep’ had gotten a bad rap.” She proved sharks were smart by teaching them to push on different shaped and colored buttons to receive food.  She dispelled the idea that sharks had to swim continuously to move water across their gills, discovering the “sleeping sharks” in marine caves along the Yucatan Peninsula.  Over time, she became known as The Shark Lady.

In 1954, she attracted the attention of the Vanderbilt family, who invited her to give a seminar at their Florida estate.  The whole town turned out, as she remembered, “They were fascinated—the fishermen, families, children—they all just loved hearing about fishes in the Red Sea and the exotic places I had been to.”  The Vanderbilt’s had a hidden agenda.  After the talk, they suggested she stay and start a marine laboratory with their financing.  “How often do you get an offer like that?” Clark recalled.  The next year, the new laboratory opened, and it has been going ever since.  Now known as the Mote Marine Laboratory, in Sarasota, her one-person start-up has become a world-famous scientific and public education institution.

Like so many leading conservationists, her ability to combine the best of science with the best of public education is a hallmark of Clark’s career. Along with scores of scientific papers, she wrote many articles for National Geographic, especially about sharks.  From 1968-1992, she was a professor at the University of Maryland, with an adoring following of undergraduate students.  A colleague wrote that “her ability to connect to the general public and talk about the importance of exploration and protection of oceans and conservation of species.”

Eugenie Clark kept at it to the end.  On her 92^nd birthday, she went for a dive in her beloved Red Sea.  Despite her age, said her diving companion, “The minute she was underwater, she was as graceful as a ballerina.”

Perhaps it would be more fitting to say she was as graceful as a shark.

References:

Rutger, Hayley.  2015.  Remembering Mote’s “Shark Lady”:   The Life and Legacy of Dr. Eugenie Clark.  Mote Marine Lab, March 5, 2015.  Available at:  https://mote.org/news/article/remembering-the-shark-lady-the-life-and-legacy-of-dr.-eugenie-clark.  Accessed May 1, 2018.

National Ocean Service.  Dr. Eugenie Clark (1922-2015).  Available at:  https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/news/may15/eugenie-clark.html.  Accessed May 1, 2018.

Stone, Andrea.  2015.  ‘Shark Lad’ Eugenie Clark, Famed Marine Biologist, Has Died.  National Geographic, February 25, 2015.  Available at:  https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2015/02/150225-eugenie-clark-shark-lady-marine-biologist-obituary-science/.  Accessed May 1, 2018.

If you have ever taken a water or bottom sample in a freshwater lake, you owe your success to Vagn Walfrid Ekman, the namesake for the Ekman Water Bottle and Ekman Dredge.

Ekman was born on May 3, 1874, the son of a Swedish oceanographer.  Ekman went to the University of Uppsala to study physics, but ocean science must have been in his DNA—he quickly switched to oceanography.  Oceanography became his life’s work, most of which was performed while he was a professor at the University of Lund in Sweden.

While still a student, he learned about a peculiar behavior of floating icebergs.  Rather than moving in the direction of the prevailing wind, icebergs moved off at an angle.  Presented with this unsolved dilemma, Ekman performed a theoretical analysis that proved an iceberg’s path was the combination of wind, friction of moving water layers and the Coriolis force of the earth’s rotation.  It explained why icebergs moved off in one direction in the northern hemisphere and the opposite in the southern hemisphere.

His understanding of the detailed movements of ocean waters led him to several other discoveries.  He determined the cause of so-called “dead water” in Scandinavian fjords was the resistance of cold water layers from melting glaciers on the surface of the ocean.  He expanded his work with icebergs into a more general treatment of the movement of water at various depths in the ocean, noting and explaining the deflection of currents again as a balance of wind, friction and Coriolis forces.  The phenomenon, which he explained in a 1905 paper, is called the Ekman Spiral in his honor.  He went on to develop full theoretical analyses of wind-blown ocean currents.

But his work as an experimental scientist is what has made him a common name among freshwater biologists.  He was more than just a theoretician—he excelled at field work as well.  His theories relied on having accurate measurements of aquatic phenomena at various depths.  To collect the data, he invented devices that could be lowered to the appropriate depth and then activated from the surface.  The Ekman Dredge works by lowering an open set of jaws to the bottom of a lake on a rope and then sending a heavy weight down the rope that trips a trigger, closing the jaws.  He also invented the Ekman Bottle, which works similarly—a bottle is lowered to the desired depth, is opened by a dropped weight, fills with water, and then is closed by a second dropped weight.  He also invented a device to measure water currents.  All these tools continue in use today, elegant in their simplicity and efficient in their reliability.

I used Ekman Dredges often in my early research, but my most successful use was with a kindergarten class.  I was telling the children about how much life lives in the bottom of a lake, but that we can’t see it because it is below the surface.  I showed them how an Ekman Dredge worked by simulating the lake bottom with sand in a plastic swimming pool.  When a student sent the weight down the line and thus scooped up a big bite of sand, we put it through a sieve.  And out popped wrapped candy bars that I had buried in the sand.

Thank you, Vagn Ekman!

References:

Ichiye, Takashi.  2018.  V. Walfrid Ekman.  Encyclopedia Britannica.com.  Available at:  https://www.britannica.com/biography/V-Walfrid-Ekman.  Accessed May 1, 2018.

Knight, J. D.   Meet the Ocean Explorers:  Vagn Ekman.  Available at:  http://www.seasky.org/ocean-exploration/ocean-explorers-vagn-ekman.html.  Accessed May 1, 2018.

Welander, Pierre.  Ekman, Vagn Walfrid.  Encyclopedia.com.  Available at:  https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/ekman-vagn-walfrid.  Accessed May 1, 2018.

On May 2, 1936, Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf was performed by the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra for the first time.  While not composed as an ecological treatise, the musical piece earns itself an honorary appearance in the history of conservation as one of the most beloved children’s compositions of all time—and it does involve several species of wildlife!

Prokofiev was a well-known composer when he took on the task of writing Peter and the Wolf.  He was asked by Nataliya Sats, the director of the Moscow Children’s Theater, to write music to accompany a narrative about a strong-willed boy who defied his grandfather.  The purpose was to introduce the instruments of the orchestra to young listeners.  Prokofiev was well-suited to the task, as he had composed several other children’s pieces.  However, he rejected the text provided to him, instead writing his own story.

The hero is Peter, a Pioneer—the Soviet equivalent of a Boy Scout—who, against his grandfather’s warning, ventures into the woods with his companions: a duck, a bird and a cat.  They meet a wolf who eats the duck and then—but you all know the story.  The story is, in fact, adapted from the Russian folk tales of the young and resourceful Ivan Tsarevich, who tangles with all manner of creatures from wolves to firebirds to magical lions and frogs.

Peter and the Wolf moves on from traditional folk tales to more modern lessons appropriate for students of the soviet movement.  First is the lesson that the old established regimes—in the person of a grumpy grandfather—must make way for the ways of adventurous, questioning and independent Bolsheviks like Pioneer Peter.  Second, however, is the lesson that mastery over nature is part of the soviet ideal.  The wolf loses in this narrative, trapped by the cunning Peter and hauled off to the zoo in a military-style parade.

I prefer a more nuanced interpretation.  Consider the various relationships that we can observe between humans and nature.  Peter wants to experience nature instead of being trapped inside the domesticated confines of a fenced farmstead.  But he takes with him his humanized animal friends, complete with names—Sasha, Sonia and Ivan.  The food web is displayed as the wolf eats Sonia.  Fear of the danger of nature is the underlying premise of the narrative, but that danger is overcome as both Peter and the hunters demonstrate their domination over nature when they capture the wolf.  But human kindness is again displayed as instead of killing the wolf, it is saved for a zoo or, in some later versions, banished back to the wilderness.  Oh, and along the way, Sonia escapes unharmed!

Peter and the Wolf is believed to be the most performed and recorded piece of classical music ever written.  More than 400 recording are available.  Most serious and not-so-serious actors have jumped at the chance to narrate the piece, including Sting, Patrick Stewart, Sophia Loren, Sean Connery, Captain Kangaroo, William F. Buckley, Allan Sherman and Weird Al Yankovic.  Prokofiev was so mesmerized by the project that he wrote it in just one week.  As his biographer related, “That he never forgot what it meant to be a child, and how children think, is evident in the playful but never condescending music he wrote for them, most of all the phenomenally successful ‘Peter and the Wolf,’ written when Prokofiev was a boy of forty-five.”

References:

Historical Boys Uniforms.  Young Pioneers.  Available at:  http://histclo.com/youth/youth/org/pio/pioneer.htm.   Accessed May 1, 2017.

Morrison, Simon.  2010.  The People’s Artist:  Prokofiev’s Soviet Years.  Oxford University Press, Oxford.  512 pages.  Accessed May 1, 2017.

Russian Crafts.  Ivan Tsarevitch and the Gray Wolf.  Available at:  https://russian-crafts.com/tales/ivan_tsarevitch.html.  Accessed May 1, 2017.

Smith, Tim.  2008.  Essay:  Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf.”  Public Broadcasting System, Great Performances.  March 26, 2008.  Available at:  http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/peter-the-wolf-essay-prokofievs-peter-the-wolf/27/.  Accessed May 1, 2017.

Taxonomy as we know it began on May 1, 1753.  Before then, the naming and description of species was a free-for-all.  Species were described by long, cumbersome Latin names that were given randomly by different observers.  A single species might have several names that the originator changed at will.  The common wild briar rose, for example, was called Rosa sylvestris inodora seu canina by one botanist and Rosa sylvestris alba cum rubore, folio glabro by another.  From now on, that would be different.

Linnaeus is a name familiar to anyone who has taken a biology course.  Carl von Linne, or as we know him, Carolus Linnaeus, was born in 1707 in Sweden, studied medicine and became a prominent Swedish doctor, eventually serving as the physician to the Swedish royal family.  His family name was taken from the linden tree, a favorite of his father, a minister.

Like his father, Linnaeus loved plants.  At the time, studying plants was part of studying medicine, because doctors needed to know which plants to prescribe as drugs for their patients’ ailments.  But Linnaeus’ interest went much farther.  He explored the agricultural and economic uses of plants, including creating gardens and indoor growing environments in which he hoped to produce varieties of tropical plants that could grow in Sweden.  He wasn’t particularly successful in that work.

He was successful, however, in figuring out a way to organize plant identification that was simple and standard.  He created the binomial system we use today, designating a plant’s identification by a genus name and a species name, both in Latin so that common names wouldn’t confuse botanists and the public.  He worked on this gradually over years, eventually publishing Species Plantarum on May 1, 1753.  He named the wild briar rose Rosa canina.

Species Plantarum inventoried and classified every known plant at the time, 6,000 species in all.  The book immediately became the standard way to classify organisms, marking its publication as the historical beginning of modern taxonomy.  His innovation allowed much better communication among scientists and also allowed the public to participate in botanical exploration and discovery.

Linnaeus followed up his botanical treatise with a complete binomial taxonomy of known plants and animals in 1758, the tenth edition of his Systema Naturae.  The biological basis of his classification was challenged because he used only sexual characteristics in his ordering of plants—some considered it too restrictive, and others thought it was obscene.  But his system of classification—genus and species—has become standard.

Some also consider Linnaeus a pioneer in ecology.  He understood that the relationship between a plant and its environment was crucial to its success.  That is why he was so convinced that he could breed plants with traits that were more adapted to the cold environment of Sweden.

So, next time you complain about having to learn the two-name scientific identification of a plant or animal, stop and thank Linnaeus that you can describe a species in two words–instead of a paragraph of nonsense!

References:

Encyclopedia Britannica.  Species Plantarum.  Available at:  https://www.britannica.com/topic/Species-Plantarum.  Accessed April 30, 2018.

University of Aberdeen.  Carolus Linnaeus, Species Plantarum.  Available at:  https://www.abdn.ac.uk/special-collections/carolus-linnus-species-plantarum-458.php.  Accessed April 30, 2018.

University of California Museum of Paleontology.  Carl Linnaeus (1707-1778).  Available at:  http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/history/linnaeus.html.  Accessed April 30, 2018

John James Audubon is unquestionably the greatest artist of avian life that the world has ever seen.  Others may surpass him in technical detail or realism or expressive emotion, but none performed the feat that makes him the king of ornithologists.

Jean Rabin was born on April 26, 1785, in what is now Haiti.  He was the illegitimate son of a French sea captain and his French mistress.  His mother died soon after his birth and he was sent to France to live with his father’s wife.  In France, he lived the good life of a wealthy merchant family.  He wanted for little, as he said:  “Hunting, fishing, drawing, and music occupied my every moment.  Cares I knew not, and cared naught about them.”

His father and step-mother adopted him formally, changing his name to Jean-Jacque Audubon.  In 1803, when he was 18, his father snuck Audubon out of the country to avoid his drafting into Napoleon’s army.  On the ship to America, he changed his name to an English form:  John James Audubon.

He was sent to his father’s estate in Mill Grove, Pennsylvania, to oversee a lead mining business.  The business failed, and Audubon, with his new wife, Lucy, moved to Kentucky, settling first in Louisville, later in Henderson.  His attempts at business again failed, and Audubon was briefly jailed over his debts.

But his interest in birds and drawing them never faltered.  He said, “I never for a day gave up listening to the songs of our birds, or watching their peculiar habits, or delineating them in the best way I could.”  The wilds of America gave Audubon a blank canvas to fill with bird life. Lucy knew that her husband had an extraordinary talent, and she encouraged him to explore, discover and paint.  Audubon made money however he could—painting portraits, teaching dance, performing taxidermy—but Lucy kept bread in the house for her and their children through work as a teacher and governess.  He wrote, “My wife determined that my genius should prevail, and that my final success as an ornithologist should be triumphant.”

Audubon sought that triumph through a grand plan—to paint every bird in America, at life size, in a natural setting.  “How could I make a little book,” he wrote, “when I have seen enough to make a dozen large books?”  When he had amassed enough paintings to demonstrate his skills and visualize his dream, he sought a publisher.  Finding none in the United States, he traveled to England in 1824.  He was an immediate sensation.  His paintings fascinated the aristocracy, feeding their romantic view of the American frontier.  Audubon sold subscriptions to his paintings—for the astounding prices of $1,000, a near fortune at the time—around England and Europe.  He found a publisher and engraver to carry the work forward.

He returned to America and continued the enormous task before him.  He traveled throughout the continent, shot or bought birds, mounted them immediately and then drew and painted them.  Page by page his portfolio expanded.  His monumental Birds of America was published in serial form from 1827-1838.  The completed work included 435 life-sized prints of 1065 birds in 489 species.  It was printed on the biggest paper available, called an elephant folio, each piece measuring about 26 inches by 39 inches.  Laid side by side, the prints would stretch for one-quarter of a mile.

Birds of America rightfully established Audubon as the greatest bird painter of all time, but he was more than just an artist.  He was the first person known to have put bands on birds to track their migration; he tied colored yarn on the legs of Phoebes, learning that they returned to the same location year after year.  He performed experiments to show that vultures were visual scavengers, disproving the common belief that they found food by scent.  He wrote a companion book for his prints, Ornithological Biography, that described the natural history of the species he drew.  He was hard at work on an equally grand vision to paint all the mammals of North America, but the project ended with his death at age 65.

He was also a conservationist, fully aware that the transformation of the eastern U.S. from forest to farm and then to city was reducing the abundance of birds and other wildlife.  He succinctly summed up his—and, I would venture, our modern—philosophy of conservation:  “A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers, but borrowed from his children.”

References:

Audubon Society.  John James Audubon, The American Woodsman:  Our Namesake and Inspiration.  Available at:  http://www.audubon.org/content/john-james-audubon.  Accessed April 21, 2018.

Biography.  John James Audubon.  Available at:  https://www.biography.com/people/john-james-audubon-9192248.  Accessed April 21, 2018.

Brainy Quote.  John James Audubon Quotes.  Available at:  https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/john_james_audubon.  Accessed April 21, 2018.

Chowder, Ken.  2007.  John James Audubon:  Drawn From Nature.  American Masters, PBS.  Available at:  http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/john-james-audubon-drawn-from-nature/106/.  Accessed April 21, 2018.

Florida Museum of Natural History.  John James Audubon.  Available at:  https://www.floridamuseum.ufl.edu/naturalists/audubon01.htm.  Accessed April 21, 2018.

Japan celebrates “Botany Day” annually on April 24.  The celebration recognizes the life and career of Tomitaro Makino, the Father of Japanese Botany, on his birthday.

Tomitaro Makino was born on April 24, 1862, son of a wealthy brewer of the Japanese national drink, sake (died 1957).  His family met with tragedy, however, as both his father and mother died by the time he was five years old.  He was raised by his grandmother, who considered him a frail child.

Makino, however, must not have been frail.  He attended primary school, but his real interest was plants.  He spent his spare time roaming the countryside of his native Kochi Prefecture, hiking continuously, climbing mountains and collecting plants.  His extensive collecting revealed the high plant biodiversity of an ecosystem he loved, Mt. Yokogura.  Over the course of his life, he collected more than 400,000 specimens (now held in his herbarium at the University of Tokyo).

Formal schooling was not for Makino, and he left at an early age to pursue botany independently.  He visited Tokyo when he was 19, meeting Japan’s leading botanists.  Tokyo, he decided was where he could learn the best, so he moved there in 1884.  He was granted access to the University of Tokyo’s herbarium and allowed to attend classes even though he was not a registered student.  He became a gifted illustrator of plants, using traditional Japanese brush and ink techniques

His affiliation with the University of Tokyo continued without interruption for nearly fifty years.  He founded The Botanical Magazine (Tokyo) in 1887, regularly publishing his own articles and botanical illustrations.  He was employed by the university starting in 1891, working for 47 years until retiring in 1939.  He founded the scholarly Journal of Japanese Botany in 1916 and served as its editor for the next two decades.  The university awarded him a doctorate in 1927, based on his acknowledged reputation, although he never sought such credentials and refused to use such titles.

Both his spirit and his work ethic were heroic.  He described 1500 new plant species, including wild species but also cultivated vegetables and ornamental plants.  In 1938, he published “The Illustrated Flora of Japan,” which contained 3235 illustrations, all drawn by Makino himself.  It remains a standard work to this day.  After retiring from the university, he devoted himself to educating the general public, both through popular presentations and magazine articles.

He well deserves his recognition as the Father of Japanese Botany.  He was made an Honorary Citizen of Tokyo and awarded the Japanese Order of Culture.  The botanical garden in his home of Kochi has been renamed in his honor.  At his death in 1957, at the age of 95, a memorial to him noted,

“When talking of plants he was fascinating, and when writing of them his prose was charming and witty.  It is no wonder that all who came in contact with him loved him.  By his efforts and his influence he advanced the standard of plant taxonomy in Japan to its present high levels, and this remains as a memorial of his great achievement as a botanist”

References:

Hisauchi, Kiyokata et al.  1957.  Rectificiation:  Tomitaro Makino 1862-1957.  Taxon 6(5):125-127.  Available at:  http://www.jstor.org.prox.lib.ncsu.edu/stable/pdf/1216089.pdf?refreqid=excelsior:cfc9b5186f8cfb6bc44dee8ce3bb3f26.  Accessed April 21, 2018.

Makino Botanical Garden.  An Overview.  Available at:  http://www.makino.or.jp/index_e.html.  Accessed April 21, 2018.

Makino Memorial Garden & Museum.  About Tomitaro Makino.  Available at:  http://www.makinoteien.jp/03-makino/e.html.  Accessed April 21, 2018.

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.