Planet Savers : 301 Extraordinary Environmentalists [1 ed.] 9781909493735, 9781906093006

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Planet Savers

‘We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.’ Native American Proverb

PLANET SAVERS 301 EXTRAORDINARY ENVIRONMENTALISTS

KEVIN DESMOND WITH A FOREWORD BY SIR GHILLEAN PRANCE

First published 2008 by Greenleaf Publishing Limited Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

Copyright © 2008 Taylor & Francis Cover by LaliAbril.com. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

The paper used for this book is a natural, recyclable product made from wood grown in sustainable forests; the manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data: Desmond, Kevin, 1950Planet savers : 301 extraordinary environmentalists 1. Environmentalists - Biography I. Title 333.7'2'0922 ISBN-13: 978-1-906093-00-6( * ( (pbk )

Contents Foreword . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Professor Sir Ghillean Prance FRS, VMH

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Acknowledgements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

The Planet Savers: 1 Siddhartha Gautama Buddha . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 2 Appius Claudius Caecus . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 3 St Francis of Assisi . . . 14 4 John Evelyn . . . . . . . . . 16 5 William Penn. . . . . . . . 17 6 Amrita Devi . . . . . . . . . 18 7 Carl Linnaeus . . . . . . . 19 8 Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon . . . . . 20 9 Pierre Poivre . . . . . . . . 21 10 Gilbert White. . . . . . . . 22 11 John Chapman. . . . . . . 22 12 Thomas Malthus . . . . . 23 13 Alexander von Humboldt. . . . . . . . . . . 24 14 John James Audubon . 26 15 Henry Doulton. . . . . . . 27 16 George Catlin . . . . . . . 28 17 Joseph Paxton . . . . . . . 29 18 Hugh Cleghorn . . . . . . 30 19 Chief Seattle . . . . . . . . 30 20 Henry David Thoreau . 31 21 Frederick Law Olmsted . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 22 Charles Darwin . . . . . . 34 23 George Perkins Marsh 35 24 Joseph Bazalgette . . . . 36 25 John Ericsson . . . . . . . 37 26 Julius Sterling Morton 38 27 Ellen Swallow Richards. . . . . . . . . . . . 39 28 George Bird Grinnell. . 40 29 William Morris . . . . . . 41 30 Ernst Rudorff. . . . . . . . 42 31 Mrs Phillips . . . . . . . . . 42

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62

Mrs Williamson . . . . . . 42 Poul la Cour. . . . . . . . . 43 Johannes Juul . . . . . . . 43 John Muir . . . . . . . . . . . 44 John Burroughs . . . . . . 46 Octavia Hill . . . . . . . . . 47 Robert Hunter . . . . . . . 47 Hardwicke Rawnsley . 47 Gifford Pinchot . . . . . . 48 Elihu Stewart . . . . . . . 49 James ‘Scotty’ Philip. . 49 Rudolph Diesel . . . . . . 50 Theodore Roosevelt . . 51 Edward North Buxton. 52 Paul Kroegel . . . . . . . . 53 Frederick Courtney Selous . . . . . . . . . . . . . 54 Alice Hamilton . . . . . . 55 Paul Sarasin . . . . . . . . 56 Gilbert H. Grosvenor. . 57 Ansel Adams . . . . . . . . 58 Will Dilg . . . . . . . . . . . . 59 Beatrix Potter . . . . . . . 60 Alessandro Ghigi. . . . . 61 Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky . . . . . . . . . . 62 Mohandas K. Gandhi . 63 Charles Sutherland Elton. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Richard Buckminster Fuller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Albert Howard. . . . . . . 66 Myles Dunphy . . . . . . . 67 Milo Dunphy . . . . . . . . 67 Franklin Delano Roosevelt. . . . . . . . . . . 68

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63 Jay Norwood ‘Ding’ Darling . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 64 Rosalie Edge . . . . . . . . 70 65 William Beebe. . . . . . . 71 66 Roger Tory Peterson . . 72 67 Frank Lloyd Wright . . . 73 68 Arthur George Tansley 74 69 Aldo Leopold . . . . . . . . 75 70 Robert Marshall . . . . . 76 71 Colonel Jim Corbett . . 77 72 Roderick Haig-Brown . 78 73 Archibald Belaney (alias Grey Owl) . . . . . 79 74 Théodore Monod. . . . . 80 75 Lady Eve Balfour. . . . . 81 76 Laurance S. Rockefeller . . . . . . . . . 81 77 Russell Ohl . . . . . . . . . 83 78 Palmer C. Putnam . . . . 83 79 Perrine Moncrieff . . . . 84 80 Gertrude Dudy Blom. . 85 81 Norman Borlaug . . . . . 86 82 John Gordon Dower . . 87 83 Peter Scott. . . . . . . . . . 88 84 Marjory Stoneman Douglas . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 85 Sàlim Ali . . . . . . . . . . . 89 86 Ruth Patrick . . . . . . . . 90 87 Archie Carr . . . . . . . . . 91 88 Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr . . . . . . . . . . . 93 89 Roger Heim . . . . . . . . . 93 90 Harold J. Coolidge. . . . 94 91 Emma Lucy Braun. . . . 95 92 Arie Haagen-Smit . . . . 96 93 Miriam Rothschild . . . 97 94 Alain Bombard . . . . . . 98

95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138

Eugene Odum . . . . . . . 99 Kai Curry-Lindahl . . . 100 Scott Nearing . . . . . . 101 Helen Nearing. . . . . . 101 Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt . . . . . 102 Wladyslaw Szafer . . . 103 Frank Fraser Darling. 103 Margaret Mee . . . . . . 104 Ian L. McHarg . . . . . . 106 William O. Douglas. . 106 Charles David Keeling. . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Bernhard Grzimek . . 109 Frank Craighead . . . . 110 John Craighead . . . . . 110 Raymond Dasmann . 111 Gerald Durrell . . . . . . 112 George Schaller . . . . 113 Julian Huxley. . . . . . . 114 Joy Adamson . . . . . . . 115 Jane Goodall . . . . . . . 116 Kenneth Mellanby. . . 117 Rachel Carson. . . . . . 118 Murray Bookchin . . . 120 Ghillean Prance . . . . 121 Edward Pritchard Gee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 122 Jacques-Yves Cousteau . . . . . . . . . . 123 Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 Neftalí García . . . . . . 125 Claudia ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson . . . . . . . . . . . 126 Russell E. Train . . . . . 127 Clair Cameron Patterson. . . . . . . . . . 128 Wendell Berry . . . . . . 129 Ralph Nader . . . . . . . 130 Barbara Ward . . . . . . 131 Barry Commoner . . . 132 Robert H. Boyle . . . . 133 Lynn Townsend White Jr . . . . . . . . . . . 134 Alan Chadwick . . . . . 135 Herman Daly . . . . . . . 136 Paolo Lugari . . . . . . . 137 René Dubos. . . . . . . . 138 Edward Abbey. . . . . . 139 Margaret Owings . . . 140 Carl Sverker Åström . 141

139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148 149 150 151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163 164 165 166 167 168 169 170 171 172 173 174 175 176 177 178 179 180 181 182 183

Garrett J. Hardin . . . . 142 Anton Rupert . . . . . . 143 Paul Ehrlich. . . . . . . . 144 Anne Ehrlich . . . . . . . 144 David Brower . . . . . . 145 Pete Seeger . . . . . . . . 147 Mario Boza . . . . . . . . 148 Tom J. Cade . . . . . . . . 149 Edward (‘Teddy’) Goldsmith . . . . . . . . . 150 Oren Lyons . . . . . . . . 151 William D. Ruckelshaus . . . . . . . 152 Sylvia Earle . . . . . . . . 153 Denis Hayes . . . . . . . 154 Nicholas GeorgescuRoegen . . . . . . . . . . . 155 José Lutzenberger. . . 156 Roger Payne . . . . . . . 157 Peter Raven. . . . . . . . 158 Biruté Galdikas . . . . . 159 Arne Naess . . . . . . . . 160 Mostafa Kamal Tolba 161 Arthur H. Westing. . . 162 David McTaggart. . . . 163 Donella H. Meadows 164 Ernst Friedrich Schumacher . . . . . . . 165 Ivan Illich . . . . . . . . . 167 F. Sherwood Rowland . . . . . . . . . . 168 Paul Crutzen . . . . . . . 168 Mario Molina. . . . . . . 168 Takayoshi Kano. . . . . 169 Jean-Baptiste Chavannes. . . . . . . . . 170 Paulo Nogueira-Neto 172 Lester R. Brown . . . . 173 Lonnie Thompson. . . 174 Robert Bateman . . . . 175 Robert Redford . . . . . 176 Pat Mooney . . . . . . . . 177 Cary Fowler. . . . . . . . 177 Russell A. Mittermeier . . . . . . . . 178 Paul Watson . . . . . . . 179 Crispin Tickell. . . . . . 180 Anita Roddick . . . . . . 181 John Denver. . . . . . . . 182 Ibrahim Abouleish . . 183 Bill Mollison . . . . . . . 184 David Holmgren . . . . 184

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184 185 186 187 188 189 190 191 192 193 194 195 196 197 198 199 200 201 202 203 204 205 206 207 208 209 210 211 212 213 214 215 216 217 218 219 220 221 222 223 224 225 226 227 228 229 230 231 232

David Ehrenfeld . . . . 185 David Gaines. . . . . . . 186 Lois Gibbs . . . . . . . . . 187 Hazel Wolf. . . . . . . . . 188 Hans Jonas . . . . . . . . 189 James Lovelock . . . . . 190 David Attenborough . 191 Melaku Worede. . . . . 192 Yolanda Kakabadse . 194 Alan Rabinowitz . . . . 195 Jimmy Carter . . . . . . . 196 Sunderlal Bahuguna. 197 Wangari Maathai . . . 198 Thomas E. Lovejoy . . 199 Jakob von Uexküll. . . 200 Jared Diamond . . . . . 201 Norman Myers . . . . . 202 Amory Lovins . . . . . . 203 Vandana Shiva . . . . . 204 Madhav Gadgil . . . . . 206 Petra Kelly. . . . . . . . . 207 Martin Green. . . . . . . 208 John Houghton . . . . . 209 Jonathon Porritt . . . . 209 Jean-Bosco Kpanou. . 210 George M. Woodwell 211 Dian Fossey. . . . . . . . 212 Homero Aridjis . . . . . 213 Atsumu Ohmura . . . . 214 Joschka Fischer. . . . . 215 Craig E. Williams . . . 216 Charles Windsor . . . . 218 Medha Patkar . . . . . . 219 Cindy Duehring. . . . . 220 Yvon Chouinard . . . . 221 János Vargha . . . . . . . 222 Alla Yaroshinskaya . . 223 Gro Harlem Brundtland . . . . . . . . 225 Daniel Janzen . . . . . . 226 John Elkington . . . . . 227 Nicolas Hulot . . . . . . 228 Harrison Ngau Laing 229 Yoichi Kuroda . . . . . . 230 Chico Mendes . . . . . . 231 Richard Leakey . . . . . 232 David Foreman . . . . . 233 Karl-Henrik Robèrt . . 234 Sunita Narain . . . . . . 235 Danny Seo . . . . . . . . . 236

233 Arturo GómezPompa . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 234 David T. Suzuki . . . . . 238 235 Ted Turner . . . . . . . . . 240 236 Stephan Schmidheiny . . . . . . . 240 237 Pat Gruber. . . . . . . . . 242 238 Juan Pablo Orrego . . 243 239 Terry Tempest Williams . . . . . . . . . . 244 240 Maurice Strong . . . . . 245 241 Edward O. Wilson . . . 246 242 Gunter Pauli . . . . . . . 247 243 Mikhail Gorbachev . . 248 244 Alexey V. Yablokov . . 248 245 Paul Hawken . . . . . . . 250 246 Birsel Lemke . . . . . . . 251 247 Randall Borman . . . . 252 248 Ray Anderson . . . . . . 253 249 José Maria Figuères . 254 250 Pooran Desai. . . . . . . 255 251 Sue Riddlestone . . . . 255 252 Steven R. Galster . . . 257 253 Dimítrios Archontónis. . . . . . . . 258 254 Ken Saro-Wiwa . . . . . 259 255 Charles A. Munn III . 260

256 257 258 259 260 261 262 263 264 265 266 267 268 269 270 271 272 273 274 275 276 277 278

Theodora Colborn. . . 261 Sebastian Chuwa . . . 262 Alexandr Nikitin . . . . 263 Erin Brockovich . . . . 264 Pan Wenshi . . . . . . . . 265 Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker . . . . . . . . 267 Timothy E. Wirth . . . 268 Jane Lubchenco . . . . 268 José Bové. . . . . . . . . . 270 Pierce Brosnan . . . . . 271 William Clay Ford Jr . 272 Janine M. Benyus . . . 273 Dan Morrell . . . . . . . . 274 Annie Kajir . . . . . . . . 275 Julia ‘Butterfly’ Hill. . 276 Klaus Töpfer . . . . . . . 277 Carl Safina . . . . . . . . 278 Hammerskjoeld Simwinga . . . . . . . . . 279 Leonardo DiCaprio . . 280 Yann ArthusBertrand . . . . . . . . . . 281 Jorge Viana . . . . . . . . 282 Gordon E. Moore . . . 283 James Gustave ‘Gus’ Speth . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284

279 Alden ‘Denny’ Townsend . . . . . . . . . 286 280 Ken Livingstone . . . . 287 281 Giorgios Catsadorakis . . . . . . . 288 282 Myrsini Malakou . . . . 288 283 Peter Blake . . . . . . . . 289 284 Tim Smit . . . . . . . . . . 290 285 William McDonough . 291 286 Anita Studer . . . . . . . 292 287 Cormac Cullinan . . . . 293 288 Li Quan . . . . . . . . . . . 294 289 Arnold Schwarzenegger . . . . 295 290 Geoffrey Hawtin . . . . 296 291 José Andrés Tamayo . 297 292 Jim Ball . . . . . . . . . . . 299 293 Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 300 294 Zhao Hang . . . . . . . . . 301 295 Olya Melen . . . . . . . . 302 296 Dorothy Stang. . . . . . 303 297 Greg Nickels . . . . . . . 304 298 Jean-Michel Cousteau . . . . . . . . . . 305 299 James E. Hansen . . . . 306 300 Al Gore . . . . . . . . . . . 307 301 George Monbiot . . . . 308

Index of Planet Savers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310 Index of organisations . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313 Photo credits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 About the author . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320

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Foreword It is a bold task to choose 301 ‘Planet Savers’ from among the many people who have striven and are striving to save planet Earth from disaster. Here we have a fascinating selection of people from all walks of life who have played their part. The contribution of each individual might seem small in light of the grave environmental crisis we are facing, but it is these many individual actions that are indeed making a difference. The sum of all these actions, whether large or small, is certainly much greater than the parts. This book shows how every local action, however small, counts towards the avoidance of ecological disaster. It is impressive to see how someone from any background or any type of job can play a part in saving our planet. In this selection of people we see how movie actors, mothers and housewives, poets, scientists, journalists, musicians and many others are helping to rescue the planet. It is also good to see the long history of action from early visionaries such as George Perkins Marsh to contemporary activists and conservationists. The selection of people is also suitably international as we read about planet savers from Brazil to India, from Malaysia to Kenya and from many other corners of the globe. A sadness that becomes apparent as we read through these brief biographies is how the governments or industries of the countries of so many Planet Savers are resisting their actions and the change that is needed to save Earth’s ecosystems. While we have an excellent and most appropriate selection of Planet Savers discussed here, I must also herald the numerous unsung heroes that I have encountered in my travel around the world who are also playing their part. The home gardeners in Bangladesh who have restored their land to produce nutritious food, the indigenous peoples who are protecting so many of the ecosystems upon which their livelihoods depend, the medicine men of India and Nepal who have moved to sustainable cultivation and conservation of the plants they use for treatment of illnesses, and the Guaraní of northern Argentina who are fighting to preserve their forests from excess timber extraction. Wherever I go I come across Planet Savers who are striving for the cause and who deserve as much praise as those people who happen to have been selected for inclusion here. Whether the Planet Savers working today will be successful in defending the planet for future generations very much depends upon the actions that we take now in 2008 and over the next decade. We have little time left as we see the growing effects of climate change, species loss, water shortages, soil erosion, desertification and many other signs of a groaning planet. The best way in which we can honour all the Planet Savers in this book and the many others working around the world is to take action in small ways wherever we may be located. We can all join this group 8

of Planet Savers if we want to, by promoting energy conservation, recycling, using public transport, composting green waste, using renewable green energy, writing to politicians about environmental issues, and in many other ways. This is a book that should not just be read to entertain, but to challenge all its readers into action. It is my hope that you too will join this distinguished list of people who care about the future of the planet upon which we live. Professor Sir Ghillean Prance FRS, VMH School of Plant Sciences, University of Reading Scientific Director, The Eden Project

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Introduction Welcome to a collection of 301 portraits of those who have had the drive, determination, patience and courage to do something positive to save our planet. This is not a scientific or political treatise, but a long overdue tribute to a glittering display of pioneers – male and female, young and old, rich and poor, black and white, from all corners of the globe. It is an impressive roll of honour that should be available in every language and in every library in the world to inspire and to educate those who would do likewise – particularly the next generation on whom so much now depends. Although ecology, environment and conservation must continue to inspire philosophical and political discussion, role-model narratives can also play an important part. We all need heroes. If we are to save our planet, we shouldn’t spend all of our time reading and talking about it. We should really be out in the field doing what we can in our back yards and beyond. For this reason, the Planet Savers in this book have been presented as short, easy-to-read portraits. They are arranged chronologically. Should you wish to read more – and I sincerely hope you will – use the website addresses provided, read their books or other books written about them. And an atlas will also come in very handy; these Planet Savers truly are a global phenomenon. Living in the countryside, as I do, certainly changes your perspective and priorities. Where I have the privilege to live, we have become the intruders, and the squatters. I inhabit a house in the middle of a wilderness. The birds migrate overhead, as they were doing so long before the house was built. The woodpeckers, butterflies, dragonflies, salamanders, tree-frogs, hummingbird hawk moths, honeybees and bats go about their business as they always have done. If we are sensitive enough, we take our place in nature, no longer the dominant destroyers nor the clumsy constructors, but observing and integrating. This collection does not for one moment claim to be definitive. There have been tens of thousands of people who have acted to protect the planet and its threatened inhabitants throughout history. New Planet Savers are at work right now in rainforests and megacities; in community centres and boardrooms; at road protests and in courtrooms, all over the world. If this book has one great aim it is to inspire you, the reader, to join them. Kevin Desmond Bordeaux, France

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Acknowledgements The research for this book was undertaken over a period of three years. The question very early on became: where to stop? The more time I spent on the project, the further away I was from completing it. The discovery of a new Planet Saver led me to investigate other under-represented areas and twenty more people would appear on my long list for inclusion. But this has been a long labour of love. The people included here have been the recipients of literally thousands of environmental awards for their work in protecting the planet. Many of these awards are mentioned in their portraits, but it is impossible to be absolutely inclusive without tiring the reader with exhaustive lists. Several of these prizes have been extremely helpful in writing this book. In particular, kudos must be given to the Right Livelihood Award, the Goldman Prize, the Rolex Award for Enterprise, the Tyler Environmental Prize, the Cosmos Prize, the Chevron Conservation Award, the Volvo Environment Prize and the Heinz Award. I would also like to thank the numerous organisations that have supported the book by providing information and photographs. While every effort has been made to verify all of the information in this book, the nature of the biography is that it is always in flux. Finally, much credit should also be given to the editors at Greenleaf Publishing who have tirelessly worked on the manuscript over a number of months. Nor could I have finished this book without the support of my friend, Sir Ghillean Prance, Philippe De Spoelberch and my wife Alex, and our two children, Helen and Andrew.

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The Planet Savers:

c.c.533 533BC BC

Siddhartha Gautama Buddha 563–483 BC

Dharma Some time during the 6th century BC, Siddhartha Gautama, formerly a wealthy Nepalese prince but now a monk living a life of complete austerity, spent some seven weeks meditating beneath a pipal tree (Ficus religiosa) near Buddh Gaya in the Indian state of Bihar. He refused to rise until he had attained the ultimate knowledge of spiritual enlightenment. Gautama achieved his aim and, from then on, was known as the Buddha or Awakened One. Among the truths the Buddha subsequently presented to his followers was the concept of oneness with the Earth. For him, planting gardens (aram-aropa) and forests (vanaropa) would give them merit both night and day. Believing that if we destroy something around us we destroy ourselves, the Buddha and his disciples refused to kill any animal. Today, Buddhism teaches that the Western idea of individuality is an illusion. The health of the whole is inseparably linked to the health of the parts, and the health of the parts is inseparably linked to the health of the whole. This means that caring for the environment begins The Ushiku Big Buddah peering through autumn foliage in with caring for oneself. As calls for ethical business practices Ibaraki Prefecture, Japan. It is the world’s tallest bronze statue at 120 metres grow in our ever more globalised world, a livelihood that does not harm others, such as refusing to trade with or own shares in companies that deal in weapons, meat, alcohol or drugs, can be seen as a Buddhist way of life.

“

The kind of seed sown will produce that kind of fruit. Those who do good will reap good results. Those who do evil will reap evil results. If you carefully plant a good seed, you will joyfully gather good fruit.

”

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312 312BC BC

Appius Claudius Caecus c. 340–273 BC

Cleaner water In the early days of Rome, the city’s water supply came from the River Tiber and its waste went back into the river. By the 4th century BC, with the Roman population growing rapidly, the city urgently needed an alternative supply of unpolluted water. In 312 BC, the Roman Senate ordered Appius Claudius Caecus, an aristocratic reformer, to find a new source of water for the city. Claudius started construction on the first aqueduct to supply water to Rome. The 16.5 km Aqua Appia flowed almost completely underground and dropped only 10 m over its entire length, making it a remarkable engineering achievement for its day. It could deliver 73,000 m3 of water a day to the city. It was so successful that 40 years later another aqueduct, the Anio Vetus, was built. This was followed by the improved Marcia aqueduct of 144 BC which used the inverted siphon system to lead water upwards to the hills of Rome. By 97 AD, thanks to 11 aqueducts, Rome’s water supply system was one of the marvels of the ancient world. The Roman Empire also built many other aqueducts in Greece, Italy, France, Spain, north Africa and Asia Minor. It was to be many years before such a sophisticated system for clean, unpolluted fresh water came to be used again.

1224 1224

St Francis of Assisi 1182–1226

The patron saint of animals and ecology During the 13th century, Francis of Assisi founded a brotherhood of 5,000 monks – the Franciscans – whose way of life was based on charity, poverty and obedience. Many of the stories that surround the life of St Francis deal with his love for animals. Perhaps the most famous incident that illustrates his humility towards nature is recounted in the Fioretti (Little Flowers), a collection of legends and folklore. It is said that one day while Francis was travelling with some companions they came to a place where birds filled the trees on either side. Francis told his companions to ‘wait for me while I go to preach to my sisters the birds’. The birds surrounded him, drawn by the power of his voice, and not one of them flew away. Francis spoke to them: My sister birds, you owe much to God, and you must always and in everyplace give praise to Him; for He has given you freedom to wing through the sky and

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He has clothed you . . . you neither sow nor reap, and God feeds you and gives you rivers and fountains for your thirst, and mountains and valleys for shelter, and tall trees for your nests. And although you neither know how to spin or weave, God dresses you and your children, for the Creator loves you greatly and He blesses you abundantly. Therefore . . . always seek to praise God.

Another legend from the Fioretti tells us that, in the city of Gubbio, where Francis lived for some time, there was a wolf ‘terrifying and ferocious, who devoured men as well as animals’. Francis had compassion upon the townsfolk and went, with some companions, up into the hills to find the wolf. Soon fear of the animal had caused all his companions to flee, but Francis pressed on and when he found the wolf he made the sign of the cross and commanded the wolf to come to him and hurt no one. Miraculously the wolf closed his jaws and lay down at the feet of Francis who said he wanted to make peace with the animal. Then Francis led the wolf into the town and, surrounded by startled citizens, he made a pact between them and the wolf. Because the wolf had ‘done evil out of hunger’ the townsfolk were to feed the wolf regularly and, in return, the wolf would no longer prey upon them or their flocks. In this manner Gubbio was freed from the menace of the predator. Francis even made a pact on behalf of the town dogs that they would not bother the wolf again. These legends exemplify the Franciscan love of the natural world. Part of this appreciation of the environment is expressed in Francis’s Canticle of the Sun, a poem thought to have been written around 1224, which expresses a love and appreciation of Brother Sun, Sister Moon, Mother Earth, Brother Fire and all of God’s creations personified in their fundamental forms. Francis believed in the universal ability and duty of all creatures to praise God, and the duty of all men to cherish and protect God’s divine creation of the natural world. This teaching, that the Earth must be preserved, is more prescient now than ever in light of habitat loss and species extinction. The realisation that everything comes from the same source made Francis call all created things, no matter how insignificant, his brothers and sisters, because they had the same origins as he. Every year on the Sunday nearest the feast day of St Francis on 4 October, Catholic and other Christian churches around the world host services where animals are blessed. These services are a powerful way to celebrate Francis’s compassionate concern for all creatures.

“

If you have men who will exclude any of God’s creatures from the shelter of compassion and pity, you will have men who deal likewise with their fellow men.

”

x www.franciscanfriarstor.com

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1661 1661

John Evelyn 1620–1706

Diarist turns silviculturalist With the restoration of King Charles II to the throne of England, among the members of the Court was John Evelyn, a diarist, gardener and writer. London had for a long time been suffering from air pollution caused by the burning of poor-quality ‘sea-coal’. In 1661 Evelyn wrote a pamphlet entitled Fumifugium (or The Inconvenience of the Aer and Smoak of London Dissipated), the first book ever written about air pollution. To combat the problem, Evelyn proposed moving industries such as breweries and lime-burners to locations far outside the city. In addition to relocating polluting industries, Evelyn encouraged gardens and orchards to be planted on the city’s periphery that the ‘the whole city, would be sensible of the sweet and ravishing varieties of the perfumes’. In contrast to unpleasant odours, which were believed to cause illness, pleasant odours were thought to be healthful and curative. Following the publication of Fumifugium, Evelyn was appointed to the Royal Society. Soon after this, Evelyn received a request from the Commissioners of the Navy for advice on the management of woodland. Timber for ships was in short supply and forests were being stripped to provide material for the expansion of the British Navy and to provide wood for iron and glass-making. The resulting book, first published by the Royal Society in 1664, was Sylva (or A Discourse of Forest-Trees). Evelyn was well aware of the need for replanting, residing as he did near the naval dockyard in Deptford, and encouraged new planting to meet the demand. His plea for afforestation was a valuable work on arboriculture. He went on to recommend that: His Majesty’s forests and chases be stored with this spreading tree at handsome intervals, by which grazing might be improved for the feeding of deer and cattle under them, benignly visited with the gleams of the sun, and adorned with the distant landscapes appearing through the glades and frequent valleys; nothing could be more ravishing. We might also sprinkle fruit trees amongst them for cider . . .

Only 200 mature trees were left standing in the old Forest of Dean when it was surveyed a few years later. Fortunately, Evelyn’s advice was taken – an open pattern of replanted forest was established and later echoed in many parks. Today, some 350 years later, those oaks, limes and sweet chestnuts planted under the influence of Evelyn’s Sylva are magnificent examples of his vision. One wonders whether the diarist ever considered the beneficial effect that the planting of trees might have had on the very lungs of his polluted city.

“

. . . the Hellish and dismall Cloud of sea coal . . . which is . . . so universally mixed with the otherwise wholsome and excellent Aer, that her Inhab-

16

itants breathe nothing but an impure and thick Mist accompanied with a fuliginous and filthy vapour, which renders them obnoxious to a thousand inconveniences, corrupting the Lungs, and disordring the entire habits of their Bodies; so that Catharrs, Phthisicks, Coughs and Consumptions rage more in this one City than in the whole Earth besides.

”

x www.british-trees.com/Oldsite/p10.htm

1682 1682

William Penn 1644–1718

‘A greene country towne’ In 1681, a 37-year-old Englishman called William Penn obtained a grant of land in North America which he called Pennsylvania in honour of his father. On arrival, Penn began to plan Pennsylvania’s first town, which he called Philadelphia. Having in his youth seen overcrowding and unsanitary conditions exacerbate the Great Plague in London and then watched the city razed by fire, Penn aimed for what he called a ‘greene country towne’. He and his surveyor, Tom Holme, mapped out a grid of evenly spaced streets with their boundaries marked on the trunks of the chestnut, walnut, locust, spruce, pine and other forest trees that covered the land. There were to be several wide boulevards lined by trees and five public squares of greenery. Writing the world’s first urban conservation law, Penn stipulated that each plot of land within Philadelphia was to be at least one acre, with space each side of the building ‘for gardens, or orchards, or fields’. He also required Pennsylvanian settlers to preserve one acre of trees for every five acres cleared. After Penn had returned to England not all Pennsylvanians respected their founder’s love of trees. After only 25 years, Philadelphia’s South-east Square was being used as a potter’s field and a burial yard for strangers in the city. But Penn’s spirit lived on and, in 1815, a public walk was created at South-east Square and a tree-planting programme began which today supports 60 varieties of tree.

“

Let us begin where nature begins, go at her pace, and close always where nature ends, and we cannot miss being good naturalists.

”

x www.williampenn.org

17

1730 1730

Amrita Devi c. 1700–1730

The world’s first environmental martyr Amrita Devi was a woman from the Bishnoi community in Rajasthan, India, founded by Guru Jambheshwar in the 15th century. The sect followed a remarkably detailed 29 principles laid down by its founder. Animals and trees were deemed sacred and killing or felling them was banned. In 1730, the Maharaja of Jodhpur sent an army of woodcutters to fell the Khejri trees in the Bishnoi village of Khejarli. He needed wood to fuel the lime kilns for cement to build a palace. Amrita Devi was at her home with her three daughters (Asu, Ratni and Bhagu bai) and when she realised what was happening she protested to the Maharaja’s men. The woodcutters asked for bribes to spare the trees. Amrita told them that she considered this an insult to her faith and would rather give away her life to save the trees, saying: ‘Sar santey rookh rahe to bhi sasto jaan’ (‘If a tree is saved even at the cost of one’s head, it’s worth it’). She was beheaded, as were her three daughters. The Bishnois of Khejarli and 83 other Bishnoi villages in the area gathered as the tree-felling continued. It was decided that for every tree felled, one Bishnoi volunteer would sacrifice his/her life. In the beginning, old people voluntarily started embracing the trees to be cut. Soon, young men, women and children were sacrificing themselves in a similar manner. The carnage led the tree-felling party to return to Jodhpur to report to the Maharaja with their mission unfulfilled. As soon as he learned about it, he ordered the felling of trees to be stopped. By that time, 363 Bishnois had already become martyrs. Honouring the courage of the Bishnoi community, Maharaja Abhay Singh apologised for the mistake committed by his officials and issued a royal decree banning the cutting of green trees and hunting of animals within the revenue boundaries of Bishnoi village – even members of the ruling family would not be allowed to shoot animals in or near Bishnoi villages. Although the Bishnoi community paid a huge price for saving a few trees, this incident has inspired many others to fight and protect trees and wildlife. Today, the Bishnois consider themselves the world’s first environmentalists and were the inspiration for the 20th-century Chipko (treehugger) movement in India. They continue to be proactive and were recently instrumental in securing the conviction of Bollywood film star Salman Khan for the illegal shooting of black buck deer.

“

Let the Earth we dig become greener and greener every day.

”

x www.bishnoi.org

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1735 1735

Carl Linnaeus 1707–1778

The economy of nature In 1735, a widely travelled Swedish scientist, botanist, zoologist, geologist, doctor, health worker and philosopher, Carl Linnaeus, published Systema Naturae in which he set out a plant classification system based on sexual characteristics. It was to earn him the title ‘the father of modern taxonomy’. But Linnaeus was curious about the entire natural world and wanted to map the whole of nature. His curiosity led to the naming convention known as the binary nomenclature that he introduced in 1749. In his Species Plantarum published in 1753 Linnaeus attempted to name and describe all known plants, calling each kind a species and assigning to each a two-part Greek or Latin name consisting of the genus (group) name followed by the species name. Many of his names for flowering plants survive with little, if any, change: for example, Quercus alba for white oak. The 1758 edition of Systema Naturae extended binomial classification to animals. Humans, for example, are known as Homo sapiens in the Order primates in the Class of mammals (Mammalia). Because he was the first to achieve a consistent and efficient system of nomenclature, in 1905 botanists agreed to accept his Species Plantarum and zoologists agreed to accept the 10th edition of his Systema Naturae (1758) as the official starting points for scientific names of plants and animals. The subject of ecology as a distinct area of investigation was first outlined by Linnaeus in a thesis of 1749 entitled Specimen Academicum de Oeconomia Naturae. Linnaeus organised ecology around the balance-of-nature concept, which he named the ‘economy of nature’. He emphasised interrelationships in nature and was one of the first naturalists to describe food chains. He also studied plant succession, the diversity of habitat requirements among species, and the selective feeding habits of insects and hoofed animals. He was strongly interested in the distribution of species and studied their different means of dispersal. He urged the application of biological knowledge not only in medicine but also in agriculture, for he believed that the effective combating of agricultural pests must be based on a thorough knowledge of their life histories.

“

If a tree dies, plant another in its place.

x www.linnaeus2007.se

”

Blunt and William T. Stearn, The Compleat Naturalist: A Life  Wilfrid of Linnaeus

(London: Frances Lincoln Publishers, 3rd rev. edn 2002)

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1749 1749

Georges-Louis Leclerc, Comte de Buffon 1719–1786

France’s first naturalist In an era long before ecosystems or biodiversity became commonly understood, the French naturalist, mathematician, biologist, cosmologist and author Comte de Buffon had deduced that all organisms, including humans, are the products of specific environmental conditions. He wrote that ‘three causes . . . must be admitted as concerning the production of . . . varieties . . . among the different nations of the earth: the influence of climate; food, which has a great dependence on climate; and manners on which climate has a still great influence’. From 1739, as Manager of King Louis XV of France’s Royal Garden, Buffon doubled both its plants and animal menagerie. His achievements included planting a magnificent arboretum of trees of every origin, transported from all over the world. Observing nature, he noted the importance of certain species in the food chain, and the role of birds in the dispersion of tree seeds. In 1749 he began to write what would be his life’s work: Histoire naturelle, générale et particulière. It would run to 36 volumes in the next 29 years up to his death, with another eight volumes published posthumously. This astonishing project included everything known about the natural world up until that date. He noted that, despite similar environments, different regions have distinct plants and animals, a concept later known as Buffon’s Law, widely considered the first principle of Biogeography. He also made the radical conclusion that species must have both ‘improved’ and ‘degenerated’ (evolved) after dispersing away from a centre of creation. He also asserted that climate change must have facilitated the worldwide spread of species from their centre of origin. Buffon was the most widely read scientist of his day, an influence on the later work of Darwin (Buffon considered the possible shared ancestry between man and 34 apes), and his work is regarded as a great influence on modern ecology.

Ü

“

Humans squander and pollute Nature, but in her generosity she is capable of supporting it . . .

”

 Jacques Roger, Buffon (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996) 20

1767 1767

Pierre Poivre 1719–1786

The colonial environmentalist The Dutch abandoned the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius in 1710. Five years later, the French arrived and renamed the territory Ile de France. Among them was Pierre Poivre, a horticulturalist from Lyon, who had originally trained to be a missionary. Poivre had a sense of adventure and wanted to remove the Dutch monopoly on the spice trade. He arrived with trunks full of seeds and shrubs, including cloves, nutmeg and pepper plants. His efforts were sabotaged and he returned disillusioned to France. In 1767, Poivre returned as administrator of Ile de France and Ile Bourbon (Réunion). He constructed a botanical garden on Mauritius which consisted of trees, shrubs and plants from tropical sites worldwide. Today, on northern Mauritius, the Botanical Garden of Pamplemousses that Poivre created still flourishes; it is now a 25 hectare garden containing tropical plants and trees from Africa, Asia and the Americas as well as the islands of the Indian Ocean. Poivre observed that the wholesale destruction of the Mauritian Calvaria tree (Sideroxylon majus) was having an impact on the regional climate by reducing rainfall. The trees had once been nourished by, and provided nourishment for, the dodo which had lived off the fruit of the tree and whose faeces helped fertilise the seeds. But with the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 16th century the flightless dodo was hunted for the table. Its eggs became food for the dogs, pigs, monkeys and other animals brought by humans. Since the female dodo laid only one egg at a time, their population rapidly declined. By 1681 the dodo was extinct and the Calvaria tree was endangered, although the connection between these events remains unproven. In a law of 1769, called the Règlement Economique, and in later laws passed after Poivre had left the island in 1772, an extensive system of forest and riverside reservations was established on Mauritius, along with tree-planting programmes, in order to protect the rainfall, prevent soil erosion and provide a sustainable timber supply. These plans were very ambitious: one scheme of 1784 envisaged the planting of 500,000 trees The complex environmental and botanical agendas pursued by the French on Mauritius stand out as a template for most subsequent conservationist initiatives throughout the British and French colonial empires. They also constituted a major plank of the earliest arguments for a forest conservation service in the US. Poivre has since been considered by his fellow countrymen as one of the founders of modern ecology.

 Pierre Poivre, Mémoires d’un botaniste et explorateur (Rennes: La Découvrance, 2006) 21

1789 1789

Gilbert White 1720–1793

England’s first ecologist During his life as curate of Selborne and its neighbouring Hampshire parishes, Gilbert White spent most of his hours observing and noting down the plants, animals and birds that surrounded him. In 1751 he began to keep a Gardeners’ Kalendar, and later A Naturalist’s Journal. He would then include his observations in letters to Thomas Pennant, the leading British zoologist of the day and also to the Hon. Daines Barrington, another member of the Royal Society. These letters contained White’s discoveries about local birds, animals and plants. He believed in distinguishing birds by observation rather than by collecting specimens, and was thus one of the first people to separate the similar-looking chiffchaff, willow warbler and wood warbler by means of their song. After twenty years, White published his findings in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. It has never been out of print. White is regarded by many as England’s first ecologist and one of the founders of modern respect for nature The Selborne Society for the preservation of birds and plants was founded in 1885 in memory of Gilbert White. Today ‘The Wakes’, White’s family home, is a museum, whose grounds are managed with conservation efforts in mind.

“

Earthworms, though in appearance a small and despicable link in the chain of nature, yet, if lost, would make a lamentable chasm . . . worms seem to be the great promoters of vegetation, which would proceed but lamely without them.

”

x www.gilbertwhiteshouse.org.uk

Natural History and Antiquities  G. White, TheofIllustrated Selborne

(London: Thames & Hudson, 2007)

1797 1797

John Chapman 1774–1845

Johnny Appleseed In 1797, a 26-year-old Christian missionary called John Chapman, later known as Johnny Appleseed, left western Pennsylvania carrying a sack of apple seeds obtained from a cider mill. As he travelled westward, Chapman began planting the 22

seeds. He created his first nursery orchard in a valley near the Ohio River. Many more would follow. Chapman had discovered that, following the War of Independence, those who had volunteered to fight against the British were to be rewarded with plots of land. He went ahead and planted his nurseries in readiness for the arrival of these veterans. His plan was to sell them the trees at an affordable price. In 1802, when they arrived, his trees were big enough to transport. He continued planting for the next 50 years, ahead of the great immigrant flood sweeping ever westward, first across Ohio, then Indiana, then Illinois. It is estimated that Johnny Appleseed planted millions of apple trees throughout the upper Midwest. He was forever travelling, either moving on to plant the next nursery or returning to ensure the healthy growth of the saplings. Many pioneers travelled long distances to buy trees from him. Johnny Appleseed came to know many Indian tribes, to understand their culture and medicines, and to speak their languages. He also sowed seeds of medicinal herbs wherever he went, such as dog fennel, pennyroyal, catnip, horehound, mullen and rattlesnake root. During his seed-sowing travels, Johnny Appleseed rescued several abandoned, aged or maimed horses and paid a farmer to care for them during their final years. It is even said that he once rescued a wolf from a trap, resulting in the wolf adopting him and following him for many days. When asked why he feared neither man nor beast, Johnny Appleseed claimed that he could not be harmed as long has he lived according to the laws of harmony and love. Just before his death aged 71, Johnny Appleseed was still ‘a gatherer and planter of apple seeds’. Today, he is considered one of America’s first conservationists.

“

I could not enjoy myself better anywhere – I can lay on my back, look up at the stars and it seems almost as though I can see the angels praising God, for he has made all things for good.

”

1798 1798

Thomas Malthus 1766–1834

The principle of population In 1797, Reverend Thomas Malthus, a brilliant 31-year-old Cambridge-educated mathematics scholar was a clergyman at Okewood Chapel, a few miles from his parents’ home at Albury, Surrey. Although a poor parish, it had an unusually high baptism rate. One day, Malthus had a discussion with his father on the ‘perfectibility of society’. His father, Daniel Malthus, a philosopher and close friend of JeanJacques Rousseau, was struck by his arguments and encouraged him to publish his ideas. 23

An Essay on the Principle of Population first appeared in 1798. In it, Malthus made the famous prediction that population increases in England would quickly outstrip the available food supplies, leading to famine and misery. His argument was based on the premise that, while populations can grow geometrically, food production cannot because it is limited by the land available. He doubted whether science and technology could solve the problem since any gains made through technology would be quickly offset by population increases, with ultimately disastrous consequences. Although Malthus seriously underestimated the ability of society to augment the resource base, and therefore the ability of the population to grow to its present size, he nevertheless initiated an important debate on the interaction between human populations and environmental conditions and constraints which continues today. The UN Population Division expects the world population to reach 9.5 billion by the year 2100.

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The power of population is so superior to the power of the Earth to produce subsistence for man that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race. The vices of mankind are active and able ministers of depopulation. They are the precursors in the great army of destruction, and often finish the dreadful work themselves. But should they fail in this war of extermination, sickly seasons, epidemics, pestilence, and plague advance in terrific array, and sweep off their thousands and tens of thousands. Should success be still incomplete, gigantic inevitable famine stalks in the rear, and with one mighty blow levels the population with the food of the world.

”

x desip.igc.org/malthus

Essay on the Principle of Population  Thomas Malthus, An(Teddington, UK: The Echo Library, 2003)

1799 1799

Alexander von Humboldt 1769–1859

The greatest travelling scientist In 1799, 30-year-old Alexander von Humboldt, a Prussian naturalist and explorer, travelled to South America for what would be one of the greatest scientific expeditions ever undertaken. Among the myriad achievements of the five-year trip were four months exploring the route of the Orinoco river which established its connection to the Amazon, an ascent of Mount Chimbarazo in the Ecuadorean Andes to a new record height and investigations into the fertilising properties of guano which led to its widespread use in Europe. His work was the first detailed scientific 24

description of the region and has led him to become described as the father of both physical geography and meteorology. By his delineation (in 1817) of isothermal lines, he devised the means to compare climatic conditions between countries. He first investigated the rate of decrease in mean temperature with increase of elevation above sea level and, informed by his inquiries into the origin of tropical storms, uncovered the earliest clue to the detection of the more complicated law governing atmospheric disturbances in higher latitudes. His work on the geography of plants was based on the then novel idea of studying the distribution of organic life in relation to varying physical conditions. His discovery of the decrease in intensity of the Earth’s magnetic field from the poles to the equator was communicated to the Paris Institute in a memoir read by him in 1804, and its importance was attested by the speedy emergence of rival claims. His services to geology were mainly based on his attentive study of the volcanoes of the New World. He showed that they fell naturally into linear groups, which he deduced corresponded with vast subterranean fissures; and by demonstrating the igneous origin of rocks previously held to be of aqueous origin he contributed largely to the development of geology as a scientific discipline. One of von Humboldt’s lesser-known studies concerned the falling water levels of Lake Valencia in Venezuela. With characteristic originality, he attributed this to decreasing rainfall caused by deforestation – in effect, human-influenced climate change. By the middle of the 19th century, von Humboldt’s observations, published in his book Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New World, had helped raise concern worldwide about whether expanding industrialisation allied to deforestation would have a permanent impact on the climate. On his return to France, he quickly became the most famous living European 34 after Napoleon Bonaparte. According to Charles Darwin, Humboldt was ‘the greatest travelling scientist who ever lived’.

Ü

“

I have the crazy notion to depict in a single work the entire material universe, all that we know of the phenomena of heaven and earth, from the nebulae of stars to the geography of mosses and granite rocks – and in a vivid style that will stimulate and elicit feelings.

x www.humboldt-foundation.de

”

Aaron Sachs, The Humboldt Current: Nineteenth-century Exploration and the Roots of American Environmentalism (New York: Viking, 2006).

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1820 1820

John James Audubon 1786–1851

First paint the birds, then protect them In 1820, John James Audubon, a 34-year-old financially unsuccessful farmer and hunter, started an unprecedented project. He planned to paint the likeness of every bird in North America – life-size! With the financial and moral support of his wife Lucy, seven years later this artist of French/Creole origins had published the first 87 portfolios of The Birds of America. Audubon spent the next years of his life seeking out additional species. By 1838, The Birds of America – hand-coloured engravings of an astounding 1,065 birds – was complete. Their life-size portrayal demanded printing on double elephant folios, a very expensive undertaking. Between 1840 and 1844, Audubon produced a ‘miniature’ edition of seven volumes, which became a bestseller. At the same time, he began another tome: The Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America. Audubon had already drawn 61 species by the time he and his four assistants embarked on their journey up the Missouri River in 1843 to collect information and images of western mammals. Audubon’s influence lasted long after his death. In response to the slaughter and exploitation of birds for their plumage, eggs and for taxidermy collections, George 40 Grinnell founded the Audubon Society in 1886. Although this first organisation was disbanded in 1888, new Audubon organisations continued to form in a number of US states. In 1905 the various state organisations were incorporated into the National Association of Audubon Societies for the Protection of Wild Birds and Animals. Today, the National Audubon Society has more than 600,000 members and 530 chapters in the Americas. Environmental and nature education is conducted at over 100 Audubon wildlife sanctuaries and nature centres nationwide.

Ü

“

A true conservationist is a man who knows that the world is not given by his fathers but borrowed from his children.

x www.audubon.org

”

William Souder, Under a Wild Sky: John James Audubon and the Making of the Birds of America

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(New York: North Point Press, 2004)

1827 1827

Henry Doulton 1820–1897

Making drinking water safer Henry Doulton’s father, John, founded his first pottery in 1815 at Lambeth in England on the banks of the River Thames. The main products of the original company were ceramic busts, figurines, canning jars and tableware. Influenced by the unrelenting progress of the Industrial Revolution, John Doulton placed equal emphasis on industrial applications for ceramic technology. As early as 1827, this fine china manufacturer was in the water treatment business, using various earth and clay materials in the first Doulton water filters. The Thames at that time was heavily contaminated with raw sewage. ‘Offensive to the sight, disgusting to the imagination and destructive of health’, as one pamphlet described it at the time. Cholera and typhoid epidemics were rife. In 1827, Henry ingeniously came up with a ceramic filter for removing bacteria from drinking water. In 1835, Queen Victoria recognised the health dangers in drinking water and commissioned Doulton to produce a water filter for the royal household. Doulton created a gravity-fed stoneware filter which combined the technology of a ceramic filter with the artistry of a hand-crafted pottery water container. Satisfied with the new device, the Queen bestowed upon Doulton the right to embellish each of his filters with the Royal Crest. Henry Doulton introduced the Doulton manganous carbon water filter in 1862, the same year that Louis Pasteur’s experiments with bacteria conclusively exploded the myth of spontaneous generation (the long-held idea that some forms of life arose spontaneously in dead matter: for example, maggots from rotting meat). This more advanced understanding of bacteria made it possible to direct research and development efforts towards the creation of a porous ceramic capable of filtering out microscopic organisms. In 1901 King Edward VII knighted Henry Doulton and honoured the company by authorising it to use the word ‘Royal’ on its products. In 1906, Doulton introduced a filter that proved to be the equal to the one Louis Pasteur had developed in France. It was rapidly adopted by hospitals, laboratories and for use in domestic water filtration throughout the world. The popularity and effectiveness of these early-20th-century designs has resulted in their continued use in Africa and the Middle East. The range and efficiency of Doulton domestic water filters has been widely extended over the years to meet the demands of increasingly sophisticated uses. Gosse and Desmond Eyles, Sir Henry Doulton: The Man of  Edmund Business as a Man of Imagination

(London: Hutchinson, 1970)

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1832 1832

George Catlin 1796–1872

First call for a national park In 1824, a 28-year-old lawyer called George Catlin saw an Indian delegation passing through Pennsylvania. He was so impressed that he gave up law to devote his career to painting Native Americans and championing the cause of this ‘vanishing race’. Having taught himself to paint, in 1830 Catlin set off for St Louis and became friends with General William Clark, the US Superintendent of Indian Affairs, sketching and painting the Native Americans who visited Clark at his office. Two years later he travelled over 3,000 km up the Missouri River to Fort Union where he spent several weeks among indigenous people still relatively untouched by European civilisation. There, at the edge of the frontier, he produced the most vivid and penetrating portraits of his career. Increasingly worried about the impact of westward expansion on Native American civilisation The White Cloud, Head Chief of the and on wildlife, Catlin put forward the idea of preIowas, painted by George Catlin serving and protecting special areas of wilderness. His vision was partly realised in 1864 when Congress donated Yosemite Valley to California for preservation. Eight years later, in 1872, Congress reserved the spectacular Yellowstone country in the Wyoming and Montana territories ‘as a public park or pleasuring-ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people’. With no state government established yet to receive and manage it, Yellowstone remained in the custody of the US Department of the Interior as a national park – the world’s first area to be so designated.

“

By some great protecting policy of government . . . What a beautiful and thrilling specimen for America to preserve and hold up to the view of her refined citizens and the world in future ages! A Nations Park, containing man and beast, in all the wild and freshness of their nature’s beauty!

x americanart.si.edu/catlin/highlights.html

”

American Art Museum, George Catlin andSmithsonian His Indian Gallery: Smithsonian American Art (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002)

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1842 1842

Joseph Paxton 1803–1865

Designing ‘lungs’ for cities By the 1840s, the inhabitants of many of the polluted cities across Victorian Britain were increasingly in need of easy access to fresh air and open spaces. As head gardener at the Duke of Devonshire’s stately home of Chatsworth in Derbyshire, England, Joseph Paxton began his work to give city-dwellers what they so needed. In 1842 he designed Princes Park in Liverpool. It was the first time that land for a public park had been acquired by an Act of Parliament. Paxton designed a separate perimeter road for carriages, which allowed the park interior to be enjoyed by pedestrians. Among those who walked through the park was a young American on a 33 European tour, Frederick Law Olmsted. Olmsted observed, ‘We have nothing like this in democratic America’. Paxton’s growing reputation as a designer of glasshouses (he designed the Great Conservatory and lily house at Chatsworth) resulted in him being awarded a commission to build his masterwork – the Crystal Palace for the Great Exhibition in May 1851. In October, he was knighted by Queen Victoria. A year later, as Crystal Palace was relocated to Sydenham in Kent, Paxton co-designed a park around the great structure. The same year he laid out Scotland’s first public urban park for the citizens of Glasgow: Kelvingrove. Four years later, Paxton designed the People’s Park for the wool manufacturing town of Halifax. He followed this with Baxter Park in Dundee and, in 1864, the year before his death, Hesketh Park in Slough, Berkshire. In 1874, Olmsted’s Central Park, many of its features inspired by Paxton, gave New Yorkers room to breathe.

Ü

x www.josephpaxton.org

The Visionary Life of Joseph  Kate Colquhoun, A Thing in Disguise: Paxton

(London: Fourth Estate, 2003)

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1851 1851

Hugh Cleghorn 1752–1837

Conservator of forests in India In 1851, a paper was submitted for discussion at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science. Report of the Committee Appointed by the British Association to Consider the Probable Effects in an Economical and Physical Point of View of the Destruction of Tropical Forests warned that tropical deforestation – specifically in India – threatened to reduce rainfall and increase regional temperatures. Potentially important drugs might be lost as little-known trees and plants were cut down, while fuel-wood shortages would become serious. Famines would become more frequent and disease-carrying insects would thrive in stagnant watercourses left after deforestation. Timber resources in India were declining rapidly as a result of the British Empire’s insatiable demand for timber, local use and, above all, the expansion of colonial agriculture. The rapid growth of a railway system after 1850 added a critical burden on forest resources. In 1855, on the advice of one of the report’s three authors, Hugh Cleghorn, Professor of Botany at the Madras Medical College, the government of Madras established a Forest Department and appointed Cleghorn as Conservator of Forests. In 1864, the Governor-General of India, Lord Dalhousie, set up an India-wide Forest Department with Cleghorn as the first Inspector-General. The establishment of this department, motivated by Lord Dalhousie’s concern both to maintain a sustainable timber supply and to curb drought, was his, and Cleghorn’s, crowning achievement and one of the most durable outcomes of British rule in India.

 Alywin Clark and Hunter Steele, An Enlightened Scot: Hugh Cleghorn, 1752–1837 (Perth, UK: Black Ace Books, 1992)

1854 1854

Chief Seattle c. 1786–1866

For Native America ‘Chief Sealth’ (Ts’ial-la-kum), better known today as Chief Seattle, was a leader of the Suquamish and Duwamish tribes, around Washington’s Puget Sound. Although there was no hereditary system among the Puget Sound Indians, strong leaders arose in each village from time to time, distinguishing themselves by their actions

30

or particular skills. Chief Seattle was a crisis leader and a noted orator in his native language. Chief Seattle had pursued a strategy of accommodation with the white settlers and Governor Isaac I. Stevens had made treaty proposals that asked for the surrender or sale of native land to the colonisers. In 1854, Chief Seattle is reported to have made a speech at a large public meeting with the Governor. The exact date and the content of what has since come to be regarded as a powerful, bittersweet plea for respect of Native American rights and environmental values, is disputed. But the words are remarkable.

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So, we will consider your offer to buy our land. But it will not be easy. For this land is sacred to us. This shining water that moves in the streams and rivers is not just water but the blood of our ancestors. If we sell you the land, you must remember that it is sacred, and you must teach your children that it is sacred and that each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in the life of my people. The water’s murmur is the voice of my father’s father . . . We know that the white man does not understand our ways. One portion of land is the same to him as the next, for he is a stranger who comes in the night and takes from the land whatever he needs. The earth is not his brother, but his enemy, and when he has conquered it, he moves on. He leaves his father’s grave behind, and he does not care. He kidnaps the earth from his children, and he does not care. His father’s grave, and his children’s birthright are forgotten. He treats his mother, the earth, and his brother, the sky, as things to be bought, plundered, sold like sheep or bright beads. His appetite will devour the earth and leave behind only a desert . . .

”

 Chief Seattle, The Speech of Chief Seattle (Bedford, MA: Applewood Books, repr. edn 2000)

1854 1854

Henry David Thoreau 1817–1862

Walden In 1837, the year following publication of his prose rhapsody Nature, the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson moved to the village of Concord, Massachusetts. Soon after, he was joined by an unknown 20-year-old Harvard graduate called Henry David Thoreau. Born in Concord, young Thoreau had returned home to teach and to expand his family’s pencil-making business. Emerson introduced him to other writers who were making Concord a centre for new ideas. Emerson, who valued

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Thoreau’s skills in gardening, carpentry and stonemasonry, invited him to live in the Emerson household. Grief brought them closer together. Emerson’s first son died just two weeks after the death of Thoreau’s beloved brother. Three years later Thoreau, still grieving, decided that he wanted to live in the woods and embark on a career as a writer. Emerson offered him the use of a newly purchased site at Walden Pond. It was surrounded by one of the few remaining woodlands in a heavily farmed area. During the spring and early summer of 1845, Thoreau built himself a one-room house beside Walden Pond. During the two years he was there, Thoreau lived simply, reading books, writing his diary, cultivating beans and walking in the woods. Published in 1854, Walden (or Life in the Woods) compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolise human development. Part memoir and part spiritual quest, Walden at first won few admirers, but today critics regard it as a classic American book that explores natural simplicity, harmony and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions. It has since inspired millions to become aware of, and to respect, the natural environment. Thoreau’s books, articles, essays, journals and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were writings on natural history and philosophy in which he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern-day environmentalism.

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I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.

x www.walden.org

”

David Thoreau, Walden: Or, Life in the Woods  Henry (New York: Dover Publications Inc., new edn 1995)

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1858 1858

Frederick Law Olmsted 1822–1903

Emerald necklaces Frederick Law Olmsted was fascinated by nature from his youth. After attending Phillips Academy, he studied agricultural science and engineering at Yale. Olmsted’s friend and mentor, Andrew Jackson Downing, the charismatic landscape architect, first proposed the development of New York’s Central Park when he was publisher of The Horticulturist magazine. It was also Downing who introduced Olmsted to the English-born architect Calvert Vaux, whom Downing had personally brought back from England as his architect–collaborator. After Downing died a hero’s death in a steamboat explosion on the Hudson River in July 1852, Olmsted and Vaux entered a competition in his honour to present designs for Central Park and, in 1858, won. Their ‘greensward’ plan envisaged sweeping meadows and lakes to mimic pastoral landscapes. After 16 years of work by thousands of Irish, German and New England labourers, a difficult terrain of swamps and bluffs, punctuated by rocky outcroppings had been converted into Central Park. More than 10 million cartloads of material had been hauled through it, including 4 million trees, shrubs and plants, representing more than 1,400 species. Thirty-six bridges and archways had been built and four artificial lakes fed by the city’s water supply. The design of Central Park embodied Olmsted’s social consciousness and commitment to egalitarian ideals. Influenced by Downing and by his own observations regarding social class in England, China and the American south, Olmsted believed that common green space must be equally accessible to all citizens. This principle is now so fundamental to the idea of a ‘public park’ as to seem selfevident, but it was not so then; Olmsted’s tenure as park commissioner was one long struggle to preserve that idea. Olmsted not only created city parks in many cities around the US, he also conceived entire systems of parks and interconnecting parkways which connected certain cities to green spaces. Two of the best examples of the scale on which Olmsted worked are the park system designed for Buffalo, New York, and the system he designed for Milwaukee, Wisconsin. For Boston, Olmsted conceived a rural park system he called the ‘emerald necklace’. It involved developing 810 hectares to create five large parks, an interconnecting riverfront and playgrounds, which looped around the city in a giant semi-circle. 33

Olmsted’s other great environmental achievement concerned the protection of Niagara Falls. By the early 1880s, only a small portion of the Falls were visible to the tourist. Olmsted felt that many people were losing out on the vast beauty that the Falls had to offer. He therefore set about purchasing Goat Island, which separated the Canadian and US Falls, as well as neighbouring Bath Island which had a small factory on it. He returned them to their natural glory and in 1885 helped create the Niagara Reservation, the country’s first state park.

“

What artist so noble . . . as he who, with far-reaching conception of beauty, in designing power, sketches the outlines, writes the colors, and directs the shadows of a picture so great that Nature shall be employed upon it for generations, before the work he arranged for her shall realize his intentions.

”

Law Olmsted, Civilizing American Cities: Writings x www.fredericklawolmsted.com onFrederick City Landscapes (New York: Da Capo Press, new edn 1997)

1859 1859

Charles Darwin 1809–1882

The theory of evolution In 1831, Charles Darwin, a 22-year-old theologian and naturalist, embarked on HMS Beagle, bound for Patagonia on a scientific survey expedition. Already a passionate collector of plants, insects and geological specimens, this voyage of discovery was to be one of the most important in human history. During the five-year expedition, Darwin obtained an intimate knowledge of the fauna, flora and geology of South America, Australasia and Africa. But his most famous stay was in the Galapagos Islands, where he observed many plants and animals of the same general type as those on the South American continent. Back home after five years, the publication of his journal in The Voyage of the Beagle made Darwin famous as a popular author. During the 1840s, Darwin remained a country gentleman among his gardens and conservatories in Downe, Kent. But, from the practical knowledge he had gained, he gradually developed a theory that the origin and evolution of species had taken place over thousands of millions of years, and not the few days recounted at the beginning of the Bible. In November 1859, he published his findings in a book: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The book provided scientific evidence to show that all species of life have evolved over time from one or a few common ancestors through the process of ‘natural selection’. The veracity of his arguments led to his theory of evolution being accepted 34

in his lifetime, while the theory of natural selection came to be widely seen as the primary explanation of the process of evolution by the 1930s and now forms the basis of modern evolutionary theory. Darwin’s discovery remains the basis for our understanding of biology, as it provides a unifying logical explanation for the diversity of life. Darwin wrote, ‘There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed by the Creator into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone circling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.’ Darwin continued to write a series of books on botany, zoology, fertilisation and geology. His final work, The Formation of Vegetable Mould through the Action of Worms, was published in 1881, the year before his death. In 1959, one hundred years after publication of On the Origin of Species, the Charles Darwin Foundation was founded, dedicated to the conservation of the Galapagos Islands ecosystems.

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It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.

”

x darwin-online.org.uk

1864 1864

George Perkins Marsh 1801–1882

America’s first environmentalist In the 19th century, geographers believed that the physical aspects of the Earth were entirely the result of natural phenomena. This was not an opinion held by George Perkins Marsh, a widely travelled philologist and diplomat, originally from Vermont. Marsh believed that we are not passive inhabitants of Earth. Rather, we give Earth its shape and form; we are responsible for it. Marsh was partially sighted. As a child, finding reading difficult, he explored the forests near his boyhood home. If he could not read books, he could at least read nature. He developed an abiding love of animals, plants and the world they occupy. Few of us, he once said, could make as good a claim to personality as a respectable oak. In 1864, while acting as US Ambassador in Italy, Marsh wrote an early key work of ecology called Man and Nature (or Physical Geography as Modified by Human Action). He had seen the damage humans had caused by clearing the once lush forests surrounding the Mediterranean. Marsh argued that deforestation could lead to desertification, highlighting the advance of the Sahara as evidence. He asserted,

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‘The operation of causes set in action by man has brought the face of the Earth to a desolation almost as complete as that of the moon.’ We are, he wrote, destined to disturb nature’s harmonies. But we have to learn to do so as good stewards not as vandals. Man and Nature was heavily revised and republished in 1874 as The Earth as Modified by Human Action. Marsh’s book was widely praised by critics and scientists and indirectly sparked the Arbor Day movement, the establishment of forest reserves and a national forest system, as well as being a catalyst in the establishment of the Adirondack State Park. His influence also extended beyond North American borders. George Perkins Marsh’s book fell into disuse until the 1930s when it was rediscovered by those who were beginning to realise how much the planet was being harmed. The historian Lewis Mumford has called him ‘the fountainhead of the conservation movement’.

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Man, who even now finds scarce breathing room on this vast globe, cannot retire from the Old World to some yet undiscovered continent, and wait for the slow action of such causes to replace, by a new creation, the Eden he has wasted.

”

George Perkins Marsh: Prophet of Conservation  David Lowenthal, (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2000)

1868 1868

Joseph Bazalgette 1819–1891

The sewage engineer By the 1850s, London was suffering from recurring epidemics of cholera, with tens of thousands dying from the disease. At the time, the River Thames was little more than an open sewer, devoid of any fish or other wildlife. Following ‘The Great Stink’ caused by the summer heatwave of 1858, Parliament decided that something must be done about the foul air they believed to be causing disease. Joseph Bazalgette, chief engineer to London’s Metropolitan Board of Works, realised the cause was not the air but contaminated water. He put forward propos36

als to revolutionise London’s sewerage system at colossal expense. Bazalgette’s solution was to construct 133 km of underground brick main sewers to intercept sewage outflows, and 1,770 km of street sewers to intercept the raw sewage which up until then flowed freely through the streets and thoroughfares of London. The scheme involved the construction of a number of major pumping stations both north and south of the river. By removing sewage contamination from water supplies, the new sewerage system dramatically reduced the incidence of cholera and other water-borne diseases. Bazalgette also had a significant impact on London’s appearance. His sewers were built behind embankments on the riverfront, replacing the tidal mud of the Thames shoreline with reclaimed ground for riverside roads and gardens. He constructed the Victoria, Albert and Chelsea Embankments, the latter reclaiming over 21 hectares from the Thames.

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The whole of the sewage passed down sewers from the high ground at right angles to the Thames into the low grounds adjoining the Thames, where at high water it was pent up in the sewers, forming great elongated cesspools of stagnant sewage, and then when the tide went down and opened the outlets, that sewage was poured into the river at low water at a time when there was very little water in the river.

”

Halliday, The Great Stink of London: Sir Joseph Bazalgette and the  Stephen Cleansing of the Victorian Metropolis (Stroud, UK: Sutton Publishing, 1999)

1872 1872

John Ericsson 1803–1889

Inventor of the ‘sun motor’ Following the end of the American Civil War, 60-year-old Swedish-born engineer, John Ericsson, the inventor of the screw-propeller and the first metal-clad warship, turned his genius to developing what he called the ‘sun motor’. His work was inspired by a fear shared by virtually all of his fellow solar inventors that coal supplies would someday end. Following extensive experiments from the rooftop of his Manhattan home, in 1872 Ericsson built a machine that used two concave mirrors to gather radiation from the sun strong enough to run an engine at 240 rpm. His original intention was that Californian farmers utilise his sun motor for irrigation projects. Ericsson maintained an unshakable belief in the future of solar power to his last breath. He had set up a large engine in his back yard and was still perfecting it when 37

he died in early 1889. Unfortunately for the struggling discipline, the detailed plans for his improved sun motor died with him. Nevertheless, the search for a practical solar motor was not abandoned. In fact, the experimentation and development of large-scale solar technology was just beginning.

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The time will come when Europe must stop her mills following the inevitable exhaustion of the coal fields. Upper Egypt then, with her neverceasing sun power, will invite the European manufacturer to remove his machinery and erect his mills on the firm ground along the sides of the alluvial plain of the Nile where sufficient power can be obtained to enable him to run more spindles than a hundred Manchesters. We estimate that 22 million solar engines, each of 100 horsepower could be kept in constant operation, during nine hours a day, by utilising only that heat which is now wasted on a very small fraction of the land extending along some of the water fronts of the sunburnt regions of the Earth.

”

x www.johnericsson.org

1872 1872

Julius Sterling Morton 1832–1902

Founder of Arbor Day In the 1840s, the Midwestern state of Nebraska was a territory with a wide prairie. When pioneers moved to settle there, they found few trees to build houses or to burn fuel. There was no shade from the sun or shelter from the wind, and crops did not grow well in the dry earth. When Julius Sterling Morton and his wife moved from their home in Detroit, Michigan to settle in Nebraska, one of the first things they did was to plant trees. As the editor of the state’s first newspaper, The Nebraska City News, Morton began to advocate planting trees to help sustain life on the vast, barren plain. In January 1872, Morton, now Secretary of the Nebraska Territory, spoke at a meeting of the State Board of Agriculture, proposing that citizens set aside a day to plant trees. He suggested offering prizes as incentives for committees and organisations that successfully planted the most trees. On 10 April 1872, Nebraska celebrated its first Arbor Day, with Nebraskans planting a staggering 1 million trees in less than 24 hours. Two years later, Arbor Day was officially proclaimed by Governor Robert W. Furnas. In 1882 it became a legal holiday in Nebraska and 22 April, Morton’s birthday, was selected as the date for its permanent observance, particularly at schools. Julius Sterling Morton later wrote:

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Arbor Day which has already transplanted itself to every state in the American Union and has even been adopted in foreign lands . . . is not like other holidays. Each of these reposes on the past, while Arbor Day proposes for the future.

Today the most common date for state observances is the last Friday in April, and several US presidents have proclaimed Arbor Day on that date. But a number of Arbor Days have taken place at other times to coincide with the best tree-planting weather, ranging from January and February in the south to May in the north. Julius Sterling Morton became Secretary of Agriculture in the government of President Grover Cleveland. He is credited with helping change that department into a coordinated service to farmers, and he supported Cleveland in setting up national forest reservations.

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Each generation takes the Earth as trustees. We ought to bequeath to posterity as many forests and orchards as we have exhausted and consumed.

”

x www.arborday.org

1876 1876

Ellen Swallow Richards 1842–1911

The feminist ecologist In 1876, Ellen Swallow Richards, a chemistry professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), bought an Italianate home in Jamaica Plain, a part of Boston, which she systematically began to convert into what she later called the Center for Right Living. She installed window units that opened at both the top and bottom to release warm, stale air. She removed lead pipes, set up a system of indoor oxygen-producing plants and re-routed the waste system away from the property’s well. Richards hired MIT students to scientifically test foods, utilities and utensils to the point of calculating the smallest units of fuel, time and money needed for individual tasks. She would call this ‘home economics’. Richards was a pioneer is many ways. The foremost female industrial and environmental chemist in the US in the 1800s, Richards was the first woman admitted to MIT and its first female instructor, the first woman in America accepted to any school of science and technology, and the first American woman to earn a degree in chemistry. Her work was not confined to her home. In 1887, at the request of the Massachusetts State Board of Health, Richards and her team undertook a survey of the quality of the inland bodies of water of Massachusetts, many of which were already polluted with industrial waste and municipal sewage. Over 20,000 water samples 39

were examined, the first such large-scale study in America. As a result, Massachusetts established the first water quality standards in America, as well as the first modern sewage treatment plant, in Lowell. Richards was a consulting chemist for the Massachusetts State Board of Health from 1872 to 1875, and the official water analyst from 1887 until 1897. In later years, Richards was a tireless campaigner for the new discipline of home economics applying scientific principles to domestic situations, such as nutrition, clothing, physical fitness, sanitation and efficient home management, with the aim of allowing women more time for pursuits other than cooking and cleaning. In 1908, she was chosen to be the first President of the newly formed American Home Economics Association.

1876 1876

George Bird Grinnell 1849–1938

A journalist and conservationist In 1860, the 11-year-old George Bird Grinnell moved with his father to Audubon Park, a piece of land owned by the ageing Lucy Audubon, the widow of bird artist John Audubon. His friendship with Lucy laid the foundation for his lifelong love of 26 the outdoors and of protecting bird life. In his twenties, while on fossil-hunting expeditions, the young George realised that hunting and shooting had brought such species as the passenger pigeon, the Carolina parakeet and the buffalo to the very edge of extinction. Grinnell had extensive contact with the terrain, animals and Native Americans of the northern plains, starting with his participation in the last great hunt of the Pawnee in 1872 and spending many years pursuing the natural history of the region. As a naturalist he accompanied Custer’s 1874 Black Hills expedition in search of gold. In 1875, Colonel William Ludlow, who had also been on Custer’s gold exploration effort, approached him to again serve as naturalist and mineralogist on an expedition to Montana and the newly established Yellowstone Park. His experience in Yellowstone led to the production of the first of many magazine articles dealing with conservation and the American west. Seeing the need for urgent action, Grinnell purchased a hunting and fishing tabloid publication called Forest and Stream. As its new editor, he directed its editorial to fiercely champion the cause of conservation and sportsmanship. He championed the protection of big game from poachers in the Yellowstone Park. He advocated the protection of the Adirondack mountain range and pressed for sustainable management of the nation’s forests. He remained editor for 35 years, until 1911. In 1885, Grinnell discovered the glacier in Montana that now bears his name and was later influential in establishing Glacier National Park in 1910. He was also

Ü

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a member of the Edward Henry Harriman expedition of 1899, a two-month survey of the Alaskan coast by an elite group of scientists and artists. 51 In 1887, Grinnell was a founding member, with Theodore Roosevelt, of the Boone and Crockett Club, dedicated to the restoration of America’s wildlands. Other founding members included General William Tecumseh Sherman and Gif48 ford Pinchot. Subsequent US legislation to regulate the hunting of migratory birds was indirectly due to the campaigning journalism of George Bird Grinnell.

Ü Ü

“

We are a water drinking people, and we are allowing every brook to be defiled.

”

x www.boone-crockett.org

Punke, Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to  Michael Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West (London: Collins, 2007)

1883 1883

William Morris 1834–1896

Eco-socialism With the relentless advance of the industrial revolution in Victorian Britain, William Morris – poet, critic, artist and designer – a towering figure in the cultural and political landscape of England, devoted his later literary and theoretical skills to promoting socialism. From 1883, Morris promoted his ideas within the Social Democratic Federation and, later, The Socialist League. He also expressed his utopian and radical views in his writing of an imaginary future socialist world in A Dream of John Ball and, in 1890, News from Nowhere. The latter intimately linked Marxism to ecological regeneration and sustainability. In this respect, many contemporary scholars believe him to be one of the first eco-socialist thinkers. His romantic vision most likely came from his earlier commitment as an artist to a ‘critical notion of beauty’. Morris was radically opposed to industrialisation. With a group of friends, he set up a company (‘The Firm’) to revive traditional, hand-made crafts such as stainedglass painting, dyeing and printing fabrics, tapestry weaving and furniture making. He was one of the principal founders of the British Arts and Crafts movement.

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I do not [believe] we should aim at abolishing all machinery; I would do some things with machinery which are now done by hand, and other things by hand which are now done by machinery; in short, we would be the masters of our machines and not their slaves, as we are now. It is not this or

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that . . . machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny which oppresses the lives of all of us.

”

Morris, News from Nowhere (Oxford:  WilliamOxford University Press, new edn 2003)

x www.morrissociety.org

1888 1888

Ernst Rudorff 1840–1917

A musician protects nature Ernst Friedrich Karl Rudorff of Leipzig came from a wealthy musical family. He was a highly respected music teacher and composer. But Rudorff became increasingly concerned about the protection of nature in his native Germany, including rural paths and landscapes. His enemies were the scars of economic development – unsightly railways, dams on scenic rivers, the extension of agriculture into virgin land, the replacement of small fields, copses and hedgerows by larger fields suitable for mechanical equipment, and the despoiling of the landscape by tourist hotels, scenic railways and litter. In 1888, Rudorff coined a new word in the German language – Naturschutz (nature protection). One of Rudorff’s close colleagues was Hugo Conwentz, 15 years his junior and director of the Prussian Natural History museum. Conwentz had been making a detailed inventory of objects such as moraines, dunes and quarries which should, in his opinion, remain wild. In 1901, Rudorff published a book, Heimatschutz (Homeland Protection), in which he protested against the destruction of nature and called for the creation of nature reserves. Three years later, Rudorff, Conwentz and other supporters founded the League for Homeland Protection (Bund Heimatschutz) to preserve natural wonders, endangered species, rural landscapes and other threatened historic objects such as buildings, costumes and crafts.

1889 1889

Mrs Phillips and Mrs Williamson dates of birth and death unknown

For the protection of birds Towards the end of the Victorian era in Britain, several waterfowl birds were seriously threatened with extinction due to the demands of fashion. For example, the 42

skin and soft underpelt and head frills of the great crested grebe’s feathers were particularly in demand by the millinery trade to decorate ladies’ fancy hats and ruffs. The only way to obtain such feathers was by killing the birds. In one year, according to the official trade figures of auctions at the London Commercial Sales Rooms, some 1,608 packages of heron plume came under the hammer. In 1889, two small concerned groups decided that if they got together something could be done. One was Mrs Emily Williamson’s Plumage League in Didsbury, Manchester, which met at the local Fletcher Moss Botanical Gardens to campaign against the craze for egret feathers from Florida. The other was the Fur and Feathers League run by Mrs Phillips in Croydon, near London, which campaigned against the killing of grebes. The first publication of the Society for the Protection of Birds, formed by the merger of the two groups, was called Destruction of Ornamental Plumaged Birds. Soon afterwards, the Duchess of Portland accepted the office of President and the Society for the Protection of Birds began in earnest. Incorporated by Royal Charter in 1904, today the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds has 1,500 employees, 12,000 volunteers and over 1 million members, making it the largest wildlife conservation charity in Europe. In recent years, legislation, changing fashions and an increase in the number of lakes available for breeding have seen great crested grebe numbers in Britain and Ireland grow to over 1,000 pairs and the egret has even expanded its worldwide range to include southwestern England.

x www.rspb.org.uk

1891 1891

Poul la Cour 1846–1908

Johannes Juul 1887–?

Harnessing the power of the wind The Danish are culturally predisposed towards wind power and, at a time when electricity was about to be introduced, Poul la Cour, a Danish scientist, inventor and educationalist, believed that wind should contribute to the electrification of the country. In Holland, proposals to produce electricity from windmills had been investigated but not implemented because of their low efficiency and the problem of storing the energy. Overcoming these problems appealed to the inventor and physicist la Cour.

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In 1891 la Cour got the idea of storing wind energy in the form of hydrogen (and oxygen) using electrolysis. He was granted financial support by the Danish government and the first experimental mill at Askov Folk High School, where he was teaching, was erected in the summer of 1891. La Cour’s first task was to make the mill produce a constant current to drive a generator. This was solved by a differential regulator, the so-called ‘kratostate’, which was later simplified and widely used in electricity-producing windmills in the Nordic countries and Germany. In 1904, la Cour founded the Society of Wind Electricians which reached a membership of 356 after a year. By the end of the First World War, more than a quarter of all rural power stations in Denmark were using wind turbines. During the long wartime blockade, the 3 MW (megawatt) provided by these crude wind machines and the widespread use of small farm windmills for grinding grain were a valuable source of power for an impoverished rural population. Though most windmills were used for mechanical power, the Danish Energy Agency estimates that wind turbines were providing the equivalent of 120–150 MW in Denmark by 1920. One of la Cour’s students at Askov was the engineer Johannes Juul. Half a century later, Juul built the first alternating-current wind turbines at the Danish village of Vester Egesborg. In 1957, he built a 200 kW (kilowatt) turbine on the coast of Gedser in southern Denmark. Its aerodynamic efficiency enabled it to run for 11 years, virtually maintenance-free. Indeed, the Gedser wind turbine was renovated as late as 1975 at the request of NASA which wanted measurements from the turbine for the new US wind energy programme. Poul la Cour and Johannes Juul were the European pioneers of wind power, and their work carries huge importance as the world comes to terms with the problems of climate change and the finite resources of a carbon-based economy.

x www.windsofchange.dk

1892 1892

John Muir 1838–1914

High sierra When he was 29 years old, the Scottish-born John Muir was working in a factory in Wisconsin. While connecting a machine belt, he accidentally thrust the point of 44

a file into his right eye. That evening his other eye failed him. Thinking he had gone blind he protested, ‘My right eye is closed forever on God’s beauty!’ Muir’s eyesight would return, but he found the prospect of blindness so terrifying that he began plans to see the world’s natural wonders. He became a wilderness explorer, renowned for his adventures in California’s Sierra Nevada, for crossing Alaskan glaciers, for riding an avalanche down a mountain and surviving, for exploring the source of waterfalls and for travelling all over the world to see trees and mountain landscapes. In 1892 Muir wrote to the editor of The Century Magazine, ‘Let us do something to make the mountains glad!’ The result was the foundation of the Sierra Club, the first major organisation in the world dedicated to using and ‘preserving’ wild nature, and now one of the most important conservation organisations in the US. Muir was the club’s president for 22 years until his death. Muir’s hugely popular writing contributed greatly to the creation of the US national parks Sequoia, Mount Rainier, Petrified Forest and Grand Canyon. His words and deeds helped 51 inspire President Theodore Roosevelt’s innovative conservation programmes, including the establishment of Yosemite National Park by Congressional action. He was not always successful, however, and some say he died of a broken heart in 1914 when his beloved Hetch Hetchy Valley, which he referred to as ‘a second Yosemite’, was flooded to create a reservoir to supply water to San Francisco. Muir’s vision of nature’s value for its own sake and for its spiritual, not just practical, benefits to humankind helped to change the way we look at the natural world. He was a preservationist rather than a conservationist and argued for many years with leading figures 48 in the latter camp, such as Gifford Pinchot. Muir’s heroic life is recognised in the naming of many places, including the Muir Glacier in Alaska, Muir Memorial Park in Wisconsin and, in California, by such places as Muir Woods National Monument, John Muir Trail, John Muir Wilderness and the John Muir National Historic Site. In his birthplace of Dunbar, Scotland, there is a Muir Country Park, and his birthplace home is now a museum. Scotland also boasts a John Muir Trust which works to preserve nature in the UK, much as the Sierra Club does in the US and Canada, and through global partners around the world.

Ü Ü

“

When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.

”

x www.sierraclub.org 45

Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra  John (New York: Modern Library, new edn 2003)

1895 1895

John Burroughs 1837–1921

The grand old man of nature John Burroughs had been working for 20 years as a treasury clerk and bank examiner in Washington when, in 1874, he bought a farm near Esopus, New York. There he studied fruit culture and literature and, before long, he began to write collections of essays extolling nature, such as Wake-Robin, Locusts and Wild Honey, Fresh Fields and Signs and Seasons. By 1895 John Burroughs had become an immensely popular nature writer. At this point, as he later explained: I was offered a tract of wild land, barely a mile from home, that contained a secluded nook and a few acres of level, fertile land shut off from the vain and noisy world by a wooded precipitous mountain . . . and built me a rustic house there, which I call Slabsides, because its outer walls are covered with slabs. I might have given it a prettier name, but not one more fit, or more in keeping with the mood that brought me thither . . . Life has a different flavor here. It is reduced to simpler terms; its complex equations all disappear.

A mile and a half from his house by the Hudson River, Slabsides served the naturalist for the last 20 years of his life as a place where he could write, study nature and entertain his friends. The guest books of Slabsides contain the names of hundreds of Burroughs’ admirers, including Theodore Roosevelt, 51 John Muir, the inventor Thomas Edison and the 44 car manufacturer Henry Ford A year after his death in 1922, the ‘sage of Slabsides’ final book Accepting the Universe was published. Its simple, expressive prose continued to encourage people to experience and respect the natural world. John Burroughs’ books have sold over 1.5 million copies. His work resonated with early-20th-century culture and society, which explains its enormous popularity at the time and its relative obscurity since. In 1964 the woodlands surrounding Slabsides were threatened by logging and development. Following successful fundraising, the 69 hectare John Burroughs Sanctuary was created.

Ü Ü

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We can use our scientific knowledge to improve and beautify the Earth, or we can use it to . . . poison the air, corrupt the waters, blacken the face of

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the country, and harass our souls with loud and discordant noises, [or] . . . we can use it to mitigate or abolish all these things.

x www.johnburroughs.org

”

 Edward J. Renehan, John Burroughs: An American Naturalist

(White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 1993)

1895 1895

Octavia Hill 1838–1912

Robert Hunter 1844–1913

Hardwicke Rawnsley 1851–1920

Founders of the National Trust

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16 In 1884, the descendants of the 17th-century diarist John Evelyn approached

Octavia Hill, a well-known social reformer. They asked her whether it would be possible to permanently conserve the garden that Evelyn had created at his home in Sayes Court in the heart of Deptford, east London. They wanted to donate the property to the nation, but no organisation existed to accept the gift. Hill approached Sir Robert Hunter, legal adviser to the Post Office and well respected for his successful legislation to protect common lands. Hunter felt a new company should be established ‘for the protection of the public interests in the open spaces of the country’. Hill wanted a short, expressive name for the new company, prompting Hunter to suggest the National Trust. The idea lay dormant for nearly ten years until 1893 when Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley sought help to buy some land in the Lake District which was under threat from speculators. A brilliant propagandist, Rawnsley gained nationwide financial support ranging from Princess Louise, the daughter of Queen Victoria, to factory workers in the industrial Midlands. With a donation of 2s 6d, a Sheffield worker wrote, ‘All my life I have longed to see the Lakes. I shall never see them now, but I should like to help keep them for others.’ In this spirit, in January 1895 the National Trust was founded with Sir Robert Hunter as its first chairman. With the purchase of two acres of Wicken Fen, near Cambridge, the Trust acquired its first nature reserve. The National Trust Act, skilfully drafted by Hunter, was passed in 1907. Today, over a century later, with around 4,300 members of staff and more than 43,000 volunteers, the National Trust cares for over 248,000 hectares of British

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countryside, plus more than 1,126 km of coastline and more than 200 buildings and gardens.

x www.nationaltrust.org.uk

Murphy, Founders of the National Trust  Graham (London: National Trust Books, new edn 2006)

1898 1898

Gifford Pinchot 1865–1946

America’s first professional forest protector In 1890, a 25-year-old Yale graduate called Gifford Pinchot returned from Europe where he had been studying forestry in France and Germany convinced of the value of selective rather than unrestrained harvesting of forests. Eight years later, Pinchot was appointed chief of the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Bureau and charged with developing a plan for the nation’s western forest reserves. Pinchot’s approach was so effective that in 1905 his Bureau was given control of the national forest reserves and renamed the US Forest Service with Pinchot its first chief. Working under the patronage of President Theodore 51 Roosevelt, Pinchot further developed his scientific approach to forest management and is credited with coining the term ‘conservation’ as applied to the wise use of all natural resources. Under Pinchot, the Forest Service added millions of acres to the national forests, controlled their use and regulated their harvest. Pinchot also organised the 1908 Governor’s Conference on Conservation and the 1909 North American Conservation Conference. He founded the Yale School of Forestry and served as a professor there from 1903 to 1936. Although Gifford Pinchot died in 1946, his name lives on in many ways. In 1949, the 530,000 hectare Columbia National Forest was renamed the Gifford Pinchot National Forest. In 1963 President John F. Kennedy inaugurated the Pinchot Institute for Conservation at Grey Towers, Pinchot’s former home in Washington, DC. In the early 1980s forest activists in south-west Washington came together in a coalition known as the Gifford Pinchot Task Force. Their priorities were to monitor timber sales, reducing logging of old-growth trees within the Gifford Pinchot National Forest and create the Mount St Helen’s Volcanic National Monument. Perhaps because of pride in the first Gifford Pinchot’s legacy, the Pinchot family has continued to name their sons Gifford, down to Gifford Pinchot IV.

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The purpose of conservation: The greatest good to the greatest number of people for the longest time.

x www.fs.fed.us/gpnf

”

Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmen Char Miller, talism

(Washington, DC: Shearwater Books, new edn 2004)

1899 1899

Elihu Stewart 1844–1935

Father of the Dominion Forest Service In 1899, Elihu Stewart, the 55-year-old mayor of Collingwood, Ontario, Canada, was appointed chief inspector of timber and forestry for the Dominion Forestry Branch – now the Canadian Forestry Service. For many decades, Canada’s natural resources had been considered vast and everlasting, but by the turn of the century they were being depleted at an alarming rate. There was a need to raise public awareness of the dangers of the wholesale destruction of timber along rivers and streams. Stewart saw a need for major improvements to the development of forest public lands – promoting tree planting in treeless areas, along streets and in the parks of villages, towns and cities. In 1900, Stewart founded the Canadian Forestry Association. For Stewart, only two words counted: conservation and propagation. His perseverance led to a reforestation programme in western Canada which saw more than 8 million seedlings planted. He also set up a fire-fighting system to protect woodland. The Dominion Forest Reserve Act, passed in 1906, placed some 14,000 km2 of forest reserves under the management and protection of the Dominion Forestry Branch. One of Stewart’s greatest strengths was his ability to talk about forestry issues with Canadians at all levels, including the then Prime Minister Sir Wilfrid Laurier who often consulted him on forestry issues. On Stewart’s suggestion, in 1907 the University of Toronto offered the first Canadian forestry course. His legacy is sustained by the Canadian Forestry Association which continues to advocate the protection and wise use of Canada’s forest, water and wildlife resources.

x www.canadianforestry.com

1899 1899

James ‘Scotty’ Philip 1858–1911

The man who saved the buffalo Approximately 60 million bison roamed North America when Europeans first started to settle there in the 16th century. During the 1800s, the railroad brought 49

hunters who killed bison for sport, for their hides and for meat. By the mid-1800s, the US Army was killing the bison to take away the Native American’s food source. By the 1890s fewer than 1,100 bison remained in the US and Canada. Meanwhile, James ‘Scotty’ Philip, a South Dakota rancher, originally from Scotland, was building his cattle herd. Scotty had met Pete Dupree a few years earlier. Dupree had rescued five bison calves from the Last Big Buffalo Hunt on the Grand River in 1881 and taken them back home to his ranch on the Cheyenne River. When Dupree died in 1899, Philip decided to preserve the species from extinction, purchasing Dupree’s herd which now numbered 74 head. Scotty prepared a special pasture for the bison along the western side of the Missouri River north of Fort Pierre and drove the herd there in 1901. Scotty’s goal was to preserve the animal from extinction. At the time of his early death in 1911 Scotty had grown the herd to an estimated 1,000–1,200 head of bison. He was buried on a family cemetery near his buffalo pasture. As the funeral procession passed, some of the bison came down out of the hills. Newspapers at the time suggested the bison were ‘showing their respect to the man who had saved them’. Bison from Philip’s herd helped restock populations throughout the US.

1900 1900

Rudolph Diesel 1858–1913

A biofuel pioneer At the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris, Rudolph Karl Diesel, a 42-year-old German engineer, exhibited the rational heat compression–ignition engine he had assembled some three years before at Augsburg. As he started up his engine, Diesel said two words: ‘Erdnuss Öl’ (‘peanut oil’). He had designed his engine to run on biofuel, so that farmers, small industries and those in isolated communities could produce their own fuel locally. In 1913, Diesel disappeared from a ferry taking him from Antwerp to England. A few days later, his body was found floating in the English Channel. Diesel most probably committed suicide. He had a history of nervous breakdowns and was deeply in debt. But conspiracy theories abound. One theory revolves around the German military, which was beginning to use his engines on their submarines. Diesel opposed this usage, and the German military may have feared that his invention could otherwise power the rival British Royal Navy submarine fleet. A second theory is based around the idea that his engine could have provided power using alternative, cheaper and greener fuels. This revolutionary thinking may have scared some oil investors. Vegetable oils were used in the diesel engine until the 1920s when an alteration was made to the engine, enabling it to use a residue of petroleum; this came to be known as diesel 2. 50

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My engine can be fed with vegetable oils and would help considerably in the development of agriculture in the countries which use it. The use of vegetable oils for engine fuels may seem insignificant today. But such oils may become in the course of time as important as the petroleum and coal tar products of the present time.

”

1901 1901

Theodore Roosevelt 1858–1919

The presidential protector of nature In September 1883, Theodore Roosevelt, a 25year-old Harvard graduate, arrived in the ‘badlands’ of North Dakota for a hunting trip. While there, he became interested in the cattle business and invested in Elkhorn Ranch. First as Leader of the New York legislature, then as Governor of New York State, whenever he visited the badlands Roosevelt became more and more alarmed by the damage that was being done to the land and its wildlife. He witnessed the virtual destruction of some big game species, such as buffalo and bighorn sheep. Overgrazing was also destroying the grasslands and with them the habitats of many small mammals and songbirds. Conservation increasingly became one of Roosevelt’s concerns. After assuming the Presidency following the assassination of President William McKinley in 1901, he worked with all the major figures in the conservation movement, especially Gifford 48 Pinchot, his chief adviser on forestry and conservation matters. Roosevelt urged Congress to establish the US Forest Service (in 1905) to manage government forest lands, and he appointed Pinchot to head the service. Roosevelt set aside more land for national parks and nature preserves than all of his predecessors combined – some 78.5 million hectares. By 1909 the Roosevelt administration had created 17 million hectares of national forests, 53 national wildlife refuges and 18 areas of ‘special interest’, including the Grand Canyon. This environmental record was unequalled until President Clinton’s term 90 years later. In 1907, with Congress about to block him, Roosevelt hurried to designate 6.5 million hectares of new national forests. In May 1908, he sponsored the Governors’

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Conference on Conservation at the White House, with a focus on the most efficient planning, analysis and use of water, forests and other natural resources. Roosevelt’s conservationist leanings also impelled him to preserve national sites of scientific, particularly archaeological, interest. The 1906 Antiquities Act gave him a tool for creating national monuments by presidential proclamation, without requiring congressional approval for each monument on an item-by-item basis. The language of the Antiquities Act specifically called for the preservation of ‘historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest’, and was primarily designed by its creator, Congressman James F. Lacey (assisted by the prominent archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett), to target the prehistoric ruins of the American south-west. Roosevelt, however, applied a typically broad interpretation to the Act, and the first national monument he proclaimed, Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming, was preserved for reasons tied more to geology than archaeology. Today, the Theodore Roosevelt National Park in North Dakota commemorates his conservationist philosophy. It is home to a multitude of plants and endangered animals, including bison, prairie dogs and elk.

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To waste, to destroy our natural resources, to skin and exhaust the land instead of using it so as to increase its usefulness, will result in undermining in the days of our children the very prosperity which we ought by right to hand down to them amplified and developed.

x www.theodoreroosevelt.org

”

Lewis L. Gould, The Presidency of Theodore Roosevelt  (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, new edn 1992)

1903 1903

Edward North Buxton 1840–1924

A conservationist at home and abroad From the 1860s, Edward North Buxton, a Quaker businessman, was working hard for the protection of both forest and deer in Epping Forest in the English county of Essex. But Buxton was also a hunter. He had twice travelled to Africa, from where he returned to become a formidable campaigner for the preservation of big game. At the time, the authorities in the Sudan had recently created a vast game reserve between the White and Blue Niles and the Sobot River. But, in 1902, they changed their mind and proposed to open this area up to hunting. Buxton, aged 63, decided to launch a campaign against this policy reversal. The support he gathered ranged from famous hunters such as F.C. Selous and 54 aristocrats such as the Duke and Duchess of Bedford, Lord Avebury and the Earl of Rosebury, to businessmen such as brewery owner Sam Whitbread. A firm but polite

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protest letter, signed by them all, was then sent to Lord Cromer, the governor-general of the Sudan. It was a success. In June 1903, the signatories met up in the House of Commons to discuss the creation of a permanent society to promote game preservation. It was named the Society for the Preservation of the Wild Fauna of the Empire. One of the first missions of ‘The Fauna’ as it was affectionately known, was to safeguard the future of the Sabie Game Reserve, created by the Boer leader Paul Kruger some 20 years before. The Fauna went through several name changes over the years and is now known as Fauna and Flora International (FFI). Working in tandem with landowners, governments and hunters, the society influenced the passage of legislation that controlled hunting in vast stretches of East and South Africa. This ultimately paved the way for the formation of national parks, such as Kruger National Park and Serengeti National Park. The society has been referred to by many historians as the world’s first conservation society, and its early work in Africa is also an early example of ecotourism. The organisation can claim to have played a key role in establishing much of today’s global conservation infrastructure – including the World Conservation Union, WWF and the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Flora and Fauna (CITES). FFI today has members in over 80 countries.

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How rapidly the teeming millions born of the soil may be shot out.

”

x www.fauna-flora.org

1903 1903

Paul Kroegel 1864–1948

The defender of pelicans In 1881, a 17-year-old German immigrant called Paul Kroegel arrived in Sebastian, Florida. He made his home on the west bank of the Indian River, overlooking a three-acre speck of land called Pelican Island. As feathers became more and more coveted by the fashion industry, the trend attracted the attention of poachers, who began to target pelicans, egrets, spoonbills and other water birds. They frequently used cannon-sized punt-guns and many-barrelled shotgun batteries capable of decimating a whole flock as it rested on the water. This was not sport. By 1902, Paul Kroegel went to war with the poachers on the lagoon’s barrier islands. Outfitted with a skiff and a 10-gauge double-barrel shotgun, the 21-year-old started patrolling the lagoon in an effort to protect the birds, primarily brown pelicans.

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He also talked to as many prominent residents as he could, inviting them to witness the slaughter for themselves. One of the men Kroegel invited was Frank Chapman, curator of the American Museum of Natural History. Horrified, Chapman told President Theodore Roosevelt 51 about the young man’s crusade. It is reported that Roosevelt asked his aides, ‘Is there anything that prevents me from designating Pelican Island a federal bird sanctuary?’ When the reply was a cautious ‘No’, Roosevelt’s answer was succinct. ‘Very well then,’ he grinned. ‘I so declare it!’ On 14 March 1903, the President issued an executive order naming Pelican Island ‘a preserve and breeding ground for native birds’. The decree marked the birth of the National Wildlife Refuge System which now comprises 500 refuges and 38 million hectares. Paul Kroegel went on to become the first national wildlife refuge manager, paid the princely sum of $1 a month by the National Association of Audubon Societies, since there were no federal appropriations to support the presidentially created refuge. Kroegel, one man alone, with a badge, a gun, a boat and the American flag, stood watch over Pelican Island until 1926. Today, the Paul Kroegel Award honours outstanding dedication among refuge managers.

Ü

x www.fws.gov/pelicanisland

1905 1905

Frederick Courtney Selous 1851–1917

The big game conservationist For three decades, from the 1870s, Frederick Selous was a self-employed professional hunter across the great and then uncharted regions of Southern Africa. His adventures inspired H. Rider Haggard to create the character Allan Quartermain. But at the same time as killing a prodigious tally of game, Selous was a naturalist and a conservationist. His book A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa, published in 1881, gained him world renown for his precise observations on natural history. While hunting, he collected hundreds of butterflies, now held in the British Museum’s collection. In none of his expeditions was his objective the making of a ‘big bag’, 54

but as a hunter–naturalist and slayer of big game he ranked with the most famous of the world’s sportsmen. In leading so many hunting expeditions, Selous noticed over time how the impact of European hunters was leading to a significant reduction in the amount of game available in Africa. In 1881 he returned to Britain for a while, observing: Every year elephants were becoming scarcer and wilder south of the Zambezi, so that it had become impossible to make a living by hunting at all.

Selous wrote nine books as well as numerous articles on hunting and natural history. Among them was Africa Nature Notes and Reminiscences (1908), which was written with and at the urging of US President Theodore Roosevelt, who wrote of Selous: Mighty hunters, Dutch and English, roamed across the land on foot and on horseback, alone or guiding the huge white-topped ox-wagons; several among their number wrote with power and charm of their adventures; and at the very last the man arose who could tell us more of value than any of his predecessors.

When the First World War began, he participated in the fighting in East Africa as a Captain in the 25th Royal Fusiliers, a unit he joined when he was 64 years old. He was killed by a German sniper in a minor engagement along the banks of the Rufugi in January 1917. In his honour, in 1922 the 55,000 km2 Selous Game Reserve in Tanzania was named after him. It was declared a UNICEF World Heritage Site in 1982 due to its unique ecological importance.

x www.selous.org

 J.G. Millais, The Life of Frederick Courtney Selous

(Zanzibar: Gallery Publications, 2001)

1905 1905

Alice Hamilton 1869–1970

A pioneer for occupational health It was during the early 1900s that Dr Alice Hamilton, a professor of pathology at the Women’s Medical School of Northwestern University in Chicago, began to observe how pollution in the workplace could have a serious effect on human health. In the typhoid fever epidemic in Chicago in 1902, Hamilton made a connection between improper sewage disposal and the role of flies in transmitting the disease.

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Her findings led to a reorganisation of the Chicago Health Department. She then noted that the health problems of many of the immigrant poor were due to unsafe conditions and noxious chemicals, especially lead dust, to which they were being exposed in the workplace. In 1907, Hamilton began exploring existing literature from abroad, noticing that industrial medicine was not being studied much in America. She set out to change this and, in 1908, published her first article on the topic of occupational diseases. Two years later she was appointed director of the Occupational Disease Commission when it was created by the governor of Illinois. It was the first such investigative body in the world. Relying primarily in ‘shoe leather epidemiology’ and the emerging science of toxicology, Hamilton pioneered occupational epidemiology and industrial hygiene in the US. Following a report on workers’ compensation that she gave to an international conference in Brussels, Hamilton was asked by the US Commissioner of Labor to replicate her research at national level, although she was not offered a salary. She looked at the hazards posed by exposure to lead, arsenic, mercury and organic solvents, as well as radium which was being used in the manufacture of watch dials. She remained in this unsalaried position from 1911 to 1921 when her programme was cancelled after pro-business Republicans regained control of the White House. In 1919, Hamilton was hired as assistant professor in a new Department of Industrial Medicine at Harvard Medical School, making her the first woman appointed to the faculty there. A New York Tribune article celebrated the appointment with the dramatic headline: ‘A Woman on Harvard Faculty – The Last Citadel Has Fallen – The Sex Has Come Into Its Own’. She continued to investigate issues such as carbon monoxide poisoning in steelworkers, mercury poisoning in hatters and ‘dead fingers’ syndrome among labourers using pneumatic drills.

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Every article I wrote in those days, every speech I made, is full of pleading for the recognition of lead poisoning as a real and serious medical problem.

”

Sicherman, Alice Hamilton: A Life in Letters  Barbara (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2003)

1909 1909

Paul Sarasin 1856–1929

A visionary internationalist Between 1893 and 1896, and then again between 1902 and 1903, the Swiss Paul Sarasin and his cousin Fritz made two voyages of exploration to Ceylon and the 56

Celebes (now Sri Lanka and Sulawesi, Indonesia). They brought back a rich collection of molluscs and described their findings in a series of five books. Back in Switzerland, Paul Sarasin became an activist, helping to found the first Swiss National Park and also began to concern himself with the protection of the international environment. He believed that, if conservation was to be effective, it needed increased cooperation between people with similar environmental interests. In 1909, he proposed that the League of Nations create ‘a committee to establish a world commission for the protection of nature . . . covering both the continents and the seas’. The Secretary-General and Head of the International Bureau at the League of Nations, Inazo Nitobe, promoted Sarasin’s ideas now encapsulated in the 1911 publication Weltnaturschutz (Global Protection of Nature). Unfortunately, member states of the League of Nations proved reluctant to embrace proposals that would impinge national sovereignty, and the First World War resulted in the shelving of the idea. Nitobe encouraged non-governmental organisations to build their own international network and to pressure their governments. Hope lasted until 1924 when Sarasin’s project was finally abandoned. His vision would not be realised until almost 30 years later with the formation of the World Conservation Union.

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A product from the human hand, let us say a product of culture, may be of supreme value, but in the case of its destruction there will always be the consoling thought that mankind may be able to create once again such a product of art, yes, even may surpass it . . . but never in the years ahead of us will a remarkable, highly organized animal species re-occupy its place on the stage of Life after it has been exterminated – and this is most deplorable – exterminated aimlessly and without thought.

”

x www.wwf.org

1916 1916

Gilbert H. Grosvenor 1875–1966

The father of photojournalism In 1903, 28-year-old Gilbert H. Grosvenor became the editor-in-chief of National Geographic Magazine – the journal of the National Geographic Society, whose president was then his father-in-law, Alexander Graham Bell. He would remain in the job for 51 years. Grosvenor quickly developed the publication from a dull, scholarly journal with a circulation of only 900 into something with a greater appeal by introducing photography as a medium for telling stories.

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Grosvenor travelled widely in search of interesting stories for publication. In 1915, he visited Sequoia National Park and the High Sierras in California. Affectionately nicknamed Tenderfoot by other party members, Grosvenor was so overwhelmed by the area’s natural grandeur that on his return he provided $20,000 of National Geographic Society funds to supplement a $50,000 congressional appropriation to buy Giant Forest and add it to the Sequoia National Park. The April 1916 issue of National Geographic Magazine was dedicated to the national parks and sent to every member of US Congress. It proved a factor in the establishment of the National Park Service. Two years later, the magazine and Grosvenor involved themselves in protecting the Katmai volcanic crater and Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes in Alaska from mining exploitation. This led to the establishment of the Katmai National Monument. Gilbert Grosvenor was elected president of the National Geographic Society in 1920. During his administration greatly increased revenues through paid membership and rapid increases in the magazine’s circulation enabled the society to send out hundreds of expeditions – from the North Pole to the South Pole, from the stratosphere to the ocean depths (when William Beebe made his record-setting descent 71 in 1934), and almost everywhere in between. Today, with over 2 million members, the National Geographic Society is the largest non-profit scientific and educational organisation of its kind. Its concern for conservation and the protection of wildlife is Grosvenor’s legacy.

Ü

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Fate does not often permit a man to engage in a single labor of love for more than half a century, and only rarely does it reward his life’s work with fruits beyond his boldest dreams of youth. Yet, I have been greatly blessed in both respects.

”

x www.nationalgeographic.com

1916 1916

Ansel Adams 1902–1984

A blazing poetry of the real In 1916, during a family vacation in Yosemite National Park, 14-year-old Ansel Adams was given a Kodak box brownie camera by his parents. Together, Yosemite and the camera were to change his life. At the age of 17, Adams joined the Sierra Club, remaining a member throughout his lifetime and serving as a director, as did his wife Virginia. Adams was an avid mountaineer in his youth and participated in the club’s annual ‘high trips’, being later responsible for several first ascents in the Sierra Nevada. It was at Half

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Dome in 1927 that he first found that he could make photographs that were, in his own words, ‘an austere and blazing poetry of the real’. Adams became an environmentalist, and his photographs are a record of what many of these national parks were like before human intervention and travel. His work promoted many of the goals of the Sierra Club and brought environmental issues to light. In the 1930s, Adams creThe Tetons and the Snake River photographed by Ansel Adams ated a limited-edition book of his photography, Sierra Nevada: The John Muir Trail, as part of the Sierra Club’s efforts to secure the designation of Sequoia and Kings Canyon as national parks. This book and his testimony before Congress played a vital role in the success of the effort, with Congress designating the areas as national parks in 1940. Over the next half-century, Adams took hundreds of magnificent photos, not only of Yosemite Valley but also of the Sierra Nevada, and published many bestselling books. In 1980, the Ansel Adams Conservation Award was established by the Wilderness Club and Adams himself named as the first recipient. In the same year, Jimmy Carter awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honour.

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Both the grand and the intimate aspects of nature can be revealed in the expressive photograph. Both can stir enduring affirmations and discoveries, and can surely help the spectator in his search for identification with the vast world of natural beauty and the wonder surrounding him.

x www.anseladams.com

”

 Ansel Adams, Yosemite (New York: Little, Brown & Company, 1995)

1922 1922

Will Dilg 1869–1926

Ad man campaigns for America’s fishing rivers On 14 January 1922, 54 wealthy sportsmen, influential anglers and hunters came together at the Athletics Club of the City of Chicago, Illinois. They had assembled to discuss an issue of common concern – the deteriorating conditions of America’s 59

top fishing streams. Uncontrolled industrial discharges, raw sewage and soil erosion threatened to destroy many of the nation’s most productive waterways. The man who had called them together was a middle-aged, fast-talking advertising agent and passionate fisherman called Will H. Dilg. Within hours, energised by Dilg’s rousing speech, this group had formed the Izaak Walton League – named after the 17th-century English angler conservationist and author of the literary classic The Compleat Angler – to act as a pressure group. By 1924, with over 100,000 supporters, the League was the first conservation organisation with a mass membership. In 1923, Will Dilg, as elected president of the Izaak Walton League, started the magazine Outdoor America while at the same time organising the League’s first national convention in which 34 states were represented. By August, the League was calling for the creation of a 300-mile-long Mississippi River national reserve – a sanctuary voted into law the following year by President Calvin Coolidge and funded by an appropriation of $1.5 million. Just months later, the League initiated a campaign to purchase up to 1,460 hectares of land adjoining the national elk refuge in Jackson, NY. In 1927, it donated this land to the nation. The League led unsuccessful efforts in the 1930s for clean water legislation, but achieved partial success with the passage of weak federal water pollution acts in 1948 and 1956. Its major victory came with the Clean Water Act 1972. The League continues to advocate for wetland preservation, wilderness protection and soil and water conservation. Its Save Our Streams programme involves activists monitoring water quality in all 50 states. Although membership had declined by the 1960s to a stable 50,000, the organisation retains a firm base of anglers in the Midwest and Tidewater, Virginia.

x www.iwla.org

1923 1923

Beatrix Potter 1866–1943

Peter Rabbit and Herdwick sheep The Herdwick is a breed of small hardy sheep with course dark wool that is indigenous to the Lake District of north-east England. The sheep are ideally suited to this tough environment. As well as being extremely hardy, they are ‘heafed’ to the fell, which means they stay in a particular area and graze without fences or shepherds. Ewes teach their lambs this territorial behaviour. But in the 1920s they risked extinction through human encroachment. Their saviour was Beatrix Potter, a highly successful writer and illustrator of children’s books. Between 1900 and 1912, her stories of Peter Rabbit, Jemima PuddleDuck, Benjamin Bunny and other animals had made her very wealthy. 60

In 1913, she married and settled down at Hilltop Farm at Sawrey, Cumbria. On her father’s death, she received a substantial inheritance and, in 1923, she bought Troutbeck Park Farm, a 7,700 hectare Herdwick sheep farm near Kirkstone Pass. With her shepherd, Tom Storey, Beatrix Potter began to build up their numbers again. Dressed in her clogs, shawl and old tweed skirt, she was often seen helping with the haymaking or searching the fells for lost sheep. Her Herdwicks won most of the major prizes at local shows. In 1930 she became the first woman to hold the position of president-designate of the A scene from Peter Rabbit, written and Herdwick Sheep Breeders’ Association. The illustrated by Beatrix Potter Association had been established by her friend, 47 Canon Hardwicke Rawnsley, one of the founders of the National Trust. When she died on 22 December 1943, Beatrix Potter left 15 farms and 1,600 hectares of land to the National Trust, together with her flocks of Herdwick sheep. In 2001, there were 52,000 Herdwicks on Trust-owned fell farms in Cumbria. The severe outbreak of foot and mouth disease which hit the UK livestock industry in 2001 posed a serious threat to the survival of the Herdwicks, nearly 40% of them having to be destroyed. The Cumbria Hill Sheep Initiative has been set up to ‘reassess the position and circumstances’ in the aftermath of the disease. The reintroduction of many agricultural shows in the county should help to boost interest in the breed.

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Thank God I have the seeing eye, that is to say, as I lie in bed I can walk step by step on the fells and rough land seeing every stone and flower and patch of bog and cotton pass where my old legs will never take me again.

”

x www.beatrixpottersociety.org.uk

1923 1923

Alessandro Ghigi 1875–1970

For mountain ecology In 1907, the Italian zoologist Alessandro Ghigi, president of the Pro Montibus et Sylvis (For the Mountains and the Forests) association, launched the idea of a natural park in the Abruzzo region. Following the First World War, the little munici-

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pality of Opi leased 5 km2 to Ghigi’s association. By 1923 the National Park of Abruzzo had grown to 120 km2 and its protection was enshrined in law. While the park continued to grow, Professor Ghigi became Rector of the University of Bologna. Although known for his expertise in the breeding of birds, particularly poultry, Ghigi’s great concern was the threat posed by hunting to wildlife such as red deer, lynx, ibex and boar. This motivated him to set up the Instituto Nazionale per la Fauna Selvatica (National Wildlife Institute) in 1933. During his long life, Ghigi wrote hundreds of articles about genetics, general biology, fauna, applied zoology and hybridisation. In his nineties, Ghigi decided to donate his magnificent hillside villa and its 30 hectare park to the City of Bologna. Since his death in 1970, aged 95, Villa Ghigi has become a major centre for wildlife conservation, and its magnificent park a place for the people of Bologna to enjoy.

x www.infs.it

1926 1926

Vladimir Ivanovich Vernadsky 1863–1945

Understanding the biosphere Although the word ‘biosphere’ was invented by the Austrian geologist Eduard Suess, it was the Russian mineralogist and biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky who formed an integrative approach to the concept. His studies of solar and cosmic radiation on life led Vernadsky to formulate a revolutionary theory. In 1926, aged 63, he published an article entitled Biosfera in which he wrote: Cosmic energy determines the pressure of life that can be regarded as the transmission of solar energy to the Earth’s surface . . . Activated by radiation, the matter of the biosphere collects and redistributes solar energy, and converts it ultimately into free energy capable of doing work on Earth . . . A new character is imparted to the planet by this powerful cosmic force. The radiations that pour upon the Earth cause the biosphere to take on properties unknown to lifeless planetary surfaces, and thus transform the face of the Earth . . . In its life, its death, and its decomposition an organism circulates its atoms through the biosphere over and over again.

Vernadsky’s visionary pronouncements were not widely accepted in the West. However, he was one of the first scientists to recognise that the oxygen, nitrogen and carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere result from biological processes. In the 1920s, he published works arguing that living organisms could reshape the planet as surely as any physical force. Vernadsky was an important pioneer of the scientific bases for the environmental sciences. When English atmospheric chemist James Lovelock proposed his Gaia hypothesis in 1972 he was unaware of Vernad- 190 sky’s earlier understanding of the same principle.

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“

Living matter gives the biosphere an extraordinary character, unique in the universe . . .

”

 Vladimir Vernadsky, The Biosphere: Complete Annotated Edition

(New York: Springer-Verlag, annotated edn 1998)

1926 1926

Mohandas K. Gandhi 1869–1948

Father of the Indian nation During the late 1920s, Mohandas K. Gandhi was anxious that the movement he was leading to make India free from British Imperial rule would not result in more violence. He therefore distanced himself, temporarily, by setting up an ashram on the banks of the River Sabarmati in Ahmedabad. Here he lived a life encouraging village autonomy. This included the production of organically grown cotton, individually home-spun on traditional looms. As a vegetarian Gandhiji, as he was affectionately called, had great respect for all forms of living creatures, including the cattle and goats on his ashram. The prayer meetings at the Sabarmati Ashram were conducted under a neem tree (Azadirachta indica), neem chutney being an important part of Gandhi’s daily diet. When, in the 1990s, hundreds of thousands of Indian farmers rallied to non-violent protest against laws to create seed monopolies, they called their movement Seed Satyagraha. This was directly inspired by Statue of Gandhi in Union Square, Gandhi’s pioneering use of satyagraha – peaceful New York City mass civil disobedience. Gandhi’s observation ‘When people lead, governments will follow’ could very well be the motto of most of the Planet Savers included in this book.

“

There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not for man’s greed.

”

x www.mkgandhi.org

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Fischer, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi  Louis (New York: HarperCollins, new edn 1997)

1927 1927

Charles Sutherland Elton 1900–1991

Animal ecology In 1927, a young Oxford-based ecologist called Charles Elton wrote a seminal work called Animal Ecology. In the book, Elton discusses the community or population concept of ecology and the importance of studying an animal in relation to its environment. It introduced the idea of the food chain – plants get energy from sunlight, plant-eating animals get their energy from eating plants and meat-eating animals get their energy from eating other animals. Elton introduced the concept of the ‘pyramid of numbers’ as a method of representing the structure of an ecosystem in terms of feeding relationships. In 1932, Elton set up the Bureau of Animal Population at Oxford. To it came several young ecologists from around the world – Dennis Chitty, Mick Southern, Amyan MacLayden, John Brereton and others, most of whom would achieve distinguished careers in their specialist fields. Elton considered that ecology should be included ‘in the training of young zoologists, for ecology, more than any other science, would be ‘more able to offer immediate practical help . . . in the present parlous state of civilisation’. In 1949, Elton was instrumental in establishing The Nature Conservancy Council and became particularly concerned with the impact of introduced species on natural systems. Although the Oxford Bureau was closed down on Elton’s retirement in 1967, his Animal Ecology is still considered so important that, recently, two American university faculties successfully petitioned the University of Chicago Press to reprint his landmark publication.

“

When an ecologist says ‘there goes a badger’ he should include in his thoughts some definite idea of the animal’s place in the community to which it belongs, just as if he had said ‘there goes the vicar’.

”

 Charles Sutherland Elton, Animal Ecology (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, new edn 2001)

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1928 1928

Richard Buckminster Fuller 1895–1983

Inventing for Spaceship Earth In 1927, aged 32, Richard Buckminster Fuller stood on the shores of Lake Michigan prepared to throw himself into its freezing waters. His young daughter had died. He was bankrupt, discredited and jobless. He had a wife and new-born daughter. It suddenly struck him that his life belonged not to himself, but to the universe. He chose at that moment to embark on what he called ‘an experiment to discover what the little, penniless, unknown individual might be able to do effectively on behalf of all humanity’. Fuller took a job at a local college in North Carolina. There, with the support of a group of professors and students, he began work on the project that would make him famous and revolutionise the field of engineering – the geodesic dome. In 1949, he erected the world’s first such structure – a building that could sustain its own weight with no practical limits. This prototype was a 14-foot-diameter dome constructed using lightweight aluminium aircraft tubing with a vinyl–plastic skin in the simple form of a tetrahedron (a triangular pyramid). The US government recognised the importance of the discovery and employed him to make small domes for the army. Within a few years there were thousands of these around the world. In recent years, the geodesic dome has proved ideal for botanical gardens, as is evidenced by the Missouri Botanical Gardens’ Climatron and the biomes of the Eden Project in Cornwall, UK. For the next 50 years Fuller contributed a wide range of ideas, designs and inventions to the world, particularly in the areas of practical, inexpensive shelter and transportation. His concept of ‘dymaxion’, a principle for maximising resources to improve standards of living, reA Buckminster Fuller Biosphere sulted in designs for both low-cost energy-efficient houses and cars. Although prototypes were built and tested, neither design ever went into mass production. Buckminster Fuller strove to inspire humanity to take a comprehensive view of the finite world we live in, and the infinite possibilities for an ever-increasing standard of living within it. Deploring waste, he advocated a principle that he termed 65

‘ephemeralisation’, which in essence means ‘doing more with less’. Wealth, Fuller argued, can be increased by recycling resources into newer, higher-value products with more technically sophisticated designs that require less material. Fuller was one of the earliest proponents of renewable energy – solar, wind and wave power were all incorporated into his designs. His research posited that humanity could satisfy 100% of its energy needs while phasing out fossil fuels and atomic energy. Buckminster Fuller was one of several to use the term ‘spaceship Earth’ for which he wrote an ‘operating manual’ in 1963. His patented ‘dymaxion map’ was the first to show continents on a flat surface, appearing as a one-world island in a one-world ocean. His ‘world game’ uses a large-scale dymaxion map for displaying world resources, and allows players to work out solutions to global problems, matching human needs with resources. Fuller’s ideas, teachings and attitude to life and creativity have prodded designers and engineers to think ‘outside the box’, an essential requirement in dealing with today’s problems of sustainability.

“

Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.

x www.bfi.org

”

Lichtenstein (eds.), Your Private Sky: R. Buckminster  J. Krausse and C.Fuller – The Art of Design Science (Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 1999)

1931 1931

Albert Howard 1873–1947

Pioneer of organic farming As an agricultural adviser in India in the early 1900s, Albert Howard began to realise that the modern scientific farming methods he was teaching Indians might not be suitable locally. During the next 25 years, Howard, supported by his wife Gabrielle, observed and then further developed the traditional methods of cultivation used for hundreds of years by local farmers and peasants. Between 1924 and 1931, now working as director of the Institute of Plant Industry at Indore, Howard perfected the Indore Process for the manufacture of quality humus, or compost, from vegetable and animal wastes, which in turn enriched the soil. Instead of fighting pests with an ever-widening array of poisons, Howard saw pests as indicators of soil fertility levels and as a pointer to unsuitable crops growing in unsuitable conditions. He found that, when the unsuitable conditions were corrected, the pests departed. In 1940, the now knighted Sir Albert Howard published his findings in a book he called An Agricultural Testament. It has since 66

become one of the bibles of organic farming and composting, and an influence and inspiration for many farmers and agricultural scientists who furthered the organic 81 movement, including Lady Eve Balfour.

“

The whole problem of health, in soil, plant, animal and man is one great subject.

”

The Soil and Health: A Study of Organic Agriculture  Sir Albert Howard, (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, new edn 2007)

1931 1931

Myles Dunphy 1891–1985

Milo Dunphy 1928–1996

Bushwalkers who played their part Since 1910, Myles Dunphy had been a passionate explorer of the Australian wilderness. His systematic mapping of the Blue Mountains of New South Wales had led to an increasing number of bushwalking clubs and, eventually, a Sydney-based federation. But, by the late 1920s, Myles Dunphy began to see the need for the bush to be protected for public use and benefit. In 1931, following a confrontation between a group of bushwalkers led by Myles and a group of loggers who were planning to destroy the Blue Gum Forest, a campaign began which resulted in the creation of the 465,000 hectare Greater Blue Mountains National Park, including the Blue Gum Forest. From then on, Myles Dunphy, leading Australia’s Parks and Primitive Areas Council, promoted a system of national parks extending from the Snowy Mountains in southern New South Wales to the Hastings River in the north of the territory. In 1934, Myles pioneered the first wilderness reserve in Australia, the Tallowa Primitive Reserve. Myles’s son, Milo, was taken into the bush from only 20 months old, riding in a specially modified pram. As he grew up, Milo became as passionate about protecting Australia’s wilderness as his father. Milo led the fight to prevent the Colong Caves in the heart of the southern Blue Mountains from being turned into a limestone quarry and campaigned to save the Boyd Plateau from being planted with pine trees. Milo was part of almost every major environmental campaign in eastern Australia, from Terenia Creek in New South Wales to Lake Pedder in Tasmania. In the 1970s, the octogenarian Myles proudly saw his son become the first executive director of the Total Environment Centre in Sydney. 67

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In 1996, following Milo’s death, the Dunphy Wilderness Fund was set up by the New South Wales government. It provides AUS$1 million a year to purchase private and leasehold land inside identified wilderness areas. To date, over 30,000 hectares have been added to the wilderness that the Dunphys, father and son, fought so hard to conserve. In May 1996, the former New South Wales premier Neville Wran described Milo as, ‘unquestionably the most persistent and vigorous fighter and advocate for the environment we have had in this country’.

“

It is no good us gathering together on Sunday and thanking God for his wonderful creations, this glorious land, its trees and flowers, when we spend the other six days smashing it all up. (Milo Dunphy)

”

 Peter Meredith, Myles and Milo (London: Allen & Unwin, 1999)

1933 1933

Franklin Delano Roosevelt 1882–1945

Roosevelt’s Tree Army By 1932, nearly 17 million Americans (25% of working-age adults) were out of work. The economy was in a shambles. Industrial production had fallen by half since 1929 and the banking system had collapsed. Many farmers had lost their livelihoods as prices fell by 60%. Vast stretches of the American Midwest had been denuded of vegetation and disastrously eroded resulting in the legendary dust bowl conditions described in books such as John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This was the Great Depression. The man voted into power as the 32nd US President in 1933 was Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He was destined to be one of the greatest ever leaders of the US. Beginning with his inauguration address, Roosevelt began blaming the economic downturn on businessmen, the quest for profit and the self-interest basis of capitalism. Roosevelt’s solution was ‘The New Deal’ – a plan that aimed to provide relief, recovery and reform. The relief element was established under the Federal Emergency and Relief Administration, the most popular agency of which was the

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Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) which sought to ‘stimulate and re-organize the use of our natural resources’ by revaluing two wasted resources – young unemployed men and the land. Over the next decade, over 500,000 volunteers, including 250,000 Afro-Americans, 80,000 Native Americans and 25,000 war veterans, would build 3,470 towers, 156,000 km of fire roads, and plant 5 billion trees to protect against soil erosion. They became known as Roosevelt’s Tree Army. Five hundred of the 2,600 CCC camps worked with the Soil Conservation Service to arrest erosion on more than 16 million hectares. The workforce from 46 camps drained 100,000 hectares of swampland. Seven million days were spent on protecting ranges for the grazing service, protecting the natural habitats of wildlife, stream improvement, flood protection and restocking a staggering 460 million fish. CCC camps were also set up in Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, in June 1942 it was decided to stop funding the CCC, although it was never abolished. The organisation became a model for state agencies that opened in the 1970s. Today, corps are state and local programmes that engage primarily youth and young adults (ages 16–25) in fulltime community service, training and educational activities.

“

A nation that destroys its soils destroys itself. Forests are the lungs of our land, purifying the air and giving fresh strength to our people.

”

 Jean Edward Smith, FDR (New York: Random House, 2007)

1934 1934

Jay Norwood ‘Ding’ Darling 1876–1962

The duck stamp

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68 In 1934, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt asked Jay Norwood ‘Ding’ Darling to

head the Bureau of Biological Survey. It was a novel choice, given that Darling was better known for his editorial cartoons which had appeared in nearly 150 newspapers across the US and earned him two Pulitzer Prizes. Published with near daily frequency, sometimes on the front page, Darling’s cartoons had an enormous impact on pre-television public opinion. Darling’s mission was to help raise awareness about the wise use of the world’s resources, covering conservation education and developing programmes and institutions that would benefit wildlife. A key initiative was the Federal Duck Stamp Program which came into being when Congress passed the Migratory Bird Hunting and Conservation Stamp Act 1934 (commonly known as the Duck Stamp Act). The law set up a permanent source of money to buy and preserve land for waterfowl, using the idea of an annual federal revenue stamp conceived by Darling that would

69

be bought by all hunters of ducks, geese and swans. Darling’s duck stamp has since raised more than $600 million for land acquisition and helped put the National Wildlife Refuge System on sounder financial footing. In 1940, Darling learned that the state of Florida was nearing agreement to sell 2,200 pristine acres of Sanibel’s mangrove wetlands to developers for half a dollar per acre. Darling recognised the special qualities of this place where land met sea, saltwater met freshwater, and temperate climate mixed with tropical to produce a habitat uniquely productive for wildlife. The sur‘Ding’ Darling and the ‘duck stamp’ rounding estuary with its rich seagrass meadows, mudflats and mangroves provided shelter and food for birds, fish, reptiles and a host of other animals. Quickly gathering his allies, Darling arranged for the US Fish and Wildlife Service to lease the threatened land to form the Sanibel Island National Wildlife Reserve. When Darling died, a foundation was formed to purchase the lands within the Sanibel Range under federal ownership. After five years the refuge was acquired and rededicated as the J.N. ‘Ding’ Darling National Wildlife Reserve.

“

If I could put together all the virgin landscapes which I knew in my youth and show what has happened to them in one generation it would be the best object lesson in conservation that could be printed.

x www.dingdarling.org

”

L. Lendt, Ding: The Life of Jay Norwood Darling  David(Lake MacBride, IA: Maecenas Press, new edn 2000)

1934 1934

Rosalie Edge 1877–1962

An American suffragette protects birds of prey Today, Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, near Kempton, Pennsylvania, is well known as one of the most spectacular bird of prey migration sites in the world – eagles, hawks and falcons abound. Its education, conservation and research programmes attract 70

tens of thousands of visitors each year. None of this would have existed without the persistence of a 57-year-old bird-lover and former suffragette called Rosalie Edge. Since 1929, Edge, whose ‘life list’ of birds observed would rise to over 800 species, had become acutely aware of the rapid disappearance of many species of American birds by commercial hunters. For several years, she had been relentlessly attacking the alleged corruption and apathy of the much-respected National Association of Audubon Societies over this threat. When she read about the reckless killing of birds of prey that was seasonally occurring at Hawk Mountain, she went to inspect the damage. She understood that predators have a vital role in the natural order and deserved respect and protection, something not widely recognised in the 1930s. Within days, and with the help of a friend, the zoologist Dr Willard Van Name, Edge had leased the land for $500. Soon after, with a $3,500 private donation from the Jansen family of Reading, Pennsylvania, she was able to purchase the 600 hectares of Hawk Mountain. Rosalie Edge continued as the fiercely outspoken president of the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary until her death in 1962. She has been called ‘the only honest, unselfish, indomitable hellcat in the history of conservation’. She was the first prominent female conservationist in America and has served as an outstanding role model for those who have followed.

“

. . . that when we who have feeling for birds observe a mighty eagle or the perfection of a tiny warbler, we see, not the inspiration of God filtered through human agency, but the very handiwork of the Creator Himself.

”

x www.hawkmountain.org

1934 1934

William Beebe 1877–1962

Half a mile down For 30 years, William Beebe had travelled the world as the curator of ornithology for the New York Zoological Society, carrying out tropical research on subjects ranging from rare pheasants in the Asian forest to exotic animals in the South American jungles. His books, such as Galapagos, had captured the popular imagination. Beebe was fascinated by the marine environment, but at that point there was no technology enabling deep-sea exploration. To rectify this, Beebe collaborated with Harvard University engineer Otis Barton to build a submersible they called a bathysphere. In June 1930, they made the first manned descent. Over the next four years, Beebe and Barton made a succession of increasingly daring dives, probing deeper into the sea than any before them.

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In the 1934 National Geographic Deep-Sea Expedition, Beebe’s bathysphere reached a then world record depth of 3,028 feet – half a mile down. During these hazardous voyages off Bermuda, Beebe recorded unusual fish specimens including ‘flashing lights and sea monsters’ that caused a scientific stir and great controversy. In his book Half Mile Down, published in 1934, Beebe introduced his reading public to the idea of zoological diversity and the importance of protecting it.

“

When the last individual of a race of living things breathes no more, another Heaven and another Earth must pass before such a one can breathe again.

”

of William Beebe: Explorer and Naturalist  Carol Grant Gould, The Remarkable Life(Washington, DC: Island Press, new edn 2006)

1934 1934

Roger Tory Peterson 1908–1996

Inventor of a practical field guide In 1934, Roger Tory Peterson, a 26-year-old ornithologist and painter from Jamestown, NY, published his Guide to the Birds which introduced his unique but simple system for identifying birds in the field. It was the world’s first field guide and helped turn bird-watching into a global activity. While the popular guide went through five editions, Peterson travelled the world to paint, write, lecture and to observe and record obscure and exotic species of birds. He was put in charge of educational activities for the National Audubon Society and became art editor of their magazine. He made films in six continents. He was also art director of the National Wildlife Federation’s stamp programme. The Peterson Field Guide now numbers over 50 titles that describe practically all readily available features of nature, from fishes, to mushrooms, to clouds and to the stars above.

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‘In this century’, wrote ecologist Paul Ehrlich, ‘no one has done more to promote an interest in living creatures than Roger Tory Peterson, the inventor of the modern field guide’.

“

It is inevitable that the perceptive person who watches birds, or mammals, or fish, or butterflies, becomes an environmentalist.

x www.rtpi.org

”

Tory Peterson, Guy Mountfort and P.A.D. Hollum, A Field Guide to the  Roger Birds of Britain and Europe (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, new edn 2001)

1935 1935

Frank Lloyd Wright 1867–1959

An organic architecture Throughout his life, a key mission of the great American architect Frank Lloyd Wright was to bring people closer to nature. He believed architecture should be intimately connected to the land on which it was built. Lloyd Wright called this ‘organic architecture’ – an architecture that evolves naturally out of the context and, most importantly for him, out of the relationships between the site, the building and the needs of the client. From 1935 to 1939, Lloyd Wright designed a home for Edgar J. Kaufmann in Mill Run, Pennsylvania. Fallingwater was built into a natural rock outcrop above a pristine waterfall. Lloyd Wright had the stones lifted out of the riverbed to create the interior floor, using the largest rock as the hearthstone for the living-room fireplace. For the other houses he designed, the building materials were often limited to those found in the immediate area – brick if the earth yielded clay, stone if the ground was rocky and natural wood from nearby trees for buildings in forested regions. In one home, a tree was part of the interior design. For the columns of an administrative building in Racine, Wisconsin, Lloyd Wright had analysed the interior of the tall, slender Saguero cactus dotting the desert around his winter studios in Taliesin West. He then converted the Saguero’s structure into an architectural form using steel and concrete. Between 1946 and 1948, Lloyd Wright, now in his late seventies, attempted to develop low-energy architecture with a home for Herbert and Katherine Jacobs in Middleton, Wisconsin. Named The Solar Hemicycle, it has circles for rooms and south-facing glass walls.

“

I believe in God, only I spell it Nature.

x www.franklloydwright.org

”

 Frank Lloyd Wright, Frank Lloyd Wright: The Masterworks

(New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1993)

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1935 1935

Arthur George Tansley 1871–1955

Champion of the ecosystem From the early 1900s, the English botanist Arthur Tansley was a champion of ecology. He coordinated a large project to map the vegetation of the British Isles, published in 1911. Three years later he founded the British Ecological Society and edited its journal, the Journal of Ecology, for 20 years. In 1923, Tansley published Practical Plant Ecology and five years later he was appointed Sherardian Professor of Botany at Oxford University. It was while he held this post that, in 1935, Tansley formed the concept of the ecosystem, which he defined as ‘a distinct unit of interacting organisms and their surrounding environment’. His delineation of the concept, incorporating both living and inert elements, helped move plant ecology in the direction of today’s approaches. In The British Islands and their Vegetation, published in 1939, Tansley showed how vegetation is affected by soil, climate, the presence of wild and domesticated animals, previous land management and contemporary human activities. One Oxford professor strongly influenced by Tansley was J.R.R. Tolkien, Professor of Anglo-Saxon. It is perhaps not a coincidence that there are 64 species of wild plants in Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

“

Future generations will be slow to forgive us for the wholesale and often wanton destruction that goes on at present almost unchecked by any general feeling that it is an antisocial crime, and quick to applaud the actions and to reverence the memories of those who have done something to preserve their heritage of natural beauty.

x www.britishecologicalsociety.org

”

George Tansley, The British Islands and their  Arthur Vegetation

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, new edn 1949)

1935 1935

Aldo Leopold 1887–1948

Sand County Almanac In 1933, Aldo Leopold, a 46-year-old forestry expert in Madison, Wisconsin, had a book published called Game Management. This key book defined the fundamental skills and techniques for managing and restoring wildlife populations. It created a new science that holistically intertwined forestry, agriculture, biology, zoology, ecology, education and communication. The book was so successful, that the University of Wisconsin created a Department of Game Management and appointed Leopold as its chairman. But Leopold was a man who loved fieldwork. In 1935 he bought a run-down farm, north of Baraboo, next to the Wisconsin River. There, he and his wife Estella and their four children could take holidays. It was also there that Leopold put into action his beliefs that the same tools people used to disrupt the landscape could also be used to rebuild it. An old chicken coop was renovated and served as a haven and land laboratory for the Leopold family, their friends and graduate students. They called it the Shack. It was here that Leopold visualised many of the essays for what was to become his most influential and popular work: A Sand County Almanac. Leopold died of a heart attack while helping to fight a brush fire on a neighbour’s farm. A Sand County Almanac was edited by his son Luna and posthumously pub31 lished the following year. Compared favourably with Thoreau’s Walden, its mix of exceptional poetic prose with keen observations of the natural world has influenced environmentalists ever since. Today there are Aldo Leopold ecological centres in Iowa (his birthplace) and Montana. The Shack is now listed on the US National Register of Historic Places.

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“

We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.

”

x www.aldoleopold.org

County Almanac (New York:  Aldo Leopold, A SandOxford University Press, 1968)

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1935 1935

Robert Marshall 1901–1939

Protecting the wilderness Bob Marshall’s great passion was to go trekking in the vast wilderness of America. Although he had a weak heart, he climbed all 46 peaks over 4,000 feet in the Adirondack Mountains near his family’s summer home in upstate New York. As a forestry expert, he inventoried and rated all ponds and lakes in the Cranberry Lakes Region near the Adirondacks, thinking nothing of hiking 80 km a day, preferring tennis shoes to heavy hiking boots. Marshall’s brother, George, wrote of him, ‘His joy was complete when, standing on some peak, never before climbed, he beheld the magnificence of a wild timeless world extending to the limit of sight filled with countless mountains and deep valleys previously unmapped, unnamed and unknown.’ Knowing full well that such wide-open spaces were under increasing threat by big business, in February 1930 Marshall had an article entitled ‘The problem of the wilderness’ published in Scientific Monthly. Five years later, together with Benton MacKaye, Aldo Leopold and others, he founded the Wilderness Society. Its aim was 75 to save ‘that extremely minor fraction of outdoor America which yet remains free from mechanical sights and sounds and smell’. With his wealthy background, Marshall donated an initial $1,000 to ensure that the Wilderness Society remained solvent. Marshall died of heart failure in November 1939 on an overnight train en route from Washington DC to New York City. He was just 38 years old. He left over a quarter of his $1.5 million estate to the Wilderness Society which, since 1935, has helped protect more than 43 million hectares of America’s wildest places and today has around 300,000 members. Perhaps the greatest honour was the creation of the Bob Marshall Wilderness. This 400,000 hectare preserve in north-west Montana is home to some of the last grizzly bears as well as to dozens of other species of plants and animals. It is one of the most preserved ecosystems in the world. Marshall’s dream of permanent wilderness protection became a reality 25 years after his death when President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Wilderness Act into law on 3 September 1964.

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“

There is just one hope of repulsing the tyrannical ambition of civilization to conquer every niche on the whole Earth. That hope is the organization of spirited people who will fight for the freedom of the wilderness.

x www.wilderness.org

”

Original: The Life of Bob Marshall  James M. Glover, A Wilderness (Seattle, WA: Mountaineers Books, 1986)

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1936 1936

Colonel Jim Corbett 1875–1955

Saving the man-eaters In the 1930s, Indian tigers killed between 1,000 and 1,600 people each year, causing terror among the human population. One famous tigress, known as Champawat, had killed an estimated 436 men and women before she was tracked down and killed. The hunter who ended the life of this man-eater was Jim Corbett. Nevertheless, Corbett would never kill a tiger that was not a proven habitual killer of humans. He considered that most tiger attacks were due to misfortune, injury or to a tigress protecting her cubs. Indeed, Corbett was more a conservationist than a hunter. In 1936 he advised the then governor of the United Provinces, Sir Malcolm Hailey, to create a park in the south Patlidum valley at the base of the Himalayas. Covering an area of 520 km2, it was originally named the Hailey National Park. The park has a dense and lush forest, while its savannah grasslands have almost 33 species of bamboo and grass as well as 110 species of trees. Alongside the tiger, there are 50 species of mammals, 580 species of birds and 25 species of reptiles. In the mid-1940s, Jim Corbett, with the help of hundreds of his friends from the villages around Hailey Park, fought a war against poachers. Following India’s independence in 1947 Corbett moved to Africa where he became director of the Kenyan-based Safariland hunting company. Safariland looked after its game using rigid and strict standards, and there is some evidence to suggest their practices also helped ensure the future of much of the wildlife of Kenya. Although the Hailey Park was renamed Ramganga Park, after Jim Corbett’s death in 1955, it was later renamed Corbett National Park in his honour. And, in 1968, one of the five remaining subspecies of tigers was named after him Panthera tigris corbetti, or Corbett’s tiger. In 1973, Project Tiger, set up with the help of the then World Wildlife Fund, was launched at Dhikala in the Corbett National Park. This project, aimed at saving the Indian tiger from extinction, could not have been closer to Jim Corbett’s heart.

“

A country’s fauna is a sacred trust and I appeal to you not to betray this trust. If we do not bestir ourselves now, it will be to our discredit that the fauna of our province was exterminated in our generation, and under our very own eyes, while we looked on and never raised a finger to prevent it.

”

x www.jimcorbettnationalpark.com

Corbett, The Jim Corbett Omnibus: ‘Man-eaters of  JimKumaon’, ‘Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag’ and

‘Temple Tiger and More Man-eaters of Kumaon’ (New Delhi: Oxford University Press India, 1991)

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1936 1936

Roderick Haig-Brown 1908–1976

Fly-fisherman defends Canada’s waterways In 1936, Roderick Haig-Brown, an enthusiastic fly-fisherman, bought a house and called it Above Tide because it was just above the tide-line of the Campbell River in British Columbia. During the next four decades Roderick Haig-Brown wrote 25 books on British Columbian rivers and fly-fishing. His concern for conservation, long a part of his writing, took a more public and political turn as time went by. In the 1950s he fought against ambitious hydroelectric projects of the government of British Columbia that threatened salmon rivers, and spoke widely in Canada and in the US for the budding conservation movement. Haig-Brown said that conservation means ‘fair and honest dealing with the future, usually at some cost to the immediate present’. In the 1950s, such a view was unpopular. In those boom times, an advocate of conservation who took the long view of the impact of humans on the natural world was seen as an enemy of progress. Haig-Brown served as a member of the International Pacific Salmon Commission and on the boards of many conservation organisations, including the Nature Trust of British Columbia where he worked for the protection of wild fish stocks and the rivers they inhabit. As a result of his work and the contributions of many others, the Roderick Haig-Brown Provincial Park was created, and its world-famous run of millions of sockeye salmon preserved. Today the Haig-Brown Institute, established in 2002, continues to promote watershed conservation, to explore practical ways in which to link ecology with the economy and to inspire a new generation of conservationists through literature and education.

“

It seems clear beyond possibility of argument that any given generation of men can have only a lease, not ownership, of the Earth; and one essential term of the lease is that the Earth be handed on to the next generation with unimpaired potentialities. This is the conservationist’s concern.

x www.haigbrowninstitute.org

”

Haig-Brown, Deep Currents: Roderick and Ann Haig  Valerie Brown

(Victoria, Canada: Orca Book Publishers, 1997)

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1937 1937

Archibald Belaney (alias Grey Owl) 1888–1938

‘Indian’ hoaxer proves influential In 1924, a 19-year-old Iroquois Indian girl called Pony fell in love with a 36-yearold Ojibwa Indian known as Grey Owl. His business was trapping and skinning beavers in the rivers of Ontario, Canada. Pony wanted Grey Owl to stop his cruel trade. At first he resisted, but then one of his traps killed the mother of two beaver kittens. When Pony adopted these kittens, Grey Owl decided to leave the trapping trade. With beavers on the verge of extinction from over-hunting for their fur, Grey Owl started a conservation project. What gave this project such impetus was the extraordinary, almost mysterious ability of this ‘Indian’ to speak and write so articulately, starting with magazine articles and later moving on to books. With the help of Canada’s national parks service, Grey Owl was soon making short films about himself, Pony and the beavers. He would use these films in his lecture tours of England, Europe and the US. The highlight of his second lecture tour in 1937 was speaking at Buckingham Palace before King George VI. Grey Owl died in April 1938, aged just 50. The following day, a reporter announced his true identity. In 1906, Archibald Belaney, born in Hastings, England, had travelled by ship from Liverpool to the Canadian northland and became a guide in Ontario. Adopted by the Bear Island Indians, the Ojibwas, the long-haired teenager was given the name of Grey Owl and taught how to trap. During the First World War, Belaney, alias Grey Owl, enlisted in the 13th Montreal Battalion and was shipped to battle in France. He served as a sniper until he was wounded and discharged. The immediate consequences of the revelation of his identity were dramatic. Publication of the Grey Owl books ceased immediately and, in some cases, they were withdrawn from publication. This in turn had a knock-on effect on the conservation causes with which Belaney, as Grey Owl, had been associated, affecting donations to conservationist causes badly. Today, however, Grey Owl’s reputation as an influential conservationist has been redeemed. In 1999, the film Grey Owl, directed by Richard Attenborough and star271 ring Pierce Brosnan in the title role, was released. Attenborough had seen Grey Owl lecture at the London Palladium theatre as a teenager along with his brother, the 191 naturalist David Attenborough.

“

The wilderness should now no longer be considered as a playground for vandals, or a rich treasure trove to be ruthlessly exploited for the personal gain of the few, to be grabbed off by whoever happens to get there first. Man should enter the woods with the awe of one who steps within the portals of some vast and ancient edifice of wondrous architecture.

”

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Ü Ü

1938 1938

Théodore Monod 1902–2000

A spiritual explorer of the desert In 1938, l’Institut d’Afrique was founded in Dakar by Théodore Monod, a young Frenchman with an extensive working knowledge of the western Sahara Desert. Under Monod’s direction, l’Institut became a centre for research into the plants, animals and people of that desert region. This was perhaps to be expected from someone who, by the age of 18, had already collected degrees in biology, botany and geology from the Sorbonne University of Paris. During his term directing l’Institut, Monod covered some 5,200 km of the Sahara on foot or by camel. He discovered numerous plant species as well as several important Neolithic sites. Perhaps his most important find was the Asselar man, a 6,000-year-old skeleton that many scholars believe to be the earliest remains of a distinctly black individual. Alongside this, his expertise in shellfish led Monod to take part in the deep-sea bathyscape expeditions carried out in the early 1950s by Swiss physicist Auguste Piccard. Monod became a vegetarian and an animal rights advocate, leading anti-hunting and anti-bullfighting campaigns. The dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 convinced Monod that traditional Christianity was ineffective and that we must work towards a theology of nature. In 1966 he set up a Movement Against the Atomic Weapon, its members meeting every year at Taverny, the headquarters of the French Strategic Forces, where Monod would lead a four-day fast on the anniversary of the Japanese bombing. At the age of 93 and almost blind, in 1995 Monod accompanied a botanical expedition to the Yemen and even returned to the Sahara the following year. When Théodore Monod died in 2000, aged 98, he was revered as one of the pioneer fathers of the French green movement.

“

Deserts stir our emotions because they represent Nature as it was before human beings came on the scene. They also show us what it may be like after we have disappeared.

”

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1939 1939

Lady Eve Balfour 1899–1990

The living soil experiment In 1939, with war clouds looming over the south coast of England, the 40-year-old farmer Lady Eve Balfour began a privately run experiment on her farm in Haughley Green, Suffolk. Inspired by books she had read, she began to investigate the relationship between food, health and the soil. With her friend and farming neighbour Alice Debenham, Balfour determined to prove the benefits of organic husbandry, using compost developed on her Haughley farm. Three side-by-side units of land were established, each large enough to operate a full farm rotation. One was purely arable. On the other, cows, sheep and poultry ate the produce and contributed to the compost. On the third, chemical fertilisers, herbicides, insecticides and fungicides were used. After three seasons, Balfour published the initial results of the her experiment in a book called The Living Soil where she presented the case for an alternative, more sustainable approach to agriculture. Its influence was such that, in 1946, Balfour co-founded and became first president of the Soil Association. While continuing the Haughley experiment for the next 25 years, the Association has developed into an international organisation promoting the organic system pioneered by Balfour. Balfour continued to farm, write and lecture for the rest of her life.

“

If fresh food is necessary to health in man and beast, then that food must be provided not only from our own soil but as near as possible to the sources of consumption.

x www.soilassociation.org

”

 Lady Eve Balfour, The Living Soil (London: Faber & Faber, 1975)

1940 1940

Laurance S. Rockefeller 1910–2004

Like father, like son In 1926, Horace Albright, superintendent of Yellowstone National Park gave a guided tour to the wealthy philanthropist John D. Rockefeller Jr and his family through Jackson Hole, the 30-mile-long mountain valley which has as its western backdrop the snowy peaks of the Grand Tetons. John Rockefeller was so impressed

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that he decided to purchase 13,300 hectares in the Jackson Hole valley from ranchers and other owners. His plan was to donate it for the enjoyment of the nation. Although John Rockefeller went on to donate land to other national parks such as the Great Smoky Mountains, Shenandoah, Acadia and Yosemite, management for Jackson Hole would fall to his third son, Laurance Spelman Rockefeller. In 1940 Laurance Rockefeller, a shrewd businessman, set up the Jackson Hole Preserve Inc. as a non-profit conservation and education organisation the purposes of which were not only to preserve areas of outstanding primitive grandeur and national beauty, but also to provide appropriate facilities for their use and enjoyment by the public. In 1949 he gifted Jackson Hole valley to the nation for eventual inclusion in the Grand Teton National Park. In 1956, Rockefeller visited the Virgin Islands during a cruise in the Caribbean. He was so affected by the natural beauty on the island of St John that he had the Jackson Hole Preserve Inc. acquire 2,000 hectares. This was then donated to the government to become the Virgin Islands National Park. In 1962, the park’s boundaries were extended to include offshore areas containing beautiful coral formations and rich forms of tropical marine life. Profits from the local tourist resort were ploughed back into conservation work. Similar tourism-funded conservation operations were set up in Puerto Rico and Hawaii. During the 1960s and 1970s Rockefeller was adviser to US Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon and Ford on matters of environmental conservation and outdoor recreation. Between 1969 and 1973, he headed the Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality. In 1991, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal and extolled by President George H.W. Bush as a ‘hidden national treasure’. Rockefeller said at the award presentation that nothing was more important to him than ‘the creation of a conservation ethic in America’. In 1992 Laurance and his wife Mary donated their Woodstock, Vermont summer home and farm to the National Park Service, eventually creating a museum dedicated to the history of conservation, now called the Marsh–Billings–Rockefeller National Historical Park.

“

Concern for the environment and access to parks is not frivolous or peripheral; rather it is central to the welfare of people – body, mind and spirit.

”

x www.nps.gov/mabi

Catalyst for Conservation  Robin W. Winks, Laurance S. Rockefeller: (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1997)

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1941 1941

Russell Ohl 1898–1987

Power from the light In 1939 vacuum tubes were state of the art in radio equipment. People had previously used crystals for radios, but they were so inconsistent they were becoming discredited. Most scientists agreed that simple vacuum tubes were the future for radio and telephones everywhere. Russell Ohl, working for Bell Telephone Laboratories at Holmdel, New Jersey, did not agree. He persisted in studying crystals believing that, if the silicon were purified, radio-broadcasting capabilities would be improved. On 23 February 1941, Ohl was examining a crystal with a crack down the middle when he noticed that the amount of electrical current changed when the crystal was held close to an incandescent lamp. By afternoon, Russ Ohl realised that it was light shining on the crystal that caused this small change in current. On 6 March Ohl showed his discovery to colleagues at Bell Laboratories. With his crystal attached to a voltmeter, Ohl turned on a flashlight and aimed the silicon at it. The voltmeter instantly jumped up half a volt. The effect was a simple device that converted sunlight to electrical energy. Ohl had invented the silicon solar cell. By 1954, three scientists at Bell Labs had taken Ohl’s discovery to the point where they had assembled 400 silicon cells into the world first solar battery. Since then, solar panels have come to be considered as the answer to tapping an unlimited and clean source of renewable energy – the sun.

1941 1941

Palmer C. Putnam 1900–?

Power from the wind The US state of Vermont’s mountain tops have never been short of wind. This was certainly taken into account when, in 1941, an engineer called Palmer C. Putnam of the Smith–Putnam Company arrived on a 2,000 foot mountain called Grandpa’s Knob in Castleton, Vermont. Putnam directed three construction crews to build a turbine for converting wind into electricity. Putnam’s horizontal-axis design featured a two-bladed, 175 foot diameter rotor, oriented downwind from the tower. A 16 tonne stainless steel rotor used full-span blade pitch control to maintain an operating speed of 28 rpm. The aerodynamics

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of the blades had been worked out by Boeing aerodynamicist Theodore Karman. Putnam’s turbine was designed to deliver 1.25 MW to the Central Vermont Public Service Company. It was the world’s first megawatt-sized wind turbine – and, incredibly, comparable in size to the turbines of today. The turbine operated for 1,100 hours before a blade failed at a known weak point in 1945. More hours would have been accumulated except for the problem of getting critical repair parts during the war. The experiment was deemed a success, but too expensive to continue with. When Putnam wrote up the experiment in Power from the Wind, published in 1948, wind turbines had slipped down the energy agenda. Putnam could not have envisaged how, today, some 60 nations around the world have advanced wind energy programmes producing almost 1% of global electricity.

x www.eere.energy.gov/windandhydro/windpoweringamerica

1942 1942

Perrine Moncrieff 1893–1979

The bird woman In 1921 Captain Malcolm Moncrieff and his wife Perrine left England and emigrated to New Zealand where they came to settle on the shores of Tasman Bay. A keen ornithologist since her childhood, Perrine Moncrieff was soon travelling through the region, observing native birds such as the kiwi. In 1925 she wrote New Zealand Birds and How to Identify Them. Although she had intended her book for the untrained bird-watcher, it influenced scientists as well as lay people, running to five editions over the next four decades. Soon after publication, the Moncrieffs’ elder son died. In his memory they donated part of Haulashore Island to the people of Nelson. They later purchased a large tract of coastal bush at Okiwi Bay and presented it to the Crown. Moncrieff was a founding member of the New Zealand Native Bird Protection Society (1923) and the New Zealand Ornithological Society (1940), and she campaigned successfully for land at Lake Rotoroa and Maruia Springs to be turned into wildlife reserves, and for the designation of Farewell Spit as a bird sanctuary. By the late 1930s, she had become increasingly concerned about extensive logging along the coast and began a campaign to have 6,000 hectares of Crown land made into a national park. A petition presented to the government suggested the park be named after Abel Tasman who had discovered New Zealand some 300 years before. The Abel Tasman National Park was opened in 1942 and Perrine would serve on its board for the next 35 years. Her 1965 book People Came Later documented her advocacy for the park.

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By the time of her death in 1979, ‘the bird woman’, as she was known, had been New Zealand’s leading female conservationist for almost 50 years.

1943 1943

Gertrude Dudy Blom 1901–1993

Photographs of a disappearing forest In 1943, Gertrude Dudy Blom, who was Swiss, and her Danish husband, the archaeologist Frans Blom, accompanied a Mexican archaeological expedition into the isolated Lacandon rainforest in Chiapas, Mexico, where only 250 members of the Mayan Lacandones tribe remained. The Bloms were so concerned that they made it their mission to study and assist these forest people as they made their transition into the 20th century. At this time, giant stands of mahogany were attracting lumber companies who had built roads into the forest and were beginning systematically to destroy it. Realising that the survival of the Lacandones depended on the existence of the forest, Trudi Blom embarked on a campaign to save the Lacandon. She had relevant experience for such work. In the 1920s and 1930s as a socialist journalist in Europe she had highlighted the dangers of Italian and German fascism and had been arrested on several occasions. Although she never considered herself a photographer, Blom took tens of thousands of photographs – a body of work now seen as one of the great legacies of documentary photography. The scorched landscapes in many of her photos are a harsh indictment of the tragic destruction of the rainforest and helped to bring their plight to world attention. Blom was one of the first advocates for rainforest preservation In 1950, the Bloms bought a large property in San Cristóbal de las Casas where they founded a cultural and scientific centre. They called it Na Bolom, the House of the Jaguar. To the Lacandones, Blom sounds very similar to their Mayan word for jaguar, bolom. The tree nursery they founded there now provides 30,000 trees annually for reforesting the land. Meanwhile, the population of the Lacandones has doubled to 500. Today Na Bolom is a non-profit, environmental centre working alongside Mexico’s Department of Rainforest Projects to protect the Lancadon. Award-winning playwright Alex Finlayson has now completed a multimedia one-woman play about Blom called ‘Trudi’.

“

Always wear lipstick in the jungle.

” 85

x www.nabolom.org

1944 1944

Norman Borlaug 1914–

The green revolutionary In 1944, the Rockefeller Foundation decided to work with the Mexican Ministry of Agriculture in a scientific research programme to try to improve the resistance and yield of wheat. To organise and direct this programme, they chose a specialist in plant pathology and genetics called Norman Borlaug. Borlaug, previously a microbiologist on the staff of the Du Pont de Nemours Foundation, arrived at Obregon in Sonora in 1945 to find the station there in a dilapidated state. Working at Campo Atizapan, and after many seasons of trial and error, he arrived at two momentous breakthroughs. The first involved ‘shuttle breeding’, a technique that sped up the immunities of several crops to disease. Second, Borlaug produced shorter and equally sized stalks of wheat, in order to ensure that all the plants received an equal amount of sunlight. These new wheat breeds increased by between two and three times the total amount of wheat production in Mexico. In 1966 Borlaug’s Quiet Revolution in Wheat Improvement created worldwide interest. The Rockefeller and Ford Foundations, in cooperation with the Government of Mexico, set up the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre at El Batan near Mexico City. Working with scientists from other parts of the world, especially India and Pakistan, Borlaug adapted the new dwarf wheat varieties, such as Sonora 64, to countries in Latin American, the Middle East and Africa. Following the publication of A Green Revolution Yields a Golden Harvest, Borlaug was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970. In 1986, Borlaug founded the World Food Prize to recognise exceptional achievements for agriculture or efforts to counter global hunger and poverty. Since 1997, some 1,940 young scientists from over 16 countries have studied and worked at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre. Norman Borlaug whose improvements have saved millions from starvation, has been honoured with over 40 doctorate degrees. Living in Mexico, he continues experimenting, this time with triticale, a man-made species of grain from a cross between wheat and rye that promises even greater yields and nutritional qualities.

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In July 2007 Borlaug, aged 93, received the Congressional Gold, the United States’ highest civilian honour. In Iowa and Minnesota, World Food Day on 16 October is now referred to as Norman Borlaug World Food Prize Day.

“

I cannot live comfortably in the midst of abject poverty and hunger and human misery, if I have the possibility of doing something about improving the lot of young children.

x www.worldfoodprize.org

”

Leon Hesser, The Man Who Fed the World: Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Norman Borlaug and His Battle to End World Hunger (Dallas, TX: Durban House, 2006)

1945 1945

John Gordon Dower 1900–1947

Founder of national parks in England and Wales In 1938, John Dower, an architect and keen rambler, was asked to prepare a report laying out the case for the creation of national parks in England and Wales. The onset of the Second World War saw his report shelved but, in 1945, Dower made a second official report in which he defined a national park as An extensive area of beautiful and relatively wild country in which, for the nation’s benefit and by appropriate national decision and action, (a) the characteristic landscape beauty is strictly preserved, (b) access and facilities for public open-air enjoyment are amply provided, (c) wildlife and buildings and places of architectural and historical interest are suitably protected, while (d) established farming use is effectively maintained.

Dower clearly saw that national parks in England and Wales would have to be different to other national parks in the world – with the land remaining largely privately owned and their areas protected as working environments, this situation is still the same today. Whatever the local perception today in terms of success or failure, this model is of increasing interest around the globe in protected area debate and management. The Dower report helped to lay the foundations for the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, creating the national park system in England and Wales. Tragically, Dower died two years before, aged only 47. The first ten English and Welsh national parks were designated in the 1950s: first, the Peak District closely followed by the Lake District, Snowdonia and, in 1951, Dartmoor. Today, there are 12 national parks, with a further area, the South Downs, in the process of being designated. They are visited by an estimated 110 million people a year.

x www.cnp.org.uk 87

1946 1946

Peter Scott 1909–1989

‘Try and make the boy interested in natural history’ Peter Scott was the only son of the ill-fated Antarctic explorer, Robert Falcon Scott. His father famously left instructions to his wife, the sculptor Kathleen Bruce, to ‘try and make the boy interested in natural history if you can’. During the 1930s, the young Scott enjoyed several passions – travelling the world, hunting, and painting rare birds. But, as he hunted, Scott became increasingly concerned about the future of such wildlife. In 1946, Scott set up the Wildfowl Centre at Slimbridge on the banks of the River Severn in Gloucestershire. His aim was to bring wildlife and people together for the benefit of both. During the next four decades, Scott developed the Severn Wildfowl Trust (now renamed the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust) to the point where today it has nine visitor centres covering 2,000 hectares around the British Isles. Meanwhile, he led several ornithological expeditions worldwide – to Iceland in 1953, Australasia in 1956 and to the Pacific in 1957. He also became a television personality, popularising the study of wildfowl and wetlands. His BBC natural history series Look ran from 1955 to 1981 and made him a household name. He wrote and illustrated several books on the subject, including his autobiography The Eye of the Wind (1961). Already a member of the World Conservation Union, he went on to co-found and become the first chairman of the then World Wildlife Fund in 1961, designing its famous panda logo. Under his chairmanship, Red Data books were initiated to itemise both animals and plants under threat. His pioneering work in conservation also contributed greatly to the shift in policy of the International Whaling Commission and the signing of the Antarctic Treaty to establish the continent as a militaryfree scientific reserve (his interest inspired by his visit to his father’s base on Ross Island in Antarctica). He is also remembered for giving the scientific name of Nessiteras rhombopteryx (based on a blurred underwater photograph of a supposed fin) to the Loch Ness Monster so that it could be registered as an endangered species. The Greek-based name means ‘the wonder of Ness with the diamond shaped fin’, but is also an anagram of ‘monster hoax by Sir Peter S’. By the time of his death in 1989, Sir Peter Scott was only not only regarded as one of the pioneers of world conservation, but also as one of the greatest bird artists of the 20th century.

“

The conservationist’s most important task, if we are to save the Earth, is to educate.

”

x www.wwt.org.uk 88



Sir Peter Scott, The Eye of the Wind (London: Hodder & Stoughton, new edn 1966)

1947 1947

Marjory Stoneman Douglas 1890–1998

Centenarian defends the Everglades In 1947, Marjory Stoneman Douglas, a former campaigning journalist on the Miami Herald newspaper, published a book entitled The Everglades: River of Grass. Her prose extols the strange beauty of the Florida Everglades and its diversity of wildlife, explains its importance as the region’s watershed and addresses modern civilisation’s impact on this fragile ecosystem. In the years that followed, Douglas became increasingly involved in the movement to preserve the Everglades. In the 1950s the US Army Corps of Engineers became her major enemy. In a major construction programme, a complex system of canals, levees, dams and pump stations was planned to protect former marshland converted for real-estate development from seasonal flooding. But the request for a Corps of Engineers permit to undertake the work was eventually turned down. This was no surprise to those who had heard Douglas’s crusading speeches. In 1970, Marjory Douglas, now aged 80, formed Friends of the Everglades to add a voting constituency to her efforts. After several reprints, the revised edition of her book was published in 1987, when Marjory was 97 years old, to draw attention to continuing threats to the Everglades. In 1993, President Bill Clinton awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest honour that can be given to a civilian. Douglas died in 1998, aged 108. But the battle to save the Everglades continues into the 21st century.

“

The most unhappy thing about conservation is that it is never permanent. If we save a priceless woodland today, it is threatened from another quarter tomorrow.

”

x www.everglades.org

 Marjory Stoneman Douglas, The Everglades: River of Grass

(Sarasota, FL: Pineapple Press, 60th Anniversary edn 2007)

1947 1947

Sàlim Ali 1896–1987

The birdman of India With India’s Independence from British Imperial Rule in 1947, the 200-year-old Bombay National History Society was threatened with closure. The man who saved 89

it was a field ornithologist called Dr Sàlim Ali. He appealed to Prime Minister Nehru who gave the society funds to tide it over a difficult period. During previous decades, Ali, whose training had been with the German ornithologist Professor Erwin Stresemann in Berlin, had been carrying out regional surveys of the birds of India. Some of these surveys had taken him and his supportive wife Tehmina into the most remote, uninhabited places. He was one of the first Indians to conduct systematic bird surveys in India and his books have contributed enormously to the development of professional and amateur ornithology in the country. Following Tehmina’s sudden death in 1939, Ali threw himself even further into ornithological research. Besides the rediscovery of the rare weaver bird Finn’s Baya (Ploceus megarhynchus) in Kumaon Terai, he authored numerous books including the tenvolume Birds of India and Pakistan, co-authored with S. Dillon Ripley, then a young zoologist with the US Army in Ceylon. In later years, as a highly respected elder spokesman for the environment, Ali’s timely intervention saved the Bharatpur Bird Sanctuary and he also spoke out to protect the Silent Valley National Park which he described as ‘one of the richest, most threatened and least studied habitats on Earth’ from being flooded to create a hydroelectric dam.

“

For me, wildlife conservation is for down-to-earth practical purposes. This means – as internationally accepted – for scientific, cultural, aesthetic, recreational and economic reasons. I believe that future generations should enjoy the same fun with it as I had.

”

 Sàlim Ali, The Book of Indian Birds (New York: Oxford University Press, new edn 2003)

1947 1947

Ruth Patrick 1907–

The river doctor In 1947, Dr Ruth Patrick, a 40-year-old botanist specialising in diatoms, the singlecelled algae at the bottom of the freshwater food chain, set up a diatom research department in the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences in Pennsylvania.

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Since 1983, this department has been known as the Patrick Center for Environmental Research. In 1948 Patrick led her multidisciplinary team in an unprecedented study of water pollution over a 475-square-mile region of the Conestoga Basin, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The research team collected samples of aquatic organisms, then used a machine invented by Patrick – a diatometer – to determine the presence of pollution. Her work, dubbed the Patrick Principle, became the fundamental principle on which all environmental science and management is based. She proved that biological diversity holds the key to the environmental problems affecting an ecosystem. From the early 1950s, the quiet and diminutive ‘river doctor’ and her team were in demand. The US Atomic Energy Commission asked for baseline data on the water quality of the Savannah River, near Aiken, South Carolina, prior to DuPont’s building a nuclear plant on the site. In the years that followed, Ruth Patrick’s ecosystem services for industry, government agencies and community groups helped to foster the concept of environmental stewardship. She put forward the revolutionary idea that tidal wetlands could serve as natural wastewater treatment plants – an idea that has led directly to the use of constructed wetlands in watershed management programmes around the world. While teaching limnology and botany at the University of Pennsylvania for over 35 years, Patrick, with 25 honorary degrees to her name, never stopped her fieldwork to diagnose the health of rivers and streams.

“

The amount of water on our planet is limited. It is recycled through evaporation, precipitation, and runoff. Through this recycling it is cleansed.

”

1947 1947

Archie Carr 1909–1987

Protecting the sea turtle In 1947, Archie Carr Jr, a zoology professor from the University of Florida, was teaching biology in Honduras, Central America, when he first encountered sea turtles, many species of which were endangered. Sea turtles – in particular the green 91

turtle – were to become Carr’s all-abiding passion. His work in tagging, tracking and counting species took him around the planet from South America and the Caribbean to East Africa, Papua New Guinea and Australia. In 1955 Carr founded a turtle research station in Tortuguero National Park, Costa Rica. Originally Tortuguero had been a tortoise slaughterhouse for poachers, its beach white with tortoise bones. Carr’s 1956 book about the sea turtles at Tortuguero, The Windward Road, inspired the founding in 1959 of the Caribbean Conservation Corporation to study and protect sea turtles. Carr was scientific director of the organisation from its inception until his death. The original research station is now the 44 hectare Dr Archie Carr Wildlife Refuge. During the 1960s, Carr launched Operation Green Turtle with the assistance of the US Navy. Using flying boats and seaplanes, the project distributed green turtle eggs and hatchlings to various nesting beaches around the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico in an effort to encourage the growth of their dwindling populations. Carr’s conservation efforts also led him to carry out campaigns against ocean pollution. In 1986, the year before his death, a sea turtle research centre, named in his honour, was set up at the University of Florida in recognition of his outstanding achievements in researching and protecting his beloved green sea turtle. In 1991 the Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge, designated by Congress, was opened. This 20 mile section of the coastline in central Florida protects important nesting sites for endangered sea turtles. To date more than 35,000 adult female green turtles have been tagged at the Tortuguero research station, which now welcomes 15,000 ecotourists a year.

“

You cannot argue the case for saving any wilderness on grounds of practicality alone. If this difficult saving is done, it will be because man is the creature who preserves things that stir him.

x www.fws.gov/archiecarr

”

Frederick R. Davis, The Man Who Saved Sea Turtles:  Archie Carr and the Origins of Conservation Biology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)

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1948 1948

Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr 1887–1969

Our Plundered Planet Although Fairfield Osborn’s father had been a geologist and palaeontologist, his namesake son was more concerned with living creatures. As a young man, he became secretary of the New York Zoological Society and later its long-time president. Encouraged by William Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Gardens, Osborn worked tirelessly on conservation projects, including the creation of a marine aquarium at Coney Island, New Jersey; the upkeep of the Bronx Zoological Park; the Save-the-Redwoods League and the International Council for Bird Preservation. In 1947, concerned for endangered species, Osborn founded the Conservation Foundation, an adjunct to the New York Zoological Society. But perhaps Osborn’s greatest statements were his two seminal books. In Our Plundered Planet, published in 1948, Osborn produced a devastating critique of man’s mismanagement of the Earth. He calculated Earth’s carrying capacity at less than 2 billion people – an early warning on the population/resource/environment crisis. In 1953, his second book, The Limits of the Earth, repeated the warning. In 1997, Osborn’s daughter Joan and her husband William Roth donated the Fairfield Osborn Preserve to Sonoma State University, California. It is dedicated to protecting and restoring natural communities and to fostering ecological understanding through education and research.

“

The tide of the Earth’s population is rising, the reservoir of the Earth’s living resources is falling. There is only one solution: man must recognise the necessity of cooperating with nature.

x www.wcs.org

”

 Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (London: Faber & Faber, 1948)

1948 1948

Roger Heim 1900–1979

Magic mushroom man In October 1948, Roger Heim, as director of the Museum national de l’Histoire naturelle in Paris, played host to 150 delegates from 33 nations at Fontainebleau during the foundation of the International Union for the Protection of Nature (later to become the World Conservation Union). 93

Since 1925, Heim had specialised in the study of mycology or mushrooms, his travels alerting him of the need to protect their fragile delicate habitats. The only pause in his research came during the Second World War when, as a French Resistance worker, he was arrested, deported to a number of prisoner of war camps and tortured. In 1953, the year after he had published a 222-page book, Destruction and Protection of Nature, Heim made a public appeal for the forest of Fontainebleau to be made into a national park. For the next four years, as president of the World Conservation Union, Heim continued to study the hallucinogenic effects of mushrooms, travelling to Mexico with R. Gordon Wasson where they collected samples of the psychoactive mushrooms being used in the healing and religious ceremonies of native people. In 1965 Heim finally won his battle for Fontainebleau when the entire forest was declared as a classified natural site. Heim continued to fight for the protection of nature, participating in the WWF’s Operation Oryx.

1948 1948

Harold J. Coolidge 1908–1985

Specimen hunter becomes conservationist Harold Jefferson Coolidge took part in three expeditions to Africa and Asia at a time when the only specimens to bring home were dead ones. The Harvard Medical Expedition of 1927 journeyed from Liberia to the Belgian Congo, collecting plants and animal specimens and studying disease. During the following two years, the 25-year-old Coolidge took part in the Kelley–Roosevelt Expedition to Asia, leading a branch of the expedition that travelled along the Mekong and its tributaries. In 1937 Coolidge conceived, organised and led the Asian Primatology Expedition. Over a period of several months, Coolidge and his team successfully collected 5,000 birds and 3,000 mammals in north-west Tonkin and northern Laos. In addition, Coolidge brought back the first family of breeding gibbons, later housed at the Washington Zoo. In 1948, having spent 17 years as assistant curator of mammals at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, specialising in gorillas, Coolidge became one of the founding forces behind the creation of the International Union for the Protection of Nature (later the World Conservation Union), along with Julian Huxley, Max 114 Nicholson, Roger Heim and Jean Delacour, established at Fontainebleau, France, in 93 October 1948. As vice-president from 1948 until he became president in 1966, Coolidge fostered international cooperation and marshalled global clout on behalf of community-based conservation – ideas years ahead of their time. Today the World Conservation Union has members from some 83 states, 110 government agencies and more than 800 non-governmental organisations. More

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than 10,000 internationally recognised scientists and experts from 181 countries volunteer their services to its six global commissions. Its 1,000 staff members in offices around the world are working on some 500 projects.

x www.iucn.org

1950 1950

Emma Lucy Braun 1889–1971

‘Do Americans really love trees?’ In 1950, a book entitled Deciduous Forests of Eastern North America drew awe and admiration from those who read it. It synthesised 25 years of work and 105,000 km of travel describing in detail the trees and shrubs of the deciduous forests of Kentucky, Tennessee, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. It is still used as a reference text today. Its author ‘Doctor Lucy’ Braun had recently retired from fulltime teaching of geology and botany at the University of Cincinnati. Braun had been a conservationist since her youth. In 1917 she helped found the Cincinnati Wild Flower Preservation Society, a group that sent volunteers into schools to teach children about caring for native trees and flowers. Braun’s 1926 book Naturalist’s Guide to the Americas was the first attempt to inventory natural areas on the Appalachian plateaux in southern Ohio and Kentucky. Despite her continual warnings about man’s vandalism to trees expressed in almost 200 articles for scientific and popular journals, many of the deciduous forests she described were destroyed by ‘axe, fire and chestnut blight’. In 1933 the Ohio Academy of Science elected Braun as its first female president. The Ecological Society of America repeated the honour in 1950, also making her its first female president. Braun managed to protect several areas in her native southern Ohio, including the 21 hectare Lynx Prairie Reserve, designated a national landmark by the National Park Service in 1967, when Braun was 87 years old. Since renamed in her honour, this reserve now covers more than 2,400 hectares. In 1970, a Natural Areas Bill passed by the Ohio state government incorporated many of her ideas. Braun lived almost her entire life with her sister Annette. At their home in Mount Washington, the Braun sisters converted their lawn into an experimental garden where they grew rare and unusual flowers and plants such as the box huckleberry, nodding mandarin, Cumberland azalea and Allegheny spurge Shortly before her death, Braun’s herbarium of 11,891 specimens, collected over six decades, was presented to the Smithsonian Institute. Her devotion to land preservation was one of the pivotal influences in the developing field of ecology, while her extensive research on plants was a major impetus in establishing plant ecology as an academic discipline. 95

“

As a result of man’s continuing destruction of his natural environment by the plough, lumbering, urban sprawl and ever enlarging highways, few natural habitats will remain shortly in Ohio.

”

x www.esa.org

1950 1950

Arie Haagen-Smit 1900–1977

Recognising smog During the late 1940s, Dr Arie Haagen-Smit, a Dutch-born scientist working at Caltech’s Biology Division, became concerned about the discoloured and undersized plants in his garden in the Los Angeles basin. He learned that farmers near Southland oil refineries had been complaining for years that air pollution was damaging their crops, bleaching and discolouring the leaves. Haagen-Smit then discovered that local hospitals had noted an increased incidence of respiratory-related ailments and severe eye irritation on smoggy days. Researchers had suspected that something other than just pollution was behind smog, but no one knew its cause. Haagen-Smit was determined to find out. In 1950, he recreated smog in a laboratory test tube by irradiating a combination of reactive hydrocarbons and oxides of nitrogen. He determined that vehicle emissions and oil refineries were smog’s primary causes. Two years later, Haagen-Smit completed his research and announced that ozone, the main ingredient in smog, was not directly emitted from tailpipes and smokestacks, but was created in the presence of ultraviolet radiation from the sun. This breakthrough in understanding is the foundation on which today’s public health protective standards for ozone pollution are based. In 1960 Haagen-Smit became one of the original members of the Motor Vehicle Pollution Control Board, then the California Air Resources Board’s first chairman eight years later. He was also one of the first editors of the International Journal of Air Pollution. Ironically, Arie Haagen-Smit died of lung cancer in March 1977, just two months after the Air Resources Board Laboratory in El Monte was dedicated in his name.

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It was luck. We hit the jackpot with the first nickel.

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”

1952 1952

Miriam Rothschild 1908–2005

The queen bee In 1952 Miriam Rothschild published Fleas, Flukes and Cuckoos, a classic study of these parasites. She was the first person to work out the flea’s jumping mechanism. In 1964,her work on the reproductive cycle of the rabbit flea, vector of myxomatosis, found that the flea’s cycle was controlled by the rabbit’s sexual hormones. Pressures of evolution had enabled the flea to use mammalian hormones. Biochemical relationships of this kind have since been shown to be of great importance in the evolution of host–parasite relationships. The rabbit flea observation became a worldwide platform for research and a branching point in Miriam’s own career, the beginning of several collaborations with biochemists and a new fount of scientific papers. This work predicated the modern web-of-life view of conservation which looks on the protection of habitat as the vital element in the survival of threatened species But Rothschild’s first love was butterflies and dragonflies. To encourage them, she planted some 96 species of wildflowers over 60 hectares of previously barren fields at her family estate near Oundle in Northamptonshire, England. She then created the National Dragonfly Museum nearby, where wildflower seeds are sold to 218 encourage others to grow more. She became an adviser to Prince Charles when he wanted to create wildflower meadows at his estate at Highgrove, and even influenced the Highways Agency to plant seeds on the verges of main roads in the UK. Firmly rejecting all forms of cruelty to animals, Rothschild spoke out vigorously for their better treatment on the farm and in the laboratory. She became a vegetarian, eschewed make-up and elected to wear leather-free shoes and boots – moonboots in the winter, tennis shoes in the summer and, perhaps most notably, white Wellington boots in the evening. An eccentric, she had little formal education but, without aspiring to academic status, she was so expert in so many fields that she gathered eight honorary doctorates, from Oxford in 1968 to Cambridge in 1999.

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There’s no money or public success in zoology, just complete happiness. For a zoologist life can never be dull.

”

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1952 1952

Alain Bombard 1924–2005

Fighting for the sea Alain Bombard was a junior doctor at a hospital in Boulogne, France, when a trawler sank in bad weather outside the harbour and 43 bodies were brought in. Unable to revive a single one, the 27-year-old determined to give hope to people who feared shipwreck at sea. Becoming a researcher at Monaco’s Oceanographic Institute, and after experiments in the English Channel and the Mediterranean, in 1952 Bombard cast off into the Atlantic in a 15 foot inflatable zodiac dinghy called L’Hérétique. Living on fish, plankton, rainwater and controlled drinking of seawater, Bombard managed to survive for 62 days. He touched land in Barbados, suffering from exhaustion, diarrhoea and weight loss, having travelled 4,400 km. He had lost 25 kg and was immediately hospitalised. But Bombard returned to France a hero. His book Naufragé Volontaire (translated into English as The Bombard Story) made him world-famous. In the years that followed, Bombard directed a marine laboratory in Saint Malo for the study of the physiopathology of the sea, monitoring the coastal environment of north-west France. In 1974 Bombard joined Paul-Emile Victor in setting up a pressure group for ‘la défense de l’homme et de son environnement’ and two years later was one of those who signed the Ecoropa document For an Economy which Respects the Earth and Man. In May 1981, Bombard became Secretary of State at the Ministry for the Environment in the government of Prime Minister Pierre Mauroy. He lasted little more than a month in office, his uncompromising pronouncements against hunting having alienated many in high places. In the same year, he was elected to the European Parliament. There, until 1994, he was a formidable agitator on environmental issues, ranging from nuclear power to the culling of baby seals. His outspoken opposition to the French practice of force-feeding geese for pâté de foie gras earned him and his family death threats.

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I had fought on behalf of man against the sea, but I realised that it had become more urgent to fight on behalf of the sea against men.

”

 Alain Bombard, The Bombard Story (London: Grafton, new edn 1986)

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1953 1953

Eugene Odum 1913–2002

The father of modern ecology In 1951, the US Atomic Energy Commission wanted to see what effect its Savannah River site in South Carolina would have on nearby plants and animals. To carry out the investigation they chose a biologist from the University of Georgia. His name was Eugene Odum. Finding himself with one of the largest self-contained laboratories on Earth – some 777 km2 of property offlimits to the public, Odum helped set up research projects at the site. Earlier, he had been on a faculty committee drawing up a curriculum of required courses for biology majors. When he suggested that ecology should be a required course, he was ridiculed. At this time, ecology had not yet been defined as a separate discipline. In Odum’s view, even professional biologists seemed generally ignorant of how the Earth’s ecological systems interact with one another. With the Savannah River site as his laboratory, Odum began to address this problem. He realised there was no single book that examined the entire ecosystem. So, with his brother Howard, then a graduate student at Yale, Odum set about writing his pioneering tome. First published in 1953, Fundamentals of Ecology would remain the only textbook in the field for at least a decade. It was translated into 12 languages and influenced an entire generation of ecologists. By 1970, when the first Earth Day was organised, Odum’s concept of the living Earth as a global set of interlaced ecosystems had become one of the key pillars of the environmental movement. Only a few weeks before his death in 2002 at 89, Odum was updating his landmark book, now in its fifth edition.

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Without healthy, natural systems to support and buffer industrial, urban and agricultural activities, there can be no healthy economy or high quality of life.

”

x www.ecology.uga.edu

 Eugene Odum and Gary W. Barrett, Fundamentals of Ecology

(Belmont, CA: Brooks/Cole, new edn 2004)

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1953 1953

Kai Curry-Lindahl 1917–1990

A Swedish migrant While Europe was embroiled in the Second World War, a young Swedish zoologist called Kai Curry-Lindahl was editing the Swedish Society for the Protection of Nature’s journal Sveriges Nature. In 1953 he was appointed director of the Department of Natural History at the Nordic Museum in Stockholm. While holding this post Curry-Lindahl frequently took leave to participate in various zoological–ecological expeditions. As travel between sub-arctic Swedish Lapland and Africa’s tropical Congo is a normal part of the life-cycle of certain trans-equatorial migratory birds, Curry-Lindahl was obliged to adopt a similar lifestyle, commuting between the freezing north and the sweltering equator. He became actively concerned with the preservation of natural areas, with contributing to the understanding and solution of environmental problems, with land use planning, and with the whole complex network of human interactions with the environment. From 1966 to 1972, he was vice-chairman of the International Commission on National Parks. During this time, he wrote three books: The Global Role of National Parks for the World of Tomorrow; Three Parks in Swedish Lapland; and Conservation for Survival. He also served as special consultant to UNESCO for the Intergovernmental Conference of Experts on the Scientific Basis for Rational Use and Conservation of the Resources of the Biosphere. In 1982 Kai Curry-Lindahl’s seminal Bird Migration in Africa: Movements between Six Continents was published. When he died in Nairobi, while serving as a senior adviser to the UN Environment Programme, this Swedish environmentalist had authored 57 books.

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In the overcrowded world of today nature cannot any longer defend itself by remoteness or inaccessibility. Therefore the establishment of national parks and equivalent nature reserves is the only means to give maximum protection to what remains of representative natural habitats, biomes and ecosystems as well as rare and threatened species. However, this is not enough. So many significant habitats and ecosystems have disappeared or been greatly modified through human disturbance that it is necessary to undertake restoration programmes in order to regain for man’s benefit what he unwisely has destroyed.

”

x www.waterbirds.org/kai.htm

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 Kai Curry-Lindahl, Conservation for Survival

(London: Gollancz, 1972)

1954 1954

Scott Nearing 1883–1983

Helen Nearing 1904–1995

Living the good life In the autumn of 1932, at the height of the Great Depression, Scott Nearing, a 50year-old pacifist and anarchist who had lost his job as a college professor because of his beliefs, together with his 28-year-old wife Helen, decided to move from their small apartment in New York City to a dilapidated farmhouse and leaking barn, set on 26 hectares at the foot of Stratton mountain in the state of Vermont. Neither Scott nor Helen, a trained musician, knew anything about subsistence farming. Nevertheless, they paid $300 cash and signed up for an $800 mortgage. Initially, they followed the example of their neighbours, planting traditional crops at the traditional times, but later experimented with greenhouses (virtually unknown in the area despite only 100 frost-free days a year) and also adopted some innovations in preparing maple syrup and maple sugar from their tapped maple trees – their cash crop – rejecting fertilisers and pesticides for an organic approach. For 20 years, the Nearings lived simply and sustainably on the land. Their philosophy was to create a lifestyle giving importance to work, on the one hand, and to contemplation or play on the other. Ideally, they aimed at a pattern that divided waking hours into three blocks of four hours: ‘bread labour’ (work directed towards meeting basic needs such as food, shelter and clothing); civic work (doing something of value for their community); and professional pursuits or recreation. In 1952 they moved to Forest Farm on the coast of Maine where they continued their way of life. Two years later they wrote a book Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World. The book was a major spur to the US backto-the-land movement that began in the late 1960s, selling some 250,000 copies. During the following years a steady stream of anti-war back-to-the-landers visited the Nearings. Eugene V. Debs, the five-times socialist presidential candidate, called Scott the ‘greatest teacher in the United States’. Scott Nearing died 18 days after his 100th birthday while Helen lived until she was 91.

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Do the best that you can in the place where you are, and be kind.

x www.goodlife.org

”

 S. Nearing and H. Nearing, The Good Life (New York: Schocken Books, 1990)

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1954 1954

Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt 1928–

In honour of Darwin In 1954, Irenäus Eibl-Eibesfeldt, a 26-year-old Austrian ethologist and experienced diver from the Max Planck Institute in Germany, landed in the Galapagos Islands while on a scientific cruise in the Caribbean. He was fascinated by the wildlife but saw cause for alarm about the chances of the ecosystem’s survival against invasive species and human impacts. Giant tortoises were being slaughtered for food and their young sold as pets. Sea lions were killed for sport. The fearless native birds were stoned for fun while introduced domestic animals had run wild and were destroying the unique fauna and flora. Eibl-Eibesfeldt raised the issue with the then recently formed International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) (now the World Conservation Union) and also with the Ecuadorean government. His appeal gained many sympathisers and they began campaigning for a biological research station to be established on the islands. Several distinguished scientists in Europe and the Americas joined with them, including Julian Huxley, Roger Heim, S. Dil- 114 93 lon Ripley, Jean Delacour and Misael Acosta-Solis. Meanwhile, Eibl-Eibesfeldt gained the backing of UNESCO to return to the Galapagos for four months during 1957 and survey the animal populations while searching for an appropriate site for the station. Delacour and Ripley, on behalf of the International Council for Bird Preservation, gained approval from the Ecuadorean government to establish a research station. This was the base from which, in July 1959, the Charles Darwin Foundation for the Galapagos Islands – independent, international and non-governmental – was founded and the Charles Darwin Research Station was established at Puerto Ayora on Santa Cruz Island. Coincidentally, this was the centenary year of the publication of Darwin’s major work On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selec- 34 tion. The following year, Eibl-Eibesfeldt’s book Galapagos: Noah’s Ark in the Pacific was published. Today, the Charles Darwin Foundation has been carrying out crucial scientific research for almost 50 years, but the islands remain threatened. The rapid growth of tourism and immigration to the islands led to a UNESCO decision in June, 2007 to include the Galapagos on its List of World Heritage in Danger, reinforcing the April 2007 decision of the government of Ecuador to declare Galapagos at risk and as a national priority for conservation.

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x www.darwinfoundation.org

 I. Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Galapagos: The Noah’s Ark of the Pacific

(New York: Doubleday, 1961)

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1956 1956

Wladyslaw Szafer 1886–1970

Protecting Poland’s plantlife From 1917 a Polish botanist called Wladyslaw Szafer was a professor at the Jagiellonski University in Kraków. During the 1920s, Szafer led the movement which, in 1932, culminated in the establishment of a national park in the forest of Bialowieza. In turn, this also helped to protect the European bison from extinction. Part of Szafer’s campaign involved the publishing and editing of Poland’s first nature conservation journal, Ochrona Przyrody. From 1936 to 1938, now promoted to university president, Szafer continued to campaign for the protection of Poland’s wilderness. In 1956, the scientific secretariat of the Polish Academy of Sciences established the Department of Botany as an independent, national, scientific institute. Szafer built the department into a prominent research centre specialising in systematics, plant geography and palaeobotany. As the institute grew, additional disciplines were included, such as environmental ecology and ecological monitoring. By the 1960s the Kraków Institute of Botany employed more than 70 staff and Szafer was internationally recognised. In 1986, 16 years after his death, the Kraków University Institute was renamed the Wladyslaw Szafer Institute of Botany in honour of Poland’s pioneer conservationist.

1956 1956

Frank Fraser Darling 1903–1979

The ecological survey Living at Dundonnell, and later in the Summer Isles in the Scottish Highlands, the Englishman Frank Fraser Darling began the work that was to be his legacy. He described the social and breeding behaviour of red deer (Cervus elaphus), sea birds and the grey seal (Halichoerus grypus) respectively in three academic works: A Herd of Red Deer, Bird Flocks and the Breeding Cycle and A Naturalist on Rona. His work marked a shift towards what was to become field survey – or ‘human ecology’ as he called it – integrating the disciplines of zoology and genetics with those of natural history and conservation. This work brought him to the attention of the natural his114 torian Sir Julian Huxley.

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Between 1939 and 1943 Darling brought derelict land back into agricultural production on Tanera Mor in the Summer Isles. In 1942 the wartime Secretary of State for Scotland, Tom Johnston, asked Darling if he would run an agricultural advisory programme in the crofting areas of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. He agreed and for two years he travelled, taught and wrote articles that were later published in book form as Crofting Agriculture. During the early 1950s, Darling left Scotland to study human ecology in other parts of the world. He assessed the impact of the introduction of Siberian reindeer on native caribou populations and its consequences for the Eskimo population. From 1956 to 1961 he toured Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and the Sudan. He travelled on foot, by Land Rover and by air in the wet and dry seasons. His holistic overview of complex ecosystems was augmented by the advice of experts in the field. His conclusions encompassed issues as diverse as tribal law, game management, game hunting (which he condemned as vandalism), animal husbandry, flora and colonial politics. In 1956 Darling published Pelican in the Wilderness: Odyssey of a Naturalist. It was a sharp critique of the abuse of nature by man. To Darling, science’s purpose was to discover the principles that underlie the complexity of nature in its widest sense.

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There can be no greater moral obligation in the environmental field than to ease out the living space and replace dereliction by beauty.

”

1956 1956

Margaret Mee 1909–1988

The disappearing flowers of the Amazon In 1952, Greville Mee and his wife Margaret arrived in São Paulo, Brazil. Having trained as an artist at St Martin’s School of Art, Margaret soon obtained a job teaching at St Paul’s, São Paulo’s British school. Fascinated by the exuberance of the Atlantic forest, she began painting the plants and flowers she found on local expeditions. Gradually, her expeditions penetrated deeper and deeper into the Brazilian jungle. In 1956, she went on a painting expedition up the Amazon River and its various tributaries, collecting and painting plants in the wild. She was to make 14 further forays, each time heading up the river with a small boat either by herself or with only a local pilot for companionship. The expeditions weren’t without hardship. Mee contracted malaria and hepatitis, nearly drowned on several occasions, suffered broken ribs in an accident, and encountered hostile Indians and threatening gold prospectors. She packed a .32 revolver along with her paints and brushes.

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Her innate talent for botanical illustration was soon recognised and, in 1962, Mee was invited by the São Paulo Botanical Institute to illustrate the section on bromeliads for Flora Brasilica, an extraordinarily ambitious documentary project to catalogue and illustrate the plants of Brazil. But, with each expedition, Mee witnessed the disappearance of more forest habitat and this led her to start protesting at the forest policies of Brazil’s military dictatorship. Moving to Rio de Janeiro in 1968, Mee continued her Amazon trips, forever searching out new Margaret Mee in the garden of her home in Santa Teresa, flowers and plants to paint. She Rio de Janeiro, 1988. Aged 78, she was preparing to make had long wanted to paint the Amaher final Amazon journey. zonian moonflower (Selenicereus witti) which only flowers on one night of the year by moonlight under the right conditions. A special expedition – her fifteenth and last – was mounted in May 1998, the month of her 79th birthday, and she was successful in witnessing and drawing the blooms for the first time. Later that year, she made a trip to England for an exhibition of her paintings at the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, while taking the opportunity to call international attention to the destruction of the Amazonian forests. Her book In Search of Flowers of the Amazon Forests was a vivid visual testimony to the magnificence of the plantlife under threat. Mee died in November 1988, but left behind 400 folios of gouache illustrations, 40 sketchbooks and 15 diaries. Her mission has continued after her death. The Margaret Mee Amazon Trust exists to preserve her paintings for posterity and to provide scholarships for Brazilian scientists to conduct field research in Brazil. Botanical illustrators are funded by the Brazilian Fundação Botanica Margaret Mee.

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I know my death will not be the end of my work. Wherever I go I will try to influence those who are destroying our planet, so the Earth will have a chance to survive.

”

x www.margaretmee.org.br

Mee’s Amazon: The Diaries of an  Margaret Mee, Margaret Artist Explorer (Woodbridge, Suffolk, UK: Antique Collectors Club, 2004)

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1957 1957

Ian L. McHarg 1920–2001

Designing with nature In the autumn of 1957, Ian McHarg, the Glasgow-born professor of landscape architecture and city planning at the University of Pennsylvania, introduced a new course which he called Man and Environment. In the years that followed, some 3,000–4,000 students were to be influenced by his groundbreaking approach. McHarg further promoted his ideas in the 1969 book Design with Nature, which essentially gives step-by-step instructions on how to break down a region into its appropriate uses. It would sell some 155,000 copies and pioneered the concept of ecological planning. It continues to be one of the most widely celebrated books on landscape architecture and land-use planning, and its ideas have been taken up throughout the world. In 1996 McHarg published his autobiography, A Quest for Life. Besides writing he was also involved in many important design projects: the 1962 plan for the valleys in Baltimore County, Maryland; the inner harbour in Baltimore; the woodlands in Houston, Texas; and regional plans for the twin cities of Minnesota, Washington DC and Denver, Colorado.

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Our eyes do not divide us from the world, but unite us with it. Let this be known to be true. Let us then abandon the simplicity of separation and give unity its due. Let us abandon the self mutilation which has been our way and give expression to the potential harmony of man–nature.

”

 Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (New York: John Wiley, 1995)

1958 1958

William O. Douglas 1898–1980

Judge Bill One of the most spectacular features of the Olympic National Park near Los Angeles is its 96 km of Pacific coastline. In 1957 the Park’s superintendent and local chamber of commerce were planning a controversial road through this area of natural beauty which would have involved much tree felling. To the rescue came US Supreme Court Associate Justice William O. Douglas who was then 60 years old. At a time when American youth proclaimed you could 106

not trust anyone over 30, ‘Judge Bill’ was becoming a political hero on college campuses. In 1954 he had organised a 189 mile hike along the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal towpath to protest against a proposed highway in the area. He inspired the effort to establish the area as a national park, going as far as to challenge the editorial board of the Washington Post to go with him for a walk along the canal after it had published opinions supporting a Congressional plan to pave the canal into a road; the board subsequently changed its stance. To protect the Pacific coastline, in 1958, Douglas organised a second hike by a coalition of environmental groups along the secluded and pristine beach; plans for the road were soon abandoned. During the 1960s, Douglas became a spokesman for many liberal causes, writing a book published in 1969 entitled Points of Rebellion and controversially authoring a piece for ‘hippie’ publication Evergreen magazine. Douglas also became a key supporter of the fledgling environmental movement, serving on the board of directors of the Sierra Club from 1960 to 1962 and writing prolifically on his love of the outdoors. In 1972, he eloquently dissented from the Supreme Court’s decision in Sierra Club v. Morton that denied the environmental group ‘standing to sue’ to block a permit given by the US Forest Service to develop a valley near Sequoia National Park. Douglas asserted that environmental groups should have the right to legally represent natural resources and argue on their behalf. The Sierra Club lost the Morton battle but, thanks to Douglas, won the war. Today, any environmental group seeking to assert standing and take legal action in a natural resource matter simply has to find among its membership a single person with a particular interest (e.g. one who hikes, hunts, fishes or camps in or near the affected area) Douglas is also credited with preserving the Red River Gorge in eastern Kentucky. When a proposal to build a dam and flood the gorge reached the Supreme Court, Douglas visited the area himself and the Red River Gorge’s Douglas Trail is now named in his honour. The William O. Douglas Wilderness in Washington state honours him for his role in federal wilderness legislation, as well as his dedication and love for the Cougar Lakes region (now part of that wilderness).

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A conservation park is not a playground. It is not an amusement centre. The Disneyland approach is at war with the idea of conservation parks. Those who want to play tennis or basketball or practice on bars need a gymnasium or a stadium . . . The conservation park should return man to the environment from which he came.

”

Nature’s Justice: Writings of William O. Douglas  J. O’Fallon (ed.), (Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2000)

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1958 1958

Charles David Keeling 1928–2005

First evidence of the greenhouse effect During the early 1950s, Roger Revelle, Director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, became concerned about increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) from the use of fossil fuels. Like other scientists, Revelle was unsure why CO2 levels fluctuated and varied with location. So, in 1956, he recruited a brilliant 28-year-old postdoctoral fellow in geochemistry at Caltech called Dave Keeling as a researcher. Keeling developed the manometer – the first instrument to measure CO2 in atmospheric samples. He camped at Big Sur on the Californian coast where he used his new device to measure the level of CO2 and found it had risen to 315 parts per million (ppm) in the atmosphere, 12 per cent more than the 280 ppm that ice-core samples had shown was the level before the Industrial Revolution – before man’s extensive burning of coal, oil and other fossil fuels that spew out carbon dioxide. Working out that measurements of background (long-term) CO2 could be recorded on mountain tops, Keeling persuaded the US government to fund a research station in Hawaii, far from industrial influences. A CO2 monitoring machine was set up in 1958 at the Mauna Loa Observatory, on top of a Hawaiian volcano. By 1960, Keeling had demonstrated strong seasonal variations in CO2 levels, with peaks reached in late winter in the northern hemisphere followed by reductions in spring and early summer as plant growth increases and CO2 is absorbed. In 1961, Keeling produced data showing that CO2 levels were rising steadily, in what became known as the ‘Keeling curve’. This was the first indication of the greenhouse effect. The data collection started by Keeling and continued at Mauna Loa is now the longest continuous record of atmospheric CO2 in the world and is considered a reliable indicator of the global trend. Keeling’s research shows that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 has grown from 315 ppm in 1958 to 380 ppm in 2005, with the increase linked to fossil fuel emissions. Appointed professor of oceanography in 1968, Keeling spent his entire 50-year career at Scripps. Author of over 100 research articles, he was co-convener of two international conferences on ocean and atmospheric CO2. He also constructed a model of the carbon cycle into which future man-made CO2 could be introduced to predict the concentration level in air and water well into the 21st century. Having received numerous international awards, it is perhaps ironic that climate change sceptic President George Bush selected Keeling to receive the National Medal of Science in 2002, the highest US award for lifetime achievement in scientific research.

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It is possible that this is merely a reflection of natural events like previous peaks in the rate, but it is also possible that it is the beginning of a natural process unprecedented in the record.

”

x scrippsco2.ucsd.edu/home/index.php

1959 1959

Bernhard Grzimek 1909–1987

Serengeti Shall Not Die At the end of the Second World War, Bernhard Grzimek took over the ruins of the Frankfurt zoo in defeated Germany. Following the sustained bombing there were only a few animals left alive among the wreckage. But, before long, the determined Grzimek had persuaded the occupying Allied Forces to help with feeding and rehousing the animals. At the beginning of the 1950s Grzimek headed to Africa looking for animals to repopulate his zoo. He also wanted to study and film the lives of wild animals in their natural habitats in order to improve their conditions in captivity. In 1956 his book No Room for Wild Animals became a bestseller. With its profits, and those of a film version, Grzimek offered to help the Tanzania National Parks Service buy more land to add to the Serengeti National Park. But the Tanzanian parks director had another suggestion: why not fund a survey to map the movement of the great herds as they migrate across the Serengeti? Only if they knew where these animals went could they draw up sensible boundaries for the park. Grzimek rose to the challenge. At the age of 48 he and his 23-year-old son Michael learned to fly, bought a light aircraft, and flew the 6,400 km from Frankfurt to the Serengeti. Over the next two years, the Grzimeks pursued their airborne task of counting and mapping the migration routes of huge herds such as wildebeest. They also made a film about their work, with cameraman Alan Root. Serengeti Shall Not Die was released in 1959 and won an Oscar that year for best documentary feature film.

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Palaces can be rebuilt if they are destroyed in wartime, but once the wild animals of the Serengeti are exterminated no power on Earth can bring them back.

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x www.serengeti.org

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1959 1959

Frank Craighead 1916–2001

John Craighead 1916–

Tracking the grizzly bear Until the 1950s, little was known about the grizzly bear (Ursus arctos horribilis). The animals were feared and had been slaughtered almost to the point of extinction in most of the US. One of the few places left with a viable population was Yellowstone National Park. In 1959, twin brothers, John and Frank Craighead, well known for their knowledge of falconry, were invited to Yellowstone to conduct the first scientific investigation of grizzly bears. Over the next 12 years, the Craighead twins courageously outfitted 29 bears with radio Grizzly bears collars and followed them for the next year. At first, the brothers used relatively primitive radio receivers but later developed satellite telemetry for the task. They documented what the bears ate, how they bonded and their territorial range, eventually showing that Yellowstone grizzlies roamed far beyond the park’s boundaries. In the course of their research, the brothers became advocates for the bears. When park officials decided to close the rubbish dumps where the grizzlies had congregated each spring to feed, the Craigheads warned them that the bears would either find new feeding areas beyond the park or die. The dumps had, in fact, become part of the grizzlies’ ecosystem. When the park went ahead with the closure in 1967, the Craigheads’ relationship with the Yellowstone administration deteriorated. The twins finally gave up their study in 1971 after refusing a demand by the park service to edit their findings before they were made public. They claimed that more grizzlies than ever were being killed and Frank accused the park of covering up the deaths. The Craigheads experienced partial vindication in 1975 when the grizzly bear came under the protection of the Endangered Species Act. Their pioneering research 110

not only appeared in National Geographic, but also in a book, Track of the Grizzly, published in 1979. Their work helped to save the grizzly from extinction in the lower 48 states of the US. Today, the big bear remains threatened, although its numbers appear to have stabilised. In Frank’s words:

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Alive, the grizzly is a symbol of freedom and understanding – a sign that man can learn to conserve what is left of the Earth. Extinct, it will be another fading testimony to things man should have learned more about but was too preoccupied with himself to notice. In its beleaguered condition, it is above all a symbol of what man is doing to the entire planet.

x www.grizzlybear.org

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Jr, Track of the Grizzly (San  F.C. Craighead Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1982)

1959 1959

Raymond Dasmann 1919–2002

Environmental conservationist During the late 1950s, Raymond Dasmann, who trained as a field biologist at the University of California at Berkeley, was studying deer populations in northern California. Despite convincing data that predicted a population crash unless the number of deer was reduced (the population was growing far faster than their range could support), preferably by liberalising hunting regulations, Dasmann and his colleagues were unable to build the necessary support among deer hunters who believed a doe hunt would lead to extinction. As a result, the deer population did indeed crash in the mid-1960s. By that time, Dasmann had published his first books. The Destruction of California was a call to action that became a staple text of US university ecology courses in the 1970s. His textbook Environmental Conservation, originally issued in 1959, would go into five editions. He fought for the title with the publisher at a time when the phrase was unknown. In the years that followed, Dasmann’s work took him to Africa, Sri Lanka and the Caribbean. His pioneering work on game ranching in Africa fostered the new field of eco-development and helped make ecotourism the multi-million-dollar industry it is today. While working with UNESCO he helped launch the Man and 111

Biosphere programme. He is also (along with Peter Berg) credited with the concept of ‘bioregionalism’, which opposes a homogeneous economy and a consumer culture that ignores its dependency on the natural world. Bioregionalism argues for the use of local food and materials, the cultivation of native plant species and living in a sustainable way.

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The Earth is the only known nature reserve in the entire universe.

”

Wild: The Autobiography of a Conservationist  Raymond F. Dasmann, Called by the(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002)

1959 1959

Gerald Durrell 1925–1995

My Family and Other Animals In 1945, at the age of 20, Gerald (‘Gerry’) Durrell became a junior keeper at Whipsnade Zoo in Bedfordshire, England. During his teens, Durrell’s family had lived on the island of Corfu where Durrell was home-schooled in zoology and kept a large number of wild animals as pets. A year later, financed by an inheritance, Durrell began animal-collecting expeditions for British zoos, to the British Cameroons (now Cameroon) in 1947 and to British Guiana (now Guyana) in 1949, followed by half a dozen other countries. During these forays, he witnessed the loss of habitat that was threatening many animal species with extinction. Soon, Durrell became noted for his efforts in animal conservation. He came to believe that only a private zoo would allow him ‘to create a sanctuary in which we could establish colonies of these threatened species so that, even if they become extinct in the wild state, they would not vanish forever’. In 1956, his book My Family and Other Animals, based on his time in Corfu, became a bestseller and enabled him to realise his dream. Three years later, he acquired Les Augres Manor on Jersey in the Channel Islands where he created the Jersey Zoological Park. Five years later, he founded the Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust. Today, despite its lack of large, crowd-pleasing animals and its relatively out-ofthe-way location, the zoo reports more than 250,000 visitors annually. It has some 1,900 birds, fish and other animals, comprising 190 species. Jersey was the first zoo to house only endangered breeding species and is a pioneer in the field of captive breeding.

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The great ecosystems are like complex tapestries – a million complicated threads, interwoven, make up the whole picture. Nature can cope with

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small rents in the fabric; it can even, after a time, cope with major disasters like floods, fires and earthquakes. What nature cannot cope with is the steady undermining of its fabric by the activities of man.

x www.durrellwildlife.org

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 Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

(London: Penguin, 2004 edn)

1959 1959

George Schaller 1933–

The year of the gorilla In the 1956, German-born George B. Schaller, a graduate in zoology and anthropology from the University of Alaska, took part in a biological survey of a little-known region in northeastern Alaska. This work indirectly led to the creation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. In 1959, sponsored by the New York Zoological Society, Schaller had turned his attention to the mountain gorilla of the Virunga Volcanoes in Central Africa. He spent two years in close intimacy with the mountain gorillas and, together with later 212 work by Dian Fossey, was instrumental in dispelling the public perception of gorillas as brutes by demonstrably establishing the deep compassion and social intelligence evident among them and how some traits of their behaviour parallel those of humans. His book, The Mountain Gorilla: Ecology and Behaviour, published in 1963, drew considerable attention. Schaller later recounted his experiences in The Year of the Gorilla. After working in India for two years on tigers and their prey, Schaller moved with his wife and two small children to the Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, spending over three years studying lions and their prey. His book The Serengeti Lion won the National Book Award in 1973 In 1970, Schaller conducted research in Pakistan on the snow leopard, wild sheep and goats. This work led to the setting up of Khunjerab National Park in the Karakoram Mountains. He went on to work on jaguars and other wildlife in Brazil in the late 1970s. From 1980, Schaller began the first-ever intensive research programme on wild giant panda ecology and behaviour, carried out for WWF in collaboration with Chinese scientists. The purpose of the project was to obtain basic life history information – social life, extent of travel, habitat requirements – to enable better conservation efforts. The resultant research – detailed in the book The Last Panda – revealed that these creatures, originally carnivores, have undergone an unusual evolution-

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ary change to a diet of difficult-to-digest bamboo. His breakthroughs in the study of panda ecology and behaviour formed the basis of giant panda conservation knowledge for years to come. During the 1990s, Schaller, now in his sixties, continued his conservation crusade by studying wildlife in Mongolia and Laos and on the Tibetan plateau of China. In the last-named, he has worked with the Chinese government to help establish several reserves, including the Chang tang Reserve, which covers about 120,000 square miles. During this century, Schaller’s work in Tibet has continued. He has also initiated research on Marco Polo sheep and snow leopards in Afghanistan and Tajikistan, and on the last Asiatic cheetah in Iran. Two of his most recent books are Tibet’s Hidden Wilderness and Wildlife of the Tibetan Steppe. As vice-president of the New York-based, Wildlife Conservation Society’s Science and Exploration Programme, his output of scientific and popular articles, books and documentary films has led him to be recognised as one of the world’s leading field biologists.

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A large animal needs a large area. If you protect that area, you’re also protecting thousands of other plants and animals. You’re saving all these species that future generations will want – you’re saving the world for your children and your children’s children.

x www.wcs.org

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and Other Beasts: Tales From a Life in  George B. Schaller, A Naturalist the Field (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2007)

1960 1960

Julian Huxley 1887–1975

Nature’s Red Cross In 1960, the eminent 73-year-old biologist and popular science writer Sir Julian Huxley visited East and Central Africa to advise on wildlife conservation in the area. He was appalled by what he saw. Many parts of the continent which 30 years before had been teeming with animals were now devoid of wildlife. Huxley wrote a series of articles for The Observer newspaper in which he warned the British public ‘that habitat is being destroyed and animals hunted at such a rate that much of the region’s wildlife could disappear within the next 20 years’. The public responded with concern. Among those who wrote to Huxley was businessman Victor Stolan who suggested an international organisation to raise funds for conservation. Huxley contacted the ornithologist Max Nicholson, Director-General of Britain’s The Nature Conservancy, who took up the challenge with enthusiasm. During the spring and summer of 1961, Nicholson gathered together a team to found ‘Nature’s Red Cross’. Sir Peter Scott, the vice-president of the Inter- 88

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national Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) (now the World Conservation Union) responded immediately, and the World Wildlife Fund (now WWF) was officially registered as a charity on 11 September 1961. The new organisation joined the IUCN at its headquarters, a villa in the small town of Morges on the northern shores of Lake Geneva. Meanwhile, a giant panda called Chi Chi had arrived at London Zoo in a blaze of publicity. Aware of the need for a strong symbol to overcome language barriers, the group agreed that the panda would make an excellent logo. Sir Peter Scott designed the famous logo based on sketches done by naturalist Gerald Watterson. In its first three years, WWF raised and donated almost $2 million to conservation projects around the world. One of the early grants was to the Charles Darwin Foundation in the Galapagos Islands, another was to purchase 6,668 hectares of the Gaudalquiver wetlands in southern Spain to help create the Doñana National Park. Its work was just beginning.

x www.panda.org

1960 1960

Joy Adamson 1910–1980

Born Free On 1 February 1956, George Adamson, senior warden for the Kenya Game Department, brought home three lion cubs whose mother he had been forced to shoot in self-defence. Adamson’s 47-year-old, Austrian-born wife Joy agreed to nurture them. Raising three lion cubs soon became too much for her, so two were sent to Rotterdam Blydorp Zoo when they were five months old. Elsa, the smallest, stayed behind. Because her infant charge had been born free, Adamson was determined that the lioness would not be tamed or domesticated. When Elsa reached sexual maturity, Adamson began to prepare her for a return to the wild. After much trial and error she succeeded but continued to enjoy yearly reunions with Elsa even after she had found a mate and raised three cubs. In 1960, Adamson wrote about the experience in her first novel Born Free. It became an instant international success and was translated into over 30 languages. With the sequels Living Free (1961) and Forever Free (1962), Adamson used her fame to publicise the plight of wild animals around the world. She pledged every penny earned by the books to wildlife preservation. In 1966, the film version of Born Free was released and helped spread the message even further. Zoos responded by creating more humane conditions for lions and other big cats such as larger outdoor enclosures.

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Adamson continued to live in her beloved Kenya. Her unique skill in handling and caring for wild animals often turned her home into an animal orphanage or veterinary hospital. She cared for everything from baby weaverbirds to baby elephants. Joy Adamson was murdered on 3 January 1980 near her camp in Shaba Nature Preserve, where she had been living for three years. One year later a Kenyan, Paul Ekai, who had worked for her but whom she had dismissed in 1979, was convicted of her murder. Her remains were cremated and, according to her wishes, her ashes scattered on Elsa’s grave.

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Since we humans have the better brain, isn’t it our responsibility to protect our fellow creatures from, oddly enough, ourselves?

x www.elsacanada.com

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A Lioness of Two Worlds  Joy Adamson, Born Free:(New York: Pantheon, 2000)

1960 1960

Jane Goodall 1934–

Pioneering primatologist In the summer of 1960, the British anthropologist Dr Louis S. Leakey sent a young English student called Jane Goodall – previously his secretary – out to the Gombe National Park on the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika. He had asked her to observe wild chimpanzees and record everything she saw. Along with Dian Fos- 212 sey, famous for living with gorillas, and Biruté Galdikas, who advanced 159 studies on orangutans, Goodall was one of the three women dubbed ‘Leakey’s Angels’. At first the chimpanzees fled whenever they saw Goodall. But she persisted, watching from a distance with binoculars. Gradually, the chimps allowed her closer. One day, she observed them stripping leaves off twigs to fashion tools for fishing termites from their nest. Until then, scientists had thought humans were the only species to make tools. On hearing this, Goodall’s mentor Leakey said, ‘Now we must redefine tool, redefine man, or accept chimpanzees as humans.’

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Five years later, Goodall earned her PhD in ethology (animal behaviour) at Cambridge University. She immediately returned to Tanzania to establish the Gombe Stream Research Centre. There, she defied the scientific convention of the time by giving the chimpanzees personal names rather than numbers. She made other discoveries such as observing that they could engage in a primitive form of warfare – in early 1974, a four-year chimpanzee war began at Gombe, the first record of longterm warfare in non-human primates. Goodall also noted courtship patterns and even adoption of infants. Goodall’s methodology revolutionised the field of primatology. To provide ongoing support for chimpanzee research she founded the Jane Goodall Institute which supports the Gombe research and is a global leader in the effort to protect chimpanzees and their habitats. With 19 offices around the world, the institute is widely recognised for innovative, community-centred conservation and development programmes in Africa and has a global youth programme, Roots and Shoots, which currently has over 8,000 groups in 96 countries. In 2006 she received the 60th Anniversary Medal of UNESCO and the French Légion d’Honneur.

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You cannot get through a single day without having an impact on the world around you. What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.

x www.janegoodall.org

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with the Chimpanzees  Jane Goodall, My Life(New York: Aladdin, 1996)

1961 1961

Kenneth Mellanby 1908–1993

Monks wood During the 1930s Kenneth Mellanby, a reader in medical entomology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, travelled to Africa to study the tsetse fly. While doing military service in the Second World War, Mellanby investigated scrub typhus, an acute infectious disease spread by chiggers (a larval stage of certain types of mite) in Burma and New Guinea. After the war his entomological research took him to Nigeria, where he founded that country’s first university in Ibadan, and then back to England and Rothamstead Experimental Station, one of the oldest agricultural research institutions in the world But it was during the 1960s that Mellanby made his major planet-saving contributions. In 1961, he became the Founding Director of the Monks Wood Research Station in Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. Over the next decade Mellanby drew atten117

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tion to the detrimental effects of chemical pollution, particularly pesticides, on the environment – echoing the concerns expressed across the Atlantic by Rachel Carson. 118 Instead of chemicals he advocated the use of biological control methods – the use of natural predators to keep pest populations under control. In 1970, he founded the journal Environmental Pollution. Among his publications was the seminal book Pesticides and Pollution. Monks Wood is now the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology where research continues on pollution and ecotoxicology, environmental processes and modelling, and Earth observation. In her book Philosophers of the Earth: Conversations with Ecologists (1972) Anne Chisholm observes that The ecological scene in America is dominated by individuals, but in Britain it is dominated by a place, Monks Wood, the Nature Conservancy’s main research station in Huntingdonshire. There is a larger concentration of ecologists at Monks Wood than anywhere else in Europe, and the work done there, since it was set up in 1960, has provided much of the substance, as opposed to the verbiage, of environmental debate.

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Convince me that what you are doing is good science and I’ll back you.

x www.ceh.ac.uk/sites/monks_wood.html

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and Pollution (London:  K. Mellanby, Pesticides The Scientific Book Club, 1967)

1962 1962

Rachel Carson 1907–1964

Silent Spring In 1952, a shy, 45-year-old marine biologist called Rachel Carson published her biography of the ocean. The Sea Around Us quickly moved into the national bestseller lists where it remained for 86 weeks, 39 of them in first place. By 1962, it had been published in 30 languages. By this time, Carson, who had been employed by the US Fish and Wildlife Service, had retired to devote herself to researching and writing what has since become known as the book that radically changed attitudes towards the environment. The project began when she received two letters. One came from a friend in Massachusetts bemoaning the large bird kills that had occurred on Cape Cod as the result of spraying dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). The other was from old friends, Stuart and Olga Huckins. It told of the destruction that aerial spraying of pesticides had caused to their two-acre private bird sanctuary at Power Point, Duxbury, Massachusetts. Carson spent four and a half years researching the effects of DDT and other synthetic pesticides then being used to enhance agricultural productivity. She con-

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cluded that the effects of pesticides and other industrial chemicals are felt throughout the food chain – that what was intended to kill an insect ends up poisoning larger animals and humans. The outcome of her research was Silent Spring. The book’s warnings about the previously littleremarked practices of introducing an enormous variety of industrial chemicals into wilderness, waterways and habitats with little concern for possible toxicity struck a chord with the general public. Carson observed: ‘We are subjecting whole populations to exposure to chemicals which animal experiments have proved to be extremely poisonous and, in many cases, cumulative in their effects. These exposures now begin at or before birth and, unless we change our methods, will continue through the lifetime of those now living’. Silent Spring was first serialised in The New Yorker in June 1962, then published in September of that year. It immediately sparked off a fierce debate. Attacks came from all of the chemical industry giants with American Cyanamid Company and Monsanto publishing a parody of Silent Spring entitled The Desolate Year which described a world where famine, disease and insects ran amok because chemical pesticides had been banned. Some of the attacks were more personal, questioning Carson’s integrity and even her sanity. But others came to her defence. Supreme 106 Court Justice William O. Douglas declared: ‘We need a Bill of Rights against the 20th century poisoners of the human race.’ In 1963 President John F. Kennedy summoned a Congressional Science Advisory Committee to examine the charge ‘Are pesticides publicly dangerous or aren’t they?’ Carson, in her last public appearance before her death from breast cancer in 1964, was called to testify. The committee’s report largely backed her claims. DDT was eventually banned in the US in 1972. Silent Spring remains in print and continues to inspire new generations to protect the living world and its creatures.

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The more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe around us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.

x www.rachelcarson.org

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Silent Spring (Boston, MA:  Rachel Carson, Mariner Books, new edn 2002)

1962 1962

Murray Bookchin 1921–2006

The anarchist ecologist The son of Jewish Russian immigrant parents, Murray Bookchin was imbued with Marxist ideology from his youth and remained vehemently anti-capitalist – but anarchist – throughout his life. He was the founder of the social ecology school of libertarian socialist and ecological thought. In 1962, writing under the pseudonym of Lewis Herber, he published his first American book Our Synthetic Environment six months before Rachel Carson’s Silent 118 Spring. The book received warm reviews from allies such as René Dubos and 138 William Vogt, but many were alienated by his radical politics. His groundbreaking essay ‘Ecology and Revolutionary Thought’ introduced ecology as a concept for radical politics. Other essays from the 1960s pioneered innovative ideas about ecological technologies. In the 1970s, Bookchin co-founded and directed the Institute for Social Ecology in Plainfield, Vermont, which soon acquired an international reputation for its advanced courses in eco-philosophy and alternative technologies. In 1982, Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom had a profound impact on the ecology movement, both in the US and abroad, especially Germany where it was an influence on the emerging Green Party.

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To speak of ‘limits to growth’ under a capitalistic market economy is as meaningless as to speak of limits of warfare under a warrior society. The moral pieties, that are voiced today by many well-meaning environmentalists, are as naive as the moral pieties of multinationals are manipulative. Capitalism can no more be ‘persuaded’ to limit growth than a human being can be ‘persuaded’ to stop breathing. Attempts to ‘green’ capitalism, to make it ‘ecological’, are doomed by the very nature of the system as a system of endless growth.

x www.social-ecology.org

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The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and  M. Bookchin, Dissolution of Hierarchy

(Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2005)

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1963 1963

Ghillean Prance 1937–

Recording and conserving the planet’s flora In 1963, Ghillean Prance, a 26-year-old English-born Oxford botanist graduate specialising in plant taxonomy (classification), went on a tropical expedition to Suriname on the edge of the Amazonian jungle, sponsored by the New York Botanical Gardens (NYBG). As Prance moved his surveying and collecting expeditions deeper into the jungle, he discovered the massive destruction of the Amazonian rainforest. During the next decade, working with both the NYBG and the Brazilian government, Prance dedicated himself to recording and conserving the plants and flowers of Amazonia. This involved the setting up of the NYBG’s Institute of Economic Botany and a faculty at the Instituto Nacional de Pesquisos da Amazonia in Manaus, Brazil. There, Prance was able to pass on his knowledge to countless students whom he saw as the future guardians of the forest ecosystem. The author of 17 books and over 400 scientific papers, one of Prance’s most widely read books, Extinction is Forever (1977), was co-authored with T. Elias. His strong Christian beliefs are evident in The Earth under Threat: A Christian Perspective. In 1987, Prance became director of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, London. As well as repairing the severe damage done to the gardens by the October 1987 devastating storm, Prance began to set up development programmes to research plants, fungi and ecosystems and to train botanists and horticulturalists worldwide, in short: ‘To enable better management of the Earth’s environment by increasing knowledge and understanding of the plant kingdom – the basis of life’. During Prance’s 11 years’ directorship, perhaps the most ambitious project was the Millennium Seed Bank at Wakehurst, Sussex. Its aim is to conserve not only seeds from all native British plants, but also a further 24,000 species of the world’s seed-bearing flora by 2010. The Millennium Seed Bank will act as a genetic storehouse for future generations. Knighted in 1995, Sir Ghillean Prance has received 14 honorary doctorates and a string of awards from universities and august bodies around the world, Supported by his wife Anne, he has continued to campaign diligently for plant conservation. In 1999 he became Scientific Director of the Eden Project. In 2002 the Weston Foundation sponsored the Royal Botanic Gardens to found a programme of Prance Fellowships to be administered from 2003 to 2007. 121

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As a biologist, I see evidence for climate change worldwide.

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1964 1964

Edward Pritchard Gee 1904–1968

Tea planter protects Indian wildlife In 1964, Edward Pritchard Gee, a British naturalist and tea planter of Upper Shillong, Assam, India, published his magnum opus The Wildlife of India. Gee had spent half a lifetime studying and photographing animals and birds throughout the Indian subcontinent. He had once sat in the open within 3 m of a lion and on another occasion fallen in front of a charging rhinoceros. It was Gee who, in 1933, rang the alarm bell concerning the threat to the Bengal tiger, warning of their possible extinction before the end of the century. Their numbers had dropped from 100,000 to fewer than 5,000. It was also Gee who mounted an expedition into the leech-infested marshes of Kaziranga to record and film the cream-coloured langur monkey. In 1956, the langur was given the scientific name Presbytis geei (Gee’s golden langur) in his honour. After Indian President Pandit Nehru had been given a guided tour of Kaziranga by Gee, this former paradise for hunters and poachers was turned into a world-famous sanctuary. From a few dozen Asiatic one-horned rhinoceroses in 1908 there were more than 1,500 animals at Kaziranga by 1999. In 1959, the Fauna Preservation Society appointed Gee to make a survey of Chitwan’s wildlife. He recommended the creation of a national park north of the Rapti River and this was established in 1961. In 1962 the newly formed World Wildlife Fund gave a grant to Gee to visit the Rann of Kutch to ascertain the total numbers and present population trends of the Indian wild ass. Gee recorded 870, but by 1975 numbers had dropped to 400. A wild ass sanctuary was set up and, by the mid1980s, the population had risen to 2,000.

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Some of the noblest and most beautiful animals in the world are to be found in India. But they are unlikely to survive outside the pages of Kipling and the memoirs of big-game hunters unless something is done quickly to save them.

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1964 1964

Jacques-Yves Cousteau 1910–1997

Pioneer of marine conservation In 1943, a French naval officer, Jacques-Yves Cousteau, worked with engineer Emile Gagnan to perfect the aqualung, a compressed-air breathing device which allowed a diver to stay underwater for several hours. It opened up a new world of exploration. Seven years later, using a converted American minesweeper, renamed Calypso, Cousteau and his team began to explore and map the planet’s oceans and rivers. They would do so for the next four decades. To finance his trips, Cousteau produced a succession of more than 70 documentary films, winning three Oscars for The Silent World (1956), The Golden Fish (1960) and World Without Sun (1964), as well as many other top awards including the Palme d’Or in 1956 at the Cannes Film Festival. His work did a great deal to popularise knowledge of underwater biology and was featured in the long-lived documentary television series The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau which began in 1966 and ran for ten years. Throughout his work, Cousteau was a great advocate for marine conservation. He vehemently rejected spear-fishing and highlighted previously unconsidered destructive practices such as the use of dynamite to stun and kill fish in large numbers, and the devastating impact of lost fishing gear on sea lions, dolphins and other marine life. Cousteau coupled his activist cinematography with public speeches and lobbying. In October 1960 a large amount of radioactive waste was going to be discarded in the sea by the European Atomic Energy Community. Cousteau organised a publicity campaign which gained wide popular support. The train carrying the waste was stopped by women and children sitting on the railway, and it was sent back to its origin. In the 1970s, he convinced the Italian government to remove some 500 drums of toxic chemicals dumped in the Mediterranean. In 1973 Cousteau formed the Cousteau Society for the protection of ocean life: it now has more than 300,000 members. Even towards the end of his life, the ‘oceanographic technician’ (as he preferred to be called) was diving and actively promoting conservation. In 1990 he took six children, each from a different continent, to Antarctica on a special mission to call attention to the importance of protecting the Antarctic environment.

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When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.

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x www.cousteau.org

1964 1964

Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente 1928–1980

El amigo de los animales In 1964, a dentist called Felix Rodriguez de la Fuente and his falcon Durandal were invited to appear on Spanish television. Over the previous decade, de la Fuente had been reintroducing falconry from Saudi Arabia back into his native Spain. Indeed, the following year, his TV programme Art of Falconry brought him popular recognition. From 1968, de la Fuente appeared regularly on television in the programme Felix, el Amigo de los Animales (Felix, Friend of the Animals). Now followed a sequence of programmes, presented by de la Fuente, which made him famous throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Fauna of the Planet (later renamed Wildlife) was followed by Blue Planet which produced 153 programmes between 1970 and 1973. Finally, Man and the Earth, which he scripted, directed and presented from 1974 to 1979, was sold to 40 countries and watched by an estimated 800 million viewers. Alongside this, de la Fuente co-edited The Wildlife Encyclopaedia, the first of its 11 volumes published in 1970. He also authored or co-authored 21 books, 300 articles and was a delegate at almost 500 conferences. As co-founder and President of ADENA, Spain’s Association for the Protection of Nature, de la Fuente was able to lobby for the protection of his country’s wilderness. He also led a campaign to protect the Iberian wolf from extinction, was involved in campaigns to preserve the Iberian bear and lynx, and directed Operation Bahari where falcons were used to keep the runways and flight paths of Spain’s airports clear of birds. In 1980, while filming a TV series about Dogs of the World, de la Fuente’s helicopter crashed in Alaska and he was killed. He was just 52. In 1999, the newspaper El Mundo published 11 CD-ROMs of de la Fuente’s series on Iberian Fauna. The following year, the Spanish Academy of Television Sciences and Arts voted his Man and Earth series as the best production in the entire history of Spanish television.

x www.felixrodriguezdelafuente.com (Spanish-language site)

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1964 1964

Neftalí García 1938–

A relentless campaigner against multinational pollution One man, more than any other, has stood up for the protection of the environment of the archipelago of Puerto Rico, ruled since 1898 by the US. He is Dr Neftalí García. After obtaining a PhD in chemistry from Ohio State University, Garcia returned home where he very soon started to campaign against Puerto Rico losing the beauty of its green mountains and valleys through pollution from US-controlled industries. During the 1950s Puerto Rico experienced a rapid industrialisation, due in large part to Operación Manos a la Obra (Operation Bootstrap, an offshoot of Roosevelt’s New Deal) which aimed to change Puerto Rico’s economy from agriculture-based to manufacturing-based. From 1964, and for the next three decades, García campaigned for 323 hectares in west-central Puerto Rico to be declared a state forest before copper, gold and silver mining could cause major acidification and destroy it. From 1968, García was campaigning, with eventual success, to defeat three separate attempts to construct nuclear power plants in Puerto Rico. In 1972 he helped prevent a petroleum superport being built on beautiful Mona Island. From 1975, he was fighting against Exxon and Mobil exploiting Puerto Rico’s northern coast for its oil and gas reserves with inevitable damage to marine life. By 1979, García was involved in stopping the building of coal-fired power plants, and then helping to shelve a plan for a hazardous waste dump. But perhaps García’s greatest crusade concerned the 134 km2 island of Vieques just off the eastern coast of Puerto Rico, once a paradise of mangroves, lagoons, beaches and coconut groves. From 1941 the US Navy began to use the island for military target practice, destroying the coconut groves and the beaches. They bombarded it so heavily that eventually some parts of the island looked like the surface of the moon. The depleted uranium shells caused further long-term environmental damage, not to mention a cancer rate among the islanders that was 26% higher than that of the main island residents. In May 2003 García’s efforts finally bore fruit when the US Navy left Vieques. While this was an important victory, the struggle now continued for what the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques called the 4 Ds: demilitarisation, decontamination, devolution or return of the land and development. Today, over 60% of Vieques is the largest wildlife sanctuary in the Caribbean under the protection of the US Fish and Wildlife Service.

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1965 1965

Claudia ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson 1912–2007

Protecting America’s wildflowers When Claudia Alta Taylor was two, her nursemaid commented, ‘She’s as pretty as a ladybird’, and the nickname virtually replaced her given name for the rest of her life. In 1965, two years after her husband, Lyndon, became US President, 53-yearold Claudia ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson began a beautification programme by planting hundreds of trees and thousands of tulips and daffodils in Washington DC. Johnson travelled widely to make speeches which helped push through Congress the Highway Beautification Act of 1965. This legislation included restrictions on billboards along the nation’s highways. In 1969, Johnson founded the Texas Highway Beautification Awards, going on to chair a committee that landscaped and planted flowering trees on a popular 19 km hike and bike trail along the Colorado River. In 1977, President Gerald Ford presented Johnson with the country’s highest civilian award, the Medal of Freedom. She also received the Congressional Gold Medal from President Ronald Reagan in 1988. In 1982, on her 70th birthday, Johnson and the actress Helen Hayes opened the National Wildflower Center at Austin, Texas, later renamed the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It was dedicated to conserving and re-establishing America’s indigenous plants and natural landscapes. In 1987, the US government required that federal highway funds be spent to plant native species. In 1988, aged 76, Johnson co-authored the book Wildflowers across America with Carlton Lees.

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The clash of ideas is the sound of freedom.

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 Lady Bird Johnson and Carlton B. Lees, Wildflowers across America

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(New York: Abbeville Press, 2001)

1965 1965

Russell E. Train 1920–

Holding the environmental line In the late 1950s, Russell E. Train, an attorney and jurist specialising in US tax affairs, went on two safaris to East Africa. Observing the fragility of the African wilderness in the face of encroachments, in 1959 Train set up the Wildlife Leadership Foundation. Through it, he attempted to help the emerging nations of Africa establish an infrastructure of professional resource management in order to establish effective wildlife parks and reserves. From 1965 Train abandoned the safety of the tax court to work as president of the non-profit Conservation Foundation. Three years later he returned to government to prepare a report for the Nixon administration. In 1970 this became the foundation for the National Environment Policy Act. Soon after, Train was made first chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). While Train and the CEQ were formulating interna152 tional policies, William Ruckelshaus at the EPA was boldly implementing them. With the onset of the Watergate crisis, Train took over from Ruckelshaus as the EPA’s second Administrator and, from 1973 to 1977, ‘held the environmental line’ during fuel supply instability. In 1978, Train, aged 58, was named president and CEO of the World Wildlife Fund (US), becoming the chairman of the board in 1985–1994 and, later, Chairman Emeritus. His legacy continues through the Russell E. Train Education for Nature Program, which is helping produce the next generation of conservation leaders.

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It was the leadership of the United States, both at home and abroad, that helped move the world through positive and cooperative engagement to new levels of environmental commitment and achievement. We need to find that road again; it is the only path to a sustainable future for humanity.

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x www.worldwildlife.org/efn

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1965 1965

Clair Cameron Patterson 1922–1995

A passionate champion against lead In 1965, Dr Clair Cameron Patterson, a Californian Institute of Technology geochemist, published a paper entitled ‘Contaminated and Natural Lead Environments of Man’ in the Archives of Environmental Health. In this work, Patterson reported that, since 1923 and the commercial production of tetra-ethyl lead as a fuel additive, levels of lead in humans living in industrial societies had increased 100-fold and levels of lead in the atmosphere 1,000-fold. Because of the significant public health implications of his findings – exposure to high concentrations of lead was known to be toxic – he devoted the rest of his life to removing as much introduced lead from the environment as possible. Following publication of his paper, Patterson was accused of being more a zealot than a scientist. His findings were greeted with derisive and scornful insults from toxicologists, sanitary engineers and public health officials. Executives at the powerful Ethyl Corporation – a major producer of tetra-ethyl lead – are said to have offered to endow a chair at Caltech if ‘Patterson were sent packing’. Undeterred, Patterson wrote to Pat Brown, Governor of California, claiming that its Public Health Department was not doing all it should to protect the population from the dangers of lead poisoning. Several months later, Governor Brown signed a Bill to establish air quality standards in California. Patterson progressed to a national campaign. He further justified his findings by showing how analyses of ice cores taken from Greenland indicated a serious lead increase in the environment since the Industrial Revolution. In 1971 the National Research Council released a report entitled Airborne Lead in Perspective to guide the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s policies on lead pollution. The report was accused of being too heavily weighted towards industrial scientists. Patterson’s work was largely ignored. But, by December 1973, the EPA announced a programme to reduce lead in petrol by 60–65% in phased steps. It was the first move towards unleaded petrol. Lead was removed from all gasoline in the US by 1986. Americans’ blood lead levels dropped by 80% soon after this. Meanwhile, Patterson continued to add to the body of evidence for lead’s damaging effects. Analysing the bones of 1,600-year-old Peruvian skeletons, he found a 700–1,200-fold increase in concentrations of lead in modern humans. He went on to focus on improving analytical methods for measuring lead in food and food cans. By 1993, lead solder was removed from all food containers in the US. It is interesting to speculate on how many additional years of life to the inhabitants of our planet have resulted from the work of Clair Cameron Patterson.

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Most persons cannot see the ills of a culture constructed by 10,000 years of perverted utilitarian rationalizations because they perceive only its

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material technological forms through the eyes of a diseased Homo sapiens mind.

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1965 1965

Wendell Berry 1934–

The farming poet In the 1960s, Wendell Berry was offered a post teaching English and creative writing at the University of Kentucky. Initially, Berry decided to spend vacations on a farm in the Kentucky River Valley in Henry County which had been in his family for five generations since the early 1800s. Instead, with his wife Tanya, Berry renovated the house, mended the fences and began to farm in a traditional, organic way. Waste was turned into compost and draft horses were employed to replace ‘exhaust-stinking, engine-roaring, gasolineguzzling tractors’. Berry wrote with pencil and manual typewriter in the daytime to avoid the need for electric lighting. A strong Christian, Berry authored 32 books of essays, poetry and novels. His non-fiction serves as an extended conversation about his personal values. According to Berry, the good life includes sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work and local economics. The threats Berry finds to this good life include industrial farming and the industrialisation of life, ignorance, hubris, greed, violence against others and against the natural world, soil erosion and environmental destruction. Berry is among the most eloquently Christian of contemporary authors, frequently referring to the Gospels, the stewardship of creation and peacemaking in his writings. His defence of agrarian values and appreciation of traditional farming techniques, such as those of the Amish, are well known.

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Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.

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 Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter: A Novel (Emeryville, CA: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005)

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1965 1965

Ralph Nader 1934–

Consumer and green activist In 1962, 28-year-old Ralph Nader wrote an article entitled ‘American Cars: Designed for Death’. After graduating from law school, Nader began to practise as a specialist in car safety. In 1965, he published his book Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-in Dangers of the American Automobile. The book exposed such unsafe cars such as General Motors’ dangerously defective Corvair. Nader became an American folk hero when General Motors’ executives hired private detectives to harass him and Nader sued them for invasion of privacy. General Motors was forced to admit wrongdoing before the US Senate Committee and settled the case with $280,000 compensation. With this money, and his reputation for standing up to predatory corporations, Nader helped launch the modern consumer movement. Nader now went on to create a team of energetic young lawyers and researchers, called ‘Nader’s Raiders’, who produced systematic exposés of industrial hazards, pollution, unsafe products and government neglect of consumer safety laws. Their targets included the meat-packing industry, unsafe trucks and polluting paper mills. In 1971, Nader founded the non-governmental organisation Public Citizen as an umbrella campaign group for these projects. Today, Public Citizen has over 140,000 members and numerous researchers investigating Congress, health, environmental, economic and other issues. Their work is credited with helping to pass the Safe Drinking Water Act and prompting the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency and Consumer Product Safety Commission. In 1996, Nader appeared on the ballot in some states as the presidential candidate of the US Green Party, but ran a largely symbolic campaign, making only a handful of public appearances to promote his candidacy. In the 2000 elections, again as Green Party candidate, Nader won nearly 3 million votes nationwide, close to 3% of the votes cast. In what turned out to be a desperately close contest between George W. Bush and Al Gore, some argued that Nader’s campaign lost Gore the presidency. 307 Atlantic Monthly’s list of the 100 most influential Americans, published in December 2006, ranked Nader as the 96th most influential American: ‘He made the cars we drive safer; 30 years later, he made George W. Bush the President.’

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The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.

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x www.nader.org

 Ralph Nader, The Ralph Nader Reader

(New York: Seven Stories Press, 2000)

1966 1966

Barbara Ward 1914–1981

Only one Earth During the mid-1960s, several writers used the phrase ‘spaceship Earth’ as a metaphor for understanding the Earth as a closed life-support system on which we are all crew members. Mass media guru Marshall McLuhan declared, ‘There are no passengers on spaceship Earth. We are all crew.’ US economist Kenneth A. Boulding, serving on Washington State University’s Committee on Space Sciences, wrote 65 of ‘Earth as a spaceship’, while visionary engineer Richard Buckminster Fuller wrote an Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. Then, in 1966, the book Spaceship Earth appeared. It was written by a 52-yearold British economist called Barbara Ward, who used the metaphor to encourage thinking of Earth as a single system with a common interest in successful survival. During the previous 25 years, Ward had written for The Economist, particularly on the topic of poverty in the developing world. Ward advocated the transfer of wealth from rich to poor countries. She started to see a close connection between wealth distribution and conservation of planetary resources: ‘the careful husbandry of the Earth is sine qua non for the survival of the human species, and for the creation of decent ways of life for all the people of the world’. She used the phrases ‘inner limits’ and ‘outer limits’ to refer to the inner limits of the human right to an adequate standard of living and the outer limits of what the Earth can sustain. In 1971 she founded the International Institute for Environment and Development, acting as president from 1973 and chairwoman from 1980. Following Space138 ship Earth, in 1972 she co-authored with René Dubos Only One Earth: The Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet for the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm. With Dubos, she is seen as a pioneer of the term ‘sustainable development’. Environmentalist Richard D. North called Ward and Dubos the ‘parents’ of a concept that ‘did not know its own name at first’. The same year, Dubos took part in a film documentary, Survival of Spaceship Earth. Ward became an adviser to the Vatican, the UN and the World Bank. In 1976 she was made a life peeress with the title Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth. In 1979, three years before her death, Ward published her final book, Progress for a Small Planet. It examined the coming conflict between the rising demands for

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economic growth in all economies and the exhaustion of resources and irreversible ecological damage by ever-increasing global consumption.

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We cannot cheat on DNA. We cannot get round photosynthesis. We cannot say I am not going to give a damn about phytoplankton. All these tiny mechanisms provide the preconditions of our planetary life.

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 Barbara Ward, Spaceship Earth (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966)

1966 1966

Barry Commoner 1917–

Access to environmental information During the early 1950s, Barry Commoner, a biology professor at Washington University in St Louis, became concerned about the danger posed by radioactive fallout produced by above-ground testing of nuclear weapons in the Nevada Desert. Finding that much of the data from the tests remained classified, Commoner formed the St Louis Committee for Nuclear Information to campaign for public access to this information. Disputing the official government position that nuclear testing posed little health risk to humans, an analysis of children’s baby teeth demonstrated that such testing caused radioactive build-up in humans. This determination was one of the factors that led to the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. As Commoner’s concerns broadened, he studied wider environmental issues. In 1966, his book Science and Survival advocated the use of solar and other types of renewable energy, and he also established the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University. In 1970, a Time magazine cover story called him ‘the Paul Revere of ecology’ for his leadership in the field. The year after, Commoner published The Closing Circle: Man, Nature and Technology, laying down four laws of ecology: everything is connected to everything else, everything must go somewhere, nature knows best, and there is no such thing as a free lunch; in nature, for every gain there is a cost. He suggested a left-wing, eco-socialist response to the limits-to-growth thesis, postulating that capitalist technologies, rather than population pressures, are chiefly responsible for environmental degradation. In 1980, he founded the Citizens’ Party to serve as a vehicle for his ecological message; his candidacy for US President on the Citizens’ Party ticket won 233,052 votes (0.27% of the total).

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The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

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 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Bantam Books, 1980)

1966 1966

Robert H. Boyle 1929–

The riverkeeper By the 1960s, New York’s Hudson River was dying, a victim of decades of environmental disregard and law-breaking. In 1966, Robert Boyle, a staff writer at Sports Illustrated, formed the Hudson River Fishermen’s Association in order to do something about its lamentable condition. Three years later, Boyle brought out a book, The Hudson River: A Natural and Unnatural History, in which he describes the waterway as ‘trout stream and estuary, water supply and sewer, ship channel and shad river, playground and chamber pot’. Over the years, Boyle continued to use his pen on behalf of the Hudson. His articles exposed the discovery of polychlorinated biphenyls in the river’s striped bass fish. His testimony and other efforts halted the development of Westway, a New York City superhighway and real-estate project. In 1980, realising that something more radical had to be done, the 55-year-old Boyle came up with the idea of an independent Hudson River Foundation for Science and Environmental Research. He demanded that utilities exploiting the river endow the foundation before he would agree to settle lawsuits brought by the Fishermen’s Association, now known as Riverkeeper. In 1980, the Consolidated Edison power company, after a 17-year legal battle spearheaded by the NGO Scenic Hudson and Riverkeeper, dropped its plan to build a huge hydroelectric facility on Storm King Mountain which would have damaged a major spawning area of the striped bass. This victory – the Storm King case – demonstrated how grassroots organisations could successfully fight for the right to clean water and unspoiled open spaces and was hugely influential on the emerging environmental movement in the US. In 1983, Riverkeeper launched a boat on the Hudson and inaugurated the Riverkeeper programmes, led by the second head of Riverkeeper, John Cronin (Tom Wyatt had been the first). Later that year, Riverkeeper quickly received national attention when it discovered that oil tankers were regularly discharging toxic petrochemicals from their holds into the river, then moving upstream to tank up with clean Hudson water to sell to the Caribbean island of Aruba. Fortunately, Channel Four NBC news cameramen were on board to capture this event on video. Riverkeeper won an historic out-of-court settlement – and has since taken on over 300 additional environmental law-breakers. Riverkeeper’s 1986 action against Exxon, which was also guilty of polluting the Hudson,

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is considered an environmental landmark, inspiring the creation of many similar groups around the US. In recent years, Boyle has revised Natural and Unnatural History, the book that helped save a major river.

x www.riverkeeper.org

and Unnatural History  Robert Boyle, The Hudson: A Natural(New York: Norton, 1969)

1967 1967

Lynn Townsend White Jr 1907–1987

Tracing the roots By the mid-1960s, people had begun to wake up to the growing environmental crisis and some were asking how it all began. One of these was Lynn Townsend White Jr, the 60-year-old director of the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, who was a key theorist on environmental history In an essay published in the journal Science in 1967 entitled ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis’, White laid the blame on Judaeo-Christian beliefs, specifically the passage in Genesis (1:28) that gives man ‘dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the Earth’. According to White, this theological sanction for domination of the Earth’s bounty has been buttressed by material changes in Western civilisation, in particular the invention of the vertical plough in the 11th century, the scientific revolution of the 17th century and, crucially, the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century. White argued that these various theological and material factors had brought humanity to the brink of environmental disaster. He concluded that applying more science and technology to the problem won’t help. Rather, it is humanity’s fundamental ideas about nature that must change. We must abandon ‘superior, contemptuous’ attitudes that make us ‘willing to use [the Earth] for our slightest whim’. However, White did not propose to jettison the Judaeo-Christian tradition, but to retrieve a minority voice within it. He concluded his article by proposing St Fran- 14 cis of Assisi as the patron saint of ecology as a way of instilling a sense of respect for all creatures and limiting human domination over nature. The essay was reprinted many times, launching a debate about the role of religion in creating and sustaining the West’s exploitation of the natural world. It also galvanised interest in the relationship between history, nature and the evolution of ideas, thus stimulating new fields of study such as environmental history and ecotheology. However, many saw White’s argument as a direct attack on Christianity and Judaism. Some commentators, including the 2000 US presidential candidate Al Gore, consider that White’s analysis of the impact of the Bible and Genesis in 307

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particular is misguided. They argue that Genesis describes a model of stewardship rather than dominion, and asks man to take care of the world’s environment.

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We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.

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White Jr, Medieval Religion and Technology  Lynn Townsend (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978)

1967 1967

Alan Chadwick 1909–1980

A Shakespearean actor and organic gardener In 1967, Dr Paul Lee decided to create a Student Garden Project at the newly established University of California campus at Santa Cruz (UCSC). He hired a tall, 58year-old English master gardener called Alan Chadwick. As a child in a wealthy Edwardian family, Chadwick had been introduced to the beauties of a large English country garden by his mother, and inspired about the interrelatedness of living things by his tutor, the Austrian philosopher Rudolph Steiner. During the 1920s and 1930s, although Chadwick became a gold medal skier and skater, a professional painter and violinist, as well as a Shakespearean actor, his first love remained gardening. He dug, he planted, he observed. His faith in civilisation was almost destroyed while serving as the commander of a Royal Navy minesweeper during the Second World War. But then, in the 1950s, Chadwick went to Cape Town in South Africa and accepted an offer to act in A Streetcar Named Desire. While there, he also transformed a 10 hectare plot in the Admiralty Gardens, testing out a synthesis of the biodynamic teachings of his former tutor, Steiner, with the incredibly productive, double-digging French intensive method. In 1967, on the recommendation of his close friend Countess Freya von Moltke, Chadwick accepted the job at UCSC. Working with only hand tools and organic additives, Chadwick and his stu-

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dent assistants, using his raised-bed method, transformed a steep, chaparral-covered hillside into an incredibly beautiful and prolific garden, bursting with flowers, vegetables and fruit trees. Building on Chadwick’s success and the popularity of the Student Garden Project – now the Alan Chadwick Garden – UCSC administrators set aside some land on the campus’s lower meadows for a 25 acre student farm. During the past 40 years more than 1,200 students have served in the apprenticeship programme at Chadwick’s farm and garden, since 1994 part of UCSC’s Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems. Chadwick went on to develop a garden at the Zen Centre, Green Gulch, north of San Francisco, and another at Saratoga. He founded the Round Valley Garden Project in Covelo, California, where he worked and taught for over five years before finally moving to Virginia where his last project, Carmel in the Valley, took place. Today, there are Chadwick-inspired gardens and farms in 50 different countries around the world.

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We are the living links in a life force that moves and plays around and through us, binding the deepest soils with the farthest stars.

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x casfs.ucsc.edu

1967 1967

Herman Daly 1938–

Redirecting the global economy In 1967, Herman Daly, aged 29, a Ford Foundation visiting professor from Louisiana State University, arrived in Brazil. He was to serve at the University of Ceara, helping to train students for graduate work in economics programmes overseas. However, a political dispute shut down the university for several months, leaving the young American economist with little to do but read and contemplate his new surroundings. Gradually, Daly began to make connections between economics, his experience of life in north-eastern Brazil, which had all but exhausted its natural resources and was experiencing rapid population growth, and the works of environmentalists such as Rachel Carson and 118 Paul Ehrlich. It occurred to Daly that, just as human 144 population growth affects ecosystems, so does economic growth. His professional concerns have since

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been two: the relationship between the economy and the environment, and the relationship of the economy to ethics. In pursuing them he has made a masterly synthesis of the application of classical concepts of capital and income to resources and the environment, the laws of thermodynamics, and the insights of ecology, particularly in relation to levels of flows of materials and energy through economic systems. This synthesis has resulted in a quantum leap in understanding as to why the economy is destroying the environment, which has deeply influenced the whole course of the debate as to what should be done about it. Returning to Brazil, he became Fulbright Senior Lecturer until, aged 50, he was appointed Senior Economist in the Environmental Department of the World Bank, with a mission to develop policy guidelines related to sustainable development. During his six years with the World Bank, Daly was one of the founders of the International Society for Ecological Economics, a major forum bringing together economists, ecologists, academics and environmental activists. He has published numerous books, including Steady-State Economics (1977, 1991), Valuing the Earth (1993), Beyond Growth (1996) and Ecological Economics and the Ecology of Economics (1999). He is co-author with theologian John B. Cobb Jr of For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment and a Sustainable Future, which received the Grawemeyer Award for ideas for improving world order. Since 1994, Daly has been Senior Research Scholar at the School of Public Affairs, University of Maryland. From here, he has continued to develop and publish his influential thoughts on ecological economics and uneconomic growth.

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If you’ve eaten poison, you must get rid of the substances that are making you ill. Let us then, apply the stomach pump to the doctrines of economic growth that we have been force-fed for decades.

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the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward  Herman Daly and John B. Cobb Jr, For Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, updated expanded edn 1994)

1967 1967

Paolo Lugari 1944–

Las Gaviotas Paolo Lugari was educated in Colombia by his Italian father, a lawyer and engineer. Having returned from a UN scholarship studying development in the Philippines, the young Lugari launched a highly publicised and successful national campaign to save an historic village near Bogotá from being drowned by a government hydroelectric project. 137

In 1967, aged 23, he set about building a self-sustaining community near Vichada in the Orinocan llanos – a remote, almost barren savannah in eastern Colombia. He was convinced that the llano was the perfect setting to design a visionary community for sustainable living. If a community could thrive here, it would be possible to live anywhere. In 1971, Lugari staked a claim to 25,000 acres of the llanos. The new village was named after the graceful river terns – Las Gaviotas – common in the area. Before long the community, which was made up of local peasants, agronomists, engineers, scientists, doctors and artists, had introduced super-efficient wind turbines to generate wind energy, sleeve pumps to tap previously inaccessible sources of water and solar kettles to sterilise drinking water. They also planted 1.6 million Caribbean pine trees as a 1,000 hectare renewable crop, unexpectedly allowing the indigenous rainforest to re-establish itself. The resin tapped from the pines is poured into recycled cardboard boxes and used to make colophon, a key ingredient for the paint and paper industry. It won Las Gaviotas an innovation award from the Colombian government. In the late 1980s, the Gaviotans took their sleeve pumps and windmills to more than 600 villages as part of the Colombian government’s Agua Para Todos (Water For All) programme. In some areas of Colombia, gaviotas is now the local word for windmills. Since Las Gaviotas refuses to patent inventions, preferring to share them freely, their designs have been copied from Central America to Chile. Lugari has since organised the refurbishment of 40,000 local authority houses in Bogotá with solar-powered water heating and refrigerators, and the creation of semi-industrial kitchens powered by cotton wool heated to 180°C in vacuum tubes. He was also the driving force behind the construction of a hospital in Vichada which produces its own energy, distils its own water, ensures naturally conditioned air, cooks organically farmed products and cultivates its own medicinal plants.

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The only deserts are deserts of the imagination. Gaviotas is an oasis of imagination.

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x www.friendsofgaviotas.org

A. Weisman, Gaviotas: A Village to Reinvent the World (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 1998)

1968 1968

René Dubos 1901–1982

Think globally, act locally Dr René Dubos would be remembered if only for the fact that in 1938 this Parisborn microbiologist had come up with tyrothricine, the first commercially produced antibiotic with immediate medical applications.

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But in his later years, this modern-day Renaissance man explored the interplay of environmental forces and the physical, mental and spiritual development of humankind. The main tenets of his humanistic philosophy were: global problems are conditioned by local circumstances and choices; social evolution enables us to rethink human actions and change direction to promote an ecologically balanced environment; the future is optimistic since human life and nature are resilient and we have become increasingly aware of the dangers inherent in natural forces and human activities; and we can benefit from our successes and apply the lessons learned to solving other contemporary environmental problems. In 1968 Dubos wrote a seminal work: So Human an Animal. Winner of the 1969 Pulitzer Prize, this book concerns people’s environment and their health, particularly the way in which humans adapt to a rapidly changing world. Dubos is the author of the now popular maxim ‘think globally, act locally’, which recognises that efforts to address global environmental problems can turn into action only by considering the ecological, economic and cultural contexts of our local surroundings. The phrase was originated when Dubos was an adviser to the UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972. In 1979, Dubos further suggested that ecological consciousness should begin at home. He believed that there needed to be a creation of a world order in which ‘natural and social units maintain or recapture their identity, yet interplay with each other through a rich system of communications’. By 1981 the 80-year-old Dubos was ready to present his theory of the five Es – ecology, economy, energy, aesthetics (esthetique in French) and ethics – which he argued must serve as the basic concepts for the good management of the planet.

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Man shapes himself through decisions that shape his environment.

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How we are Shaped by Surroundings and Events  René Dubos, So Human an Animal: (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, new edn 1998)

1968 1968

Edward Abbey 1927–1989

Cactus Ed and his monkey-wrench approach There were two sides to Edward Abbey. There was the Edward Abbey who at various times in his life attended universities in Pennsylvania, New Mexico and Edinburgh, receiving graduate and postgraduate degrees. He was the quiet scholastic craftsman. Then there was Cactus Ed, a self-created, brawling revolutionary who wrote the novel The Monkey Wrench Gang. The novel centres on a small group of ‘eco-warriors’ who travel the American west attempting to put the brakes on uncon-

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trolled human expansion by committing acts of sabotage against industrial development projects. Abbey claimed the novel was intended as symbolic satire and was written merely to ‘entertain and amuse’. Others saw it as a how-to guide to non-violent ‘ecotage’ (sabotage to protect the environment), as the main characters attack things (such as road-building equipment) not people. The novel inspired environmentalists frustrated with conventional methods of activism. Earth First! was formed as a result in 1980, advocating eco-sabotage or ‘monkey-wrenching’. Although Abbey never officially joined the group, he became associated with many of its members and occasionally wrote for the organisation. Abbey adored the American south-west and the desert. From the late 1950s, he worked as a seasonal ranger for the US Park Service at Arches National Monument near the town of Moab, Utah. It was there that he penned the journals that would become one of his most famous works, Desert Solitaire (1968), which Abbey described ‘not [as] a travel guide, but an elegy’. The book is regarded as one of the finest nature narratives in American literature, and has been compared to Aldo 75 Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac and even Thoreau’s Walden. In it, Abbey vividly 31 describes the physical landscapes of southern Utah and delights in his isolation as a backcountry park ranger, recounting adventures in the nearby canyon country and mountains. When he died in 1989, Abbey had arranged for his body be put in an old sleeping bag and taken to his funeral in the bed of a pickup truck. ‘I want my body to help fertilise the growth of a cactus or cliff rose or sagebrush or tree’. This fertilisation was initiated by his friends somewhere in the Cabeza Prieta desert in southern Arizona.

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Humanity’s view of the world as our property, our dominion, our stewardship, is like that of a child who imagines himself as the centre of existence, with all other beings having no purpose but to serve him.

x www.abbeyweb.net

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A Season in the Wilderness  Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: (New York: Ballantine, new edn 1985)

1968 1968

Margaret Owings 1913–1999

Saving the sea otter For 20 years, Margaret Owings, supported by her husband, the noted architect Nathaniel Owings, had campaigned to keep the scenic Big Sur coast, in California, pristine. Among the threats observed by Owings was the survival of the southern sea otter (Enhydra lutris), the population of which had dwindled to only 650. For centuries sea otters had been hunted for their luxurious fur – the densest of all 140

mammals with up to 394,000 hairs per cm2 – with the result that sea otter populations were greatly reduced to the point of near extinction in many parts of their historic range. In 1968, together with Dr Jim Mattison, an avid outdoor sportsman, Owings founded Friends of the Sea Otter (FSO). The first meetings of the FSO were held at the Owings’ home; and without funds it was only through sheer force of will that the organisation continued. Margaret Owings lobbied legislators both in Sacramento and Washington DC. She managed to rally scientists, conservationists, educators and friends to embrace the cause of saving the sea otter. Recently, thanks to her efforts, the sea otter population along the central Californian coastline has been estimated at 2,300. But this was not Owings’ only crusade. In 1962, after a cougar (Puma concolor) had been killed for bounty near her Californian home, Owings waged another battle to abolish bounty and sports hunting of cougars in the state. She also played a crucial role in preventing construction of a freeway through Redwood National Park. Owings’ concern extended beyond the boundaries of her home state. She 118 founded the Rachel Carson Council, and was also a trustee of the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation. During the last months of her life, 86-year-old Owings was preparing a compilation of her writings and artwork. Entitled Voice from the Sea: Reflections on Wildlife and Wilderness, it was published by Monterey Bay Aquarium Press less than a month before her death.

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Wilderness and wildlife each carry a renewing sense of meanings that were elusive – and suddenly become clear. Each should be treasured in the same way.

”

x www.seaotters.org

Owings, Voice from the Sea: And Other  Margaret WentworthReflections on Wildlife and Wilderness (Monterey, CA: Monterey Bay Aquarium Press, 1998)

1968 1968

Carl Sverker Åström 1915–

First international conference on environmental protection In 1968, when Carl Sverker Åström, a 53-year-old permanent representative for Sweden at the UN, proposed an international conference on the protection of the environment to be held in Sweden, little interest was shown. Undeterred, and work245 ing with Maurice Strong, Åström used his considerable experience at the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs to realise his aim. In June 1972, the UN Conference on the Human Environment, with its motto ‘One Single Earth’, was held in Stockholm.

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In a brilliant diplomatic operation, Åström overcame resistance from strong western European opponents who wanted the environment compartmentalised and from developing countries who saw the developed world’s interest in the environment as a new form of colonialism. As a result, instead of the expected ‘talking shop’, a great number of practical action-oriented decisions were made. A key outcome was the establishment of environment ministries and agencies in more than 100 countries. Stockholm also marked the beginning of a boom in non-governmental and inter-governmental organisations dedicated to environmental preservation, with an estimated 100,000 such organisations formed since the conference. In order to push forward the outcomes of Stockholm, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) was established in Nairobi. Two key outcomes, the Stockholm Declaration and Action Plan, were particularly instrumental in the subsequent rapid development of international environmental law. Principle 21 of the Declaration has special significance as it places responsibility on nation-states to ensure that activities within their jurisdiction or control do not cause damage to the environment beyond their own borders.

1968 1968

Garrett J. Hardin 1915–2003

The tragedy of the commons On 13 December 1968 an essay entitled ‘The Tragedy of the Commons and Beyond’ was published in the US journal Science. It was destined to become one of the journal’s most requested papers. The author of this ‘bioethical’ essay was one Garrett J. Hardin, the 53-year-old professor of human ecology at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Hardin argued that we face problems – including human population growth and use of the Earth’s natural resources – that cannot be solved by technical means. Free access and unrestricted demand for a finite resource would, said Hardin, ultimately doom the resource through over-exploitation. His controversial solution was to suggest that we must limit our freedoms if we are not to ravage the Earth’s ability to survive the threats of overpopulation, resource depletion and pollution. He called for ‘mutual coercion, mutually agreed upon’ as the only alternative. Like Malthus, Hardin’s burning concern was overpopulation, causing him to 23 write controversial papers supporting abortion on demand (criticised by the right), immigration and sociobiology (criticised by the left), as well as conservation. ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ caused much controversy through Hardin’s proposal that the solution to the problem of overpopulation must result in ‘relinquishing the freedom to breed’, a policy later adopted by the People’s Republic of China.

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He also became known for Hardin’s Laws. The first of these states: ‘You cannot do only one thing’, an observation on the interconnectedness of nature. The second states: ‘There’s no away to throw to’ and is a compact statement of one of the major 144 problems of the affluent society. The third is based on Paul Ehrlich’s I = P A T. Hardin and his wife Jane were both members of the Hemlock Society and believed in individuals choosing their own time to die. They did so in their Santa Barbara home in September 2003, shortly after their 62nd wedding anniversary.

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In a competitive world of limited resources, total freedom of individual action is intolerable.

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x www.garretthardinsociety.org

1968 1968

Anton Rupert 1916–2006

Peace parks An Afrikaner from the Cape, Anton Rupert made millions as the owner of The Rembrandt Group which owns brands such as Rothmans, Cartier and Dunhill. Rupert had for a long time been interested in wildlife conservation. In 1968, he was a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund (now WWF). He would stay on the board for the next 22 years. During this time Rupert conceived a plan that would raise massive funds for the organisation and for conservation worldwide. His idea was The 1001 Club – the ‘1’ was WWF President Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands, while the other 1,000 were wealthy individuals who could be persuaded to invest $10,000 for life membership. The idea took off and funds were secured. New membership of the club now costs $25,000 and continues to provide the WWF with a strong financial base. In 1990, Rupert met with Mozambique’s President Joaquim Chissano to discuss the possibility of establishing a permanent link between some of the protected areas in southern Mozambique and their adjacent counterparts in South Africa, Swaziland and Zimbabwe. His idea was for trans-frontier parks (also known as trans-frontier conservation areas [TFCAs] or ‘peace parks’) which have been defined as large areas that straddle frontiers between two or more countries and cover largescale natural systems encompassing one or more protected areas. In essence, TFCAs can therefore extend far beyond designated protected areas, and can incorporate such innovations as biosphere reserves and community-based natural

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resource management programmes. With an initial grant of 1.2 million Rand (US$260,000) from the Rupert Nature Foundation, the Peace Parks Foundation was established on 1 February 1997 with the aim of facilitating the establishment of TFCAs in southern Africa. Nelson Mandela, Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands and Rupert were the founding patrons of the Peace Parks Foundation. Today, six TFCAs on the borders of South Africa have been identified. International agreements regarding the development of all six have been signed and are in various stages of development.

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He who covets all, will lose all.

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x www.peaceparks.org

1968 1968

Paul Ehrlich 1932–

Anne Ehrlich 1933–

The population bomb Since his childhood in Maplewood, New Jersey, Paul Ehrlich, a professor of biology at Stanford University, had been fascinated by insects, particularly butterflies. In the early 1960s, he and his wife Anne had come to regard butterflies as an indicator of ecological decline. Their observations led them to develop a new field of study they called ‘conservation biology’ and its theoretical handmaiden ‘co-evolution’ – the mutual effects of multiple species on survival and breeding. In an article published in the New Scientist in December 1967, Paul Ehrlich asserted that the battle to feed humanity was lost and predicted, that between 1970 and 1985, the world would undergo vast famines as the Earth’s resources could not indefinitely support the planet’s growing population. At the suggestion of David Brower, Paul Ehrlich distilled the substance of his lec- 145 tures and articles encouraging birth control into a book: The Population Bomb. First

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published in 1968, more than 3 million copies were sold around the world, catapulting the Ehrlichs to fame and controversy. In the wake of the book’s success, Ehrlich, along with Richard Bowers and Charles Remington, formed the organisation Zero Population Growth (now renamed Population Connection) to educate young people and advocate progressive action to stabilise world population at a level that can be sustained by the Earth’s resources. Since then, the Ehrlichs, still working from Stanford University, have continued to write articles (over 800) and books such as Population, Resources, Environments: Issues in Human Ecology (1970), The Race Bomb (1977) and, in 1990, The Population Explosion, a sequel to The Population Bomb. In 1983, Ehrlich played an important role as one of 40 prominent scientists to draw attention to the environmental dangers of nuclear war. Ehrlich has formulated the impact of human populations on the environment as the equation I = P A T, where I, the human impact on the natural habitat, is a product of three factors, human population (P), affluence (A) and technology (T). Ehrlich explains that we must reduce the impact of these three elements to maintain a healthy environment. In 1984, the Ehrlichs founded the Stanford Centre for Conservation Biology, actively promoting the conservation of biodiversity and disseminating information about the latest ecological research findings.

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If the services provided by ecosystems are not allowed to continue, civilisation cannot continue. Environmental destruction is the result of human acts and can be resolved by human acts.

x www.populationconnection.org

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R. Ehrlich and Anne H. Ehrlich, The Population  Paul Explosion (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990)

1969 1969

David Brower 1912–2000

Friend of the Earth In 1966, when the US Bureau of Reclamation was planning to flood the Grand Canyon to produce and sell hydroelectric power, they did not reckon on David Brower, a prickly and seasoned campaigner who had spent 14 years as executive director of the Sierra Club, building up the membership from an elite 2,000 to an influential 77,000 with assets of over $3 million. The increase in funding and members was attributed to Brower’s use of unorthodox and often upsetting advertising campaigns, showing the ravages of exploitation on animals and the environment, a previously unused but now common device of conservationists, and his 145

merchandising campaigns, built originally on the successful large-format photograph books. This was not Brower’s first campaign to save an entire canyon ecosystem. Three years earlier he had attempted to protect a deep, narrow ravine on the Colorado River in northern Arizona called Glen Canyon which was being threatened with development by the Bureau of Reclamation. But in a trade-off compromise the Sierra Club’s board had voted not to oppose the Glen Canyon proposal in order to keep the Bureau of Reclamation from erecting another dam on the Green River in Dinosaur National Monument. The embittering experience of negotiating away wondrously shaped rock walls, cascading waterfalls, bowers of ferns, quiet pools and Indian inscriptions had made Brower determined not to let it happen again. Now, faced with the Grand Canyon threat, Brower convinced the Club to publish a huge, full-page newspaper ad in both the New York Times and the Washington Post. The ad said simply: This time it’s the Grand Canyon they want to flood. THE GRAND CANYON. When the government official in charge of dam-building declared that the canyon ‘lakes’ created by the dams would enable people to see the walls better from boats, Brower ran another ad saying: ‘Should we also flood the Sistine Chapel so tourists can get nearer the ceiling?’ Within 12 months, Brower and his supporters had won. Brower’s aggressive approach led to the creation of national parks and seashores in Kings Canyon, the North Cascades, the Redwoods, Great Basin, Alaska, Cape Cod, Fire Island and Point Reyes. His attitude was uncompromising: ‘We’re not just borrowing from our children, we’re stealing from them – and it’s not even considered to be a crime.’ But Brower’s methods for campaigning for his environmental causes alienated many Sierra Club members, including Ansel Adams, who described 58 Brower and his followers as ‘inquisitors’. In 1969, the year the indefatigable Brower was dismissed from the conservative Sierra Club, he founded the more radical Friends of the Earth (FoE), giving it the motto ‘Think globally, act locally’. By 1982, Brower went on to found the Earth Island Institute. Two years later he resigned from Friends of the Earth and went to work with the institute in San Francisco, preserving sea turtles and dolphins. Thrice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, towards the end of his life Brower felt he had failed.

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All I did was to slow the rate at which things are getting worse. When they win, its forever. When we win, it’s merely a stay of execution.

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x www.sierraclub.org

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1969 1969

Pete Seeger 1919–

Activist songwriter builds a sloop By the 1960s, Pete Seeger was known worldwide as a folk singer who wrote provocative, anti-war and civil rights lyrics to songs such as ‘Where Have All The Flowers Gone?’, ‘If I Had A Hammer’, ‘Little Boxes’ and ‘We Shall Overcome’. He was blacklisted by the US government, along with hundreds of other left-leaning entertainers for many years. Seeger’s attention increasingly turned towards environmental issues. At this time, the Hudson River was thick with pollution: raw sewage, toxic chemicals, oil pollution and bacteria. In 1965 he wrote a song about this called ‘Sailing Down My Dirty Stream’. He then got the idea ‘to build a boat to save the river’. Following cocktail parties for the wealthy and concerts to raise funds, a 106 foot traditional Hudson River sloop, to be named Clearwater, began to take shape at a shipyard in Maine. When not performing, Seeger helped out at the shipyard. Launched in June 1969, Clearwater began her crusading voyages. Seeger had also formed an organisation of the same name in 1966, dedicated to advances in sewage treatment, industrial waste disposal and the discharge of major pollutants into the Hudson. In 1970, the Clearwater sailed to Washington DC to highlight the plight of the Hudson and other waterways. Seeger and fellow singer Don McLean were on board. At a press conference attended by more than 70 members of the House of Representatives, they launched into a duet. This event is credited with sowing the seeds of the US Clean Water Act and, in turn, cleaning up the Hudson. Seeger continued to sail the Clearwater, singing ‘The river may be dirty now, but it’s getting cleaner every day’. To date more than 400,000 schoolchildren and tens of thousands of adults have sailed on the sloop, receiving hands-on education about the Hudson’s unique ecosystem which blends freshwater streams from the Adirondack Mountains with the salt tides of the Atlantic Ocean around New York City. Although no longer on the board of the Clearwater Organisation, Seeger’s latest campaign is to revive ‘floating swimming pools’ on the Hudson, allowing the public to once again enjoy the river. He also remains involved with the Great Hudson

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River Revival (also known as the Clearwater Festival), an annual two-day music festival held on the banks of the Hudson.

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Technology will save us if it doesn’t wipe us out first.

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x www.clearwater.org

1969 1969

Mario Boza 1942–

The father of the Costa Rican national park system During the 1960s, logging was seriously reducing the tropical forests and massive biodiversity of Costa Rica. In 1969, two graduate students, 27-year-old Mario Boza and 24-year-old Alvaro Ugalde, were employed to run a new national park system. Ten years earlier, Boza had travelled to North America where he had been so impressed by the Great Smoky Mountains National Park that, upon his return, he drew up a master plan for protecting one of Costa Rica’s most spectacular volcanoes – the Poás Volcano – as if it were already a national park. Boza’s resulting master’s thesis would become the blueprint for the Costa Rican National Park Service. Over the next 30 years, Boza was instrumental in the transformation of a budding park system into one that can truly be called a model for the world. He wrote an influential book: The National Parks of Costa Rica (1998). Today, national parks make up over 12% of Costa Rica’s land surface (and some ocean territory too), and are surrounded by or otherwise supported by another system of protected areas, mostly forest. The total takes up about 25% of Costa Rica’s land area. Now a consultant with the Wildlife Conservation Society, Boza envisioned the Path of the Panther biological corridor, to link parks and protected areas throughout the length of Central America. The Path of the Panther served as a blueprint for the creation of the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor, signed by all seven central American nations at the Presidential Summit of the Americas in 1994 and funded by nearly $100 million in international support. Boza is currently leading an initiative to expand the Path of the Panther into the Mesoamerican Biological Corridor in an ambitious programme to link biological corridors and parks, ultimately creating an unbroken chain of protected areas from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego. Work is currently stalled, but the vision is extraordinary.

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In many countries natural resources will continue to be destroyed and there will be major catastrophes, but there will also be excellent examples to follow, such that in 50 years there will be more positives than negatives.

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1970 1970

Tom J. Cade 1928–

Falconer saves the peregrine in America By the late 1960s, the fastest creature on the planet was seriously threatened by the use of the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT). The peregrine falcon (Falco peregrinus) can reach speeds in excess of 320 km per hour as it dives onto its 118 prey. But pesticide build-up, as identified by Rachel Carson, interferes with reproduction, thinning eggshells and severely restricting birds’ ability to reproduce. By 1968 there were only 19 breeding pairs of peregrine falcons in the entire US and none east of the Mississippi River. Ornithology professor and falconer Dr Tom J. Cade from Cornell University in New York state was acutely aware of the situation. In 1965, Cade had been among 60 participants at a conference on threats to the peregrine. He believed the peregrine falcon could be saved by using a falconry technique called ‘hacking’, whereby birds bred in captivity are released into the wild. The programme he and his colleagues set up in 1970 became known as the Peregrine Fund. In 1972, Cade was immensely relieved and encouraged to hear that William 152 Ruckelshaus, the first Administrator of the US Environmental Protection Agency, had fought against the lobbying of pro-pesticide advocates and banned the use of DDT. When the peregrines were ready for release, they would no longer run the risk of poisoning. In addition, the Endangered Species Act 1973 afforded further protection. In 1974, several of the 20 falcons bred at Cornell University were released on the New Paltz campus of New York State University, within sight of the Shawangunk ridge of the Catskill Mountains, the location of several historic peregrine eyries. By 1975 the Peregrine Fund was releasing falcons on a consistent basis. Cade now began to work with Pete McLain of the New Jersey Division of Fish and Wildlife so that, by 1980, New Jersey became the first state east of the Mississippi to have wild nesting birds at Forsythe National Wildlife Refuge. Out of this grew the Eastern Peregrine Recovery Plan with five regions designated for releases. By this time, Cade had published his book The Falcons of the World. Between 1974 and 1997, more than 6,000 captive-bred peregrines were released in 34 states, and many were soon busily nesting again in the wild.

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Falcons of the World (Ithaca,  Tom Cade, The NY: Cornell University Press, 1982)

x www.peregrinefund.org

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1970 1970

Edward (‘Teddy’) Goldsmith 1928–

The Ecologist During the 1960s, the careers of the Goldsmith brothers, James and Edward (‘Teddy’), could not have been more different. James went into big business, first dealing with pharmaceutical then food supply industries. Teddy became a globetrotting philosopher, an anthropologist who had begun to believe that the survival of tribal peoples and the environment were inseparable. To develop these ideas, in 1970 Teddy Goldsmith launched a new magazine he called The Ecologist. As editor until 1990 and then again from 1997 until 1998, Goldsmith has been fighting to expose the myriad forces ravaging the planet – from genetic modification to nuclear power and from industrial pollution to habitat loss. The Ecologist came to prominence in 1972 with its special issue Blueprint for Survival which sold 500,000 copies in 17 languages. Goldsmith became one of the founders of the Ecology Party (now the Green Party) in the UK, the first in the world. In 1975, Goldsmith began teaching courses in ecology and related subjects at Michigan University. The following year, working with Denis de Rougemont, JeanMarie Pelt, Jacques Ellul and Edouard Kressman, the French-speaking Goldsmith set up Ecoropa (Ecologica Europa) while also taking part in France’s first environmental campaigns. Goldsmith’s bilingual activities enabled him to launch a French edition of The Ecologist and to write a book, La Médicine à la Question, published in 1981. While creating versions of The Ecologist in Spain, Brazil, India and New Zealand, Goldsmith co-authored such books as The Social and Environmental Effects of Large Dams, The Earth Report 190 and, with James Lovelock, Gaia: The Thesis, the Mechanism and the Implications. Following publication of his tenth book, 5,000 Days to Save the Planet, Teddy Goldsmith received the Right Livelihood Award and was also made a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur for his services to France.

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Why aren’t more people angry? Modern man is wrecking the planet and doing so at an increasingly rapid rate.

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x www.theecologist.org

1970 1970

Oren Lyons 1930–

You are the environment Chief Oren R. Lyons, or Jo Ag Quis Ho, was born into the Turtle Clan, one of six clans of the Hautenosauna nation. He was raised in the traditional ways of the Iroquois on the Seneca and Onondaga reservations in New York state. During the 1960s, having graduated from Syracuse University College of Fine Arts, Lyons became a successful commercial artist in New York City. He also exhibited his paintings of Native American life. In 1970, Oren returned to Onondaga where he became a leading advocate for Native American causes, including human rights and the environment. He has taken part in the meetings of Indigenous Peoples of the Human Rights Commission of the UN for many years and helped to establish the Working Group on Indigenous Populations in 1982. He serves on the Executive Committee of the Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival and is a principal figure in the Traditional Circle of Indian Elders, an annual council of traditional grassroots leadership of the major Indian nations of North America. In 1990, he was the negotiator between the government of Quebec, New York state, and the Mohawk nation in the violent 78-day stand-off at Oka. Mohawk Indians had taken up arms against plans to allow development on ancient burial sites. The following year he led a delegation of 17 American Indian leaders to meet with President Bush Sr in Washington DC. In 1992 he was invited to address the General Assembly of the UN and open the International Year of the World’s Indigenous People at the United Nations Plaza in New York. During that year he also organised a delegation of Native Americans to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and was invited by Maurice Strong to address the national delegations. He has been a tireless advocate against deforestation, pollution of rivers and hazardous waste dumping. Among the awards he has received are the Ellis Island Congressional Medal of Honour, the National Audubon Award, the First Annual Earth Day International Award of the UN, and the Elder and Wiser Award of the Rosa Parks Institute for Human Rights.

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The environment isn’t over here. The environment isn’t over there. You are the environment.

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1970 1970

William D. Ruckelshaus 1932–

An attorney takes charge In July 1970, a law to establish an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the US was passed in response to the growing public demand for cleaner water, air and land. Prior to the establishment of the EPA, the US government had not been able to take coordinated action on harmful pollutants. The first Administrator of the EPA was a brilliant, 38-year-old Indianapolis-born attorney called William D. Ruckelshaus. Initially, he concentrated on developing the new agency’s organisational structure, going on to enforce actions against several polluted cities and industrial polluters. Ruckelshaus also set health-based standards for air pollutants and standards for automobile emissions, requiring states to submit air quality plans to the new agency. Ruckelshaus had read Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. In 1972, defying his sci- 118 entific advisers and intensive lobbying by pro-pesticide advocates, he banned the use of dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (DDT) for nearly all purposes in the US. In April 1973 he was appointed Acting Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and, in the same year, Deputy Attorney General of the US Department of Justice. Ruckelshaus and his boss Elliot Richardson famously resigned their positions within the Justice Department rather than obey an order from President Richard Nixon to fire the Watergate special prosecutor Archibald Cox who was investigating official misconduct on the part of the president and his aides. After working for the forest products firm Weyerhaeuser Company, in 1983 Ruckelshaus was asked by Ronald Reagan’s Chief of Staff James Baker to return to the EPA to deal with a crisis caused by mass resignations over mishandling of the Superfund law which was attempting to deal with abandoned toxic waste. During his second term at the agency, 1983–85, Ruckelshaus oversaw the removal of another harmful pesticide, ethylene dibromide (EDB) from US agricultural use. He reaffirmed the EPA’s commitment to a federal–state partnership to restore and protect the Chesapeake Bay, and helped introduce tighter controls on hazardous waste management. In his sixties, Ruckelshaus served on US President Bill Clinton’s Council for Sustainable Development, as Chairman of Enterprise for the Environment and as special envoy to the Pacific Salmon Treaty between the US and Canada. He is currently chairman of the board of the World Resources Institute and serves on the boards of many non-profit organisations.

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“

Nature provides a free lunch, but only if we control our appetites.

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x www.epa.gov

1970 1970

Sylvia Earle 1935–

Outspoken advocate for marine conservation In 1970, the US Navy, the Department of the Interior and NASA organised an allfemale research expedition, where aquanauts lived for two weeks in an underwater laboratory, 15 m deep, off the Virgin Islands. During this time they experienced an underwater earthquake. Leading the project was 35-year-old marine biologist, Dr Sylvia Earle. To the surprise of Earle and her colleagues, the publicity surrounding this adventure made them into celebrities. Like astronauts, when they returned to land they were given a ticker-tape parade and a White House reception. As a result of the publicity, Earle was increasingly in demand as a public speaker. She became an outspoken critic of marine issues such as overfishing, pollution and habitat loss. Linking up with undersea photographer Al Giddings, Sylvia began to write for National Geographic and to produce books and films about deep-sea exploration. In the 1990s Earle was Chief Scientist at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration where, among other duties, she was responsible for monitoring the health of North America’s water. From 1998 to 2002 she led the Sustainable Seas Expeditions, a five-year programme to explore and study the US national marine sanctuaries sponsored by the National Geographic Society and funded by the Goldman Foundation. An expert on the impact of oil spills, she was called on to lead several research trips during the Gulf War and following the spills of the ships Exxon Valdez and Mega Borg. In 1992 she founded Deep Ocean Exploration and Research (DOER) to design, operate, support and consult on manned and robotic sub-sea systems. To date, Earle has led more than 60 deep-sea expeditions, totalling 7,000 hours underwater. She was named Time magazine’s first ‘Hero of the Planet’ in 1998.

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I want to share the exhilaration of discovery and convey a sense of urgency about the need for all of us to use our talents and resources to continue to explore the nature of this extraordinary ocean planet.

x www.doermarine.com

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A. Earle and Wolcott Henry, Wild Ocean: America’s Parks  Sylvia under the Sea

(Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 1999)

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1970 1970

Denis Hayes 1944–

Earth Day In 1969, Denis Hayes, a graduate student at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, read a news report of a speech by US Senator Gaylord Nelson calling for a series of campus ‘teach-ins’ on the environment. Following a meeting and a long discussion with Senator Nelson, Hayes decided to drop his Harvard studies in order to organise the national effort. Hayes hired a staff of experienced organisers, named the campaign ‘Earth Day’ and urged students, in addition to campus teach-ins, to organise rallies in their communities to protest against growing environmental problems. He also enlisted teachers, labour, and a wide variety of civic organisations. On 22 April 1970, an estimated 20 million Americans of all ages and from all walks of life participated in the Earth Day celebrations from coast to coast. Millions of schoolchildren picked up litter, while hundreds of thousands of college students held teach-ins, rallies, and demonstrations. Congress adjourned for the day so that all its members could return to their districts to attend rallies. The singer and activist Pete Seeger was a keynote 147 speaker and performer at the event held in Washington DC. Actors Paul Newman and Ali McGraw hosted the huge rally held in New York. Earth Day, and the subsequent poll defeats of seven of a ‘Dirty Dozen’ members of Congress named by Hayes and his staff, led directly to the passage of landmark laws on clean air (1970), clean water (1972), and to protect endangered species (1973). US President Richard Nixon, no environmentalist, felt compelled by the size of the rallies to quickly create the Environmental Protection Agency so as to not surrender this new environmental agenda to the Democratic Party. During the Carter Administration, Hayes headed the federal Solar Energy Research Institute. Then, after teaching engineering at Stanford University and practising law in Silicon Valley for several years, in 1990 he directed the first international Earth Day, involving an estimate 200 million people in 141 countries. In 2000, Hayes returned to chair the 30th anniversary of Earth Day (which was finally able

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to expand into China), and he remains chairman of the network coordinating Earth Day activities worldwide. More than 180 nations now take part in what is now the world’s most widely observed secular holiday. Today, Hayes is president of the Bullitt Foundation in Seattle, which gives millions of dollars a year to promote models of sustainable development in the Pacific Northwest. Time magazine selected him as one of its ‘Heroes of the Planet’, Look magazine named him one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century, and the National Audubon Society included him in its list of the 100 Environmental Heroes of the 20th century.

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The sunshine that strikes American roads each year contains more energy than all the fossil fuels used by the entire world.

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x www.earthday.net

1971 1971

Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen 1906–1994

Father of bio-economics In 1971, Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, a brilliant, Romanian-born economics professor at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, was the first to formally demonstrate the thermodynamic foundations of the economic process. His book The Entropy Law and the Economic Process demonstrated that the second law of thermodynamics plays a central role in production theory, with implications for the sustainability of economic growth. He argued that the entropic nature of the economic process, which degrades natural resources and pollutes the environment, constitutes a real and present danger. The Earth is entropically winding down naturally, and economic advance is accelerating the process. Humans must learn to ration the meagre resources they have so profligately squandered if they are to survive. Although generally ignored by mainstream economists, this work became a cornerstone in the fields of ecological and evolutionary economics. Far from being pessimistic, Georgescu-Roegen emphasised the difference between a rich life and the life of a rich person. Today, his work is gaining influence and his insights are being grafted into the new field of evolutionary economics.

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In the perspective of entropy, every action of a human or of an organism, and even every process of nature, can lead only to a deficit for the overall system.

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 Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen, The Entropy Law and the Economic Process (New York: iUniverse, 1999) 155

1971 1971

José Lutzenberger 1926–2002

Protecting the natural environment of Brazil During the 1960s, José Lutzenberger was working as an engineer for the German chemical firm BASF. One day Lutzenberger asked the owner of an apple orchard if he wasn’t afraid to eat apples after they were sprayed with BASF’s herbicides and pesticides. The owner replied that he didn’t eat the fruit himself but only sold it to other people. When he heard this, Lutzenberger immediately resigned from BASF and returned to the town of his birth, Porto Alegre in Brazil. In 1971 he founded Agapan, Brazil’s first environmental organisation. Agapan quickly made a name for itself by leading a successful campaign to stop air pollution at a Norwegian wood pulp factory in Porto Alegre. The campaign forced the company to sell up to a Brazilian concern which installed anti-pollution equipment. In 1987, Lutzenberger started a second environmental organisation he called Gaia to focus on global issues. Lutzenberger was one of the first to denounce the destruction of the Amazon rainforest with the 1976 publication of his book The End of the Future: A Brazilian Ecological Manifesto and by appearing as narrator in a BBC television documentary series on the subject. ‘Today in my country, Brazil, we are flooding thousands of square kilometres of pristine rainforest to make electricity for three mills that export aluminum’, he lamented. In 1990 Lutzenberger agreed to become Environment Minister in the civilian government of President Fernando Collor. In the two years he spent in office, Lutzenberger worked to reverse long-standing government policies that favoured corporate interests and encouraged exploitation of the Amazon. Overcoming strong opposition from miners and loggers, he helped carve out a 93,000 km2 Amazon sanctuary for the Yanomami Indians and pushed for rigorous enforcement of laws to punish industrial polluters. He was also instrumental in the decision by Brazil to sign the Antarctic Treaty and join the International Whaling Commission. He even arranged for Britain’s Prince Charles to visit the Amazon in the royal yacht 218 Britannia, hosting an environmental gathering on board. In May 1992, Rio de Janeiro became the venue for the biggest ever UN conference on the environment – the first Earth Summit – but Lutzenberger did not attend. His sharp tongue and confrontational tactics offended many of Brazil’s most powerful interests, including the military which accused him of wanting to hand the Amazon over to international supervision. He also tangled repeatedly with

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the national forest service which he saw as corrupted by logging companies. In March 1992, less than three months before the Earth Summit that he had lobbied to have held in Brazil, he stepped down and returned to activism. He attended the parallel alternative summit in Rio and gave a passionate speech warning of the dangers from the transnational biotechnology corporations which were beginning to take over seed companies. Over the next ten years, Lutzenberger devoted his energies to promoting sustainable agriculture, giving courses on organic farming around the globe.

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We must learn to look at Nature, at Creation, as something sacred of which we humans are only a part – or we will have no future. We need a new, actually very old, holistic ethics, an ethics of reverence for life in all its forms and manifestations.

”

x www.fgaia.org.br

1971 1971

Roger Payne 1935–

Recording whale song In 1967 Dr Roger Payne dropped his research on the sound world of owls and bats when he discovered, with colleague Scott McVay, that the eerie sounds made by humpback whales are actually recognisable ‘songs’ – long, complex sequences of repeated phrases. In 1971, Payne set up the Whale Conservation Institute (WCI) in Lincoln, Massachusetts, and the Ocean Alliance and began to conduct detailed research on whales and how to preserve their marine environments. The January 1979 edition of National Geographic included a record called ‘Songs of the Humpback Whale’. Some 10.5 million copies of the album were printed – the largest single pressing in the history of the recording industry. Writing about whale song in the same issue of the magazine Payne warned: ‘Pollution will soon replace the harpoon as the next mortal threat to whales and, ultimately, humanity.’ Since then, Payne has come to be regarded as an eloquent spokesman for whales and their welfare. He has led over 100 expeditions to study every species of large whale in the wild. His longest continuous study has been of the behaviour of more than 1,000 individual Argentine right whales (Eubalaena australis). Payne has authored many books and articles on whales, also presenting television documentaries, with his work reported in more than 35 films. He co-scripted an IMAX film, Whales. In the wake of ‘Songs of the Humpback Whale’, a new recording, ‘Whales Alive’, was released in 1989, presenting songs composed by whales but arranged and played by humans.

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Whales are humanity’s canary in the coal mine . . . As ocean pollution levels increase, marine mammals like whales will be among the first to go.

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x www.oceanalliance.org

1971 1971

Peter Raven 1936–

A steward of botanics In 1971, Peter Raven, for nine years a professor of botany at Stanford University, moved to St Louis to take charge of the 100-year-old Missouri Botanical Garden. He has been there ever since. Under his direction, it gradually became one of the leading tropical plant research faculties in the world. The northern Andes, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru are home to at least one-fifth of the world’s biological diversity, including perhaps 60,000 species of plants, endangered by development and poorly studied. Raven organised his staff at the Missouri Botanical Garden to catalogue threatened species and to work alongside these nations to help them develop their own plans to protect their natural resources. To do this, Raven increased his staff from 85 to 354 employees and, thanks largely to donations, the garden’s budget from $650,000 to $20 million. Today, it is a world-class centre for botanical research and education. Raven has authored more than 400 articles and 16 books, including Biology of Plants (now in its seventh edition). During his tenure as Home Secretary to the US National Academy of Sciences, Raven was instrumental in convening two landmark conferences, in 1986 and 1997. Time magazine, in its 1999 Earth Day issue, declared Raven one of its ‘Heroes of the Planet’ who is ‘doing extraordinary things to preserve and protect the environment’. Among the Missouri Botanical Gardens’ more recent additions is the Climatron, a geodesic dome covering half an acre and housing some 1,200 species of plants in a natural, tropical setting.

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. . . we humans are causing a mass extinction of species greater than the extinction that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago . . . This should be front-page, red-banner headline news, but it’s not. The UN and

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every country around the world should be calling for emergency conferences, but they’re not.

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x www.mobot.org

1971 1971

Biruté Galdikas 1946–

The battle to save the red ape In 1968, while Biruté M.F. Galdikas, a German of Lithuanian origin, was working on her PhD in anthropology at the University of California at Los Angeles, she met the British anthropologist Dr Louis S. Leakey. She proposed that he help her study 116 Bornean orangutans (Pongo pygmaeus) in the wild, as Jane Goodall had done with 212 chimpanzees. Leakey finally agreed and Galdikas joined Goodall and Dian Fossey as the third of ‘Leakey’s Angels’. In 1971, Galdikas arrived at one of the world’s last wild places, Tanjung Puting Reserve in Indonesian Borneo with her husband, the photographer Rod Brindamour. Conditions were harsh – the couple encountered numerous poachers, legions of leeches and swarms of biting insects. Within a few years, she gave birth to a son, Binty, who was raised among the orangutans and dubbed ‘the child of the rainforest’. Although Rod decided to return to Canada with Binty when the relationship ended, Galdikas stayed in Borneo for over 30 years, devoting her life to the study of the majestic ‘red ape’. Her work made many valuable contributions to the scientific understanding of Indonesia’s biodiversity and the rainforest as a whole, while also bringing the plight of the orangutan to the attention of the rest of the world. The orangutan By the late 1990s Galdikas had set up Orangutan Foundation International and written books such as Orangutan Odyssey, as well as continuing her work with the Indonesian government on conservation. In 1999 she opened an Orangutan Care Centre just in time to look after the numerous young orangutans orphaned as a result of the devastating Borneo fires of 1997 and 1998 and the continuing illegal destruction of the rainforest by loggers, gold miners and poachers. In addition, a 76,000 hectare wildlife reserve was set up in Kalimantan Tangah province.

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Recently, Galdikas has been living and lecturing in British Columbia, Canada, although she still spends half the year in Borneo with her second husband Pak Bohap, a Dayak rice farmer, tribal president and co-director of the orangutan programme in Borneo. The orangutan remains threatened, perhaps more than ever, as the demand for biofuel crops destroys more of their habitat. Galdikas fears that, in 20 years’ time, there may be no orangutans left in the wild.

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. . . it’s a victory here, a loss there, a victory there and a loss here. But if we weren’t doing what we’re doing now, the forests and where we work would’ve been gone a long time ago – long time ago. I mean there’s so many foresters arrayed against the forest.

x www.orangutan.org

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of Eden: My Years with the Orangutans  Biruté Galdikas, Reflections of Borneo (New York: Back Bay Books, 1996)

1972 1972

Arne Naess 1912–

Deep ecology By 1969, Arne Naess was a highly respected professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo in his native Norway. He was also a passionate mountaineer, leading the first Norwegian Himalayan expedition in 1950. He once built a mountain hut at an altitude of 3,600 m. In the late 1960s Naess, who had been in the Norwegian resistance during the German occupation in the Second World War, engaged in direct non-violent environmental action. In 1970, together with a large number of demonstrators, he chained himself to rocks in front of Mardalsfossen, a waterfall in a Norwegian fjord, and refused to descend until plans to build a dam there were dropped. Although they were removed by police, the demonstrators were eventually successful and the dam never got built. Heavily influenced by Rachel Carson, Naess coined the term ‘deep ecology’ in 118 1972 and helped give it a theoretical foundation. He believed that evidence-based ecological science cannot answer ethical questions about how we should live. For this, he thought, we need ecological wisdom. Deep ecology sought to develop this by focusing on deep experience, deep questioning and deep commitment, creating an interconnected system that is what Naess would call an ‘ecosophy’ – an evolving but consistent philosophy of being, thinking and acting in the world that embodies ecological wisdom and harmony. Naess rejected the idea that beings can be ranked according to their relative value. In this respect deep ecology supports the view

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rior species with the right to manage and control the rest of nature.

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The right of all forms [of life] to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified. No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species.

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and Lifestyle: Outline of an Ecosophy  Arne Naess and David Rothenberg, Ecology, Community (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990)

1972 1972

Mostafa Kamal Tolba 1922–

The great negotiator Leading the Egyptian delegates who attended the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment was Dr Mostafa Kamal Tolba, a 50-year-old former microbiology professor and government minister. Immediately after Stockholm, Tolba became the deputy director of the newly formed UN Environment Programme (UNEP) and, two years later, its executive director, the post he was to hold for the next 17 years. Tolba’s great strength has been his ability to persuade sharply diverging governments and interest groups to agree to a whole series of pioneering environmental treaties. In Vienna (1985), Montreal (1987) and in London (1990), he managed to achieve consensus on prototype models for dealing with global environmental issues and on effective mechanisms for the transfer of technology and funds to developing countries. His leadership has brought the environment to the forefront of global thinking. Tolba believes that environmental decisions are inseparable from socio-political decisions and he has applied this in all his consultations with political leaders. His negotiating skills and scientific knowledge contributed to UNEP’s most widely acclaimed success: the historic 1987 agreement to protect the ozone layer – the Montreal Protocol. At the Earth Summit in Brazil in 1992, he was at the helm of the negotiations when the Conventions on Climate Change and Biological Diversity were agreed. He also successfully worked for treaties to protect the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. During the Iran–Iraq conflict he often brought the warring parties together to discuss common environmental interests. Under his leadership, UNEP continually punched above its weight within the UN family, acting as the catalyst spurring governments, businesses, academia and nongovernmental organisations to meaningful action.

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Since 1994, Tolba has presided over the Centre for Environment and Development, a non-profit organisation based in Geneva and his native Cairo, which finances projects in less developed countries through an endowment fund.

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Achieving sustainable development is perhaps one of the most difficult and one of the most pressing goals we face. It requires on the part of all of us commitment, action, partnerships and, sometimes, sacrifices of our traditional life patterns and personal interests.

”

Diplomacy: Negotiating Environmental Agreements  Mostafa Kamal Tolba, Global Environmental for the World, 1973–1992 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998)

1972 1972

Arthur H. Westing 1928–

Environmental hazards of chemical warfare In 1972, Dr Arthur H. Westing, a PhD graduate from Yale and former fellow at Harvard, now working for the Guggenheim Fellowship, published his first book on the way in which chemical warfare could destroy the environment. Over the next 30 years, in publication after publication, Westing pointed out the ecological consequences of chemical warfare – detailing the damage from chemical and biological weapons on both humans and their surroundings. In the 1960s, US military forces unleashed on Vietnam the largest chemical warfare operation in history, in the form of an aerial spray – Agent Orange – designed to defoliate the trees hiding ground movement along the Ho Chi Minh trail. In all, 71 million litres of herbicide containing 51 million kg of active ingredients were used in the region’s forests and croplands. In one book, Westing reported that around 100,000 hectares, some 1 per cent of the forest lands of Vietnam, were completely obliterated by bombing and that a further 5 million hectares, over 40 per cent, were damaged. Apart from the use of Agent Orange, a significant cause of tree mortality was shrapnel because it gives access to fungus and decay. By the 1990s Westing and his team, based in Putney, Vermont, were delivering a steady stream of books such as Environmental Hazards of War: Releasing Dangerous Forces in an Industrialized World. Westing worked as consultant on environmental security for the UN Environment Programme, World Bank, the Red Cross and the government of Eritrea. But now Westing went one stage further. In his edited book for the UN Environment Programme, Transfrontier Reserves for Peace and Nature: A Contribution to Human Security, he reasoned that, if natural reserves could be established across political and military frontiers, warring sides might consider working together to

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reduce the damage he had been chronicling for so long. By 2001, there were 169 transboundary protected areas located in 113 countries. .

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The notion of security, whether national or international, is now widely recognized to extend beyond military security to embrace social security, which, in turn, cannot be achieved without an underpinning of environmental security.

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(ed.), Transfrontier Reserves for Peace and Nature:  Arthur H. Westing A Contribution to Human Security (Nairobi: UNEP, 1993)

1972 1972

David McTaggart 1932–2001

The shadow warrior During the early 1970s, David McTaggart, a semi-retired Canadian business contractor, was sailing his yacht Vega from his new home in New Zealand when he encountered a problem. The French government had decided to cordon off a vast swathe of international waters in order to conduct their nuclear testing programme in the Pacific. Outraged that any government could exclude him from any part of his beloved ocean, McTaggart renamed his yacht Greenpeace III and, with crew members from that fledgling organisation, sailed right into the zone surrounding Moruroa Atoll, where the tests were being conducted. He observed international law in establishing his anchor position, but ignored the French government’s unilateral declaration of the area as an exclusion zone. The presence of Greenpeace III at a position downwind from the planned blast forced the French to halt the test. Deciding to teach McTaggart a lesson, the French Navy rammed his yacht. The following year, undaunted, and having repaired Greenpeace III, McTaggart was back to the exclusion zone. Greenpeace III was boarded and McTaggart claimed to have been brutally beaten up by French sailors, a charge that the French government denied. However, Anne-Marie Horne, one of McTaggart’s crew, had secretly photographed the beating. In 1974, following worldwide publication of her photos and after lengthy litigation, McTaggart’s campaign forced the French government to announce the end of its atmospheric nuclear testing programme. In 1977 McTaggart began organising new support throughout Europe for Greenpeace, by then established in nine countries. In 1979 he forged an international 163

alliance between separate factions of the organisation and united them under his chairmanship as Greenpeace International. McTaggart was a driving force behind Greenpeace campaigns to save the whales, stop the dumping of nuclear waste in the ocean, block the production of toxic wastes, end nuclear testing and protect the Antarctic from oil and mineral exploitation. He came to be known as ‘the shadow warrior’. By the 1990s McTaggart had retired to Italy where he was developing organic olive oil on his farm in Umbria. In March 2001 he was killed in a head-on car crash on a country road near his home. He was 68. Among the hundreds of tributes was this from his colleague, Kieron Mulhavey: ‘David was probably the single most exasperating, infuriating, obnoxious, obstinate person I ever met; he was also probably the most brilliant, energetic and charismatic. I wish everyone . . . could have had the opportunity to get to know the extraordinary benefits of being sucked up in the whirlwind that was David McTaggart.’

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Keep the number one thing in mind: you’re fighting to get your children into the 21st century, and to hell with the rules.

x www.greenpeace.org

”

McTaggart, Shadow Warrior: The Autobiography of  DavidGreenpeace International Founder David McTaggart (London: Orion, 2002)

1972 1972

Donella H. Meadows 1941–2001

Limits to growth In 1972, Donella (‘Dana’) Meadows, a 31-year-old protégé of Jay Forrester, the inventor of systems dynamics, was part of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team that produced the global computer model World3 for the Club of Rome. This provided the basis for her to be lead author on the bestselling book Limits to Growth, which made headlines around the world and started a debate about the limits of the Earth’s capacity to support human economic expansion. It was translated into 28 languages. In the early 1990s, Meadows attended a North American Free Trade Agreement meeting where she realised that a very large new system for a regional trading bloc was being proposed with few levers in place to exert control. Inspired, in 1997 she proposed 12 leverage points to intervene in complex systems. She started with the observation that there are places within a complex system (such as a firm, a city, an economy, a living being or an ecosystem) where a ‘small shift in one thing can produce big changes in everything’. She claimed we need to know about these shifts, where they are and how to use them. Meadows argued that, although most people 164

know where these points are instinctively, they tend to adjust them in the wrong direction. Better understanding, she said, would help solve global problems such as unemployment, hunger, economic stagnation, pollution, resource depletion and conservation issues. In 1981, together with her husband Dennis, she founded the International Network of Resource Information Centres (INRIC), a global process of information sharing and collaboration among hundreds of leading academics, researchers and activists in the broader sustainable development movement. For 27 years Meadows lived on a small, communal, organic farm in Plainfield, New Hampshire, where she worked directly on sustainable resource management. In 1999 she moved to Vermont where she founded the Sustainability Institute, combining research in global systems with practical demonstrations of sustainable living, including the development of an ecovillage and organic farm. She taught at Dartmouth College for 29 years and for 16 of these wrote a weekly column called ‘The Global Citizen’, commenting on world events from a systems point of view. It appeared in more than 20 newspapers and she received a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize in 1991. She died on 21 February 2001 at the age of just 59 after a brief fight with cerebral meningitis. Her work is widely recognised as a formative influence on hundreds of other academic studies, government policy initiatives and international agreements.

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Speak the truth. Speak it loud and often, calmly but insistently, and speak it, as the Quakers say, to power. Material accumulation is not the purpose of human existence. All growth is not good. The environment is a necessity, not a luxury. There is such a thing as ‘enough’.

x www.sustainer.org

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Jorgen Randers and Dennis L. Meadows,  Donella H. Meadows,Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2004)

1973 1973

Ernst Friedrich Schumacher 1911–1977

Small is beautiful In 1955, Ernst Friedrich Schumacher, a German-born British economics adviser, travelled to Burma as a consultant. While there, he developed the principles of what he called ‘Buddhist economics’ based on the fact that ‘production from local resources for local needs is the most rational way of economic life’. Returning to England and resuming his post as Chief Economic Adviser to the British National Coal Board, Schumacher continued to refine his theory until, in 165

1968, his article about Buddhist economics was published in a magazine that he had co-founded called Resurgence. In subsequent articles for that magazine, Schumacher pioneered what is now called ‘appropriate technology’ – environment- and user-friendly technology matched to the scale of community life. He founded the Intermediate Technology Development Group (now Practical Action) in 1966. In 1973 Harper & Row published Schumacher’s book Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered. Sales were slow at first, but then Schumacher agreed to go on a lecture tour of the US. His visit coincided with the 1973–1974 energy crisis during which the price of oil rose several times. Small Is Beautiful became an overnight bestseller. Ultimately, 800,000 copies were sold and the book was translated into many languages. According to The Times Literary Supplement, it is among the 100 most influential books published since the Second World War. In his sixties, Schumacher travelled the world, speaking and promoting his ideas. He set up the Schumacher Institute for developing countries to design appropriate technologies that do not rely on Western manufacturers. In early 1977 Schumacher again toured North America where an estimated 60,000 people heard him speak on ‘the right size for the right society’. His death in Switzerland on 6 September 1977 from a heart attack tore him away at the very time his ideas were close to a breakthrough. Soon after, friends and co-workers set up E.F. Schumacher Societies, first in England and later in the US. The first Schumacher Lecture took place in 1978. In 1991 a Schumacher College for ecological studies was set up at Dartington, Devon, in the south-west of England. This is now part of the Schumacher Circle which includes the Intermediate Technology Development Group, Soil Association, New Economics Foundation, Green Books, Centre for Alternative Technology and Resurgence magazine.

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The system of nature, of which man is a part, tends to be self-balancing, self-adjusting, self-cleansing. Not so with technology.

x www.schumacher.org.uk

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Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics as if  E.F. Schumacher, People Mattered (New York: Vintage, new edn 1993)

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1973 1973

Ivan Illich 1926–2002

The energy saver In 1969, an Austrian-born priest called Ivan Illich, who was running the Centre of Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, decided to abandon the priesthood. The following year Illich published Deschooling Society in which he argued that a modern, technological economy prevents people from learning about reality. Soon after, the world encountered its first fuel crisis. Illich’s response, a book entitled Energy and Equity, made the former priest one of the most important theorists of the radical ecology movement. In it, he examined the question of whether or not humans need any more energy than is their natural birthright. The work, as with some of his other polemical writing, remains as radical today as it was at the time.

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Relieve our dependence on foreign fuels by developing ‘ecologically friendly’ energy extraction technology, or send an army to pacify the fuelrich region in question. Both of these paths, seemingly at odds with each other, take as fundamentally true a certain proposition, that in no circumstances should we use less energy than we already use. In this conception, all human problems must be solved by the impressment of still more ‘energy slaves’ to meet the expanding demand of human masters.

x www.davidtinapple.com/illich

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Energy and Equity (New York:  Ivan Illich,Marion Boyars Publishers, 1974)

1973 1973

F. Sherwood Rowland 1927–

Paul Crutzen 1933–

Mario Molina 1943–

The CFC people In 1970, Paul Crutzen, working at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, showed that nitrous oxide, a natural gas produced by soil bacteria, lives long enough to reach the stratosphere where it is converted into nitric oxide. Crutzen then noted that increasing use of fertilisers might have led to an increase in nitrous oxide emissions over and above normal background levels which would in turn result in an increase in the amount of nitric oxide in the stratosphere. He concluded that human activity could have an impact on the stratospheric ozone layer. In the following year, Crutzen and, independently, Harold Johnston, working at the University of California, suggested that nitric oxide emissions from supersonic aircraft that fly in the lower stratosphere could also deplete the ozone layer. In autumn 1973, a Mexican graduate student called Mario J. Molina arrived at the University of California at Irvine to carry out a postdoctoral study under Professor F. Sherwood Rowland. Offered a list of research options, Molina chose to investigate the environmental fate of a group of very inert industrial chemicals, the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). James Lovelock had recently discovered, during a cruise in 190 the South Atlantic in 1971, that almost all the CFC compounds manufactured since their invention in 1930 were still present in the atmosphere. Up to that time, CFCs had been widely used in a host of applications, for refrigeration, air conditioning, as aerosol can propellants and as solvents. Alongside them, chlorocarbons – also ozone depleters – such as trichloroethane were being used as cleaning agents in the electronic and automobile industries After three months of research Rowland and Molina had developed the CFC ozone depletion theory. They suggested that long-lived organic halogen compounds, such as CFCs and chlorocarbons, might behave in a fashion similar to that proposed by Crutzen for nitrous oxide, and that continued release of CFCs and chlorocarbons into the atmosphere would soon cause significant and harmful depletion of the Earth’s protective ozone layer which prevents the most harmful wavelengths of ultraviolet light from passing through the Earth’s atmosphere. Rowland and Molina first published their findings in a 1974 issue of Nature. From then on, the two became crusaders for the ozone layer, continuing to refine and commu-

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nicate their findings, not only to other scientists but also to policy-makers and the media. But their theory was contested by the chemical industry. The chairman of the board of DuPont was quoted as saying that ozone depletion theory is ‘a science fiction tale . . . a load of rubbish . . . utter nonsense’. Nevertheless, within three years, most of the basic assumptions made by Rowland and Molina were confirmed by laboratory measurements and by direct observation of the stratosphere. In response, the US, Canada, Sweden and Norway banned the use of CFCs in aerosol spray cans in 1978. But by 1985 a British Antarctic Survey team led by Joseph Farman discovered the Antarctic ozone hole. The ozone layer was thinning every spring over Antarctica and this thinning was increasing over time. The scientific community responded with shock, as thinning was seen as a major threat to human, animal and plant life everywhere. The policy-makers began to take notice. In 1985 the first regulatory policy negotiations began with the Vienna Convention. This in turn led to the 1987 Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer. This landmark international agreement phased out, by 2000, the production and consumption of the ozonedepleting substances CFCs, halons, carbon tetrachloride and, by 2005, methyl chloroform. In February 1995 President George Bush Sr ordered American manufacturers to stop all production of ozone-depleting chemicals. Later that year, Crutzen, Molina and Rowland were awarded the Nobel Prize for chemistry. As the 21st century begins, two teams monitoring global atmospheric gases have shown that the Montreal Protocol is beginning to yield results, with both chlorocarbons and CFCs showing an observable decrease. But removal of long-lived CFCs from the atmosphere will take much longer.

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What’s the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions, if in the end all we’re willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true. (F. Sherwood Rowland)

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x ozone.unep.org

1973 1973

Takayoshi Kano 1938–

The last ape In 1973, 35-year-old Dr Takayoshi Kano of Kyoto University, Japan, arrived at Wamba village in what was then Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of Congo) and chose it as the perfect venue for a field study of the bonobo ape (Pan paniscus). One of the main reasons for his choice was that Wamba’s inhabitants, the Mongandu people, respect and protect bonobos as their kin and include them in their folklore.

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The bonobo is one of the most recent large mammals to be discovered, in 1928. Many evolutionary scientists believe bonobos to be the primate most closely related to humans. The species shares 98% of our genetic profile, as close as a dog to a fox. From 1974 to 1985, Kano and his colleagues studied the bonobos. They discovered animals with strong family bonds, peaceable males, powerful females, high intelligence and energetic sex lives. In 1990, the Luo Scientific Reserve was set up in an effort to protect the bonobos. Covering 480 km2, and including Wamba and the adjacent Ilongo forest, the reserve was not large enough to protect the wild population and did not control outside poaching as there were no guards. During the 1990s, massive civil unrest in Zaire caused Kano and his fellow Japanese researchers to pull out of Wamba. During the conflict, in which as many as 4 million people died, the bonobo also suffered. Many animals were killed for their meat or died due to forest destruction. In 2002, when the drawn-out civil war seemed at an end, Japanese researchers were able to return to the Luo Scientific Reserve to resume observation and, it is to be hoped, The bonobo conservation of this dwindling and very threatened ape. It is thought that fewer than 10,000 bonobos survive. Given the species’ slow rate of reproduction, the rapid destruction of its tropical habitat, the growing problem of bushmeat and the political instability of central Africa, there is reason for much concern about the future of our closest relative.

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Seeing them so close, they seemed more than animals, more a reflection of ourselves, as if they were fairies of the forest.

x bonobo.org

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Pygmy Chimpanzee Behavior and Ecology  Takayoshi Kano, The Last Ape:(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992)

1973 1973

Jean-Baptiste Chavannes 1947–

Championing a greener Haiti Once covered with lush tropical forest, by the 1960s Haiti had become massively deforested, with trees covering only 2 per cent of the land. Floods and landslides 170

had washed down Haiti’s mountains, destroying everything in their path. Food shortages forced rural farmers to fell the few remaining trees to sell as charcoal. Haiti became the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. In 1972, the Catholic Centre for Catechist and Agricultural Initiation at Papaye asked a Haitian agronomist, Jean-Baptiste Chavannes, to lead its project on agriculture and family education. The following year, Chavannes founded the Peasant Movement of Papaye (MPP) to teach the people of Haiti the principles of sustainable agriculture. Gradually he trained up an increasing number of gwoupman, traditional community working groups, to use water-saving drip irrigation systems, natural fertilisers and pesticides, and to build low-cost erosion-prevention structures. Since then some 60,000 MPP members – men, women and children – have planted 20 million fruit and forest trees to help stabilise the island’s fragile soil and provide access to more food sources. One of their most effective projects was the Creole Pig Programme to provide low-cost pigs to peasants who lost out when the US eradicated almost all the native Haitian pigs during a swine flu epidemic. Chavannes has carried out his work despite Haiti’s long history of political violence, repression and instability. He has survived several assassination attempts. Death threats forced him into exile from 1993 to 1994. On his return, the MPP’s political wing began to construct a truly national federation of grassroots agricultural efforts, bringing together more than 100,000 peasants. Problems remain, as was apparent in the tragic mudslides and floods that killed an estimated 3,000 people in late 2004 when tropical storm Jeanne swept through the area. Chavannes’ work continues – in 2005 he was a recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize.

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I devote my life to building a green Haiti, a Haiti that offers an abundance of life to all of its children.

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x www.grassrootsonline.org/term/peasant-movement-papaye-mpp

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1974 1974

Paulo Nogueira-Neto 1922–

The creator of the ecological station Two years after the first UN Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, the Brazilian government created a Special Secretariat for the Environment (SEMA). Its first secretary was Paulo Nogueira-Neto, a former professor of general ecology at the Institute of Life Sciences in the University of São Paulo. He would hold the position for 12 years. One of Nogueira-Neto’s first moves was to introduce what he called an ‘ecological station’, a new style of protected area. Ecological stations are areas representative of native ecosystems which enable research to be carried out and educational conservation programmes to be delivered. The plan is for an ecological station for each of Brazil’s ecosystems, covering areas large enough to enable their biodiversity to be conserved. Early in the 1980s SEMA succeeded in getting a law passed to introduce yet another type of category, the environmental protection area (APA), which had the aim of protecting biological diversity, regulating the settlement processes, and ensuring the sustainable use of natural resources. This represented a revolution in the concept of protected areas in Brazil. At present, there are 21 ecological stations in Brazil with a further five awaiting official certification. As the head of SEMA, Nogueira-Neto has created and established 3.2 million hectares of protected areas. One of the best-known ecological stations is Anavilhanas on the River Negro in the state of Amazonas. This unique area includes a myriad of islands that make an ideal habitat for endangered species such as the dugong. Between 1983 and 1986, Nogueira-Neto served on the Brundtland Commission which was tasked by the UN to set out plans on how to achieve sustainable development. He currently runs a farm specialising in the management of stingless bees. In 2004, at the age of 82, he remained committed to producing a dictionary of indigenous Brazilian bees – a topic that has been his passion since he was 18.

“

They gave me three rooms and five members of staff, despite the country’s continental dimensions. I got engaged because I saw a great future to be built in such a needy area.

”

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1974 1974

Lester R. Brown 1934–

The world watcher Although the teenage Lester Brown and his younger brother might have joined the family business and become prosperous tomato farmers in southern New Jersey, Brown was destined for more important tasks. Graduating in agricultural science from Rutgers University in 1955, he planned to return to the tomato business, but a six-month exchange programme in rural India opened his eyes to food/ population issues. During the 1960s he became a highly respected analyst on how to help poorer countries improve their agricultural yield, advising US Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman and later heading the Department of Agriculture’s International Agricultural Development Service. In 1974, with support from the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, Brown founded the Worldwatch Institute, the first research institute devoted to the analysis of global environmental issues. While there he launched the Worldwatch Papers, the annual State of the World reports, World Watch magazine, a second annual entitled Vital Signs: The Trends that are Shaping our Future and the Environmental Alert book series. By the 1990s, Brown was respected as one of the world’s most influential thinkers on environmental problems. His numerous books have been translated into more than 40 languages and include Who Will Feed China? Published in 1995, this challenged the official view of China’s food prospects, spawning hundreds of conferences and seminars. In 2003, Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble was published. Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum called this ‘A great book which should wake up humankind!’ In May 2001, aged 67, Brown founded the non-profit Earth Policy Institute to provide a roadmap for achieving an environmentally sustainable economy. In 2005, he was presciently warning that the proposed switch from oil to corn-based biofuels for cars would raise corn prices and so pose a major threat to food supplies in developing countries.

“

Socialism failed because it couldn’t tell the economic truth; capitalism may fail because it couldn’t tell the ecological truth.

x www.worldwatch.org

”

B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet under Stress and a  Lester R. Brown, PlanCivilization in Trouble

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(New York: W.W. Norton, expanded and updated edn 2006)

1974 1974

Lonnie Thompson 1948–

Deciphering the ice In 1974, Lonnie Thompson, a 26-year-old geology postgraduate from Ohio State University, was exploring the Quelccaya ice mass in the Peruvian Andes when he realised that its great altitude and isolation could have preserved a long-term climate record. His initial efforts to obtain funding for an expedition met with doubts about the likelihood of success at such high altitudes and with scepticism about the quality of the information preserved in the ice. Undeterred, Thompson finally obtained funding in 1979. In collaboration with Bruce Koci, an engineer at the University of Nebraska, he developed a lightweight, low-cost solar-powered drill and, with ingenuity, muscle power and heroic feats of mountaineering that required courage, daring and physical endurance, began to extract ice cores. In 1983, Thompson led an expedition back to the Quelccaya ice cap where his team succeeded in extracting two 160 m ice cores to bedrock. Analysis showed that major European climate events had resulted in corresponding climate shifts in tropical regions. Since then, Thompson has led more than 45 expeditions to some of the world’s most remote ice fields, including the Tibetan Himalaya, the ice caps of China and many remote peaks throughout South America. He has retrieved hundreds of metres of ice cores containing up to 700,000 years of climate history, including several global-scale ice ages. Thompson’s painstaking work has drawn attention to dramatic rates of change in tropical glaciers, showing unprecedented rates of melting and retreat in recent centuries. From his work on Mount Kilimanjaro Thompson has shown that the famous snows that have been there for more than 11,000 years may be gone by 2015. His research laboratory is continuing to collect ice cores from endangered glaciers before climate change destroys them. In 2005 Thompson was awarded the prestigious Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement, an honour often regarded as the environmental science equivalent to the Nobel Prize.

“

I am more and more convinced these glaciers are going to disappear. There is such a thing as too late.

”

Bowen, Thin Ice: Unlocking the Secrets of Climate in the  Mark World’s Highest Mountains

(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2005)

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1975 1975

Robert Bateman 1930–

Thinking like a mountain From his first major one-man show in 1975, Canadian wildlife artist Robert Bateman’s evocative images of animals in their natural habitats became a powerful tool in persuading people of the need to care for wildlife. His art reflects his commitment to ecology. Bateman has received commissions from the Governor-General of Canada, Prince Philip the Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Grace of Monaco and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands. The Canada Post has also issued a series of endangered species postage stamps based on his work. His books of his paintings have sold more than 750,000 copies and his show in 1987 at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC drew the largest crowd a living artist has ever had there. Bateman’s celebrity has given him the financial means to champion and endow hundreds of environmental organisations, from the Sierra Club to the Kenya Wildlife Fund. In September 2002 Bateman put down his palette to become a powerful voice of protest against the Ontario government’s proposed CAN$1.2 billion highway that would cut through the Niagara escarpment. The escarpment had inspired Bateman’s earliest wildlife works and he was more than willing to take a public stand: ‘The escarpment is an absolute jewel of rough country and, as a World Heritage Site, a gift handed not only to the people of Ontario but to the people of the world.’ In 2005 Bateman volunteered to have the toxic chemicals in his body measured. The assessment was sponsored by the US non-governmental organisation Environmental Defense. Some 32 carcinogens, 19 hormone disruptors, 16 respiratory toxicants and 42 reproductive/developmental toxins were found.

“

I can’t conceive of anything being more varied and rich and handsome than planet Earth. And its crowning beauty is the natural world. I want to soak it up, to understand it as well as I can, and to absorb it. And then I’d like to put it together and express it in my painting. This is the way I want to dedicate my life.

”

x www.robertbateman.ca

Roger Tory Peterson, The Art of Robert  Ramsay Derry andBateman

(Rohnert Park, CA: Pomegranate Communications, 25th Anniversary edn 2006)

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1975 1975

Robert Redford 1937–

Hollywood’s environmental activist Born Charles Robert Redford Jr, in 1969 Robert Redford, the 42-year-old co-star with Paul Newman of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, purchased Timphaven, a ski resort in the US state of Utah. Renaming it the Sundance Resort, Redford planned to show how to blend leisure with the environment. Of a total 2,500 hectares of land, only 60 were developed for the resort and no trees were felled. While Redford furthered his career in Hollywood, starring in films such as The Sting and The Great Gatsby, he also continued his eco-activism. In 1975, he began a long fight against a planned coal-fired power plant on Utah’s Kaiparowits Plateau, in the middle of five adjoining national parks. In 1997, after a long and contentious battle in which Redford worked with a large coalition of activists, President Bill Clinton designated it the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. In 1980, Redford founded the Institute for Resource Management (IRM), which he led throughout the decade, bringing together environmentalists and industrialists to resolve conflicts and promote sustainable development. Under Redford’s tenure the IRM tackled issues ranging from the future of the electric power industry to resource development on Indian lands, offshore oil leasing in the Bering Sea and urban air quality in Denver, Phoenix, Sacramento and New York. Redford’s final initiative under the auspices of IRM was his 1989 global warming summit – Greenhouse Glasnost in Sundance. This brought together policy-makers, industry leaders, scientists and artists from the US and the then Soviet Union to focus on communicating the facts about global warming to a wider public. In 1998, Redford and his family put 348 hectares of Sundance wilderness into a land trust in order to protect it from development for all time. He remains active in local, regional and national organisations on a variety of environmental, arts and justice issues. For almost 30 years, he has served as a trustee on the board the Natural Resources Defense Council and been involved with many pieces of environmental legislation including the Clean Air Act (1974–1975), the Energy Conservation and Production Act (1974–1976) and the National Energy Policy Act (1989). In recent years, he has become a strong lobbyist in Washington DC on issues such as the preservation of the Arctic National Park in Alaska. Redford has received numerous awards for his environmental work, including the 1989 Audubon Medal, the 1987 United Nations Global 500 Award, the 1993 Earth Day International Award and the 1994 Nature Conservancy Award. In 2006 Redford was working with several film production companies and the National Geographic Society on a new feature film. In Aloft, he plays a retired eccentric pilot who, along with an obsessive naturalist, doggedly tracks an endangered tundra peregrine falcon from her winter home on the Texan coast to her summer Arctic nesting grounds. 176

“

I think the environment should be put in the category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?

”

1975 1975

Pat Mooney 1947–

Cary Fowler 1950–

Protecting genetic diversity In the mid-1970s, Pat Mooney (pictured), who had lived most of his life on the Canadian prairies, became increasingly concerned about the loss of agricultural genetic resources. He realised how large-scale agriculture had come to favour uniformity in food crops. For example, of the more than 7,000 US apple varieties that once grew in American orchards, 6,000 of them were no longer available. Every broccoli variety offered through seed catalogues in 1900 had now disappeared. In 1979 Mooney published a report on the subject, Seeds of the Earth. This was widely credited as being the first analysis to draw international attention to the problem. This was followed in 1983 by his study The Law of the Seed: Another Development and Plant Genetic Resources which attracted widespread attention. Mooney began to work with Cary Fowler in 1975. As international advocates for genetic conservation, they have initiated worldwide educational campaigns and proposed far-reaching conservation programmes. One of their proposals was for the establishment of international seed banks, a plan that was adopted by the UN in 1983. From 1978, Fowler and Mooney joined forces with Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI), a small, non-profit organisation that focuses on the socioeconomic impacts of new technologies on rural societies. Mooney later became the foundation’s executive director. Through RAFI the two colleagues played a major role in the formulation of the Commission and Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). In 1993 FAO hired Fowler to help draft its Global Plan of Action for the Conservation and Sustainable Utilisation of Plant Genetic Resources. He also organised the 1996 international conference in Leipzig, Germany, at which the Global Plan was adopted. At the same time, RAFI has organised numerous workshops in Africa, Asia and Latin America to address both global issues and the need for local farmers to secure their own crop genetic diversity. In 1988, Mooney and Fowler were members of a 177

team that produced The Laws of Life: Another Development and the New Biotechnologies, published as a special issue of the Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation’s Development Dialogue. This work led RAFI to research into international agricultural research institutions and, more recently, into the attempts by private corporations to patent life-forms, including human cell lines. In one important victory for the campaign to prevent commercialisation of life-forms, in 1995 the European Parliament rejected a proposed law that would have permitted the patenting of human genes.

“

To preserve genetic diversity we must engage in both conservation and politics. As the only species powerful to affect all evolution on the planet, humanity has this responsibility. If we fail, the genetic heritage of 12,000 years will disappear. (Cary Fowler)

x www.etcgroup.org/en

”



Cary Fowler and Pat Mooney, Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity (Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 1990)

1975 1975

Russell A. Mittermeier 1949–

Primate ecologist In 1975, Russell A. Mittermeier, a 25-year-old undergraduate primatologist, arrived in Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana) in northern South America, anxious to find suitable tropical rainforest to undertake field studies for his doctorate. He ended up spending the better part of three years in Suriname’s untouched interior, becoming the first to map the comparative ecology of all eight indigenous species of monkey. Obtaining his PhD from Harvard in Biological Anthropology in 1977, Mittermeier was appointed chairman of the Primate Survival Specialist Group of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) (now the World Conservation Union). He then transferred to the WWF where he carried out fieldwork in more than 30 countries around the tropical world, with special emphasis on Brazil, Suriname and Madagascar. In 1989, Peter Seligmann of the newly formed Washington DC-based Conservation International recruited Mittermeier as its president, from where he began to devote his energies to biodiversity ‘hotspots’. He is the only active field biologist to head an international conservation organisation. Mittermeier’s approach to biodiversity was exemplified in 1995 when Malaysian and Indonesian logging companies announced they wanted to fell 3 million hectares, about 20 pre cent of Suriname’s forests. An outraged Mittermeier lobbied Suriname President Jules Wijdenbosch and his government until he turned down 178

the concessions and instead set aside 10 pre cent of the country, 1.6 million pristine hectares, as the Central Suriname Nature Reserve. The reserve was declared a World Heritage Site in 2000. To support the reserve Mittermeier has raised over $15 million, a sum that greatly exceeds any revenues from logging. Mittermeier has discovered several monkey species. He was honoured for his work in Madagascar in 2006 with the naming of two newly discovered species of lemur – Mittermeier’s mouse lemur (Microcebus mittermeieri) and Mittermeier’s sportive lemur (Lepilemur mittermeieri). He is the author of Lemurs of Madagascar, a comprehensive field guide to the country’s flagship species. Mittermeier has published 15 books and over 400 papers and popular articles on primates, reptiles, tropical forests and biodiversity, including editing the gorgeous monster-size photographic series with titles that include Megadiversity, Hotspots, Hotspots Revisited, Wilderness, Wildlife Spectacles and Transboundary Conservation.

“

I believe we have a moral obligation to other species. The main reason for saving them is that it’s simply the right thing to do . . .

x www.conservation.org

”

A. Mittermeier, Patricio Robles Gil, Michael Hoffman, John  RussellPilgrim, Thomas Brooks, Cristina Goettsch Mittermeier, John Lamoreux and Gustavo A.B. da Fonseca, Hotspots Revisited: Earth’s Biologically Richest and Most Endangered Terrestrial Ecoregions (Arlington, VA: Conservation International, 2005)

1975 1975

Paul Watson 1950–

The sea shepherd In October 1969, Paul Watson, a Canadian, joined a Sierra Club protest against nuclear testing at Amchitka Island in Alaska. The group that formed as a result of that protest was called the Don’t Make a Wave Committee. This evolved into Greenpeace. Watson continued as a crew member, skipper and officer aboard several Greenpeace voyages throughout the mid-1970s. In June 1975, during a Greenpeace campaign to confront Soviet whaling, Watson had a close encounter with a dying sperm whale which, he says, changed his 179

life and moved him to dedicate the rest of his life to protecting whales and other marine animals. Two years later, believing stronger tactics were necessary, Watson left Greenpeace to found the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS). In 1978 he took his trawler, Sea Shepherd, into the ice floes of the Gulf of St Lawrence in Canada to oppose the slaughter of baby seals. The following year, Sea Shepherd hunted down and twice rammed a pirate whaling ship called the Sierra. In the years that followed, the Sea Shepherd Society built up a fleet of activist ships, ramming and claiming to have sunk some ten ships involved with the slaughter of whales and seals. Watson is not without controversy. Denounced by some as an ‘eco-terrorist’, a number of former colleagues in Greenpeace have distanced themselves from him. He has been arrested, imprisoned, expelled and sentenced in absentia by Canadian, Norwegian, Costa Rican and Icelandic authorities, but has yet to be successfully prosecuted. He claims his actions fall within international law and SSCS has the legal right to act against illegal whalers and sealers. During the 1980s, Watson declared his support for Earth First!, cultivating friendships with David Foreman and Edward Abbey and proclaiming Sea Shepherd 233 139 to be the ‘navy’ of Earth First! Watson remains the leader of the Sea Shepherd Society today, using the title ‘captain’ in reference to his role in the organisation.

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“

I have been honoured to serve the whales, dolphins, seals – and all the other creatures on this Earth. Their beauty, intelligence, strength and spirit have inspired me. These beings have spoken to me, touched me, and I have been rewarded by friendship with many members of different species. If the whales survive and flourish, if the seals continue to live and give birth, and if I can contribute to ensuring their future prosperity, I will be forever happy.

”

x www.seashepherd.org

Morris, Earth Warrior: Overboard with Paul Watson and  DavidtheB. Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (Golden, CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1995)

1976 1976

Crispin Tickell 1930–

The diplomat’s story In his travels as a distinguished diplomat, Crispin Tickell became fascinated by the fate of the many ancient civilisations he studied and the role the environment had played in the downfall of once great races such as the Incas and Aztecs. Deciding to study climate, in 1976 Tickell enrolled in a crash course at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He read all the available literature on the subject in about 180

three months. During his sabbatical in the US, Tickell wrote a pioneering book: Climatic Change and World Affairs. On his return to the UK, Tickell felt that the public had not grasped how quickly climate change could occur or how serious a problem it could be. He has since become a political advocate for the theory of human-induced climate change. First, he began working with Roy Jenkins, then President of the European Commission, and later advised and wrote speeches on the topic for Margaret Thatcher (Prime Minister 1979–1990). He went on to chair Prime Minister John Major’s Government Panel on Sustainable Development (1994–2000) and was an adviser to Tony Blair (Prime Minister 1997–2007). Tickell was knighted in 1983 and was President of the Royal Geographical Society from 1990 to 1993 and Warden of Green College, Oxford, between 1990 and 308 202 1997 when he appointed George Monbiot and Norman Myers as visiting fellows.

“

Climate change is a very formidable threat. The planet is seeing the highest level of carbon emissions for 460,000 years. There have been about 30 urban civilisations since the end of the last ice age and they have all collapsed. The reason for their collapses is always at least partly environmental.

”

x www.crispintickell.com

Change and World Affairs (Washington,  Crispin Tickell, Climatic DC: University Press of America, rev. edn 1986)

1976 1976

Anita Roddick 1942–2007

The Body Shop In 1976, Anita Roddick opened the first Body Shop in a back street of Brighton, England, with the aim of making an income for herself and her two daughters while her husband, Gordon, was away in the US. The shop was based between two undertakers and there were complaints about the name. She opened her second shop six months later. On Gordon’s return, he joined the business. By the end of the second year, they decided to franchise the operation. Selling hand-mixed beauty products made from natural products, not tested on animals and supplied in refillable plastic containers, by 1991 The Body Shop had 700 branches. From early on, The Body Shop reflected the activism of its founder. Roddick criticised what she considered the environmental insensitivity of the industry and its 181

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traditional views of beauty, and aimed to change standard corporate practices. For 15 years The Body Shop sustained a campaign called Against Animal Testing. In November 1996 the firm presented the European Union with the largest petition against animal testing in history. It had been signed by over 4 million people. In 1986 The Body Shop formed an alliance with Greenpeace, campaigning to Save the Whales, despite some concerns among franchisees that head office was becoming too political. By 1990 Roddick had switched allegiance to Friends of the Earth, following disagreements with Greenpeace. In March 2006, The Body Shop agreed to a £652 million takeover by L’Oréal, the French cosmetics group. This caused controversy, partly because L’Oréal continues to be involved in animal testing and partly because it is part-owned by Nestlé. Roddick remained confident, however, that the values of The Body Shop would have an even greater impact on the beauty industry under the new ownership. Sadly, Anita Roddick died in September 2007 aged just 64.

“

I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community. I want something not just to invest in. I want something to believe in.

”

x www.anitaroddick.com

Roddick, Business As Unusual: My Entrepreneurial  Anita Journey – Profits with Principles (Anita Roddick Books, new edn 2005)

1976 1976

John Denver 1943–1997

Poet for the planet John Denver’s songs are suffused with a deep and abiding kinship with the natural world. Often singing and writing folk songs about the Western lifestyle, the human condition and planet Earth, he was named the poet laureate of his home state of Colorado in 1977. Around that time, he got into discussion with his aikido master, Tom Crum, about the threat of nuclear energy. Denver and Crum decided to set up the Windstar Foundation as a means of demonstrating technology and science in harmony with nature. The foundation undertakes environmental education on renewable forms of energy such as wind and solar. In 1976 Denver bought 400 hectares of land in Old Snowmass, Colorado, which he then donated to the Windstar Foundation. During the 1980s, he was a critic of the Reagan administration’s environmental and defence spending policies. He battled to expand the Arctic National Wildlife refuge in the 1980s and, in an open letter to the media in the midst of the 1996 182

presidential election, praised President Bill Clinton for his opposition to oil drilling in the refuge, proposed by the majority Republican Congress. The letter was one of the last Denver would ever write. In early 1997, Denver filmed an episode for the PBS Nature series on the natural wonders that inspired many of his best-loved songs. The episode contains his last song, ‘Yellowstone, Coming Home’ which he composed while rafting along the Colorado River with his son and young daughter. By 1997 Denver was recognised as one of the five top-selling artists in the history of popular music, with 14 gold and eight platinum albums in the US alone. He died on 12 October when his experimental aircraft plunged into Monterey Bay off the coast of California. The Windstar Foundation continues Denver’s mission of promoting respect and protection for the Earth.

“

Love the Earth as you would love yourself.

”

x www.wstar.org

1977 1977

Ibrahim Abouleish 1937–

The Sekem approach In 1975 Dr Ibrahim Abouleish, a 38-year-old Egyptian pharmaceutical researcher, visited Egypt with his family. He had not been back to his native soil for 21 years and was overwhelmed by the country’s overpopulation and pollution problems. Having graduated in Austria, Abouleish was familiar with Rudolf Steiner’s biodynamic farming approach which he decided to put into operation in his country of birth. In 1977, Abouleish set up a development initiative called Sekem, taking its name from a hieroglyphic transcription meaning ‘vitality of the sun’. He began by cultivating 28 hectares of desert at Belbeis, 60 km north-east of Cairo. Since then, Sekem Holdings has expanded to cover 8,000 hectares cultivated by over 800 farmers who organically grow 6,000 tonnes of vegetables per year. Sekem also has it own processing companies – Conytex, for example, manufactures and sells organic textiles to local and export markets. Sekem’s most important impact on Egyptian society has probably been achieved through the Egyptian Biodynamic Association, a non-governmental organisation established in 1990 as a means of conducting research and development into bio-

183

dynamic agriculture in Egypt and training framers in its methods. In collaboration with the Egyptian Ministry of Agriculture, Sekem deployed a new plant protection system for cotton which led to a ban on crop dusting throughout Egypt. By 2000, according to UN reports, pesticide use in Egyptian cotton fields had fallen by over 90 per cent; prior to the ban, 35,000 tonnes of chemical pesticides were sprayed yearly. By 2003, 2,000 people were working for Sekem and revenues had grown from US$6.5 million in 2000 to $17.6 million in 2003. The same year, Abouleish was awarded a Right Livelihood award and, in 2004, was named one of the world’s outstanding social entrepreneurs by the Schwab Foundation.

“

It was my wish for this initiative to embody itself as a community in which people from all walks of life, from all nations and cultures, from all vocations and age groups, could work together, learning from one another and helping each other, sounding as one in a symphony of harmony and peace.

”

x www.sekem.com

Community in the Egyptian  Ibrahim Abouleish, Sekem: A Sustainable Desert (Edinburgh: Floris Books, 2005)

1978 1978

Bill Mollison 1928–

David Holmgren 1955–

Permaculture During the 1970s, Bill Mollison, a postgraduate course lecturer in environmental sciences at the University of Tasmania, Australia, had many discussions with David Holmgren about the relationship between human and natural systems. As a fisherman and hunter, Mollison had, since his youth, become increasingly aware of such problems as the extinction of fish stocks, the disappearance of shoreline seaweed and deforestation. In 1976, Mollison and Holmgren coined a new concept – permaculture – which they defined as ‘an integrated, evolving system of perennial or self-perpetuating plant and animal species useful to man’. Two years later, they co-authored Permaculture One: A Perennial Agriculture for Human Settlements. The book was a mixture of insights relating to agriculture, landscape architecture and ecology, with the relationships between these disciplines termed permaculture. Permaculture One was far more successful than they had anticipated. The following year, they published Permaculture Two: Practical Design for Town and Country in Permanent Agriculture. 184

At this point, Mollison and Holmgren went their separate ways. Mollison set up the Permaculture Institute at Sisters Creek in Tasmania, from where he began to travel all over the world, lecturing and developing permaculture projects. Many communities in the Pacific, South-East Asia, South Africa and seven Amazonian language groups have adopted Mollison’s ideas on permaculture. Mollison also developed permaculture systems for deserts and drylands, for city farms and for community-supported agriculture (which consists of a community of individuals who pledge support to a farm operation so that the farmland becomes, either legally or spiritually, the community’s farm, with the growers and consumers providing mutual support and sharing the risks and benefits of food production). His seminal book Permaculture: A Designer’s Manual was published in 1988. Meanwhile, Holmgren was more circumspect, preferring to test out and refine the permaculture system, first on his mother’s property in the bushland of New South Wales, and then on his own property at Hepburn in central Victoria. He has since taught permaculture design courses around the world. A recent Holmgren design project has been the Fryers Forest eco-village near Castlemaine, Victoria, which aims to create a model of sustainable housing and financially viable sustainable forest management. The publication in December 2002 of Holmgren’s Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond Sustainability saw a deeper and more accessible systematisation of permaculture principles. Holmgren has had a long-standing interest in the use of non-native invasive plants for food and fibre and, more controversially, for ecological restoration and ‘ecosynthesis’ – the use of introduced species to fill niches in a disrupted environment, with the aim of increasing the speed of ecological restoration.

“

The science of ecology provided the overwhelming evidence that everything is connected, so it is a great irony that conservation biology is now dominated by an orthodoxy that is blind to ecosynthesis as nature’s way of weaving a new tapestry of life. (David Holmgren)

x www.holmgren.com

”

Holmgren, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways beyond  David Sustainability (Hepburn, Victoria, Australia: Holmgren Design Services, new edn 2007)

1978 1978

David Ehrenfeld 1935–

The arrogance of humanism

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91 During the 1960s, one of Professor Archie Carr’s zoology students at the Univer-

sity of Florida was a Harvard College medical graduate called David Ehrenfeld. Carr 185

shared his passion for protecting the endangered marine green turtle (Chelonia mydas) with his students, and so enthused Ehrenfeld that he began to write about environmental conservation. In his classic 1978 book The Arrogance of Humanism Ehrenfeld argued that we must end our love affair with control, consumption and perpetual growth. Instead, Ehrenfeld proposed that we should aspire to ‘the inventive imitation of nature’, with all its honesty, beauty, resilience and durability. In 1987, from his base at Rutgers University, New Jersey, he became founding editor of the journal Conservation Biology, launched to provide a global voice for this emerging discipline. It quickly became the key journal dealing with the topic of biodiversity. In 1993, Ehrenfeld’s book Beginning Again: People and Nature in the New Millennium focused on the interactions between society, technology and nature, with special attention to the positive role of community in an unstable world. His 2002 book, Swimming Lessons: Keeping Afloat in the Age of Technology, describes with wit and humour what our world has become – not just our successes, but also the destruction set loose by our own genius and inventions. It offers practical, nonutopian suggestions for keeping afloat in the dangerous waters of the 21st century’s globalised culture. Within the scientific community, Ehrenfeld is regarded as a strong moral voice whose comments provoke the kind of concerned reflection that is the basis for positive change.

“

Humanity is on the march, Earth itself is left behind.

x www.conbio.org

”

Ehrenfeld, The Arrogance of Humanism  David(New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)

1978 1978

David Gaines 1946–1988

The saviour of Mono Lake In 1941, the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power began diverting the tributary streams of Mono Lake (east of California’s Sierra Nevada) 560 km south to meet the growing water demands of the city. Deprived of its freshwater sources, the volume of Mono Lake halved and its salinity doubled. Unable to adapt, the ecosystem began to collapse. Negit Island, an important nesting site for California gulls, became a peninsula, thus allowing coyotes access to the nesting birds. Mono Lake – thought, at 760,000 years, to be the oldest lake in the US – appeared to be doomed. In 1974 a 28-year-old biologist and teaching assistant called David Gaines became aware of Mono Lake’s dire situation. Along with other undergraduate stu186

dents, Gaines earned a grant from the National Science Foundation to carry out an ecological survey of the lake. Gaines formed the Mono Lake Committee in 1978 and joined up with the National Audubon Society to fight a now famous court battle to protect Mono Lake through state public trust laws. With Sally, his wife, he drove their station wagon through California to lobby for the lake’s protection. Under Gaines’s eloquent and impassioned leadership, the committee grew to 20,000 members. Owens Lake, also in California, sustained a similar ecosystem, and completely dried up because of water diversions. Mono Lake was finally spared the same fate in 1994 when the California State Water Resources Control Board issued an order to protect Mono Lake and its tributary streams. Since that time the lake level has steadily risen – in July 2007 it was 1,945 m above sea level. In 1988 Gaines and committee staff volunteer Don Oberlin were tragically killed in a road traffic accident near the lake they were protecting. Today the Mono Lake Committee continues to campaign for the protection of this unique stretch of water.

“

The birds and animals, trees and grass, rocks, water and wind are all our allies. They waken our senses, rouse our passions, renew our spirits, and fill us with vision, courage, and joy . . . We are Mono Lake.

”

x www.monolake.org

1978 1978

Lois Gibbs 1952–

Fighting the Love Canal In 1978, the Gibbs family moved to Love Canal, New York – a picturesque workingclass neighbourhood by the Niagara River. While her husband worked for the Goodyear Chemical Company, Lois Gibbs stayed at home with their two infant children. Gibbs soon became baffled by the array of illnesses in the neighbourhood – epilepsy, respiratory and urinary tract infections. Her son was hospitalised with pneumonia. She learned through an article by Niagara Falls Gazette reporter Michael Brown that her son’s school, the 99th Street School, had been built on top of a 20,000 tonne toxic dump. Later investigation revealed that the entire neighbourhood had been built on the same dump. In the 1950s, the Hooker Chemical

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Company (now OxyChem) had buried known toxins such as chloroform, dioxin, trichloroethane, tetrachloroethane, the banned pesticide lindane and benzene, and then sold the land to the board of education for $1. Although she had no formal education or prior knowledge of environmental issues, as soon as her son was released from hospital Gibbs began a campaign going door to door with a petition asking for action. Her neighbours were also concerned and in late 1978 the Love Canal Homeowners’ Association was formed and began to battle against the local, state and federal governments. Although at first the School Board denied their request to close the school, eventually it was closed and the state of New York purchased the 239 homes closest to the dump. Gibbs fought for two more years until, in October 1980, President Jimmy Carter delivered an emergency declaration moving 900 families out of the area. National press coverage made Gibbs a household name. Her efforts led to the creation of the Superfund law, which is used to locate and clean up toxic sites throughout the US. After her battle, Gibbs received thousands of calls from people around the US also facing environmental hazards. In order to help others, in 1981 she set up the Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste (later renamed the Center for Health, Environment and Justice). In 2006 she launched the Environmental Health Alliance, a coalition of 160 groups formed around the Blueprint Ensuring Our Safety And Future Economy (BESAFE) movement, which is aimed at forcing the government to ‘heed early warnings about hazardous materials, put safety first, utilize a democratic decision-making process, and choose the safest solution’.

“

The main lesson to be learned from the Love Canal crisis is that, in order to protect public health from chemical contamination, there needs to be a massive outcry – a choir of voices – by the American people demanding change.

x www.chej.org

”

Love Canal: The Story Continues (Gabriola Island, BC:  Lois Marie Gibbs,New Society Publishers, 20th Anniversary rev. edn 1998)

1979 1979

Hazel Wolf 1898–2000

An activist centenarian Following a bird-watching trip to Seattle’s Lincoln Park, Hazel Wolf, an ardent Canadian communist and campaigner for the rights of immigrants, began to 188

include environmental protection among her campaigns. As she neared retirement from her job as a legal secretary for a Seattle-based civil rights attorney, 67-year-old Wolf became secretary of the Seattle chapter of the National Audubon Society. She was to remain in this post for the next 37 years. In 1979, aged 81, having visited almost every Native American tribe in the state, Wolf helped organise the first Conference of Native Americans and Environmentalists. The conference brought together farmers, conservationists and Native Americans to protect the Columbia River from expansion by irrigation of the Columbia Basin Project and to preserve the Hanford Reach. She became nationally recognised and was awarded the National Audubon Society’s Medal of Excellence. She travelled and lectured intensively, making connections with and between indigenous peoples, labour activists and environmentalists. She travelled to Nicaragua in the late 1980s and early 1990s, seeing hope in the connection that the Sandinistas made between environmental stewardship and democratic socialism. For her 100th birthday, King County, Washington honoured her activism by renaming Eastside’s 47 hectare Saddle Swamp the Hazel Wolf Wetlands Preserve. In 2004, the Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Festival was held ‘following the 145 footsteps of Hazel Wolf and David Brower’ open to the country’s leading environmental activists aged between 13 and 22. The Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Network has now been established as a non-profit organisation dedicated to improving the quality and effective use of environmental media.

Ü

“

If I’d known as a child what I know now, I’d have become an environmentalist on the spot. I guess you could say that my childhood dreams led me first to help people in their individual environments – housing and health care, and things like that. But I ended up working to save our natural home.

”

x www.hazelfilm.org

Hazel Wolf: Fighting the Establishment  Susan Starbuck, (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2003)

1979 1979

Hans Jonas 1903–1993

The imperative of responsibility Although the philosopher Hans Jonas, from a German Jewish family, succeeded in escaping the Holocaust, his mother died at Auschwitz. Having fought in both the Second World War and the Israeli War of Independence, Jonas eventually settled in New York. It was here that he began to develop a theory about the social and ethi189

cal problems created by modern technology. In 1979 his book The Imperative of Responsibility was published in German, appearing in an English-language edition in 1984. It was a bestseller in its genre, selling some 200,000 copies. Jonas’ book had a powerful influence on the green movement, particularly in Germany. The book sets out an ethical foundation for the age of technology, arguing that ‘old world’ values of frugality, temperance and moderation are necessary to protect the world of tomorrow. Jonas formulated a new and distinctive supreme principle of morality.

“

Act so that the effects of your action are compatible with the permanence of genuine human life.

”

In Search of an Ethic for the Technological Age  Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, new edn 1985)

1979 1979

James Lovelock 1919–

Gaia During the early 1960s, an English inventor called James Lovelock had been working for NASA on equipment for exploring the planet Mars, and then for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena on the first lunar survey mission. Considering life on other plants provoked Lovelock into considering how, on Earth, our highly improbable mixture of gases could be maintained if it were ‘manipulated on a day-to-day basis by life on the surface’. Deciding to stop working for big organisations and become an ‘independent’ scientist, Lovelock returned to England where he began to develop an instrument called the electron capture detector. While monitoring the supposedly clean Atlantic air blowing onto the west coast of Ireland, Lovelock’s instrument detected chlorofluorocarbons. By 1971, he was recording the same distribution of residues in the Antarctic. By the late 1970s, Lovelock, now a Fellow of the Royal Society, had further developed his theory that the Earth’s biota, tightly coupled with its environment, acts as a single, self-regulating living system in such a way as to maintain the conditions 190

suitable for life. The system, including near-surface rocks, regulates the chemistry of the oceans, composition of the atmosphere and surface temperature. But Lovelock now concluded that the system was becoming sick as a result of human activities. At this time, Lovelock’s neighbour and friend in the Wiltshire village where he was living was the well-known author William Golding. It was often their habit to take a stroll together down to the village post office. On one of these walks, Lovelock explained his theory about the Earth as a self-regulating living system to Golding. The author of Lord of the Flies suggested that Lovelock call his theory Gaia, after the Greek goddess of the Earth. In the past three decades, Lovelock has written several books: The Gaia Theory; The Ages of Gaia; Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine; and his autobiography Homage to Gaia. Although some scientists, such as Richard Dawkins, have dismissed the Gaia theory as ‘crudely anthropomorphic’ and ‘pseudoscientific idiocy’, others find it persuasive. In 2006 Lovelock published The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back, and How We Can Still Save Humanity. In this, he drew many radical conclusions including, most controversially, passionate support for nuclear energy. This, he argued, is not only a secure, safe and reliable source of energy but also the only way to reverse the increasing emissions of greenhouse gases and their consequences, climate change.

“

Renewable energy sounds good, but so far it is inefficient and expensive. It has a future, but we have no time now to experiment with visionary energy sources: civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear energy now, or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.

”

x www.jameslovelock.org

Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting  James Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin Books, 2007)

1979 1979

David Attenborough 1926–

Life on Earth From its first broadcast in 1979, an estimated 500 million people worldwide saw the 13-part television documentary series Life on Earth. It was written and presented by an enthusiastic and charming English naturalist, David Attenborough. At the time, it was the most ambitious series ever produced by the BBC Natural History Unit. Over 1.25 million feet of film were shot in over 30 countries. Viewers saw the 191

great wildebeest migration, the laying of turtle eggs and the blooming of desert cacti, among hundreds of other unforgettable images. He followed this with two multi-million-pound productions, The Living Planet (1984) and The Trials of Life (1990). Attenborough, who was knighted in 1985, went on to present further documentary series such as The Private Life of Plants (1995), The Life of Birds (1998), The Blue Planet (2001), The Life of Mammals (2002) and Life in the Undergrowth (2005). His last major work is likely to be Life in Cold Blood (dealing with reptiles and amphibians) which is currently in production and due for completion in 2008. In 2005, Attenborough launched a partnership alongside five Asia-Pacific nations to promote technological solutions for reducing the world’s dependency on fossil fuels. In 2005 and 2006 he backed a BirdLife International project to stop the killing of albatross by longline fishing boats; and he gave public support to WWF’s campaign to have 220,000 km2 of Borneo’s rainforest designated a protected area. In May/June 2006, the BBC broadcast a major two-part environmental documentary as part of its Climate Chaos season of programmes on global warming. In Are We Changing Planet Earth? and Can We Save Planet Earth? Attenborough, who had previously been criticised by environmentalists for not speaking out on the matter, now investigated the subject and put forward some potential solutions. He returned to the locations of some of his past productions and discovered the effect that climate change is having on them. He has recently written and spoken publicly about the fact that he now believes global warming is definitely real, and caused by human activities.

“

In the past, we didn’t understand the effect of our actions. Unknowingly, we sowed the wind and now, literally, we are reaping the whirlwind. But we no longer have that excuse: now we do recognise the consequences of our behaviour. Now, surely, we must act to reform it: individually and collectively; nationally and internationally – or we doom future generations to catastrophe.

”

 Sir David Attenborough, David Attenborough: Life on Air (London: BBC Books, new edn 2003)

1979 1979

Melaku Worede 1936–

Seeds of survival Ethiopia is noted worldwide for its great genetic diversity, including many important domesticated crop plant species, such as sorghum, barley, teff, chickpeas and

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coffee. Much of this uniquely adapted crop biodiversity is found in small fields and tended by farmers who, aided by nature, have played a central role in the creation, maintenance and use of landraces – farming-based native seed varieties. But with the introduction of genetically uniform crop varieties, modern farming methods and the severe droughts the country has suffered, such diverse landraces have come under threat. One of those who realised the seriousness of this threat was a 43-year-old Ethiopian called Melaku Worede. Having obtained a PhD in agronomy (genetics and breeding) from the University of Nebraska, Worede returned to his native Ethiopia and, in 1979, set up a Plant Genetic Resources Centre in Addis Ababa. Staffed entirely by Ethiopians, the centre has trained a whole new generation of plant breeders and geneticists. Worede’s goal was to preserve Ethiopia’s great genetic diversity. Over the next 14 years, the centre set out to establish ‘strategic seed reserves’ for traditional varieties that could be released to farmers in times of drought when no other seeds were likely to thrive. In just a few years, Worede and his staff collected and safely stored a considerable amount of Ethiopia’s genetic wealth. In the process he established not only Africa’s finest facility of its kind, but one of the world’s premier genetic conservation systems. The genetic diversity protected through Ethiopia’s traditional farming culture may be a future source of new seeds capable of producing food in changing climates and of resisting unforeseen diseases and pests. The centre set up by Worede is now known as the Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute. From this, Worede also set up the African Biodiversity Network, while also acting as a board member of the International Plant Genetic Institute. He received a Right Livelihood Award in 1989.

“

Plant genetic resources are seldom ‘raw materials’; they are the expression of the current wisdom of farmers who have played a highly significant role in the building up of the world’s genetic resource base . . . As is already happening in my country, farmers and national gene banks in developing countries can work together to preserve and expand crop genetic diversity on behalf of all humanity.

”

x www.ibc.gov.et

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1979 1979

Yolanda Kakabadse 1948–

A grassroots pioneer In 1979, Yolanda Kakabadse, an educational psychologist working in her native Ecuador, was appointed Executive Director of the Fundación Natura in Quito. Over the next 11 years, Kakabadse built Fundación Natura into one of Latin America’s most important environmental non-governmental organisations, working to develop policies on education and development. From 1990 until the Earth Summit in 1992, she coordinated the participation of civil society organisations at the conference and was asked to prepare the chapter on non-governmental organisations for Agenda 21, the main output of the summit. The following year, she set up Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano, a non-governmental organisation that designs and organises policy dialogues on sustainable development among decision-makers in Latin America, where she remains executive president. In 1996 Kakabadse was elected president of the World Conservation Union (formerly the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources [IUCN]) and, two years later, served briefly as Ecuador’s Minister for the Environment. She is currently joint coordinator of the UN’s Millennium Project Task Force on Environmental Sustainability. Kakabadse has been vocal about her belief that globalisation needs to have an ethical dimension in order to build ‘bridges between the different peoples and cultures of the world. This includes the creation of awareness of the need to build solidarity between the poor and the rich, between generations, between genders and between the people of today and the people who are to be born.’ In 2001 Kakabadse was awarded the Zayed Prize for environmental protection, selected from 200 nominations from 66 countries.

“

We are forcing people to treat their environment as a marketplace, not as the place where they live. Lawyers are becoming the new priests of modern society as they negotiate over intellectual property rights that once were held sacred but freely shared.

”

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x www.unmillenniumproject.org

1979 1979

Alan Rabinowitz 1953–

Jaguar man

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113 In 1979 George Schaller charged a 26-year-old University of Tennessee postgradu-

ate ecologist called Alan Rabinowitz with a mission – to survey the status of the jaguar (Panthera onca) in South America. Until then, Rabinowitz had been studying endangered grey bats and racoons. After three years in the field, the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) was able to give Rabinowitz a long-term research project tracking jaguars in the Cockscomb Basin in the eastern part of Belize. His findings eventually led to the creation of the Cockscomb Basin Jaguar Preserve. The Maya Indians, who had previously been killing the jaguars, are now their wardens, protecting the animals for ecotourism. Rabinowitz then moved on to a project to protect the clouded leopard (Neofelis nebulosa). This involved working in the lowland forest of Taiwan and led to the setting up of the Tawu Mountain Nature Reserve. From 1986 to 1991 Rabinowitz lived and worked in Thailand where he conducted research on IndoChinese tigers, leopards, leopard cats and civets. His book Chasing the Dragon’s Tail: The Struggle to Save Thailand’s Wild Cats recounts his efforts and success. For the next two years Rabinowitz passed on his experience in wildlife research through training courses in Sabah, Sarawak, Myanmar, Taiwan and China. He wrote his own textbook, The Wildlife Field Research and Conservation Training Manual, which has been translated into a number of different languages. In 1993 Rabinowitz initiated a wildlife conservation programme in Burma, where his efforts resulted in the establishment of Lampi Island marine park, as well as the first Himalayan national park, the Hkakaborazi. While in Hukawng Valley in northern Burma, he became the first to document the existence of the smallest known species of deer, the leaf muntjac (Muntiacus putaoensis). He later helped to establish the Hukawng Valley Tiger Reserve – the world’s largest – although this is now the subject of controversy as the Burmese military regime has allegedly opened the area to gold-mining concessions. Rabinowitz is now Director of Science and Exploration at the WCS and runs the Global Carnivore Programme. His current goal is to protect jaguars throughout their entire range, from Mexico to Argentina, by creating a natural, 3,200 km corridor on public and private lands where jaguars can thrive well into the future.

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“

What I realized is there was nothing that I wanted to do more in life than be with animals and try to help them.

x www.wcs.org

”

Beyond the Last Village: A Journey of Discovery in  Alan Rabinowitz, Asia’s Forbidden Wilderness

(Washington, DC: Island Press, new edn 2003)

1980 1980

Jimmy Carter 1924–

By a stroke of the pen The 39th US President (1977–1981) did a great deal for the planet. Influenced by the lobbying and campaigning of Morris and Stewart Udall of Arizona, in August 1977 Jimmy Carter signed the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act, the first federal law to regulate the environmental effects of strip mining and to require the reclamation of land and water damaged by coal mining. In 1980 Carter signed the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (known as the Superfund law) which provided for the cleanup of hazardous waste sites such as Love Canal. But perhaps Carter’s greatest legislative coup took place on 2 December 1980 when he convinced Congress to pass the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. This Act designated for preservation some 22 million hectares of wilderness in both existing and new national parks (13 million hectares in eight park units) and in existing and new national wildlife refuges (8 million hectares in 13 refuges). In a particularly hard-fought victory, long-delayed wilderness protection was provided at last for national forest land in south-east Alaska (2 million hectares in 14 wilderness areas in the Tongass National Forest). In total, the Act set aside more wild country than had been preserved anywhere else in the world at that time – some 42.2 million hectares.

“

I want to make it clear, if there is ever a conflict [between environmental quality and economic growth], I will go for beauty, clean air, water and landscape.

”

x www.cartercenter.org

 Jimmy Carter, Our Endangered Values: America’s Moral Crisis

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006)

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1980 1980

Sunderlal Bahuguna 1927–

Ecology is permanent economy In 1973 India’s Forest Department decided to allow a sports goods company to site a factory in a forest area near the Tibetan border, the building of which would involve the felling of 2,500 trees. The local villagers, angered by the decision, came together to protest under the leadership of Chandi Prasad Bhatt, an activist belonging to the non-governmental organisation Dasoli Gram Swarajya Sangh. But, when the loggers arrived, Bhatt and the other male activists were meeting with forestry officials elsewhere. It was left to a group of 27 women and girls, led by a village woman called Gaura Devi, to confront the loggers. They formed human chains and hugged the trees. Devi addressed the men: ‘Brothers! This forest is the source of our livelihood. If you destroy it, the mountain will come tumbling down onto our village.’ She placed herself in front of a gun brandished by one of the men, saying: ‘This forest nurtures us like a mother; you will only be able to use your axes on it if you shoot me first.’ After three days of negotiation, the lumbermen finally withdrew, with the trees uncut. The success of the village women led to similar actions in other parts of the country. This became known as the Chipko movement (Hindi for ‘embrace’). Soon, the Chipko cause had been taken up by Sunderlal Bahuguna, a Gandhian activist and philosopher. He coined the Chipko slogan ‘ecology is permanent economy’. In 1980, his appeal to Indira Gandhi, then Prime Minister of India, to stop logging led to her imposing a 15-year ban on felling in Himalayan forests, including Uttar Pradesh, the Western Ghats and the Vindhyas. To publicise the ban, Bahuguna went on a 5,000 km march through the Himalayas between 1981 and 1983. In the late 1980s, Bahuguna joined a campaign that had for many years been opposing construction of a proposed Himalayan dam on the river near his birthplace of Tehri. In 1989 he began the first of a series of hunger strikes to draw political attention to the dangers posed by the dam. Bahuguna ended a 45-day fast in 1995 when the Indian government promised a review of the Tehri dam project. But the promise was not kept and the following year he committed himself to another fast, only broken after 74 days when the prime minister gave a personal undertaking to conduct a thorough review, largely on Bahuguna’s terms. But the dam project still did not die. In 2002, the northern state of Uttaranchal was earmarked to take the transmission lines from the dam project, threatening about 100,000 trees in the Advani forest and about the same number in other Himalayan forests. In addition, Uttaranchal stands on an active seismic zone. A strong earthquake is very

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The ageing Bahuguna called for resistance from Chipko activists, among them the veterans of the 1970s. This story is far from over.

“

We in Himalaya are facing a crisis of survival due to the suicidal activities being carried out in the name of development . . . The monstrous Tehri dam is a symbol of this.

”

1980 1980

Wangari Maathai 1940–

The tree woman In the late 1970s, Wangari Maathai, a 40-year-old professor of veterinary anatomy at the University of Nairobi and chairwoman of the National Council of Women of Kenya, had become concerned about both grassroots poverty and growing deforestation in Kenya. She decided to establish a Green Belt Movement, with trees being planted by poor Kenyan women. The movement grew very fast. By the early 1980s there were estimated to be 600 tree nurseries, involving 2,000–3,000 women. About 2,000 public green belts with about 1,000 seedlings each had been established and over 500,000 schoolchildren were involved. Some 15,000 farmers had planted small woods on their own farms. But Maathai did not stop there. In 1986, the movement established a Pan African Green Belt Network. This has since led to the adoption of green belt methods in Tanzania, Uganda, Malawi, Lesotho, Ethiopia and Zimbabwe. The movement has now planted over 30 million trees across Kenya to prevent soil erosion. Maathai’s mission was far from over. In 1998, Kenya’s President Daniel Arap Moi backed the development of a luxury housing project in Nairobi and began clearing hundreds of acres of Kenyan forest. For protesting against this, Maathai was arrested and imprisoned. An Amnesty International letter-writing campaign helped free her. In 1999 she suffered head injuries when attacked while planting trees in the Karura public forest in Nairobi. At the start of 2002, Maathai, for her own safety, accepted a position as Visiting Fellow at Yale University’s Global Institute for Sustainable Forestry. In December 2002, when Mwai Kibabi defeated Moi in Kenya’s parliamentary elections, Maathai was asked to return to her native country where she worked as Deputy Minister for Environment, Natural Resources and Wildlife until November 2005. 198

A recipient of the Goldman Prize and the Right Livelihood Award, in 2004 Maathai received the Nobel Prize for Peace in recognition of her contribution to sustainable development, democracy and peace – the first African woman to receive the award.

“

Every one of us can make a contribution. And quite often we are looking for the big things and forget that, wherever we are, we can make a contribution. Sometimes I tell myself, I may only be planting a tree here, but just imagine what’s happening if there are billions of people out there doing something. Just imagine the power of what we can do.

x www.greenbeltmovement.org

”

Maathai, The Green Belt Movement: Sharing the  Wangari Approach and the Experience (New York: Lantern Books, rev. edn 2003)

1980 1980

Thomas E. Lovejoy 1941–

Biological diversity During the late 1970s, in an effort to slow down the clearing of the Amazon rainforest by landowners, the Brazilian government created the Manaus Free Zone, protecting half the forest from felling. Dr Thomas E. Lovejoy, an American biology graduate who had been working in the Amazon since 1965, used this designation to convince landowners to leave their protected forest reserves in neatly cut squares. Calling this the Minimum Critical Size of Ecosystems project, he was able to measure ecosystem decay in forest patches ranging from one to 1,000 hectares. Lovejoy was soon joined by several Brazilian colleagues in what was to become one of the world’s longest-running ecological experiments. One of the most important findings was that the smallest forest areas had the fastest rates of decline in insect, bird and mammal populations. This approach, known as the biological dynamics of forest fragments, has been used to define minimum sizes for national parks and biological reserves. In 1980, while he was director of WWF in the US, Lovejoy presented a report on global extinction rates to the US President in which he coined the phrase ‘biological diversity’. He predicted that 10–20 per cent of all species on Earth would be extinct by the year 2020. Another of Lovejoy’s innovative ideas came when working with the World Bank. He launched the idea of debt-for-nature swaps, in which environmental groups purchase foreign debt and then convert this debt at its face value into the local currency to purchase biologically sensitive tracts of land in the debtor nation for purposes of environmental protection. Many such swaps of international debt for conservation 199

projects have been initiated: for example, in Bolivia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, the Philippines, Madagascar, Jamaica and Zambia, with more than $1 billion in funds being made available using this mechanism. Lovejoy is also the founder of the public television series Nature in the US and served as principal adviser to the series for many years. This programme is the most popular long-running series on public television. Today, Lovejoy is Chief Biodiversity Adviser to the World Bank, Senior Adviser to the United Nations Foundation and President of the Heinz Centre for Science, Economics and the Environment.

“

The natural world in which we live is nothing short of entrancing – wondrous really. Personally, I take great joy in sharing a world with the shimmering variety of life on Earth. Nor can I believe any of us really want a planet which is a lonely wasteland.

x www.heinzctr.org

”

E. Lovejoy and Lee Hannah (eds.), Climate Change and  Thomas Biodiversity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006)

1980 1980

Jakob von Uexküll 1944–

The Right Livelihood Awards In 1980, Jakob von Uexküll, a Swedish-born writer, philosopher and passionate philatelist specialising in the early postal history of Saudi Arabia, sold his holdings of rare postage stamps for around $1 million in order to finance an original and worthy cause. He approached the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm, famous for its annual awards for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and peace, to propose the establishment of two new awards – for ecology and social justice. Despite his offer of a financial incentive to the Foundation, Uexküll’s proposal was turned down. He therefore decided to set up what he called the Right Livelihood Awards, which have since become known as the Alternative Nobels. These are presented each year in December in Sweden’s parliament, usually on the day before the Nobel prize ceremony. There are now over 100 Alternative Nobel laureates from 48 countries, a number of whom are included in this book. In 1984, Uexküll founded The Other Economic Summit, which promotes economics that incorporate the sustainable use of natural resources and the productive engagement of all people in the development of their communities and societies. He was elected several times as a Member of the European Parliament for the German Green Party, serving on the Political Affairs Committee and the Science and Technology Committee. 200

He is currently working towards the creation of a World Future Council of planetary elders, pioneers and youth leaders, to act as a ‘global conscience’, speaking up for global citizens and the interests of future generations.

“

The Right Livelihood Award aims to help the North find a wisdom to match its science, and the South to find a science to match its ancient wisdom.

x www.rightlivelihood.org

”

of Change: Experiments in Creating  Jeremy Seabrook, Pioneers a Humane Society (London: Zed Books, 1993)

1981 1981

Jared Diamond 1937–

Ecology and civilisation Over a period of 30 years, Jared Diamond, a physiologist and membrane biophysician at the University of California at Los Angeles, went on more than 19 expeditions to study the birds of Irian Jaya (formerly New Guinea) and other tropical, south-west Pacific islands. Many of these expeditions were devoted to exploring the very isolated, little known and virtually uninhabited series of mountain ranges inland of Irian Jaya’s northern coast. During the 1981 expedition, Diamond rediscovered the long-lost golden-fronted bowerbird (Ambylornis flavifrons), previously known only from feather specimens found in a Paris hat shop in 1895. Based on his observations of the species’ ecosystem, Diamond co-designed comprehensive national park plans for the governments of Irian Jaya, Papua and the Solomon Islands. He went on to survey 14 of Irian Jaya’s proposed nature reserves, making proposals for their sustainable management. From the results of his expeditions, Diamond’s interest broadened and he turned his attention to global human ecology and environmental history. His book Guns, Germs and Steel was published in 1997 and translated into 23 languages. It asks why the evolution of human societies over the last 13,000 years proceeded so differently in Eurasia, the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa and Australia. Diamond’s book is a unique human history that integrates studies in many academic areas such as evolutionary biology, biogeography, environmental geography, genetics, molecular biology, behavioural ecology, linguistics and archaeology. He asserts that the main international issues of our time are the legacies of processes that began during the early-modern period up to around 1700, during which civilisations that had experienced an extensive amount of ‘human development’ began to intrude on less complex civilisations. Diamond sought to explain why such advanced colonial civilisations developed only in Eurasia, doing away with ethnocentric myths in the 201

process. He claims that ecological factors account for the development of civilisations and technologies, giving many examples from throughout history. In 2005 Diamond followed up with Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. This deals with societal collapses involving an environmental component. For example, he pays particular attention to the Norse settlements in Greenland which vanished as the climate got colder while the surrounding Inuit culture thrived. Diamond’s books have won him many prestigious awards, including the Pulitzer Prize.

“

The metaphor is so obvious. Easter Island, isolated in the Pacific Ocean – once the island got into trouble, there was no way they could get free. There were no other people from whom they could get help. In the same way that we on Planet Earth, if we ruin our own [world] we won’t be able to get help.

”

 Jared Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005)

1982 1982

Norman Myers 1934–

The hotspots strategist During the late 1960s, Oxford graduate Norman Myers, working as a writer, photographer and lecturer on wildlife in Kenya, had observed the increasing threat to the biological diversity of Africa. Having obtained a doctorate at the University of California at Berkeley, Myers provoked the scientific community by suggesting that, instead of the generally accepted species extinction rate of around one species per year, it was more likely to be one species per day. Following more detailed research, Myers predicted in 1979 that the rapidly accelerating decline of tropical forests, at about 75,000 km2 per year, could well double within another decade. In the early 1980s Myers was the first to warn that Central American deforestation was mainly due to conversion of forest areas into cattle pastures to supply cheap beef for the American fast food industry – a process he labelled the ‘hamburger connection’. He also drew attention to the influence of tropical forests on climate, both locally and globally. It was at this point that Myers introduced the concept of triage (a system to prioritise needs and allocate scarce resources) to environmental conservation. Postulating that we have too few resources to assist all threatened species, he devised a method based on biological, ecological, genetic and other factors to identify what he called ‘biodiversity hotspots’. These are areas with the most endemic species and in the most danger of habitat loss. One such hotspot is Madagascar where less than 10% of the original forest cover remains, yet living in

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it and relying on it are 67 species of lemurs, nearly 80 species of birds and large numbers of reptiles and amphibians, many of which are still being named as new to science. Myers and his colleagues originally identified 18 hotspots. Ten years later, this figure had risen to 25, comprising 1.4% of the planet’s land surface. Other hotspots include the Caribbean islands, the Philippines, the tip of Florida, Hawaii and other Pacific islands. Myers proposed that if these hotspots were preserved then the mass extinctions, which he had now revised upwards to 50 species per day, could be greatly reduced. During this time Myers acted as a senior adviser to a string of organisations such as the UN, the World Bank, the White House and WWF, as well as scientific academies in a dozen countries. He raised the awareness of influential politicians (including six prime ministers and presidents) and business leaders worldwide. His hotspot analysis has been adopted by conservation organisations, generating $550 million to date, the largest sum ever assigned to a single conservation strategy. To promote his convictions, Myers has written 250 academic papers, plus 300 popular articles and 17 books, total sales of which have topped the 1 million mark. Currently an Honorary Visiting Fellow at Oxford’s Green College, Myers’ most recent thinking concerns environmental refugees. He suggests that sea-level rise and agricultural disruption caused by climate change may displace millions of people in developing countries. His potentially conservative estimate of 150 million environmental refugees equates to 1.5 per cent of the predicted global population of 10 billion by the year 2050.

“

To produce one kilogram of beef takes an awful lot of water. One very, very big steak takes 16,000 litres of water . . . To produce a cup of coffee, it takes 140 litres of water . . . One hamburger takes 2,400 litres of water.

”

Consumers: The Influence of Affluence on the  Norman Myers and Jennifer Kent, The NewEnvironment (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2004)

1982 1982

Amory Lovins 1947–

The soft energy path In 1982, Amory B. Lovins, a consultant experimental physicist and committed environmentalist, educated at Harvard and Oxford, and his wife Hunter, a lawyer, forester and social scientist, decided to build a house to demonstrate that careful design could virtually eliminate energy demand. The site they chose was in Old 203

Snowmass in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado. They called their ‘soft energy path’ experiment the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). The resulting south-facing building complex is so energy-efficient that, even with local –40°C winter temperatures, the interiors can maintain a comfortable temperature solely from sunlight plus the body heat of the people who work there, and can even nurture semi-tropical and tropical indoor plants. From a small think-tank, RMI has grown into a major global research institution with more than 50 fulltime staff. Lovins has been one of the most influential American voices advocating a soft energy path for the US and other nations. He has advocated concepts of energy use based on conservation and efficiency, and of energy production based on the use of renewable sources of energy generated at or near the site where the energy is actually used. In 1991, Amory set up the hypercar project to develop small, ultra energy-efficient, lightweight fuel-cell automobiles. In 1997 the Lovinses, in cooperation with Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, co- 267 authored Factor 4: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use. This was followed, in 1999, by a partnership with Paul Hawken to write Natural Capitalism: Creating the 250 Next Industrial Revolution. Both books explore the idea that modern society can produce more with fewer natural resources. They have been instrumental in bringing the business community to the table to discuss sustainable development as a potential opportunity rather than a threat. Five years later, Amory Lovins’ book Winning the Oil Endgame: Innovation for Profit, Jobs and Security shows, in practical detail, how much the conventional oildependent sectors have to gain by moving away from oil through innovation and new technologies.

Ü Ü

“

I don’t do problems, I do solutions.

x www.rmi.org

”

L. Hunter Lovins, Natural Capitalism:  Paul Hawken, Amory Lovins and Creating the Next Industrial Revolution (New York: Little, Brown, 1999)

1982 1982

Vandana Shiva 1952–

Nuclear physicist fights ‘biopiracy’ As a teenager growing up in Dehra Dun at the foothills of the Himalayas, Vandana Shiva had participated in the Chipko movement. With her father working as a for204

est warden and her mother a farmer with a deep love for nature, it seemed inevitable that Shiva would follow an environmental career. Surprisingly, however, she chose nuclear physics, ultimately obtaining a PhD on hidden variables and non-locality in quantum theory from the University of Western Ontario, Canada. Returning to Dehra Dun, Shiva began to look at science policy issues in India. Gradually she found herself learning more and more about the threat to biological diversity posed by biotechnology. In 1982 the agricultural industry laid out its strategy for creating a world monopoly based on the patenting of seeds, so redefining seed saving by farmers as intellectual property theft. Outraged, Shiva dropped her work on dams, forests and mines to focus on biotechnology and patenting. Later the same year, she founded the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in Dehra Dun. In 1988 she represented ‘Nature’ at the People’s Tribunal on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in Berlin. Nine years later, Shiva founded Navdanyaa national movement to protect the biodiversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seeds, so setting up ‘a people’s programme on biodiversity’. Before long she was talking about ‘biopiracy’ (the appropriation, generally through the use of patents, of legal rights over indigenous biomedical knowledge), declaring: ‘I don’t want to live in a world where five giant companies control our health and food.’ Seed Satyagraha is the name of the popular movement that Shiva helped to 63 organise in a stand against the seed monopoly threat. It is inspired by Gandhi and is based on the concepts of swadeshi (producing your own food and goods), swaraj (water, food and seed autonomy) and satyagraha (non-cooperation as a non-violent defensive strategy). For Shiva, non-violence means that ‘we live ecologically and at peace with all species. In India, the Earth community has never been seen to be dominated by humans. Our species are part of vasudhaiva kutumbhakam, the Earth family.’ Shiva has also helped movements in Africa, Asia, Latin America, Ireland, Switzerland and Austria in their campaigns against genetic engineering. In 1998, Shiva set up an international movement of women working on food, agriculture, patents and biotechnology called Diverse Women for Diversity. She is one of the leaders of the International Forum on Globalisation and is a key figure in the anti-globalisation movement.

Ü

“

The primary threat to nature and people today comes from centralising and monopolising power and control. Not until diversity is made the logic of production will there be a chance for sustainability, justice and peace. Cultivating and conserving diversity is no luxury in our times: it is a survival imperative.

”

x www.navdanya.org

Justice, Sustainability, and Peace  Vandana Shiva, Earth Democracy:(Boston, MA: South End Press, 2005)

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1983 1983

Madhav Gadgil 1942–

Diversity in the Western Ghats From the early 1970s, Harvard-trained Indian botanist and zoologist, Madhav Gadgil, based at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, devoted his time and energy to solving environmental problems both in India and in other developing nations. In 1983 he set up the Centre for Ecological Sciences in Bangalore. One of his projects centred on the human–environment relationship in the mountains of the Western Ghats, southern India. Gadgil successfully organised a network of 27 science colleges, university departments and non-governmental organisations spread over 150,000 km2. Each group mapped out the landscapes of their study area, sampling trees, bird species, butterflies, fish and plantlife. The project documented environmental change and suggested ways in which the region could be best protected. The area was declared an ecological hotspot in 1988 through the efforts of ecologist Norman Myers. Though the Western Ghats cover 202 barely 5 per cent of India’s land, 27 per cent of all species of plants in India are found there. The range is home to at least 84 amphibian species, 16 bird species, seven mammals and 1,600 flowering plants which are not found anywhere elsewhere in the world. In 2003 Gadgil was awarded the Volvo Environment Prize for his pioneering work in integrating research on biodiversity with the needs of people and their communities. Most scientists examine either ecological systems or social systems, but Gadgil is an exception. He has gone beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries to link science and conservation to the needs and knowledge of poor local communities. His work shows that local knowledge can be of central importance to scientific research and land use planning. Gadgil is now promoting a national People’s Biodiversity Register which utilises local knowledge to inventory and ultimately conserve biodiversity. The Indian government has now established many protected areas including two biosphere reserves, 13 national parks with restricted human access, several wildlife sanctuaries to protect specific endangered species and many reserve forests. In 2006, India applied to UNESCO for the Western Ghats to be listed as a World Heritage Site. Gadgil has been Biodiversity Adviser to the Prime Minister of India and represents India at the International Convention on Biodiversity.

Ü

“

Switzerland’s forest cover was once down to 4 per cent; it recovered magnificently on the strength of its community forest management institutions. Perhaps, we too will turn the tide in the coming years.

x ces.iisc.ernet.in

”

and Ramachandra Guha, This Fissured Land: An  Madhav Gadgil Ecological History of India

(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1993)

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1983 1983

Petra Kelly 1947–1992

Founding Die Grünen One of the founders of Die Grünen (The Green Party), Petra Kelly has described it as ‘a non-violent ecological and basic-democratic anti-war coalition of parliamentary and extra-parliamentary grassroots oriented forces’. In 1983, she was among 28 members to be elected to the Bundestag, West Germany’s parliament. This was the first time a serious number of committed environmentalist politicians had entered into national government anywhere in the world. Distressed by the death from cancer at the age of ten of her sister Grace, Kelly had become active as an anti-nuclear campaigner and also founded and chaired an association for the support of cancer research in children. In her international political work and public speaking, Kelly concentrated on the four themes closest to her heart – peace and non-violence, ecology, feminism and human rights – and the links between them. She believed in the right of civil disobedience and participated in many such actions around the world such as Swords to Ploughshares in East Berlin and For a Nuclear-free World in Moscow. In 1987 the Bundestag unanimously approved her resolution condemning human rights violations by the Chinese government in Tibet. She used her status as the world’s most famous ‘green’ to bring her passionate concern for the rights of the victims of oppression and violence to the attention of everyone she met, from heads of government to groups of activists. Following the unification of Germany in 1990, Kelly’s strong views led to her falling out with Die Grünen. She continued to campaign against the harmful effects of uranium and was presenter of Fünf vor Zwölf (Five to Twelve), a television series on environmental protection. Tragically, in October 1992, Kelly was shot in Bonn, probably by her life partner, Gert Bastian, who then took his own life. Even today, it is not known whether this was a love pact or something more sinister. With the goal of furthering Kelly’s ideas and political message, the Petra Kelly Foundation was founded in 1997 as part of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Since 1998, the foundation has presented the Petra Kelly Prize for Human Rights, Ecology and Non-violence.

“

In a world struggling in violence and dishonesty, the further development of non-violence – not only as a philosophy but as a way of life, as found on the streets, in the market squares, outside the missile bases, inside the chemical plants and inside the war industry – becomes one of the most urgent priorities.

”

x www.petra-kelly-archiv.de

Petra Kelly, Fighting for Hope (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984)

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1983 1983

Martin Green 1948–

Making photovoltaics work Although Martin Green was interested in microelectronics at high school in Australia, as he matured he became disillusioned with his career choice. Searching for a subject that might contribute to the welfare of humankind after his graduation from Queensland University, he discovered solar energy while visiting a Sydney microelectronics company. While at McMaster University in Canada, Green steered his doctoral studies towards photovoltaics. On his return to Australia in 1974 he set up a Solar Photovoltaics Group at the University of New South Wales in Sydney. When the oil crisis hit in 1973, and a lavish American solar programme was launched, Green’s small, low-budget team, using equipment rescued from the scrap heap, started setting world efficiency records for photovoltaics. In 1983 they made the first 18 per cent efficient silicon cell. Two years later, they achieved an efficiency of 20 per cent and later improved this to 24.7 per cent. Working with PhD student Stuart Wenham, Green invented a low-cost, high-efficiency revolutionary laser-grooved cell. Termed a ‘buried contact’ cell, this eliminates the over-shadowing of the light-sensitive front that is experienced with conventional types of solar cell. Buried contact solar cells produce 30% more energy and are 20% cheaper to produce than other types. Green and Wenham’s buried contact solar cells dominated many of the major solar car races across the world. For the 1990 World Solar Challenge, the Swiss Spirit of Biel/Bienne II was equipped with buried contact cells manufactured at a cost of £160,000 by the German company Telefunken Systemtechnik. The car dominated the race, crossing the finishing line in 46 hours and 8 minutes and leaving its nearest rival, Honda, some 350 km behind. Buried contact solar cells also powered the buildings in the athletes’ village for the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. Green’s second-generation technology, based on thin silicon films deposited on glass, has recently gone into mass production at Q Cells, Europe’s largest solar cell manufacturer. This technology, unlike some others, requires no toxic or rare materials.

“

Photovoltaics could attain its full potential as a sustainable source of cheap electricity for both the developed and developing world.

”

x www.pv.unsw.edu.au

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1984 1984

John Houghton 1931–

Christian stewardship of the Earth In 1983, a Welshman called John Houghton, a professor of atmospheric physics at Oxford University since the late 1950s, became Director of the UK Meteorological Office. The following year, Houghton published The Global Climate in which he laid out his concerns about the threat of planetary warming. His public concern led to his chairing of the UK government’s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution from 1991 for the next seven years. Houghton is a committed Christian. Hot on the heels of his book Global Warming: The Complete Briefing (1994) came The Search for God: Can Science Help? (1995). Two years later, Houghton assembled a panel of fellow Christian scientists includ121 ing Ghillean Prance, to form the John Ray Initiative (named after a 17th-century Christian naturalist), exploring ecological sustainability from a Christian perspective. Houghton has compared the stewardship of the Earth to the stewardship of the Garden of Eden by Adam and Eve. He strongly believes in ‘a Christian imperative . . . to care for the Earth’. Since 1988 Houghton has been a dynamic force on the Scientific Assessment Working Group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set up by the World Meteorological Organisation and the UN Environment Programme to investigate the science of global warming. He was lead editor of the first three IPCC reports.

Ü

“

The impacts of global warming are such as I have no hesitation in describing it as a weapon of mass destruction.

x www.ipcc.ch

”

Global Warming: The Complete Briefing (Cambridge,  John Houghton,UK/New York: Cambridge University Press, 2nd edn 1997)

1984 1984

Jonathon Porritt 1950–

Respectable radicalism In 1978, Jonathon Porritt, an Oxford-educated barrister, who had chosen to work as an English teacher, became chairman of the fledgling UK Ecology Party. Following 209

the rapid expansion of the now renamed Green Party after the 1979 and 1983 UK elections he wrote the ground-breaking book Seeing Green. In 1984, Porritt became the director of Friends of the Earth. Over the next six years he developed it into one of the most powerful environmental lobbying organisations in the world. Under his leadership, its membership rose from 12,700 to 226,300. Gradually he realised the need for ‘respectable radicalism’ to get people in power to seriously consider the environmental debate. Much to the alarm of some fellow activists, Porritt began to work with business to find solutions to environmental and social problems. In 1996, with Paul Ekins and Sara Parkin, Porritt set up the charity Forum for the Future, with the aim of persuading individual businesses to improve their environmental performance. Forum for the Future is now the UK’s leading sustainable development charity with 70 staff and over 100 partner organisations, including some of the world’s leading multinationals. In 2000, Jonathon Porritt was appointed chair of the Sustainable Development Commission – the UK government’s principal source of independent advice across the whole sustainable development agenda. He has not shirked from criticising the government’s environmental record, on topics ranging from recycling to global warming. In his 2005 book Capitalism As If the World Matters, Porritt mounts a coruscating attack on the UK environmental movement for its lack of effectiveness. He calls it ‘too narrow, too technical, too anti-business, too depressing, often too dowdy and too heard-it-all-before’.

“

The most heinous ecological crime of all is for any one generation so seriously to assault the web of life that the damage done is literally irreversible for every generation that follows.

x www.forumforthefuture.org.uk

”

Capitalism: As if the World Matters  Jonathon Porritt,(London: Earthscan Publications, 2005)

1984 1984

Jean-Bosco Kpanou 1961–

Protecting the lowland gorilla In 1984, biologist Richard Carroll, funded by the WWF and the New York Zoological Society, arrived in the Central African Republic to carry out a census of western lowland gorillas (Gorilla gorilla gorilla) and forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis). 210

Unlike the mountain gorillas of Rwanda, Uganda and the Democratic Republic of Congo, western lowland gorillas make their homes in the Congo Basin rainforest. While there were many more lowland gorillas than mountain gorillas – approximately 100,000, compared to 600 – the lowland gorilla was becoming increasingly threatened by forest loss and fragmentation. On his way, Carroll stopped off at the tiny village of Boganongon in the Lobaye region. Here he met up with a young villager, Jean-Bosco Kpanou, at the time helping his widowed mother in the fields. Although Kpanou’s father had been a wildlife poacher, the young man wanted to protect rather than destroy. So Carroll employed him as a camp assistant. Kpanou proved so reliable and enthusiastic that Carroll began to train him in gorilla and elephant census techniques and, soon after, as a research assistant. Along with Carroll and his wife Rita, Kpanou and the other local trackers covered some 2,000 km to complete the census. Kpanou did everything from mapping wildlife concentrations to paddling a dugout canoe for days at a time. He wielded a machete to open up old logging roads and fixed the ageing Toyota pickup truck. He pressed and processed thousands of botanical specimens, tracked and monitored gorillas and elephants, and helped with awareness raising, turning poachers into allies. Thanks in large part to Kpanou’s involvement, the project received additional funding to protect the vital tropical habitat of the lowland gorilla. In 1990, the Dzanga-Sangha Dense Forest Preserve and the Dzanga-Ndoki National Park were established. Kpanou worked tirelessly on their development, opening and building roads, and training staff – some of them former poachers – in the friendlier business of ecotourism to generate further funds for conservation. Today Kpanou is principal gorilla researcher in Dzanga-Ndoki, although he has used his ecological skills on a wider basis, working in Gabon and other countries. He was awarded the WWF’s J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize in 1999.

“

The image I’d like to see is coming out of this tall, green forest and seeing hundreds of elephants and the bongo and buffalo in the clearing. It’s a magical place!

”

1985 1985

George M. Woodwell 1928–

The absolute limits of the ecosystem During the 1960s, American ecologist George Woodwell was one of the first scientists to systematically investigate the effects of chronic exposure to ionising radiation. This was followed by his research into the effects of persistent pesticides in the atmosphere, research that ultimately led to America’s ban on dichlorodiphenyl211

trichloroethane (DDT). From then on Woodwell began to deepen his research on the Earth as a single biophysical system and on how to tailor human activities to prevent ‘biotic impoverishment’. From his post as senior scientist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Woodwell went on to found the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, ultimately setting up the Woods Hole Research Center in 1985. It has since grown to approximately 40 staff members, consisting of scientists, international law and policy experts, researchers and administrative staff. The building is noted for its high energy performance. Using renewable energy only, in the form of photovoltaics, solar hot water and a ground source heat pump, the building consumes just 25 per cent of the energy of a conventionally constructed building of the same size.

“

It is no longer true that the Earth is big enough to absorb local damage . . . It requires the political and economic sectors to realise the absolute limits of the ecosystem.

”

x www.whrc.org

M. Woodwell, Forests in a Full World  George (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001)

1985 1985

Dian Fossey 1932–1985

Gorillas in the mist In 1984 a young male gorilla, called Digit, living near the Karisoke Research Centre in Rwanda, was butchered by poachers so that his hands could be sold to trophy hunters. Particularly upset by his death was a 52-year-old American field worker and expert on mountain gorillas (Gorilla gorilla beringei) called Dian Fossey. For the past 17 years, Fossey had been living among the gorillas, observing them daily and, most remarkably of all, earning their complete trust. She was even able to sit with them and play with their babies. It was Fossey who had named Digit when he was a baby. Fossey was a committed ‘active conservationist’ – supporting anti-poaching patrols and the preservation of natural habitats – as opposed to ‘theoretical conservation’ which includes the promotion of tourism. She was also strongly opposed to zoos as she believed the capture of individual animals often involved the killing of its family members. 212

Fossey now began a major public campaign against gorilla poaching. National Geographic heeded her pleas by placing her photo on the cover of an issue containing an in-depth article with photos by Bob Campbell. Large donations poured in from readers all over the world, enabling Fossey to establish the Digit Fund and to dedicate the rest of her life to protecting the gorillas, whose numbers had dwindled to less then 200. Her outspokenness unfortunately made her a target for violence. On 26 December 1985, Fossey was found murdered in her cabin at Karisoke. Her death remains unsolved to this day. She is buried next to Digit in the gorilla cemetery. Today, thanks to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International (the renamed Digit Fund) based in Atlanta, USA, and Karisoke, and to work carried out by former colleagues Bill and Amy Vedder, the mountain gorilla population is making steady gains in the Virunga Volcano area. In the early 1990s when Rwanda was hit by a bloody civil war, the gorilla population remained largely untouched, although much forest cover was destroyed. The preservation of the mountain gorilla remains in the balance.

“

When you realise the value of all life, you dwell less on what is past and concentrate on the preservation of the future.

x www.gorillafund.org

”

 Dian Fossey, Gorillas in the Mist (London: Phoenix, new edn 2001)

1985 1985

Homero Aridjis 1940–

The green conscience of Mexico Over 20 years, Homero Aridjis became internationally famous as a poet and ambassador for the literature of his native Mexico. Books of his poems such as Blue Spaces have been translated into ten languages. His verses express the mystical spirit of Nahuatl songs and the initiation hymns of the Huichol Indians. But Aridjis, whose father was Greek, is also deeply concerned for the planet. Indeed, Aridjis has been called the green conscience of Mexico. In 1985 he cofounded the Grupo de los Cien, a group of one hundred internationally renowned artists and intellectuals who have become actively engaged with environmental problems. They include such well-known names as Gabriel García Márquez and Carlos Fuentes. The group’s campaigns have concerned both the largest and smallest creatures. In January 1995 the Grupo de los Cien campaigned against the building of a massive Japanese–Mexican salt works at Laguna San Ignacio, the last pristine mating and calving ground of the grey whale. Aridjis and his colleagues denounced the

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project to both the Mexican and international media, helped by film stars such as Pierce Brosnan. 271 In February of that year, Aridjis published El Silencio de las Ballenas (The Silence of the Whales), a devastating indictment of the threats posed to the grey whale, the lagoon, and dozens of marine and terrestrial plant and animal species, including the severely endangered peninsula pronghorn antelope and the northernmost stand of red mangrove in the Western Hemisphere. Although Aridjis received death threats and his campaign was threatened by the Mexican state, five years later the President Ernesto Zedillo announced that the saltworks project would be cancelled. More recently, Aridjis and the Grupo de los Cien have been campaigning to protect thousands of sea turtles from their annual slaughter and consumption during Holy Week in Mexico. They have also focused on protecting Monarch butterflies, millions of which have been wiped out due to the gaps in Mexico’s decimated forest canopy and the effects of the widespread use of pesticides. Aridjis and his colleagues have suggested that governments and environmentalists should buy forest reserves to protect these fragile and beautiful insects.

“

Ecology is poetry. Nature and poetry are closely linked. I defend water, soil, trees, animal life by making them the central issues of my poems.

”

1985 1985

Atsumu Ohmura 1942–

Global dimming In 1985, Atsumu Ohmura, a 43-year-old Japanese-born assistant geology professor specialising in radiation at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, led a student team to check levels of sunlight recorded around the world. In a lengthy process, they analysed 50 journals a week, copying and pasting solar radiation measurements into a database until they had observations from 1,600 locations around the planet. To Ohmura’s astonishment, they discovered that recent levels were too dark. Compared to similar measurements recorded by predecessors, Ohmura’s results suggested that, since the beginning of systematic measurements in the 1950s, levels of solar radiation striking the Earth’s surface had declined by more than 10%. When Ohmura published his discovery at the 1988 International Radiation Symposium in Lille, France, he was met with disbelief. His findings were in apparent contradiction to global warming, as less light reaching the Earth would mean that it would have to cool.

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Today, his findings have been confirmed by many other researchers and are accepted and respected as the first documentation of a dramatic effect known as ‘global dimming’. It is now believed that the cooling effect of global dimming may have led scientists to underestimate the influence of greenhouse gases on global warming. A number of causes have been postulated for this phenomenon and most involve human influence. The incomplete combustion of fossil fuels and wood releases black carbon into the air. Though black carbon, most of which is soot, is an extremely small component of air pollution at land surface levels, it has a significant heating effect on the atmosphere at altitudes above 2 km (6,562 feet). Also, it dims the surface of the ocean by absorbing solar radiation. The phenomenon underlying global dimming may also have regional effects. While most of the Earth has warmed, the regions that are downwind from major sources of air pollution (specifically sulphur dioxide emissions) have generally cooled. This may explain the cooling of the heavily industrialised eastern US relative to the warming western part. Some climate scientists have theorised that aircraft contrails (vapour trails) are implicated in global dimming, but the constant flow of air traffic meant that this could not be tested. The near-total shutdown of civil air traffic during the three days following the 9/11 attacks afforded a rare opportunity in which to observe the climate of the US absent from the effect of contrails. During this period an increase in diurnal temperature variation of over 1°C was observed. Aircraft contrails may have been raising night-time temperatures and/or lowering daytime temperatures by much more than previously thought.

“

Authority in the natural science is, after all, nature. So unless one observes nature very carefully, there’s no anchor in our knowledge.

”

1985 1985

Joschka Fischer 1948–

Red turns green While working as a taxi driver in 1981, Joschka Fischer, an ex-revolutionary, joined Die Grünen the newly founded German Green Party. From 1983 to 1985 Fischer was a Green Party member of the Germany parliament. From 1985 to 1987, he served as Minister for the Environment in the German state of Hesse, near Frankfurt in the first ever state-level red–green coalition. Fischer’s appointment caused an uproar in parliament because he wore tennis shoes while taking his oath of office. Fischer was again Environment Minister in Hessen from 1991 to 1994, and, later on, became co-chairman of the Greens parliamentary party in the Bundestag. 215

During his years in opposition, Fischer was respected for his oratory as well as for the charisma he exuded on the political stage. For a large part of the 1990s, with the socialists languishing in the opinion polls, Fischer was referred to by his admirers as the ‘real’ leader of the opposition. He leveraged this status into political success as he moved the Green Party to the centre ground of German politics, paving the way for participation in the nation’s federal government. Fischer continued to direct the Green Party in Hesse until 1998 when the red–green coalition won national power and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder named Fischer his Vice-Chancellor and Foreign Minister, a position he held until 2005. According to opinion polls, he was the most popular politician in Germany for most of his tenure. After the defeat of the coalition government in the 2005 election, Fischer announced that he would retire from politics. He is now a visiting professor at Princeton University.

“

With our demand that industrial society move away from oil and towards renewable energy, we’ve developed a major new direction. That must not be underestimated.

”

Joschka Fischer and the Making of the Berlin Republic:  Paul Hockenos, An Alternative History of Postwar Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007)

1985 1985

Craig E. Williams 1948–

A war veteran speaks out In 1980, Craig E. Williams, a 32-year-old cabinet-maker, had been one of the original group of decorated soldiers who formed the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Five years later, Williams attended a public meeting and discovered that the Department of Defense, with no public input, had decided to build an incinerator at the Lexington army depot, situated between the beautiful rolling hills of Bluegrass and the Appalachian Mountains, not far from his home in Berea, eastern Kentucky. 216

More seriously, the incinerator would be burning stockpiles of chemical weapons. Williams decided to speak out against the plan, joining forces with citizens who lived near the eight other proposed weapons incinerators. Together, they formed the Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG). After almost ten years of petitioning, in 1993 Congress agreed to delay funding for some of the incinerators while calling for a report into safer methods of chemical weapons destruction. But when this report recommended going ahead with incinerators at six of the nine stockpile sites Williams realised that the CWWG campaign was far from over. The report did not address the clear and voluminous evidence presented two years earlier by Williams and the CWWG that not only were there significant technical and environmental problems and huge cost overruns at the incinerators, but that safer alternative disposal methods were available. Even when the Army announced in 1996 that it would use a safer, water-based process to destroy the weapons at the Maryland and Indiana stockpile sites while suspending funds for incinerators in Colorado and Kentucky, Williams continued to lobby. Internal documents were leaked to Williams. These confirmed that the Pentagon was defying Congressional directives and holding up more than $300 million in federal funds for safe weapons disposal. The plan was to redirect those funds to existing incineration sites that had cost overruns, now up to 1,400 per cent. In addition, Williams and CWWG encouraged numerous whistleblowers at the incinerators who reported fires, toxic leaks and other dangerous conditions at the plants. Ultimately, the Pentagon released funding to safely destroy more than 880,000 chemical weapons. In September 2005 the US Senate paid special tribute to the CWWG and Williams, its director, for two decades of ‘invaluable efforts’. Several months later, Williams was one of the recipients of the Goldman Prize.

“

We must not leave the health of our families and protection of the world ecology to corporations, governments and military organisations preoccupied with profit, power and armed conquest. Rather, we must take that responsibility into our own hands. It’s up to us to come together across cultural and political divides to prevent these military–industrial polluters from degrading the Earth and threatening the well-being of our communities for their own selfish interests.

”

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x www.cwwg.org

1985 1985

Charles Windsor 1948–

The green prince In 1968, aged 20, Prince Charles, son and heir apparent to Queen Elizabeth II, made his first speech on the environment at the Countryside in 1970 Conference. Soon after, he was questioning government ministers over the fate of Atlantic salmon, years before declining fish stocks figured on the political agenda. In 1985, the prince acquired a farm near his Highgrove country house in Gloucestershire and began farming part of it on an organic basis. Over the next ten years, Prince Charles gradually turned the entire 485 hectares of Duchy Home Farm into an entirely organic operation. Duchy Originals now sells more than 130 organic products, including Christmas pudding, bacon and strong ale. It makes an annual profit of £1 million. Alongside this, the prince made a programme with the BBC about the environment called The Earth in Balance. In 1991, the prince held a two-day international seminar aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, moored off the coast of Brazil. His goal was to bring together key international figures before the Rio Earth Summit and so push the radical UN environmental agenda to the forefront of the world’s attention. In October 2005, the prince stated that climate change should be seen as the ‘greatest challenge to face man’ and treated as a much higher priority in the UK. After receiving criticism from some environmental activists for his extensive air travel, in December 2006 he announced plans to make his household’s travel plans more eco-friendly. In 2007 he plans to publish in his annual accounts the details of his own carbon footprint, as well as targets for reducing his household’s carbon emissions.

“

There is a growing realisation that we are not separate from Nature, a subconscious feeling that we need to restore a feeling of harmony with Nature and a proper sense of respect and awe for the great mystery of the natural order of the Universe . . . We are beginning to realise that whatever we do to Nature – whether it is on the grandest scale or just in our own gardens – is ultimately something that we are doing to our own deepest selves.

”

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1985 1985

Medha Patkar 1954–

Against dams The Narmada is India’s largest westward-flowing river and is of immense cultural importance to the people living on its banks. It is also the subject of the largest river development project in the world – the Narmada Valley Project envisages the construction of 30 large and hundreds of small dams along its length. In the 1980s two of the largest dams, Sardar Sarovar and Narmada Sagar, received $450 million in loans from the World Bank. If built, Sardar Sarovar would submerge over 37,000 hectares of forest and agricultural land and would displace some 320,000 villagers, mostly from tribal communities. Medha Patkar, a graduate in social sciences, moved to live among the tribal communities and alerted them to danger posed by the dams. In 1985, Patkar began mobilising massive marches and rallies against the project. Although the protests were non-violent, she was repeatedly beaten and arrested by the police. In 1991, she almost died during a 22-day hunger strike to avoid a head-on configuration between supporters and pro-dam forces. But by this time she had inspired the foundation of Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA), a people’s movement for the defence of the Narmada valley. After an unprecedented independent review of the dam project, the World Bank concluded the project was ill conceived. Unable to meet the World Bank’s environmental and resettlement guidelines, the Indian government cancelled the final instalment of the World Bank loan. Despite this, the sluice gates of the dam were closed in 1993, in defiance of court orders, and the water level started to rise. Following her arrest for refusing to leave the village of Manibeli which was to be flooded, Paktar once again went on a hunger strike. Her third hunger strike occurred the following year. In January 1995 India’s Supreme Court put a stay on further construction of the half-built dam. While state governments continued to push for an increase in the height of the dam, Paktar remained with the local people in resisting evacuation and resigned herself to drowning with them in the rising waters. In October 2000, the Indian government again changed its mind and ruled that the Sadar Sarovar Dam project could resume. In 2006 Paktar started yet another hunger strike to protest against a decision of the authorities to raise the height of the Narmada Dam but ended her 20 day fast on 17 April 2006 after the Supreme Court of India refused the NBA appeal to stop the construction of the dam. Although the battle was lost, in recent years Patkar has become increasingly influential internationally, serving on the World Commission on Dams. She cur219

rently leads the National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements, a network of more than 150 political organisations across the Indian continent.

“

There is no other way but to redefine ‘modernity’ and the goals of development, to widen it to a sustainable, just society based on harmonious, non-exploitative relationships between human beings and between people and nature.

”

x www.narmada.org

1985 1985

Cindy Duehring 1962–1999

Dying woman warns of pesticide menace In 1985, Cindy Froeschle, a 22-year-old pre-med student and athlete, returned to her apartment in Seattle, Washington, to find that it had been sprayed for fleas while she was out. The pesticide was dursban, which had been classed as safe for humans. However, it had been grossly misapplied and Cindy was poisoned. She began to develop a vulnerability to seizures upon low-level exposure to chemicals. Unable to return to college because of her illness, Cindy started an organisation called EARN (Environmental Access Research Network) with the intention of making chemical health research available to anyone who needed it. After marrying Jim Duehring in 1988, they moved to a house specially built from non-toxic material in the remote North Dakota grasslands. Although a virtual prisoner inside her own home, in 1994 Duehring merged EARN into the research division of the Chemical Injury Information Network (CIIN) which has over 5,000 members in 32 countries. Her aim was to stimulate society to reassess the impact of more than 75,000 synthetic chemicals in common use. Little is known about the human toxicity of most of these chemicals as many consumer products are protected by laws on trade secrecy and go virtually unregulated. Exposure to neurotoxins is one of the top ten causes of illness and injury in the US workforce, and the National Academy of Sciences estimates that indoor air pollution costs between $15 billion and $1,000 billion annually in healthcare. The costs in terms of human suffering are incalculable. In 1996, CIIN/EARN initiated a peer-reviewed research project to look into the physiological causes of multiple chemical sensitivity (MCS). During this time Duehring’s health continued to deteriorate. To avoid the harmful effect of low-level chemicals, she eventually had to stop using the telephone, radio, computer and fax machine. Even simple pleasures such as a ray of sunlight, outside air or noise made her sick. Her husband had to move to a cabin 500 feet away, because the odours that clung to him after a day at work affected her so badly.

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By 1998, she had virtually stopped talking. On 29 June 1999, after 14 years of fighting, Duehring finally died of the poisoning. She was just 36 years old. Over the years she received numerous awards for her outstanding contributions to MCS health issues. These culminated in her winning the Right Livelihood Award in 1997.

“

Short-term profits can short-change our future . . . The cost of ignoring the chemical effects on human health is quietly but steadily growing ever higher, creating a dangerous risk to the very underpinnings of society.

”

x www.ciin.org

1986 1986

Yvon Chouinard 1938–

1% for the planet Yvon Chouinard’s father was a blacksmith and, in 1957, the 19-year-old bought a second-hand coal-fired forge and started making hard-steel pitons (a spike with a loop for rope at one end) for climbers in California’s Yosemite Valley. When not surfing and climbing, he sold pitons out of the back of his car to support himself. The pitons were a huge success and, as a result, he founded Chouinard Equipment for Alpinists Inc. Chouinard was one of the leading climbers of the ‘golden age’ of Yosemite climbing in the early to mid-1960s. He participated in the second ascent of The Nose on El Capitan in 1960, and then the ascent of the North American Wall in 1964, which was the hardest big wall climb in the world at the time. In the late 1960s, Chouinard and his business partner Tom Frost began studying ice-climbing equipment. They redesigned the basic tools – crampons and ice axes – to make them perform better on steeper ice. These new tools and his book Climbing Ice (1978) were a huge influence on the development of the modern sport of ice climbing. Around 1970, he became aware that the use of hard-steel pitons made by his company – and providing 70 per cent of his income – was causing significant damage to the rock of Yosemite. Chouinard stopped production and, in 1971 and 1972, he introduced new types of climbing protection in the form of aluminium hexentrics and stoppers, used by British climbers, committing his company to both the advocacy of the new tools and a new style of climbing, called ‘free climbing’. This concept revolutionised rock climbing in America and led to the further success of his company. From the 1970s Chouinard started up a range of outdoor clothing to sell alongside his successful climbing hardware range. He called this new company Patagonia.

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Such was its success that, in 1986, Chouinard was able to institute a ‘tithing’ policy whereby 1 per cent of company sales (or 10 per cent of profits) went to support grassroots environmental causes. As Patagonia’s sales increased, millions of dollars were donated each year. In 1996, Patagonia was the first major retail company to switch all of its cotton clothing – 66 products – to 100 per cent organic cotton, while fleeces were being made from recycled plastic bottles. In 2001, Yvon Chouinard and Craig Matthews created 1% for the Planet, a consortium of manufacturers committed to incorporating more sustainable raw materials into their products. The consortium included Ford, Gap, Levi’s, Nike and Timberland. Employees of Patagonia Inc. receive up to two months’ wages to work for a favourite cause. Recently, the company also provided a $2,000 subsidy to workers who buy a petrol–electric hybrid car. Both Patagonia stores and Chouinard’s personal home in California have been built and are operated in an environmentally friendly way, using natural lighting wherever possible, recycled concrete, recycled and reclaimed woods and content steel. Patagonia was also the first company to commit to using green power (100 per cent wind energy) in all its Californian facilities.

“

Every time I’ve done the right thing for the environment, I’ve made a profit.

”

x www.patagonia.com

Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a  Yvon Chouinard, Reluctant Businessman (New York: Penguin, 2006)

1986 1986

János Vargha 1949–

Protecting the Danube River In February 1986, Duna Kör (Danube Circle), a group of Hungarian activists, went for a rather special nature walk. It was around a site that had been chosen for the $3 billion-plus Gabcíkovo– Nagymaros dam and hydroelectric complex, to be built jointly by Hungary and Czechoslovakia on the Danube River. Duna Kör’s aim was to peacefully protest against the dam’s impact on nearly 200 km of river, the 222

flooding of 50 islands and 120 km2 of forests and fields, and the devastation of the habitat of some 200 species of flora and fauna. Sadly, the reaction of the authorities was to meet the protestors with police wielding truncheons and tear gas. Soon after, Duna Kör’s founder and leader, biologist János Vargha, was dismissed from his editorial job with a scientific magazine. But Duna Kör kept up the pressure to prevent the area being transformed into an industrial landscape. In 1988, Vargha organised an international conference on the issue, in cooperation with WWF, while 150,000 people signed a petition demanding a referendum on the dam. The following year, bowing to public pressure, Hungary cancelled the Nagymaros dam but, in neighbouring Czechoslovakia, the government decided it was too late to abandon the project. In 1992 Czechoslovakia started to operate the Gabcíkovo dam and demanded that the Nagymaros dam be completed to facilitate Gabcíkovo’s peak load operation. In 1997 the Court of Justice at The Hague concluded that there was no longer any point in building the Nagymaros dam. However, the Hungarian socialist government ignored the court’s ruling and decided to complete the dam project anyway. Demonstrations by Duna Kör and other groups contributed to the socialists losing the parliamentary elections later that year. In July 1998 Vargha was appointed chief adviser on environmental politics to the new Hungarian government. In August Hungary suggested a new round of negotiations with Slovakia (which had split from the Czech Republic in 1993) about the implementation of the court’s decision. However, the question remains unresolved. Vargha is now president of ISTER, an environmental research institute. Ister is the ancient Greek name for the Danube and is used as an acronym for East European Environmental Research. He has been awarded both a Right Livelihood Award and the Goldman Prize.

“

Let there be peace on the Danube. Let everything flow freely and let aggression be far removed.

”

1986 1986

Alla Yaroshinskaya 1953–

Telling the forbidden truth On 26 April 1986, the world’s worst ever nuclear accident took place when a disastrous fire at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the Ukraine contaminated much of Europe with radioactive fallout. In the weeks following the accident, 33year-old Alla Yaroshinskaya, a local newspaper reporter, began to feel uneasy about 223

the supposed evacuation of areas which had been contaminated. Investigating further, Yaroshinskaya discovered that people were being resettled in villages hardly less contaminated than those they had been forced to leave; that their health problems were serious but officially denied and ignored; and that people could not survive without eating the highly radioactive food being grown in the Chernobyl area. Yaroshinskaya’s newspaper not only refused to publish her story, but commissioned another journalist to write a reassuring article about the area instead. Pravda, Izvestia and other major Soviet papers also refused to publish her piece. But, with the influence of ‘glasnost’, Izvestia did eventually publish a story about how Yaroshinskaya’s work was being suppressed, and popular support for her grew. In 1989 Yaroshinskaya was nominated for election to the new Supreme Soviet of the USSR and was elected with 90 per cent of the vote. In 1990 she used her position to continue her campaign for full disclosure of the Chernobyl contamination and was appointed to a commission to look into the matter. Although she made a presentation to the European Parliament, back in the USSR the commission’s progress was blocked at every turn. In April 1992, having made clandestine copies of top-secret Politburo documents, Yaroshinskaya’s article ‘Forty Secret Protocols of the Kremlin Wise Men’ was published by Izvestia and picked up by the Western press. She then co-authored a book, Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth, which has since been published in five languages. During the 1990s, as a member of President Boris Yeltsin’s government, Yaroshinskaya worked exclusively on nuclear disarmament issues, even taking her mission to the UN. She became originator, editor-in-chief and co-author of The Nuclear Encyclopaedia, the first of its kind in the world, which shows the true nature of nuclear problems. In 1992, Yaroshinskaya received the Right Livelihood Award. Today Yaroshinskaya is president of the Ecological Charity Fund in Moscow and co-chair of the Russian Ecological Congress. She continues to fight for the rights of those who suffered at Chernobyl some 18 years ago.

“

The most dangerous isotope to escape from the bleeding mouth of the reactor will never appear on the periodic chemistry scale. It is Lie-86. A lie as global as the accident itself.

”

 Alla Yaroshinskaya, Chernobyl: The Forbidden Truth (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1995)

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1987 1987

Gro Harlem Brundtland 1939–

Our Common Future In 1977 an uncontrolled blowout took place at platform Bravo in the Ekofisk oil field of the North Sea. Rushing to the site, Gro Harlem Brundtland, the 38-year-old Norwegian Minister for the Environment, personally directed recovery efforts and succeeded in halting the spillage at an early stage. Before entering politics, Brundtland was a doctor working in the field of public health where her conviction of the link between health and the environment was formed. Brundtland’s handling of the Bravo blowout, and her strategy for contending with the problem of acid rain and creating national parks, was appreciated by the people of Norway. In 1981, at the age of 41, she became the country’s youngest, first and, to date, only female prime minister. Only three years later, the UN Secretary-General Perez de Cuellar asked Brundtland to establish and head the World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED). Although at first she hesitated due to her commitments in Norway, once Brundtland had made the decision there was no looking back and WCED became known as the Brundtland Commission. Influential politicians and academics from 21 countries, over half from the developing world, were selected to address growing concern ‘about the accelerating deterioration of the human environment and natural resources and the consequences of that deterioration for economic and social development’. From 1984 to 1987 commissions and hearings, distinguished by their inclusiveness, were organised around the world, from Indonesia to Brazil. Brundtland’s efforts culminated in the publication of the seminal report Our Common Future, which presented the broad political concept of sustainable development. It contains the most commonly used definition of sustainable development – that development should meet the needs of today’s generation without compromising those of future generations. Our Common Future provided the momentum to the 1992 Earth Summit headed 245 by Maurice Strong who had been a prominent member of the Brundtland Commission. At the summit, Agenda 21, a resolution to implement specific measures to attain sustainable development, was adopted. In 2004, the Financial Times listed Brundtland as the fourth most influential European in the last 25 years, behind Pope John Paul II, Mikhail Gorbachev and Margaret Thatcher.

Ü

“

The environment is where we all live; and development is what we all do in attempting to improve our lot within that abode. The two are inseparable.

”

 Gro Harlem Brundtland, Madam Prime Minister: A Life in Power and Politics

(New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 2002)

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1987 1987

Daniel Janzen 1939–

It’s all gardening The biologists Dan Janzen and his wife Winnie Hallwachs were in love with a Costa Rican cloud forest. But they were also alarmed at the precipitous destruction to the rich biodiversity in this corner of the world – Costa Rica’s Santa Rosa park – which extends from the Pacific Ocean to about 16 km inland. This region of Guanacaste province contains an estimated 2.3 per cent of the world’s terrestrial species. As land surrounding Santa Rosa park was cleared for cattle grazing, Jansen noticed many species in decline. In 1987, he convinced Costa Rica’s government to designate a region, to include Santa Rosa but ten times larger and incorporating some highlands, as the Area de Conservación Guanacaste. This was to become probably the oldest, largest and most successful habitat restoration project in the world. Over the next decade, Janzen managed to expand this ‘wildland garden’ and provide a corridor from the turtle beaches of the Pacific to the cloud forests of the continental divide. Next, in order to save the old 2,000 hectare Rincon Volcano National Park in the south, Janzen planned to create a ‘bridge’ connecting Rincon to Santa Rosa. From 1992 to 1997, Janzen, now founder of the Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (Inbio, the National Institute of Biodiversity in Costa Rica), raised the $1 million necessary to convert the 495 hectare Area de Conservación Guanacaste into one continuous band of forest – so forming the bridge. Realising that this wildland garden contains a myriad of molecules and genes for potential medical and industrial use, Janzen began providing technical advice to Inbio which had taken on the task of cataloguing and describing the country’s vast natural endowment. Janzen also helped develop model ‘bio-prospecting’ agreements with corporations such as Merck to conduct screens for potential products. As bio-prospecting requires bio-prospectors to collect, identify and cultivate organisms, Janzen has begun to train Guanacaste high-school graduates as ‘para-taxonomists’, thus creating worthwhile jobs. He also provided funds to teach forest biology in local schools. To manage the Guanacaste, now encompassing 112,000 hectares (plus 65,000 hectares of ocean), and to protect its 235,000 plant and animal species, Janzen has raised over $12 million for an endowment to support 130 staff to tend the wildland garden and assure its long-term future. Winner of the Crafood Prize from the Swedish Royal Academy, the MacArthur Fellowship and Japan’s Kyoto Prize, Janzen has invested all his prize money (about $1 million) and nearly all of his personal income, including that from a long-standing professorship in biology at the University of Pennsylvania, into the Guanacaste conservation project.

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“

If we understood nature like we understand books and paintings and music, we’d be much more likely to let nature be a part of society. However, if we continue to see it as nothing more than a field in which to plant alfalfa or keep cows or build houses, we’ll certainly lose the whole package.

”

x www.inbio.ac.cr

1987 1987

John Elkington 1949–

SustainAbility In 1986, John Elkington, a British business consultant who had already been working at the nexus of environment, development and business for more than a decade, coined the phrase ‘the green consumer’ at a UK conference. The following year he co-founded think-tank SustainAbility with Julia Hailes. Their book The Green Consumer Guide became a global bestseller and put SustainAbility on the map. Elkington has gone on to publish 16 more books, perhaps the most influential of which is Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of 21st Century Business, published in 1998. This introduces the concept of ‘the triple bottom line’ – the spectrum of economic, environmental and social values that organisations must embrace – or, to quote another Elkington phrase, ‘people, planet, profits’. In 2001, his book The Chrysalis Economy explored some extraordinary cases of corporate metamorphosis and the need for corporate values to be turned into corporate value. SustainAbility has grown to be a leading consultancy and research organisation, and adviser to a host of leading corporations worldwide. It expects its clients to exhibit a desire to change. In 1998 SustainAbility ended its relationship with Monsanto because the company resisted its advice on societal tensions in Europe with regard to genetic modification technologies. In 2006, the Skoll Foundation invested $1 million in a three-year field-building partnership on social entrepreneurship with SustainAbility – a tribute to Elkington’s effectiveness. Today, Elkington carries the title of Chief Entrepreneur at SustainAbility. His next book, The Power of Unreasonable People: How Entrepreneurs Create Markets that Change the World, will be published early in 2008.

“

The path to relative economic, social and ecological sustainability is guaranteed to be littered with failures of every nature and scale. If we recognise them and learn from them, the transition will proceed faster and in more resource-efficient ways. If, on the other hand, we prefer the short-

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term comfort of burying our failures, or of blaming scapegoats, the transition will be significantly slowed, or could even be derailed completely.

x www.sustainability.com

”

Cannibals with Forks: The Triple Bottom Line of  John Elkington, 21st Century Business

(Oxford: Capstone, new edn 1999)

1987 1987

Nicolas Hulot 1955–

Ushuaïa In 1987 a Brittany-born adventurer and photojournalist called Nicolas Hulot became the presenter for a television documentary entitled Ushuaïa, le Magazine de l’Extrême (Ushuaïa is the town situated closest to the South Pole). The programme was financed by pharmaceutical giant Rhône-Poulenc. The breathtaking film footage taken of Hulot’s adventures in, and discoveries of, the world’s biodiversity has since made subsequent Ushuaïa documentaries into media occasions watched by over 5 million French viewers. Be it in a balloon, a kayak or a bathysphere, Hulot is filmed exploring the planet’s every nook and cranny, from Antarctic ice to scorching desert, from the deepest caverns to the highest mountaintops. Riding on the success of these documentaries, in December 1990 Hulot formed a syndicate to set up the Fondation Ushuaïa. Five years later this had changed its named to Fondation Nicolas Hulot pour la Nature et l’Homme, its mission to contribute to the discovery of nature and to the protection of the environment through exploration, research, education and communication. Although Hulot has twice been offered the post of French Minister of the Environment, he has declined each time, preferring the post of Ecological Adviser to the President of the French Republic. He was awarded France’s highest honour, the Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur. In 2004 Hulot’s book The Titanic Syndrome was published in France to great acclaim. The book used the metaphor of the Titanic to warn of impending disaster for humanity and the planet unless urgent individual and political measures were taken to defend the environment. In November 2006,the hugely popular Hulot threatened to run for president in the 2007 election if leading candidates did not sign up to an ecological pact to make the environment a top priority. In the event, most candidates (including Socialist candidate Segolene Royal and eventual winner Nicolas Sarkozy) signed his Pacte Ecologique, affirming that consideration of the environment should be at the heart of all future political decisions.

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“

Unless all of us, rich and poor, do not immediately modify our behaviour ‘to do better with less’ and place ecology at the centre of our individual and collective decisions, we will sink together, because we are in the same boat.

”

x www.fondation-nicolas-hulot.org

Le Syndrome du Titanic [The Titanic  Nicolas Hulot,Syndrome

] (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 2004)

1987 1987

Harrison Ngau Laing 1956–

Protecting nature in Malaysia In the early 1980s, logging of 50,000-year-old tropical forests in the province of Sarawak was proceeding at the alarming rate of 30 hectares per hour, with consequent pollution, soil erosion, land spoilage and deforestation. With it, the survival of the few hundred remaining Dayak Kayan people – the last hunter-gatherers in South-East Asia – came under threat. At first, the environmental non-governmental organisation Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM)’s Sarawak office, led by Dayak Kayan Harrison Ngau Laing, sent protest letters and petitions to government officers. When these fell on deaf ears, indigenous people began to blockade the logging camps and roads, bringing logging to a temporary halt. Although police broke the blockades and Laing, along with many others, was arrested, the protests restarted and began to particularly affect the operations of one of the country’s biggest lumber companies owned by the Minister for Environment and Tourism. In October 1987, Laing was put under house arrest for almost two years and spent 60 days in jail. For some of this time he was placed in solitary confinement and interrogated twice daily. After being released, Laing was forbidden to make press statements, hold a post in any organisation or attend political gatherings. In 1990, he received the Goldman Prize and used the $60,000 award money as collateral for a loan to campaign for a seat in the Malaysia federal parliament. He won, ousting the Deputy Minister of Public Works. In 1993 Laing co-founded the Borneo Resources Institute (BRIMAS) in response to the continuing violation of land resources of his fellow Dayaks. BRIMAS, led by Laing, fought a legal battle to stop construction of the Bakun Dam in Sarawak. In 2002 Laing represented 200 native longhouse dwellers from Balingian district in central Sarawak against loggers determined to destroy their ancestral land. Meanwhile, SAM has campaigned vigorously against resource depletion, loss of indigenous seeds, abuse of pesticides in agriculture and soil contamination.

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“

In the village, minus the timber companies, life is peaceful. No one says he owns this or that. I guess that is very different from life in the city where everyone is for himself. ‘You mind your business, I’ll mind mine’ is the norm. I don’t know if that is civilisation.

”

1987 1987

Yoichi Kuroda 1958–

Against Japanese logging From the 1950s Japan had been importing more tropical hardwoods than any other country in the world. Forests in Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines had been decimated by Japanese logging interests which had also contributed to the destruction of African and South American forests. Something had to be done – but from inside Japan. In 1987, following an international conference in Malaysia, 12 Japanese grassroots organisations and hundreds of individuals came together to form JATAN (Japan Tropical Forest Action Network). They chose Yoichi Kuroda as their coordinator. From his student days as a rural sociologist, Kuroda’s experience in grassroots activism had included such issues as opposing pesticide use. By 1989 Kuroda had co-authored a WWF report, Timber from the South Seas, which provided the first comprehensive analysis of Japan’s timber consumption patterns and exposed Japanese corporations’ contribution to rainforest destruction. It also outlined an alternative, positive role that Japan could play. Widely distributed in Japan and abroad, the report has increased international scrutiny of Japan’s environmental policies and practices. Kuroda met with the presidents of major corporations to encourage corporate responsibility, and brought rainforest dwellers and Japanese decision-makers together. As a result, the Japanese government has apologised to indigenous groups and more than 40 local authorities in Japan have introduced steps to reduce tropical timber consumption. As Japan is rapidly increasing its demand for wood products from non-tropical countries, Kuroda has expanded his focus to deal with temperate and boreal forest issues in countries such as Canada, Chile and Australia. His work has also included the global paper and pulp industry and plantations. In 1991 he received the Goldman Prize for his achievements. In 1998 Kuroda accepted a three-year research fellowship with the Institute for Global Environment Strategies to examine the underlying causes of forest destruction in the entire Asia-Pacific region.

“

If such a power goes unchecked, we will not be able to have a 21st century.

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”

1988 1988

Chico Mendes 1944–1988

An environmental martyr On 22 December 1988 a Brazilian called Francisco Alves Mendes Filho was shot dead in an ambush at the door of his home in Xapuri, an isolated village in the state of Acre near the border with Bolivia. He was more popularly known as Chico Mendes. Mendes’ trade had been as a seringueiro, tapping the latex from rubber trees growing in the Amazon to use for making car tyres, erasers and tupperware. This centuries-old sustainable trade was handed down from father to son. However, in the 1960s, rubber prices had collapsed and many landowners were selling their rubber plantations to the highest bidder which, in most cases, were cattle ranchers who cut the forest as fast as possible and replaced it with grazing pastures for cattle, ultimately to produce hamburgers and steaks for Western consumption. The rubber tappers found themselves pushed out of their ancestral lands. Although Mendes would have been content to continue tapping the rubber trees and collecting brazil nuts, he felt somebody had to speak out to protect the Amazonian jungle. Elected as president of the Seringueiros Syndicate at Xapuri, he brought together his fellow rubber tappers with the local indigenous people. He made them aware that the title deeds they were being offered for their land were little more than fakes: ‘Don’t you sign anything! This land is ours. When you change it into money, you are losing the possibility of surviving. Land is life!’ Together, they would march down logging trails and overrun forest clearance parties, disarming guards and attempting to convince the ranchers’ workers not to continue with the deforestation. In many cases, they were successful, despite growing violent resistance from the ranchers. In 1980, Mendes’ ally Wilson Pinheiro was assassinated. Mendes was both a socialist and an environmentalist. He saw unionisation as a way forward for the rubber tappers. When the first meeting of the National Council of Rubber Tappers was held in 1985 in Brasilia, rubber tappers from all over the country attended. Many had never been outside their local area before. Mendes succeeded in educating many about the issues of deforestation, road paving, cattle ranching and the threats to their own livelihood. The meeting also had the effect of catching the attention of the international environmentalist movement and highlighting rubber tappers’ plight to a wider audience. In 1987, encouraged by ecologists, anthropologists and a concerned film-maker, Mendes visited the US. He spoke to organisations such as the Inter-American Development Bank which had financed the massive deforestation programmes in the Amazon Delta, and the US Senate Appropriations Committee, which decides whether or not to release funds to the multilateral banks. He received an award

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from the UN and gained global media coverage. In June 1988, Rio de Janeiro honoured him with the keys of the city. But the local landowners, the fazendeiros, were not prepared to return to the lowincome traditional practices of extracting native rubber and collecting wild fruits and medicinal plants. They increased their strong-arm tactics of bullying, maiming and even killing those seringueiros who protested. In 1988, Mendes launched a campaign to stop rancher Darly Alves da Silva from logging an area that was planned as a reserve. Mendes not only managed to stop the planned deforestation and create the reserve, but also gained a warrant for da Silva’s arrest, for a murder committed in another state. He delivered the warrant to the federal police, but it was never acted upon. Towards the end of 1988, da Silva challenged his son Pereira to kill Mendes. It was done, in front of Mendes family. It was a huge error. They had underestimated the support for Mendes in the remote town of Xapuri. Ecologists, journalists and politicians attended Mendes’ funeral. The da Silvas were arrested and imprisoned. Today, Mendes is commemorated by the Chico Mendes Extractive Reserve near Xapuri. Here, rubber tappers are allowed to pursue their trade.

“

At first I thought I was fighting to save rubber trees, then I thought I was fighting to save the Amazon rainforest. Now I realise I am fighting for humanity.

”

x www.chicomendes.org

Rodrigues (with Linda Rabben), Walking the Forest  Gomercindo with Chico Mendes: Struggle for Justice in the Amazon (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2007)

1989 1989

Richard Leakey 1944–

From ancient skulls to saving the elephant Like his parents, Louis and Mary, Richard Leakey began his career as a palaeoanthropologist and, during the 1960s and 1970s, he led expeditions in Kenya uncovering a steady stream of hominid fossils which dazzled the scientific world and helped to clarify our evolutionary history. During this time, he became increasingly concerned about the threat to wildlife in this part of Africa. In 1989, aged 45, he was appointed head of the Kenyan Wildlife Service (KWS) by President Daniel Arap Moi in response to an international outcry over the poaching of elephants. In a characteristically bold move, Leakey created special, well-armed anti-poaching units that were authorised to shoot poachers on sight. The result was a dramatic decrease in elephant poaching. 232

Impressed by Leakey’s transformation of the KWS, the World Bank approved grants worth $140 million. Leakey and the KWS made international headlines when a stockpile of 12 tons of ivory was publicly burned in 1989. But Leakey’s views that parks must be fenced in and humans kept out made him enemies. In 1993, he lost both his legs when his prop-driven plane crashed. Sabotage was suspected, but never proven. In a few months, Leakey was walking again on artificial limbs. Despite resigning from the KWS on trumped-up charges of corruption, Leakey has continued to campaign for animal conservation. In 2001, he warned that the Earth was losing between 10,000 and 50,000 species every year. In 2006 Leakey founded WildlifeDirect, a US- and UK-registered charity supporting African wildlife conservation via the use of blogs. It enables individuals to play a direct and interactive role in the survival of some of the world’s most endangered species. All payments made to the organisation go directly to conservationists working on the ground in Africa. In 2007, as a patron of the UN-based Great Apes Survival Project, Leakey raised alarm bells about the impacts of deforestation, hunting and disease on the estimated 450,000 great apes left in the world. Leakey, along with others, believes that efforts to tackle global warming through the use of biofuels could cause more damage to ape populations because of pressure to replace their tropical forest homes with biofuel crops. Preventing deforestation would, according to Leakey, help curb global warming as well as preserve endangered apes. Carbon released by deforestation is reckoned to account for 25% of all human greenhouse gas emissions, second only to the energy generation sector.

“

The environment must be seen as a basic human right.

x www.wildlifedirect.org

”

Leakey and Virginia Morell, Wildlife Wars: My Fight to  Richard Save Africa’s Natural Treasures (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2001)

1989 1989

David Foreman 1947–

Earth First! In 1989 Dave Foreman and three others were arrested by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation on charges of funding the destruction of a powerline feeding a water pumping station. While Foreman had no direct role in the attempted sabotage, he was arrested on a charge of conspiracy. Foreman denied the felony charges against him, but agreed to plead guilty to a lesser charge and was given a suspended sen-

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tence. Very soon after, the 42-year-old Foreman set about writing his autobiography, Confessions of an Eco Warrior. Back in the 1970s, Foreman, the son of a US Air Force employee, believed that the best way to protect nature was to work within the system. He became the Washington DC lobbyist for the Wilderness Society. However, by 1980 Foreman had come to the conclusion that, while they are often well-meaning, government and private organisations could not stand up to America’s powerful anti-environment forces. Inspired by Edward Abbey, Foreman established a group of radical environ- 139 mentalists called Earth First! Its motto: ‘No compromise in defence of Mother Earth’. The ecotage (ecological sabotage) of these environmental radicals included spiking trees so they could not be cut down, ‘munching’ logging roads by spreading nails, toppling high-voltage power lines, filling bulldozer gas tanks with sand and chaining themselves to heavy industrial equipment to prevent its use. In 1985 Foreman co-edited Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching with a Foreword by Abbey. At the time of his arrest in 1989 some were saying that Foreman had founded Earth First! with the backing of the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. The argument was that Earth First!’s extreme approach aimed to make these mainstream groups appear more reasonable by contrast. Recently, a more mellow Foreman has helped to found the Wildlands Project which seeks to bring together grassroots activists and conservation biologists to design and establish linked areas of countryside extensive enough to support large mammal populations.

Ü

“

It’s time for a warrior society to rise up out of the Earth and throw itself in front of the juggernaut of destruction, to be antibodies against the human pox that’s ravaging this precious, beautiful planet.

x www.earthfirst.org

”

and Bill Haywood (eds.), Ecodefense: A Field Guide to  Dave Foreman Monkeywrenching (Chico, CA: Abbzug Press, new edn 1992)

1989 1989

Karl-Henrik Robèrt 1948–

The Natural Step As head of Sweden’s Karolinska Institute, haematologist Karl-Henrik Robèrt conducted research on several forms of cancer, including leukaemia, lymphoma and lung cancer. Robèrt’s research on damage to human cells led him to consider environmental questions. He observed that, since the 19th century, humans have been 234

‘disrupting the cyclical process of nature at an accelerating pace’, with the linear processes of modern society producing waste at unprecedented rates. Robèrt resolved to draw up a plan that would restore the cyclical processes of nature. Working with Dr John Holmberg of Chalmers University, Robèrt prepared a paper about the ‘system conditions for ecological sustainability’. They then circulated this to a wide cross-section of top scientists in Sweden, seeking an apolitical consensus. In 1989, and 22 drafts later, Robèrt was ready to launch Det Naturliga Steget (The Natural Step) framework. Supported by the King of Sweden, Robèrt’s ideas were sent to every school and household in Sweden. Exported around the world, they were elaborated, refined and eventually adopted by a range of Swedish companies, including Ikea, Electrolux, Swedish McDonald’s, Skandia and 60 250 municipalities. In the US, Paul Hawken headed up the US Natural Step organisa253 tion, influencing businessmen such as Ray Anderson of Interface. Today, the organisation has offices in 12 countries. The Natural Step framework has been applied to fields as diverse as sustainable building and the ecological management of river basins. Robèrt’s system conditions are significant in that they are scientifically based, but readily understandable, principles for sustainability.

Ü Ü

“

If we think systematically, we will stop asking, ‘How much is nature worth?’ We will know that we are a piece of nature ourselves.

x www.naturalstep.org

”

Karl-Henrik Robèrt, The Natural Step Story: Seeding a Quiet Revolution (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society Publishers, 2002)

1989 1989

Sunita Narain 1961–

Water harvesting Although she started her career as a research assistant at the Vikram Sarabhai Institute for Development Research, Ahmedabad, since 1982 Sunita Narain has been working for the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in New Delhi, India. She began her career by writing and researching for the State of India’s Environment Reports and then travelled widely across the country to understand people’s management of natural resources. In 1989, aged 28, she co-authored Towards Green Villages, advocating local democracy as the road to sustainable development. During the 1990s, Narain became involved with wider environmental issues such as global warming, co-authoring several publications. Her work also included editing a fortnightly magazine called Down to Earth. Eventually she began to focus on the ancient practice of water harvesting; in 1997 she co-edited the book Dying 235

Wisdom: Rise, Fall and Potential of India’s Water Harvesting Systems. Water harvesting, practised diversely in different regions, is the collection of rainwater in millions of storage systems – tanks, ponds, stepwells and even rooftops – to recharge groundwater reserves for irrigation and drinking water needs. In 2005 CSE was awarded the Stockholm Water Prize for its promotion of a new paradigm for water management using the traditional wisdom of water harvesting and advocating the role of communities in managing their local water systems. Narain believes that water management, which involves communities and households, has to become the biggest cooperative enterprise in the world.

“

If we have to work towards water – clean water – for all, then we have to accept that we don’t have the answers yet.

x www.cseindia.org

”

Boyce, Sunita Narain and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (eds.),  James Reclaiming Nature: Environmental Justice and Ecological

Restoration (London: Anthem Press, 2006)

1989 1989

Danny Seo 1977–

A teenager leads In 1989, a 12-year-old Asian-American called Danny Seo from Reading, Pennsylvania, was disgusted by a television programme about cruelty in poultry-processing factories. He already knew about the threats to rainforests and whales. The following day was his birthday, which coincidentally falls on 22 April – Earth Day. He told his friends that, instead of birthday presents, they could join his new organisation, Earth 2000, with the aim of saving the planet by the year 2000. Over the next few years Earth 2000 grew from a neighbourhood group of six friends to a phenomenal national force of more than 25,000 teenagers. Seo staged protests, planned boycotts, lobbied legislators and convinced major retailers to stop using fur. He even joined a campaign to protest against the killing of pilot whales in the Faeroe Islands He attracted support from 116 such environmental figures as Jane Goodall.

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After high school he felt he had done as much as he could as president of Earth 2000. He stepped down in 1995 and turned to writing, advocating green living. His first book, Generation React: Activism for Beginners, was followed by Heaven on Earth: 15-Minute Miracles to Change the World. While setting up Danny Seo Media Ventures in 2001, the 22-year-old updated his message with two more books: Be the Difference: A Beginner’s Guide to Changing the World and Conscious Style Home: EcoFriendly Living in the 21st Century. The latter chronicles his renovation of his parents’ Green Hills, Pennsylvania home, using easy-to-find eco-friendly materials. In 2006 Seo’s new television and book series Simply Green continued his mission. He is now in demand, assisting some of Hollywood’s biggest celebrities as an ‘eco-stylist’. He dresses actors and actresses in environmentally friendly fashion, consults on the renovation of their homes and helps them raise money for environmental charities.

“

Clearly that goal date [2000] has passed, but I am still on a mission to show everyone how our choices have an impact on the planet. I believe that style and sustainability do not need to be mutually exclusive from each other!

”

x www.dannyseo.com

Home: Eco-friendly Living for the 21st  Danny Seo, Conscious Style Century (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2001)

1990 1990

Arturo Gómez-Pompa 1934–

El Eden Ever since publishing an article in the journal Science (177: 762-765 [1972]) about the emerging issue of the rapid transformation of tropical rainforests and the possibility of extinctions at an alarming rate, Dr Arturo Gómez-Pompa had determined to create a reserve dedicated to researching biological conservation in his native Mexico. In 1990 he was presented with that opportunity in a privately owned area in the north-east portion of Mexico’s Yucatan peninsula. El Eden Ecological Reserve in Quintana Roo is now considered to be one of the prime sites for tropical rainforest research in the world. As a professor of botany at the University of California at Riverside, GómezPompa has taken many postgraduate students to Quintana Roo and directed projects including biodiversity restoration of the tropical dry forest, ethno-botanical studies of the Maya region, evolution and domestication of tropical trees, floristic databases and community-based conservation projects.

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As Mexico’s most prominent voice for tropical forest conservation, GómezPompa has helped to develop an agenda for reasoned debate on the most effective ways to protect tropical ecosystems and, as a political adviser, he is credited with leading his government toward preserving Mexico’s biological heritage. His insightful work with indigenous forest peoples – learning from their knowledge and focusing attention on the need to involve them in efforts to preserve their environment – is a model for ecologists and agrarian economists worldwide. Gómez-Pompa’s extraordinary influence on virtually every issue associated with the study and protection of tropical forests stems from a unique combination of skills. As a tropical botanist, he has contributed significantly to the world’s scientific knowledge regarding the plant life of tropical forests. As an educator, organiser, and institution builder, he has founded a series of institutions that have contributed to basic and applied research, to scientific education, and to public education in tropical botany and biology in general. He has educated generations of outstanding scientists and professionals in biology, ecology and conservation.

“

Biotic resources are under all kinds of old and new threats. Ecosystem transformation in many areas of high biodiversity has not diminished, in spite of national and international meetings, agreements, and discussions.

”

x www.uv.mx/citro

1990 1990

David T. Suzuki 1936–

Popularising a sustainable path Following its publication in 1976, An Introduction to Genetic Analysis very soon became the most widely used textbook in the US, and was also translated into seven languages. One of its co-authors was a 40-year-old Canadian environmentalist, Professor David T. Suzuki of the University of British Columbia.

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Suzuki’s skill as a popular writer and broadcaster has been in explaining the complexities of modern science in a compelling, understandable way. Since 1979 Suzuki has hosted The Nature of Things, a CBC television show broadcast in nearly 50 countries worldwide. Through this show, Suzuki aimed to stimulate interest in the natural world, to identify threats to human well-being and wildlife habitat, and to highlight some promising alternatives in terms of sustainability. Suzuki has been a prominent proponent of renewable energy sources and the soft energy path. Among his other television documentaries are the eight-part A Planet for the Taking which won an award from the UN Environment Programme. In the 1980s, his series for CBC radio, It’s a Matter for Survival, received a staggering 17,000 letters from concerned listeners asking for advice and solutions to the environmental problems discussed. In November 1989, to better consider the concerns of all those radio listeners, Suzuki and his wife Dr Tara Cullis, hosted a meeting of a dozen top thinkers at a lodge on Pender Island, British Columbia. Less than a year later, The David Suzuki Foundation had been formed to find ways for society to live in balance with the natural world. Initial projects concerned working with the Kayapo people of the Lower Amazon, the Ainu of Japan, the Orewa in Colombia and the Hesquiat people of the west coast of Vancouver Island in an effort to learn traditional, alternative models for economic development. By 1992, the Foundation had increased its staff and budget and had turned its focus to oceans and sustainable fishing, forests and wildlands, climate change and clean energy, and biodiversity. Specific projects tackled included the Musqueam watershed restoration project, launched on Earth Day 1997, and the Pacific salmon forests project to protect the forests and fish of British Columbia by nurturing healthy communities with healthy ecosystems. Although officially retired, Suzuki is currently Professor Emeritus of the Sustainable Development Research Institute of the University of British Columbia. His Foundation, now with 40,000 members, goes from strength to strength.

“

We have both a sense of the importance of the wilderness and space in our culture and an attitude that it is limitless and therefore we needn’t worry.

”

x www.davidsuzuki.org

and Amanda McConnell, The Sacred Balance:  David Suzuki Rediscovering Our Place in Nature (Vancouver: Greystone Books, new edn 2007)

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1990 1990

Ted Turner 1938–

The natural philanthropist From his founding of Cable News Network (CNN) in 1980 until he became vicechairman of Time-Warner Inc., the world’s leading media company, the self-made billionaire Ted Turner has been concerned about the welfare of the planet. By 1987, Turner was running a bison farm in Montana; today, as the largest private landowner in the US, he has some 810,000 hectares of land containing the largest private herd in the world with around 40,000 head. In 1990, following his marriage to activist and film star Jane Fonda, Turner set up a private, independent family foundation committed to preventing damage to natural systems – water, air and land. In 1997 Turner launched the Turner Endangered Species Fund. This organisation has gone out of its way to involve private landowners to conserve such species as desert bighorn sheep, Mexican wolves, swift fox, Californian condors, black-tailed prairie dogs and red-cockade woodpeckers, among others. The fund also served as a primary catalyst for a binational campaign to conserve migratory pollinators along a 4,000 km migration corridor from the south-western US to southern Mexico. Today, the Turner Foundation has donated almost $300 million to more than 450 groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, Greenpeace, the Union of Concerned Scientists and the Waterkeeper Alliance. In 1998 he donated an extraordinary $1 billion gift to establish the UN Foundation and the Better World 268 Fund, headed by Senator Tim Wirth.

Ü

“

We must go through a natural revolution if we are to survive on Earth. We need to change people’s perceptions. If there’s no environment, there’s no human race. We are in a state of global denial.

”

x www.turnerfoundation.org

1990 1990

Stephan Schmidheiny 1947–

Changing course By 1990, Stephan Schmidheiny was a highly successful Swiss businessman. Starting with his Swiss family’s construction materials enterprise, he had diversified 240

into the forestry, banking, electronics and optical equipment industries, and sat on the board of many leading corporations. As a young man, Schmidheiny had wanted to become a missionary and, in the 1980s, had created the FUNDES, a philanthropic organisation that supports the development of small and medium-sized enterprises in Latin American countries. 245 In 1990 Maurice Strong, Secretary-General of the Rio Earth Summit, appointed Schmidheiny as his Chief Adviser for Business and Industry. Schmidheiny’s mission was to persuade the largest possible number of business leaders that socially and environmentally responsible behaviour should not be synonymous with high costs, but be seen as an opportunity for success. Having decided to take a sabbatical from his own business empire, Schmidheiny created the Business Council for Sustainable Development to which he recruited around 50 CEOs of leading multinationals, including ABB, Alcoa, Chevron, Ciba Geigy, Dow, DuPont, Mitsubishi, Nippon Steel, Shell and Volkswagen. Mindful of the fact that time is the most precious resource of a CEO, Schmidheiny promised to dissolve the council after the summit. To date this has not happened. In 1995, the council merged with the World Industry Council on the Environment (part of the International Chamber of Commerce) to become the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). Today, the WBCSD includes many of the world’s largest companies among its 190 members. Schmidheiny’s book Changing Course: A Global Business Perspective on Development and the Environment, published ahead of the Earth Summit, became a bestseller and has been translated into 15 languages. It marked the first time that a group of leaders from the world’s top companies had analysed the problems of development and the environment from a global perspective and come to relevant agreements. Ten years later, in time for the Johannesburg Earth Summit +10, Schmidheiny joined with CEOs from DuPont and Shell to co-author Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development, which looked at progress made by global business, as well as opportunities and barriers to future environmental and social responsibilities.

Ü

“

I predict that within a decade it is going to be next to impossible for a business to be competitive without also being ‘eco-efficient’ – adding more value to a good or service while using fewer resources and releasing less pollution.

”

x www.wbcsd.org

with the Business Council for Sustainable  Stephan Schmidheiny Development, Changing Course: A Global Business

Perspective on Development and the Environment (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992)

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1990 1990

Pat Gruber 1960–

A biochemist’s biodegradable breakthrough In 1989 Pat Gruber had just received his PhD in biological chemistry from the University of Minnesota when, having been asked by his new employer, the commodity grain processor Cargill Inc., to find new uses for corn sugars, he set out to turn corn into plastic. Although this had been done before, the plastic produced had no commercial value. Gruber knew that if he fermented corn sugar with the right lactic bacteria and distilled it he had a chance of making a commercially viable biodegradable plastic. In 1990, he made the first ten batches with yoghurt bacteria on his kitchen stove, and produced a high-quality biodegradable plastic. Despite his breakthrough, Gruber couldn’t find a partner. He was told that he’d never find a low-cost supply of lactic acid and that you couldn’t develop a biodegradable polymer with the potential to be used in a variety of applications. So, together with Cargill Inc., Gruber built a test factory in 1994 to learn how to adjust the process to change the performance of the polymer for different applications. That was enough to persuade Dow Chemical Co. to come in as a partner. In December 1997, two years and one month after Cargill Dow was officially established, work began on building a $3 million factory in Blair, Nebraska, to produce NatureWorks® PLA (poly lactic acid) polymer. The factory was up and running by early 2002, with the capacity to produce an annual 140,000 metric tonnes of NatureWorks® PLA made from 40,000 bushels of locally grown corn per day. Gruber’s polymer was soon being used for making windows, bottles, bags and for wrapping food. NatureWorks® PLA products are fully biodegradable and compostable in only eight weeks, unlike traditional petroleum-based plastics which can take many hundreds of years to degrade.

“

We broke a paradigm in the chemical industry. We have combined very expensive large-scale fermentation with chemical processing to bring a value-added polymer product to the marketplace that improves the environment as well. This will make renewable resource-based chemicals happen.

”

x www.natureworksllc.com

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1991 1991

Juan Pablo Orrego 1949–

Singer-songwriter opposes multiple dam building in Chile The Biobío River in southern Chile is one of South America’s most spectacular rivers and hosts a rich ecosystem of plant and animal life. The area is also home to the Pehuenche Indians who number some 10,000. Since the 1960s ENDESA, Chile’s near-monopoly energy company, has planned to build a linked series of six dams on the Biobío, with potentially disastrous consequences for its ecology and for the Pehuenche Indians. ENDESA was 100 per cent privatised in the last days of the Pinochet regime with some of Pinochet’s key supporters being the major beneficiaries. As a near-monopoly supplier of Chile’s energy, the company wields enormous economic and political power. In 1991 Juan Pablo Orrego, a professor in environmental studies and also a composer and singer, helped to found the Grupo de Acción por el Biobío (GABB) to oppose the dam building. Orrego and the Santiago-based GABB took their cause from small local meetings to national demonstrations. In 1997, despite GABB’s campaigning, the first Biobío dam was constructed. But, in the years that followed, Orrego and hundreds of concerned Chilean citizens took GABB’s case to the World Bank. They publicised issues that no one had raised before in Chile: issues of energy and environment policy, indigenous peoples’ rights, ENDESA’s energy monopoly and Chile’s overall development goals. Subsequent legislation in Chile meant that ENDESA had to follow a much more rigorous process for the second Biobío dam which would flood more than 70 km of river valley, inundating a diverse forest and its wildlife and pushing to extinction eight endemic species of fish. The second dam would also dislocate the Pehuenche. Following a series of court rulings, construction of the second dam was given the go-ahead, but flooding of the area occupied by the Pehuenche was prohibited. Orrego has been awarded both the Right Livelihood Award and the Goldman Environmental Prize for his courage, self-sacrifice and perseverance in working for sustainable development in Chile.

“

To defend the Biobío River has been an honour. To be human voices for the river . . . After all, it is obvious – it is for survival, it is for the children, it is for love.

”

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1991 1991

Terry Tempest Williams 1955–

An unnatural history Terry Tempest Williams has been called a ‘citizen writer’, a writer who speaks and speaks out eloquently on behalf of an ethical stance toward life. A naturalist and fierce advocate for freedom of speech, she has consistently shown us how environmental issues are social issues that ultimately become matters of justice. Williams, like her writing, cannot be categorised. She has served time in jail for acts of civil disobedience, testified before Congress on women’s health issues, been a guest at the White House, has camped in the remote regions of Utah and Alaska wildernesses and worked as a ‘barefoot artist’ in Rwanda. Known for her impassioned and lyrical prose, Terry Tempest Williams is the author of the 1991 environmental literature classic Refuge: An Unnatural History of Family and Place, where she passionately chronicles the epic rise of the Great Salt Lake and the flooding of the Bear River migratory bird refuge in 1983. Parallel to this she writes about her mother’s diagnosis with ovarian cancer, believed to have been caused by radioactive fallout from nuclear tests in the Nevada desert in the 1950s and 1960s. Refuge has since become a classic of American nature writing, a testament to loss and the Earth’s healing grace, with Williams compared to Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold 118 75 and Edward Abbey. 139 She has also written An Unspoken Hunger: Stories from the Field; Desert Quartet; Leap; Red: Passion and Patience in the Desert; and The Open Space of Democracy. Her new book, Mosaic: Finding Beauty in a Broken World, will be published in 2008 by Pantheon Books. In 2006, Williams received the Robert Marshall Award from the Wilderness Society, their highest honour given to an American citizen. She also received the Distinguished Achievement Award from the Western American Literature Association and the Wallace Stegner Award given by the Center for the American West. She is the recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship and a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship in creative nonfiction. Terry Tempest Williams is currently the Annie Clark Tanner Scholar in Environmental Humanities at the University of Utah. Her writing has appeared in the New

ÜÜ Ü

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Yorker, the New York Times, Orion Magazine and numerous anthologies worldwide as a crucial voice for ecological consciousness and social change.

“

. . . what might a different kind of power look like, feel like, and can power be redistributed equitably even beyond our own species?

x www.coyoteclan.com

”

An Unnatural History of Family  Terry Tempest Williams, Refuge: and Place (New York: Pantheon, 1991)

1992 1992

Maurice Strong 1929–

Earth Summit During the 1960s Maurice Strong, a self-made wealthy Canadian businessman, was President of the Power Corporation of Canada. He left to devote his energies to the Canadian International Development Agency until, in the early 1970s, UN Secretary-General U Thant asked Strong to organise and direct the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment. Strong next went on to become the first executive director of the UN Environment Programme. Perhaps Strong’s greatest achievement was as Secretary-General of the Earth Summit, held in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. One hundred and seventy-two governments took part, including 108 heads of state. Some 2,400 representatives of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) attended, with 17,000 people at the parallel NGO Forum. Agreements were signed on climate change and biological diversity, and the 400-page Agenda 21 was drafted. Subsequent summits have been held every five years to drive forward the sustainable development agenda. Speaking at the end of the 1992 summit, Strong called it an ‘historic moment for humanity . . . It is simply not feasible for sovereignty to be exercised unilaterally by individual nation states, however powerful. The global community must be assured of environmental security.’ In 1992 Strong became Chairman of Ontario Hydro, North America’s largest utility company. One of his first recommendations was that the company should buy a 12,500 hectare Costa Rican rainforest as compensation for the harm Hydro was doing to the local environment. Strong has since served as senior adviser to two UN Secretary-Generals, Boutros Boutros-Ghali and Kofi Annan, and to the president of the World Bank. He is also director of the World Economic Forum, chairman of the Stockholm Environment Institute and of the Earth Council. Since 1999 he has been president and rector of the UN University for Peace in Costa Rica.

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“

If we don’t change, our species will not survive . . . Frankly, we may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialised civilisations to collapse.

”

 Maurice Strong, Where on Earth Are We Going? (London: Texere Publishing, 2001)

1992 1992

Edward O. Wilson 1929–

Scientific humanism Ever since his childhood in Alabama, Edward O. Wilson was fascinated by the natural world, especially insects. Having obtained his PhD in myrmecology (the scientific study of ants), Wilson has remained a research professor at Harvard University for four decades. But Wilson’s greatest contribution as one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century was to proclaim the need for traditional religion to adopt more science and for environmentalists to appeal more to humankind’s spiritual impulses. He called this ‘scientific humanism’. With his books On Human Nature (1978), The Diversity of Life (1992) and The Future of Life, Wilson beats the drum for conserving global biodiversity. He argues that humanity is living through the greatest mass extinction of plant and animal species in 65 million years.

“

Now when you cut a forest, an ancient forest in particular, you are not just removing a lot of big trees and a few birds fluttering around in the canopy. You are drastically imperiling a vast array of species within a few square miles of you. The number of these species may go to tens of thousands . . . Many of them are still unknown to science, and science has not yet discovered the key role undoubtedly played in the maintenance of that ecosystem, as in the case of fungi, micro-organisms, and many of the insects.

”

 Edward O. Wilson, The Future of Life (Cambridge, MA: Abacus, new edn 2003) 246

1992 1992

Gunter Pauli 1956–

Zero emissions Gunter Pauli was 23 when, in 1979, he created the company Ecover to produce ecological soap on a small farm near Malle in the north of his native Belgium. Ecover’s products used only natural soaps and renewable raw materials – vegetable extracts, sugar derivatives and natural oils. In October 1992, to worldwide interest, Pauli opened Europe’s first eco-factory. A huge grass roof kept the building cool in summer and warm in winter. The water treatment system ran on wind and solar energy. The bricks were made of recycled clay, a waste by-product from coal mining. Pauli wanted to expand, but his lead investor was cautious. He left in 1993. In 1994, the Tokyo-based United Nations University proposed a commitment ‘to ensure that the productive forces in the world can have access to the best minds securing the manufacturing of goods affecting the critical balance of the ecosystem’. The university’s rector, Dr Heitor Gurgulino de Souza, called in Pauli as a special adviser to set up ZERI (Zero Emissions Research Institute). Pauli obtained finance from the Japanese government to use the internet to assemble a global network of 300 researchers to evaluate non-polluting future fuels and to redesign manufacturing processes into non-polluting clusters of industries. A World Congress on Zero Emissions was held in Tokyo in April 1995 to help develop these initiatives. ZERI’s focus on integrated biosystems soon led to the initiation of several small industrial-scale pilot projects in Fiji, Namibia and Tanzania. ZERI also developed a 20-hour graduate-level course on zero emissions geared toward senior-level participants from diverse backgrounds, including business, government, education and research. Courses were held in Brazil and Colombia, leading to the founding of a Latin American Zero Emissions Institute. In his 1998 book UpSizing Pauli highlights many examples of businesses where the waste of one company becomes the raw material for others. Materials others view as worthless cascade into a stream of new processes, new products and new wealth, with companies that were previously considered unrelated clustering together. In Gaviotas, Colombia, Pauli is working to expand pioneering rainforest reforestation efforts with a major corporate investment firm. In Japan, he established a major investment fund for growing biomimicry companies into mainstream businesses. Today, ZERI supports around 50 projects worldwide.

“

The full use of raw materials, accompanied by a shift towards renewable sources, means that utilisation of the Earth’s resources can be brought back to sustainable levels.

x www.zeri.org

”

Pauli, UpSizing. The Road to Zero Emissions: More Jobs, More  Gunter Income and No Pollution

(Sheffield, UK: Greenleaf Publishing, 1998)

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1993 1993

Mikhail Gorbachev 1931–

The International Green Cross During his years as general secretary of the USSR Central Committee, President Mikhail Gorbachev carried out profound changes, liberalising the country through perestroika, and being instrumental in putting an end to the Cold War and the arms race. In January 1989, when addressing the Global Forum for the Survival of Humanity in Moscow, Gorbachev proposed the formation of an organisation that would apply the medical emergency response model of the Red Cross to global ecological issues and expedite solutions to environmental problems that transcend national boundaries. In 1991, the year after he received the Nobel Peace Prize, Gorbachev stepped down as head of state in the chaos following the abolition of the Communist Party and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Two years later, following the Earth Summit in Rio, Gorbachev set about putting together the organisation he had spoken about. A charter was adopted at the first board meeting in Kyoto, Japan, in 1993, and modifications adopted in The Hague in May 1995, as Gorbachev became the first president of Green Cross International. The organisation has since grown to have representatives in 30 countries. Its aims include predicting and resolving conflicts linked to natural resources and tackling the environmental consequences of war.

“

We desperately need to recognise that we are the guests not the masters of nature and adopt a new paradigm for development, based on the costs and benefits to all people, and bound by the limits of nature herself rather than the limits of technology and consumerism.

”

x www.greencrossinternational.net

1993 1993

Alexey V. Yablokov 1933–

Striving towards a sustainable Russia In the late 1980s, Alexey V. Yablokov, a marine biologist, gained prominence when he courageously called attention to the hazards of Soviet nuclear dumping. 248

From 1992 to 1994, Yablokov was President Boris Yeltsin’s top scientific adviser on the environment and health, with an office in the Kremlin. On the office wall was a map showing the location of all the nuclear test explosions and nuclear facilities in Russia, which he considered a major health threat. Under his supervision, the Centre for Environmental Policy published books, white papers and, in 1993, a journal – Towards a Sustainable Russia. One report, the result of a working group authorised to accumulate classified information about nuclear dumping in Russian seas, became known as the Yablokov Report. In his public appearances, Yablokov has never hesitated to recite a litany of East European environmental horrors. Outdated technologies such as open-hearth steelmaking and Chernobyl-style reactors have poisoned the air, soil and water, as have misguided attempts to use nuclear explosions to mine diamonds and redirect the course of rivers. Water diversion projects have drained the Aral Sea, making the seabed a vast saline wasteland that poisons the surrounding farmland. Radioactive material has been carelessly disposed of all over the country, from submarines sunk in the Kara Sea to waste disposal in Ismailovsky Park in Moscow. Yablokov describes the human effects of this legacy, from falling life expectancies to rising rates of congenital deformities and reproductive disorders. In 1997 Yablokov published previously secret data on Soviet whaling, despite protests by the Russian Foreign Ministry and the State Fisheries Committee. In an attempt to bring him to heel, his salary was stopped. Despite this, two years later, he was citing Russian rockets and satellites as causing 50 per cent of the shrinking of the ozone layer: ‘If this goes on, in twenty or thirty years, there will be a catastrophe.’ In 2000, when President Vladimir Putin abolished the Centre for Environmental Policy, Yablokov and other members of the Russian Academy of Sciences immediately presented Putin with a protest letter. From the cramped living room of his apartment in a dilapidated Moscow high rise, Yablokov then set about collecting the signatures of more than 2.5 million Russian citizens to convince Putin of the dangers of pursuing industrial policy at the expense of the planet.

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Ecological troubles have no limits. In spite of ideological and spiritual differences, we are all citizens of the World Polluted States . . . Environmental interdependence inevitably leads us to a new concept of global security, which includes not only military but environmental security.

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1993 1993

Paul Hawken 1946–

Author, businessman During the 1960s, Paul Hawken of Sausalito, California, founded Erewhon, a natural foods wholesaling business that relied solely on sustainable agricultural sources. He went on to co-found Smith & Hawken, a garden supply company based on similar lines. From these experiences, Hawken wrote his third book, Growing a Business. Its success led him to produce and host a 17-part public broadcasting service television series of the same name profiling socially responsible business. In time, it would come to be shown in over 115 countries. Hawken’s writing and speech-making were always aimed at directing companies’ corporate philosophy towards ecological practices and social justice. His book The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (1993) has been voted the number one college textbook on business and the environment by professors in 67 business schools. It introduced full cost accounting where the entire outcome of an event or process to all parties is taken into account, not just the immediate participants. A decision to build a factory, for example, would include the associated natural resource use, pollution and any sideeffects of the production, distribution and consumption processes. The book also introduced the concepts of restoration as a more suitable goal than sustainability; green taxes; and a resource flow model where waste from industrial manufacturing became ‘food’ for other manufacturing systems. Following further research, Hawken went on to co-author Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution with Amory Lovins in 1999. The book popu- 203 larised the idea of ‘natural capital’ – a metaphor for the mineral, plant and animal formations of the Earth’s biosphere when viewed as a means of production of oxygen, water filter, erosion preventer, or provider of other ecosystem services. In other words, a method of direct accounting for nature’s services. Hawken’s new book, Blessed Unrest, How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming, was published in May 2007. In it, Hawken describes a convergence of the environmental and social justice movements as the largest and fastest-growing social movement in history, comprising over 1 million organisations in every country in the world.

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Picture the collective presence of all human beings as an organism. Pervading that organism are intelligent activities, humanity’s immune response to resist and heal the effects of political corruption, economic disease, and ecological degradation caused by ideologies, whether they are free-market, religious, or political.

x www.paulhawken.com

”

Blessed Unrest: How The Largest Movement in the  Paul Hawken, World Came into Being, and Why No One Saw It Coming (New York: Viking, 2007)

1993 1993

Birsel Lemke 1950–

Mobilising against gold mining In the early 1990s, two Turkish companies – Tuprag and Eurogold – proposed hundreds of new gold-mining projects along the Turkish Aegean coast. The proposed extraction technology would use cyanide, which has caused numerous environmental disasters worldwide. The most recent of these was in Romania in January 2000 when 99,000 m3 of mine waste contaminated with cyanide and heavy metals was accidentally discharged into a tributary of the Danube, killing practically all aquatic life along a 400 km stretch of the river. Birsel Lemke, a board member of Turkey’s Green Party, decided to found the citizens’ initiative Hayir! (No!) to oppose these projects. Her house became Hayir!’s informal headquarters and her financial resources its main source of funds. From here she organised a campaign that gained the support of local farmers and 13 mayors, and led 300,000 people to apply for asylum in Germany on the grounds that mining would make their homeland uninhabitable. In May 1993 Lemke organised a symbolic meeting in the Aegean of a Greek and a Turkish ship with children, citizens and mayors on board to demonstrate that gold mining using cyanide was not only a Turkish problem. She then took the mayors to Germany, where she had lived from 1975 to 1985 (and whose Dresdner Bank was due to provide funding for the mines), and showed them the Rhein biosphere reserve as an alternative. Dresdner Bank withdrew its finance and Hayir! won support for its stance in both the Turkish and the European parliaments. In 1994 it sued the Turkish Environment Ministry and Eurogold in the courts. In 1997 the Turkish Supreme Court found in Hayir!’s favour and prohibited the extraction of gold using cyanide in Turkey. In 2000, Lemke was the recipient of a Right Livelihood Award. 251

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I regard our resistance as a triumph of friendship and of love of one’s native country and culture over the plans of a billionaire industry, which we would have liked to persuade to grow olives instead of mining gold.

”

1993 1993

Randall Borman 1955–

Defender of the Ecuadorean rainforest In November 1993, Randall Borman, the 38-year-old son of American missionaries and chief of Zabálo, an Ecuadorean village of Cofán Indians, led a band of 35 Cofán followers on an armed visit to an oil well illegally constructed on their land deep in the San Miguel region of Ecuador’s Amazonian rainforest. With spears and shotguns, the Cofáns encircled the well and its crew of startled workers. Thirty-six hours later, following a tense stand-off and extensive negotiations, Borman had what he wanted – the promise of an environmental impact study for the area and compensation in the form of 60 solar panels for the roofs of the Cofán villagers’ huts. Ecuador’s multi-billion-dollar Amazon-based petroleum industry had been dominated for more than 20 years by the national Petroecuador and multinationals such as Texaco and Occidental. Living among the Cofáns, Borman soon realised that his numerous protest letters sent to petroleum companies pointing out the need to preserve Ecuador’s 13-million-hectare forest biodiversity from ongoing exploitation were having no impact. Taking matters into his own hands, Borman led the Cofáns into direct action, destroying a Petroecuador drilling platform built without permission on Cofán land. To date, none of the Cofán attacks have resulted in physical injuries. Anger toward oil exploration is growing across Ecuador. A new $1.1 billion pipeline, now under construction and funded by companies from Canada, Spain, Argentina, Italy and the US, is behind much of it. Borman has continued to campaign for the legal rights of the Cofán nation and for financial aid to protect the rainforest.

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Unless we take direct action like this, we know our forest and way of life will be destroyed. It has happened elsewhere and it will happen here.

”

x www.cofan.org

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1994 1994

Ray Anderson 1935–

An environmental epiphany By the early 1990s, Ray Anderson, of Atlanta, Georgia, had built up his petro-intensive company Interface Inc. into the world leader in the design, production and sales of modular, soft-surfaced floor coverings. Interface traded in 100 countries and manufactured on four continents. Then, in August 1994, motivated by the need to address a task force convened by the company’s research division on Interface’s environmental 250 position, he read Paul Hawken’s book The Ecology of Commerce. It changed his life: ‘It was an epiphany. I wasn’t halfway through it before the vision I sought became clear, along with a powerful sense of urgency to do something. Hawken’s message was a spear in my chest that remains to this day.’ Anderson offered the task force a vision – to make Interface the world leader in ‘industrial ecology’. His mission was to convert Interface to a restorative enterprise, first by achieving sustainable business practices and then helping others achieve sustainability. The strategy was to reduce, reuse, reclaim, recycle and redesign. Interface would adopt best business practices and then advance and share them, developing sustainable technologies and investing in them when it made economic sense to do so, and challenging its suppliers to do the same. Interface named this strategy EcoSense™. After two years of planning, and in consultation with Hawken and the English designer David Oakey, Interface began a project called Climbing Mount Sustainability. Its goals included eliminating waste, radically reducing emissions and producing more environmentally sustainable products. Today, waste has been reduced by a third. The ultimate aim is to eliminate any negative impacts the company may have on the environment by 2020. The technical challenges they chose to address included: ‘How would nature 273 design a floor covering?’ To answer this question, they worked with Janine Benyus at the Biomimicry Institute. The outcome, in 2001, was Entropy™, a carpet inspired by random pattern formation in nature. It rapidly became Interface’s topselling line of carpet. Three years later, this biomimetic product is still the company’s bestseller. Interface followed up by using fibres made from poly lactic acid/ 242 non-food-grade corn as developed by Pat Gruber.

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If we’re successful, we’ll spend the rest of our days harvesting yesteryear’s carpets and other petrochemically-derived products, and recycling them into new materials; and converting sunlight into energy; with zero scrap

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going to the landfill and zero emissions into the ecosystem; And we’ll be doing well . . . very well . . . by doing good. That’s the vision.

x www.interfaceflooring.com

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Anderson, Mid-course Correction: Toward a Sustainable  RayEnterprise – The Interface Model (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 1998)

1994 1994

José Maria Figuères 1954–

Fostering sustainable development in Costa Rica During the 1970s and 1980s, José Maria Figuères, son of José Ferrer Figuères, the former three-time President of Costa Rica, worked in the Costa Rican agro-industrial sector. Then, in 1994, he too was elected President. His governmental programme was based on moving the country towards sustainable development, with the aim of transforming Costa Rican society from one divided by poverty and privilege to an integrated society José Maria Figuères addresses a crowd of Costa Rican that provided opportunities for all. farmers Figuères worked to change Costa Rica from a country that had little knowledge of how to preserve its natural resources towards one that understood their value and took responsibility for their preservation. One of his first actions was to ratify the UN Conventions on Biological Diversity and Climate Change. In 1995 he approved a tax on carbon emissions. During his four-year mandate, Figuères set up the Costa Rica Foundation for Sustainable Development, initiating several programmes – LINCOS (Little Intelligent Communities); APVE (an initiative to introduce electric vehicles); and CENTAIRE (Central American Centre for Air Quality Monitoring, Assessment and Management Technologies). He brought together the academic sector, non-governmental organisations and private-sector partners to develop these programmes. He was also one of the main sponsors of the Central American Alliance for Sustainable Development, co-signed by regional leaders in the first year of his presidency. Figuères established an integrated political platform based on the principles of sustainability, capable of generating improved competitive advantages for Costa Rica in the process of economic globalisation.

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After leaving the presidency, Figuères was appointed managing director of the World Economic Forum, three years later becoming its first CEO. His responsibilities included coordinating the prestigious annual meeting of the forum at Davos, Switzerland, which brings together prominent corporate leaders, heads of state and government, as well as respected personalities from the academic, cultural and religious worlds. Among his greatest achievements while at the Forum was to strengthen the links between the corporate world and the public sector in order to identify their common long-term interests and visions. More recently, together with Nicolas Negroponte and Jeffrey Sachs, Figuères founded the Digital Nations Consortium, a programme overseen by the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In 2000, he was appointed special representative of the UN’s Information and Communication Technologies Group and Task Force.

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The enlightened self-interest of business should allow them to take up the most important challenge, that is to advance towards a world civilisation that is more jointly responsible, more inclusive and safer.

”

x www.josemariafigueres.org

1994 1994

Pooran Desai 1965–

Sue Riddlestone 1960–

The bioregional approach Following studies at Oxford, Pooran Desai conceived the idea of enabling people to live in a sustainable way within an ecological footprint of two hectares, the per capita environmental space available globally. Desai called this the BioRegional approach. To put this to the test, Desai, together with Sue Riddlestone, formed the charity BioRegional Development Group in 1994 and began to examine how more goods could be made from local resources – particularly waste or renewable resources. Their first project focused on a former sewage works at Beddington, in the south London suburb of Sutton. First they transformed the brownfield site back into the lavender fields for which the area had once been world-famous a century before. The labour was carried out by low-risk offenders from nearby Downview Prison, who cleared the site and planted not only lavender but also other herbs.

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Riddlestone also directed the development of a clean technology paper-recycling mill called MiniMill. In 2000, Desai and Riddlestone worked with architect Bill Dunstan to build the ecological village of BedZed (Beddington Zero Energy Development). It provides 82 homes and gardens, including living/working units as well as standard apartmentstyle accommodation. Energy saving is achieved by extra insulation in the walls and triple-glazed windows. The small amounts of energy required are generated through a small combined heat and power plant using waste wood from a local tree surgery and solar energy from photovoltaic cells built into the glass of the light and airy buildings. BedZed is close to public transport and a car pool reduces emissions from private car use. Rainwater is collected, used water is recycled and organic waste is made into compost on site. At the same time, the BioRegional Development Group is working with Imperial College at Wye, Kent, on research into growing flax and hemp locally as an alternative to cotton. Riddlestone is also a cofounding director of One Planet Living, a joint initiative between BioRegional and WWF. As a member of the London Sustainable Development Commission, she has worked on setting targets for reducing London’s CO2 emissions and the London 2012 Olympic bid. BioRegional, with WWF, subsequently worked with London 2012 to write the sustainability strategy ‘One Planet Olympics’. Pooran and Sue were married in September 2007.

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The BioRegional approach is a practical expression of thinking globally and acting locally. Localising the supply of products and services enables us to increase local recycling and reduce unnecessary transport and to create more stable regional economies, protected from the destructive swings of globalisation. (Pooran Desai)

”

x www.bioregional.com

Desai and Sue Riddlestone, Bioregional Solutions: For  Pooran Living on One Planet (Schumacher Briefing) (Dartington, UK: Green Books, 2002)

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1994 1994

Steven R. Galster 1961–

Undercover agent In 1994 Steve Galster, a 33-year-old master’s graduate in security police studies at George Washington University, published Crime against Nature: Organised Crime and the Illegal Wildlife Trade – An Investigative Report. The same year, Galster created the environmental and human rights group Global Survival Network. Galster’s background has covered investigative research and media campaigning relating to human, arms and wildlife trafficking. He has led numerous undercover investigations into criminal operations relating to these three topics in the former Soviet Union, US, China, Afghanistan and South-East Asia. In 1993 Galster led an investigative team that uncovered the world’s largest rhino horn smuggling syndicate in China, leading to the arrest of the smugglers and a public commitment by the Chinese government to clamp down on the illegal trade. The following year, he organised Operation Amba, a Russian anti-poaching brigade that helped the Siberian tiger population stabilise after years of heavy poaching. In 1995 he published the report Tracking the Pirates: New DNA Results and Undercover Research Expose the Illegal Whalemeat Trade. In 1997, Galster designed Burma’s first Buddhist anti-poaching project in the country’s first national park (Alaungdaw Kathepa). Two years later he was designing the Khao Yai Conservation Project, a model park protection project for Thailand. Also in 1999, together with Suwanna Gauntlett, Peter Knights and Steven Trent, he co-founded WildAid. Initially funded by the Barbara Delano Foundation, WildAid’s mission is to train local law enforcement and wildlife officials to fight poachers, with the aim of ending the illegal wildlife trade within 50 years. WildAid’s aggressive approach, using activists, undercover investigators and law enforcement officers, has helped to confiscate over 17,000 animals directly from the hands of poachers in Cambodia and to reduce the number of Phnom Penh restaurants serving illegal wildlife dishes by over 75 per cent. In 2001 Galster and WildAid collaborated with J. Walter Thompson advertising agency to design a national media campaign in Thailand to reduce consumption of shark fin soup. The campaign focused on the fact that shark fin contains dangerously high levels of the poison mercury. The campaign led to a rapid drop in shark fin sales (30–70 per cent) in key markets. China remains a major problem. During 2000, 20 tons of turtles were shipped from Indonesia to China every week. And in just seven months in 2002 Thai officials intercepted 1,800 mammals and 21,000 reptiles bound for their voracious neighbour to the north. Galster’s ambitious goal is to stop the illegal wildlife trade in Asia by the time of the Beijing Olympics in 2008.

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The aim is . . . to unplug the Chinese vacuum cleaner, sucking up SouthEast Asia’s wildlife left and right.

”

x www.wildaid.org

1995 1995

Dimítrios Archontónis 1940–

The green patriarch Dimítrios Archontónis was born in 1940 on Imvros, among a Greek community on a Turkish island in the Aegean Sea. His childhood memories of this remote and beautiful place were to have a strong influence on his life. After studying theology, at the age of 21 he became ordained a deacon, taking the name Bartholemew. In 1991, as Bartholemew I, Archontónis became the 270th successor to the Apostle St Andrew as Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, based in Istanbul. Three years later, Patriarch Bartholemew I organised a series of annual international environmental seminars on the Greek island of Heybeliada (Halki). The first, on the topic of environment and religious education, was followed by environment and ethics (1995), environment and communication (1996), environment and justice (1997) and environment and poverty (1998). In 1995, Patriarch Bartholemew declared that pollution and other attacks on the environment could be considered sins. He then popularised 1 September as a day of prayer for the protection of the natural environment throughout the Christian orthodox world. Following the Halki seminars, the green patriarch organised Symposium II, seeking to reach agreement on appropriate action for preserving the Black Sea region. Symposium III, in 1999, was a floating seminar where the Halki Ecological Institute, an interdisciplinary group of scientists, clergy, journalists and educators, voyaged down the Danube from the river’s headwaters to its delta and the Black Sea. Symposium IV, in 2002, concerned the Adriatic Sea, bringing together Muslim, Jewish, Protestant and Catholic leaders to consider the calamitous state of the planet’s oceans, seas and coasts. It concluded with an unprecedented joint declaration signed in Venice by Patriarch Bartholemew for the Orthodox Church and Pope

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John-Paul II for the Catholic Church. In 2003 Symposium V concerned the Baltic Sea and, in this same year, a book, Cosmic Grace, Humble Prayer: The Ecological Vision of the Green Patriarch Bartholemew I, was published in the US. In July 2006 Symposium VI on the Amazon discussed deforestation and the loss of regional biodiversity. Delegates agreed that the destruction of the Amazon rainforest to grow soya to feed chickens in Europe must be halted as soon as possible.

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Crime against the natural world is a sin.

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1995 1995

Ken Saro-Wiwa 1941–1995

Fighting injustice in Nigeria Since 1958, when Royal Dutch Shell struck oil on Ogoni lands in Nigeria’s oil-rich delta region, an estimated $30 billion of oil has been extracted in a joint venture in which the government is a majority partner, with Shell the largest private partner (30 per cent). In return, the Ogoni, an ethnic minority of 550,000 farmers and fishermen, have received little except a ravaged environment. Once fertile farmland has been laid waste by oil spills and acid rain. Virtually all fish and wildlife have vanished. One of those who felt strongly that action must be taken was Ken Saro-Wiwa, a well-known Nigerian author and television producer. In 1991 SaroWiwa helped to found the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), later becoming its spokesperson and then leader. The Ogoni Bill of Rights, written by MOSOP, set out the movement’s demands, including increased autonomy for the Ogoni people, a fair share of the proceeds of oil extraction and remediation of environmental damage to Ogoni lands. In 1992, Saro-Wiwa was imprisoned for several months without trial by the Nigerian military government. In January 1993 Saro-Wiwa gathered 300,000 Ogoni people on a peaceful march to demand a share in oil revenues and compensation for the damage done to their land. Bypassing the government, Saro-Wiwa asked Shell to engage immediately in environmental impact assessments of its past activities and to raise its standards to best practice. Shell’s response was to cease operations in the region. The Nigerian military moved in. In an occupation that lasted more than four years, 259

over 1,000 people were killed and many more were driven from their homes or imprisoned without trial. Saro-Wiwa and eight other MOSOP leaders were arrested and detained by the Nigerian authorities in June 1993, but were released after a month. In May 1994, he was arrested again and falsely accused of incitement to murder following the deaths of four Ogoni elders. Saro-Wiwa denied the charges, but was imprisoned for over a year before being found guilty and sentenced to death by a specially convened tribunal. Nearly all the defendants’ lawyers resigned in protest at the tribunal’s cynical rigging by the government regime. Many of the witnesses brought to testify against Saro-Wiwa and his co-defendants later admitted they had been bribed to do so by the government. On 10 November 1995, despite worldwide condemnation and incredulity, SaroWiwa and his eight co-defendants were hanged at Port Harcourt, Nigeria. Subsequently, Nigeria was suspended from the Commonwealth and condemned by the UN General Assembly. Shell became an international pariah. Although Saro-Wiwa’s exiled family continue to campaign on behalf of the Ogoni, the region remains heavily militarised and the government has yet to agree to allow an independent environmental assessment of the historic long-term and ongoing pollution in the Niger Delta.

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I harbour the hope that in founding the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People, in empowering the Ogoni people to fearlessly confront their history and their tormentors non-violently, that in encouraging the Ogoni people to a belief in their ability to revitalise their dying society, I have started a trend which will peacefully liberate many peoples in Africa and lead eventually to political and economic reform and social justice.

x www.remembersarowiwa.com

”

Osha, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow: Politics,  Sanya Nationalism and the Ogoni Protest Movement (London: Adonis & Abbey Publishers, 2007)

1995 1995

Charles A. Munn III 1956–

A pioneer of South American ecotourism During the 1980s, Charlie Munn of the Bronx Zoo-based Wildlife Conservation Society was working as a conservation zoologist researching macaws, giant otters and other wildlife in the Amazon rainforests and savannahs of the Peru–Bolivia border region. Munn’s particular passion was for the region’s eight threatened species of colourful macaws, including Lear’s macaw (Anodorhynchus leari), the hyacinth macaw (A. hyacinthinus) and the blue-throated macaw (Ara glaucogularis), which were being trapped and traded as pets. 260

In his efforts to protect the habitat on which the macaws depend, in 1995 Munn helped to create Bolivia’s Madidi National Park, home to more than 1,200 species of birds. He also helped establish a 1 million hectare buffer zone around Peru’s Manu National Park, one of the largest wildlife parks in the world. This included setting up model ecotourism projects. The adjoining parks are now the most biologically diverse protected areas on Earth. Alongside this, in 1994 Munn and a group of Brazilian environmentalists set up the non-profit organisation BioBrasil which now owns 4,000 hectares of dry forest in the Brazilian state of Piaui where there are important nesting sites for hyacinth macaws. As well as founding the World Parrot Trust USA, in 2000 Munn set up Tropical Nature, a non-profit ecotourism concern now operating in Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, the Dominican Republic and Gabon, providing high-quality sustainable jobs to people who had previously been poachers to survive. Tropical Nature is now the world’s largest operator of tropical rainforest eco-lodges.

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We use ecotourism as an effective conservation tool to add value to tropical rainforests and thus make them worth more standing than cut.

”

x tropicalnature.org

1996 1996

Theodora Colborn 1928–

Our stolen future During the 1970s Theodora Colborn, wife of a sheep farmer in Colorado and mother of four children, lost a fight to protect the Gunnison River from pollution from coal mining. In 1978 Colborn, a 50-year-old zoology graduate, decided to study ecology at Colorado’s Western State College. Four years later, she began work on a PhD in zoology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. In the mid-1980s Colborn carried out research into pollution of the Great Lakes and its links to cancer in humans. Becoming a senior scientist with the WWF in 1996, Colborn, along with journalist Dianne Dumanowski and John Peterson Myers, founder of Environmental Health Sciences, developed the endocrine disruptor hypothesis. This stated that synthetic chemicals found in common plastics, cleaning compounds and cosmetics mimic hormones in the human body and cause long-term physiological damage, including reproductive damage. Their book, Our Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story, argued that even low-dose exposures to these endocrine disruptors can affect developing foe-

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tuses and new-born babies, causing a range of problems including low IQs, genital malformations, low sperm counts and infertility. Colborn has come to be regarded by many as the Rachel Carson of the 1990s. 118 Her work has triggered worldwide public concern about endocrine disruptors and has prompted both the enactment of new laws and redirection of research by governments, the private sector and academics.

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We can’t do anything about the chemicals that have been released and are out in the environment. But we could at least not make any more, and we could try to contain those that are now in use.

x www.ourstolenfuture.org

”

Colborn, Dianne Dumanowski and John Peterson Meyers, Our  Theo Stolen Future: Are We Threatening Our Fertility, Intelligence

and Survival? A Scientific Detective Story (Cambridge, MA: Abacus, new edn 1997)

1996 1996

Sebastian Chuwa 1952–

Saving the tree of music The wood of the East African blackwood tree (Dalbergia melanoxylon), known as mpingo in Swahili, is widely used by African carvers. Because of its tonal qualities, it is also highly prized in the West to make woodwind instruments, principally clarinets and oboes. But, because of over-harvesting and the long-term lack of any efforts directed towards replanting, the mpingo has became a threatened species. In 1992, the US PBS Nature series produced a documentary on The Tree of Music. In this, a Tanzanian called Sebastian Chuwa expressed his concern for the tree and his desire to save it. Among those who saw the programme was retired civil engineer Jim Harris who was using mpingo for his craft of ornamental woodturning in Red Rock, Texas, USA. In 1996 Harris and Chuwa founded the African Blackwood Conservation Project (ABCP). Harris launched a fundraising effort among woodworkers, musicians and conservationists in the West and sent the money to Chuwa to start tree nurseries in Tanzania. Working through two national youth organisations – Malihai Clubs of Tanzania 262

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116 and Roots and Shoots (founded by Jane Goodall) – Chuwa established almost 100

conservation groups of up to 300 students each. Periodically they replanted areas that had suffered from environmental damage. One such project was to plant 15,000 trees along Mweka Route, the most popular backpacking track on Mount Kilimanjaro, while 500,000 mpingo trees have been planted on the fertile slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro itself. During their annual Environment Day celebrations for 2004 on 8 September, attended by around 2,200 people, the millionth tree was planted. Sebastian Chuwa was a recipient of the Rolex Award for Enterprise in 2002.

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It pains me to see the environment of my own country being destroyed by forces which could have been, and can be, controlled by man himself. I realised that through education the situation can be alleviated. Environmental efforts will only succeed in my country if environmental education is targeted at a grassroots level – from primary schools onward.

”

x www.blackwoodconservation.org

1996 1996

Alexandr Nikitin 1952–

Cleaning up the cold war Until 1985, Alexandr Nikitin was a naval captain in the Soviet northern fleet where he served as chief engineer on nuclear-powered submarines. From 1987 to 1992 he worked for the Department of Defence as the senior inspector for its Nuclear and Radiation Safety Inspection Department. His work included inspecting the large fleet of nuclear-powered submarines moored in a remote shipyard on the Kola peninsula adjacent to the Norwegian border along the Barents Sea. With the Cold War over and Russia unable to afford either to run or decommission the payloads, 52 submarines still containing nuclear fuel and weapons were slowly becoming an environmental timebomb – the danger of catastrophic radioactive contamination from leaks, overheating or explosion increased daily.

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In 1996 Nikitin felt obliged to publicise this threat through the Bellona Foundation which had been set up some ten years before, shortly after Chernobyl, by Norwegian environmentalists Frederic Hauge and Rune Haaland. The result was a report entitled The Russian Northern Fleet: Sources of Radioactive Contamination. The impact of the report was immediate and, for Nikitin, devastating. The Bellona Foundation’s Russian office was ransacked by federal security police, the successors to the KGB, and all the references for the report were removed. Nikitin was trying to reconstruct the report when he was arrested. He was imprisoned on charges of high treason and violating Defence Ministry secret decrees. His report had the dubious honour of being the first publication to be banned in Russia since the fall of Communism. At first, Nikitin was held in solitary confinement and denied bail. Although he was released in late 1996 the security police now drew up seven charges of high treason against him and asked that he be sentenced to 12 years in a labour colony. For the next three years Nikitin and his family were followed and harassed, and he was again held by the police. Although in April 1999 Russia’s Supreme Court refused an appeal to drop the charges against Nikitin, in December of the same year the St Petersburg City Court acquitted him of espionage and ruled that all the accusations were a violation of the Russian constitution. The police were forced to release him. Nikitin received the Goldman Prize in 1997 and, a year later, the Sierra Club’s Chico Mendes Award. The lethal danger from the Kola fleet remains. In 2004, the commander-in-chief of Russia’s Navy, Admiral Vladimir Kuroyedev, announced that the condition of the flagship of Russia’s northern fleet, the nuclear cruiser Peter the Great, was so bad that ‘it could blow sky high’.

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I am convinced that ecology cannot be secret. Environmental openness is an inalienable human right. Any attempt to conceal any information about harmful impacts on people and environment is a crime against humanity.

”

1996 1996

Erin Brockovich 1960–

A legal clerk takes on a utility company Hinkley is a town of about 3,500 people in the Mojave Desert in California about 193 km north-east of Los Angeles. Since the 1970s the town’s residents had been unknowingly drinking, bathing and swimming in water polluted by a cancer-causing chemical called hexavalent chromium (chromium 6). Millions of gallons of this chemical had been leaking into the groundwater from the nearby Pacific Gas & 264

Electric Company (PG&E) facility where it was used to prevent rust from corroding the water-cooling system. On discovering the pollution in the early 1990s, PG&E undertook a $12.5 million clean-up effort, approaching the owners of three farms and ten houses in the area and offering to buy their properties. When householder Roberta Walker was asked to name her price and found PG&E swiftly agreeing to $250,000 for a house previously valued at only $25,000, her suspicions were aroused. She approached Masry & Vititoe, a local firm of lawyers specialising in personal injury cases. Working as a filing clerk at Masry & Vititoe was a divorcee and mother of three called Erin Brockovich. While organising the papers for Roberta Walker’s case, Brockovich found some medical records that disturbed her. After obtaining permission from one of the firm’s principals Ed Masry she began to research the matter more deeply. Before long, other Hinkley residents were calling Masry’s office. Following an advertisement in the local newspaper, a town meeting brought clients together. In 1996, as a result of the largest direct-action lawsuit of its kind, spearheaded by Brockovich and Masry, PG&E paid the largest civil injury settlement in US history – $333 million in damages to more than 600 Hinkley residents. Erin Brockovich, the feature film made about this drawn-out case, was released in March 2000 by Universal Studios. It starred Julia Roberts as Erin and Albert Finney as Masry. Its five Academy Award nominations included Julia Roberts as Best Actress. The real Erin Brockovich is currently research director at Masry & Vititoe where she has taken on other major chromium 6 and groundwater contamination lawsuits in California, New Hampshire, New York, West Virginia and other states.

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Don’t be intimidated by authority. When it comes to your children and it comes to the safety of your family and you have a question and you’re not getting an answer, demand it and keep after it until you get an answer.

”

x www.brockovich.com

1997 1997

Pan Wenshi 1937–

Panda conservation By the 1980s giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), hunted by man and with their habitat shrinking, had retreated to just three provinces in China – Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi – and their numbers had declined to just 1,200 individuals.

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In the 1960s a protection programme had been set up by the WWF with the Chinese Ministry of Forestry at the Wolong nature reserve in Sichuan province. Among those who joined this programme was a zoology lecturer at Beijing University called Pan Wenshi. Pandas were known to feed almost exclusively on bamboo, and researchers had found that they favoured the leaves and young stems of the arrow bamboo. However, once every 50 years, the arrow bamboo flowers and dies off in wide areas. When news came in of arrow bamboo flowering in 1983, the Chinese government made plans to rescue starving pandas and place them in specially constructed holding stations. Wenshi did not agree with this policy. He reasoned that over the centuries pandas had survived countless flowering events and would not suffer unduly because they could eat other bamboo species. Although he knew that it could jeopardise his career, Wenshi sent a lengthy report to the State Council. Although the government took note and halted the rescue operation, by then 108 pandas had been captured, of which 33 had died. In 1984, Wenshi left the Wolong nature reserve to conduct his own panda research in the Changqing area in the northern Qin Ling Mountains. Without financial support, Wenshi and his helpers lived frugally. But, in 1987, he obtained permission to put radio collars on the pandas to better follow their movements. The Qin Ling population seemed fairly stable. Among the 36 pandas studied by Wenshi, there had been 7 deaths and 13 births, with 11 surviving infants. But, during 1993, logging threatened the survival of the colony. Wenshi wrote directly to President Jiang Zemin and then to Premier Li Peng, urging that the logging be stopped. Not only was a halt ordered, but in 1997 the government designated 305 km2 of Qin Ling as the Changqing Nature Reserve to protect the pandas’ habitat. About 170 of Qin Ling’s 240 pandas now live in the protected area. In addition, the Chinese government, in cooperation with WWF, has been implementing a plan to boost protection of the 13 existing panda reserves and to create 14 new ones. To stop poachers from killing pandas and selling their pelts stricter laws have been enforced. In 1999, Chinese scientists announced they were planning to clone a giant panda embryo and grow it in a black bear’s womb in an effort to save the species. The initiative was opposed by Wenshi, now Director of the Panda Research Centre at Beijing University, who feared it would divert resources from efforts to save the pandas’ habitat.

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“

The damage done by mankind to its natural habitat is the main threat to its existence.

”

1997 1997

Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker 1939–

Factor four In 1984 Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, who had benefited from an interdisciplinary study of chemistry, physics and biology at Essen University, became director of the Institute for European Environmental Policy in Bonn. Seven years later, he became president of the interdisciplinary Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy. The aim of the institute is to explore and develop models, strategies and instruments to support sustainable development at local, national and international level. In 1992, Von Weizsäcker published Earth Politics, which argued that a non-wasteful, non-destructive model of wealth creation requires environmental policies that not only clean up pollution but put a price on ecological realities through green taxes and pricing. The book had a great impact on the environmental debate in Germany. 203 In 1997 von Weizsäcker joined Amory and Hunter Lovins in writing the hugely influential Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use. It persuasively argued that we should use natural resources at least four times more efficiently, enabling us to live twice as well while halving the stress we place on our environment; it was widely translated. In 1998 von Weizsäcker entered mainstream politics as a candidate for the German Green Party led by Joschka Fischer. He was elected and served two terms in 215 the red–green coalition with responsibilities as chair of the Environment Committee of the Bundestag and, from 2000 to 2002, as chair of the Bundestag’s Select Committee on Economic Globalisation. In 2005 von Weizsäcker was appointed Dean of the Donald Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

Ü Ü

“

We can quadruple resource productivity using existing technological knowledge. That would allow the world to double well-being while at the same time halving resource consumption.

x weizsaecker.bawue.spd.de/index_en.html

”

von Weizsäcker, Amory B. Lovins and  Ernst Ulrich L. Hunter Lovins,

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Factor Four: Doubling Wealth, Halving Resource Use (London: Earthscan Publications, 1997)

1997 1997

Timothy E. Wirth 1939–

The science is settled Between 1974 and 1987 Tim Wirth, who had a background in education policy, served as a Democratic US congressman particularly concerned with global climate change and population stabilisation. Elected senator for Colorado in 1986, Wirth went on to serve as the first Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs under Bill Clinton between 1993 and 1997. In the State Department he worked with VicePresident Al Gore on global environmental and population issues, supporting 307 Gore’s view that the science on global warming was settled – that it was real and caused by human activities. Like Gore he was a supporter of the proposed Kyoto Protocol. As chief negotiator at the 1997 Kyoto summit he announced the US’s commitment to legally binding limits on greenhouse gas emissions. But hopes for support from the US Senate were dashed with a 95 to 0 vote against signing the protocol. Wirth believes that partisan politics, industry opposition and vocal climate change sceptics prevented action from being taken. Wirth’s credentials caused Ted Turner to appoint him, in 1998, as president of the UN Foundation and the Better World Fund, publicly supported organisations formed to execute Turner’s $1 billion pledge to support environmental causes. Wirth has since organised and led the formulation of the foundation’s mission and programme priorities, which include the environment, women and population, children’s health and peace, security and human rights.

Ü

“

We have been living off an enormous supply of natural capital and that’s coming to an end all over the world.

”

x www.unfoundation.org

1997 1997

Jane Lubchenco 1947–

Linking ecology and human health During the 1970s marine biologist Jane Lubchenco’s detailed studies of ecological systems off the rocky shores of New England made her increasingly aware of the environmental deterioration taking place in the ocean. She later became interested 268

in the human interaction in these systems; after becoming familiar with locations all over the world and doing repeated research at these sites, Lubchenco concluded that change as a result of human interaction is only visible once you know how the system actually should be, or was. Lubchenco believes human actions have changed many ecological systems. For example, humans have introduced excess nitrogen into natural ecosystems through the use of fertilisers, as well as through sewage dumping. So much excess nitrogen is used in fertilisers – more than double the amount necessary – that plants are unable to process it all in the nitrogen fixation cycle. Excess nitrogen is now found in drinking water; it also triggers algal blooms (which can infect shellfish, prove poisonous to humans and create fish kills) and creates what are known as ‘dead zones’. There are 30–40 dead zones all over the world, and all are near the mouths of rivers with large amounts of fertiliser runoff. From her post as Distinguished Professor of Zoology at Oregon State University, Lubchenco has pursued her planet-saving mission. With her husband, Dr Bruce Menge, she leads the Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO), an interdisciplinary team of scientists who study the near-shore portion of the marine ecosystem off the coasts of Washington, Oregon and California. After six years as president of the Ecological Society of America, in 1996 Lubchenco was elected president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In her presidential address Lubchenco spoke of the intimate connections between ecological systems and human health, the economy, social justice and national security, and introduced the seminal concept of a ‘social contract’ between scientists and society. That contract, she said, should express a commitment to harnessing the full power of science in discovering new knowledge, in communicating existing and new understanding to the public and to policy-makers, and in helping society become more sustainable. In 1997, she received Senate confirmation to the National Science Board and was one of seven experts summoned to the White House for a briefing on global warming. She has described the magnitude of the ‘human footprint’ on the planet as follows: half of the planet’s land surface has been transformed by humans, nearly half of its surface freshwater is used by humans, 30 per cent of the atmosphere has been altered since the Industrial Revolution, two-thirds of ocean fisheries are fully overexploited or depleted and 30,000 species a year (three species an hour) are lost due to human activity.

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During the last few decades, humans have emerged as a new force of nature. We are modifying physical, chemical and biological systems in new ways, at faster rates, and over larger spatial scales than ever recorded on Earth. Humans have unwittingly embarked on a grand experiment with our planet. The outcome of this experiment is unknown, but has profound implications for all of life on Earth.

”

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x www.piscoweb.org

1997 1997

José Bové 1953–

A French sheep farmer From the early 1980s José Bové, a French sheep farmer and Roquefort cheese manufacturer, became increasingly convinced that globally organised food production was wrong. Having created the Peasant-Workers Syndicate of the Aveyron in 1981, Bové went on to co-found and become spokesman for the radical Peasant Confederation. In 1995, he sailed on Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior to protest against nuclear tests. Two years later he took part in the destruction of a seed production facility and in hijacking genetically modified (GM)grown corn in the greenhouses of a public research centre. For this he was arrested and put in prison. Two years later, Bové and nine of his activist comrades destroyed the half-built Millau branch of McDonald’s. Three years later, he would serve a three-month prison sentence for this. In 1999 he was invited by Ralph Nader to the protest rally against the World 130 Trade Organisation in Seattle where he famously ate a Roquefort cheese sandwich in front of a local McDonald’s, the latter establishment being vandalised soon after. In 2000, with François Dufour, Bové co-authored Le monde n’est pas une marchandise. Des paysans contre la malbouffe (The World is not for Sale: Farmers against Junk Food). In 2004, Bové and other activists were filmed on television pulling up genetically modified maize for which he was sentenced to four months in prison. In 2006, Bové announced that he would be running as a candidate in the 2007 French presidential elections ‘to represent la France invisible . . . to be the voice of the voiceless, of those millions of citizens who suffer from social and economic precarity and discrimination’. In the first round he won 483,076 votes (1.32 per cent).

Ü

“

Let us globalise the struggles to globalise hope!

x viacampesina.org

”

Dufour, The World Is Not For Sale: Farmers  José Bové and François against Junk Food

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(New York: Verso, new edn 2002)

1997 1997

Pierce Brosnan 1953–

007 to the rescue At the age of 43 the Irish-born actor Pierce Brosnan was chosen as the new James Bond. While he was starring in Goldeneye (1995), Tomorrow Never Dies (1997), The World is not Enough (1999) and Die Another Day (2002) Brosnan and his wife Keely were using his box-office celebrity to highlight environmental campaigns. Working with IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare), Brosnan joined the campaign to prevent Mitsubishi from putting the world’s largest salt factory in the Laguna San Ignacio at Baja, California, the last pristine breeding ground of the Pacific grey whale. Becoming a member of the Forest Stewardship Council, Brosnan appeared for their publicity poster ‘Words Are Not Enough – you don’t have to be a special agent to protect our forests’. In 2000, Brosnan joined forces with other environmentalists and scientists in an attempt to persuade US President Clinton and Canadian Prime Minister Chrétien to create the world’s first International Ocean Wilderness, a protected area between the New England states and the Maritime Provinces of Canada. He also starred in Richard Attenborough’s feature film about the controversial Canadian environmen79 talist Grey Owl and narrated an IMAX film called Dolphins. 305 He joined Jacques Cousteau’s son Jean-Michel in the Ocean Futures Society and narrated a six-part documentary called Jean-Michel Cousteau’s Ocean Adventures. The series illuminated the great need for better understanding and sustainable management of the oceans’ rich natural treasures. Cousteau also made a film, Deadly Sounds in the Silent World II, which is introduced by Brosnan and his wife. It examines the US Navy’s low-frequency active sonar programme which threatens the survival of whales and dolphins from intense noise. In 2004, having decided that his James Bond days were over, Brosnan and his wife launched IFAW’s new ship Song of the Whale before its maiden voyage to Iceland to campaign against the recent resumption of whaling. Brosnan was named Best Dressed Environmentalist in 2004 by the Sustainable Style Foundation.

Ü Ü

“

We owe it to our children to be better stewards of the environment . . . The alternative? A world without whales. It’s too terrible to imagine.

”

x www.ifaw.org

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1997 1997

William Clay Ford Jr 1957–

Any colour you like so long as it’s green In 1979 22-year-old William Clay Ford Jr joined the Ford Motor Company set up by his great-grandfather Henry. Ford Jr’s hobbies were fly-fishing, guitar playing, tae kwon do, Zen and Tibetan Buddhism, but his main concern was with the environment. By 1997 Ford was chairman of Ford’s Environmental and Public Policy Committee and, four years later, he became CEO and president. ‘Now, as chairman of one of the world’s largest corporations,’ Ford declared, ‘I am in a unique position to be a catalyst for change.’ Such change has been evidenced by the fact that Ford’s 140 factories in 26 countries are now all certified under the International Organisation for Standardisation’s environmental management system standard (ISO 14001). At the same time the Ford Rouge Center in downtown Detroit has been redesigned as a hub for lean, flexible and environmentally sensitive manufacturing. Its 46,451 m2 roof is made of sedum, designed to limit rain runoff, produce oxygen and insulate the building. The planting of over 1,500 trees and thousands of other plants is attracting songbirds and creating new habitats. Solar cells and fuel cells are used throughout and wind power is being evaluated. The company has launched electric cars such as the Think!, and hybrid-electric SUVs such as the Escape85 running on 85 per cent ethanol. Although the electric car programme has been sold, Ford continues to study fuel cell-powered electric powertrains and is currently demonstrating hydrogen-fuelled internal combustion engine technologies, as well as developing the next generation hybrid-electric systems. Ford estimates that half of the types of cars manufactured will be available with advanced hybrid-electric power options by 2010. Ford stood down as CEO and president in September 2006, but continues as executive chairman.

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The automobile business is about to experience the most profound and revolutionary changes it has seen since the Model T first hit the streets.

”

x www.ford.com/en/goodWorks/environment

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1997 1997

Janine M. Benyus 1959–

Biomimicry During the 1980s, Janine Benyus, a graduate of Rutgers University, New Jersey, with degrees in natural resource management and English literature/writing, wrote popular field guides on wildlife habitats in the US. She had also worked as a backpacking guide in New Jersey, Maine and West Virginia. In 1997, Benyus published Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature in which she defines ‘a new science that studies nature’s models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems’. She defines the nine principles of biomimicry as: nature runs on sunlight; nature uses only the energy it needs; nature fits form to function; nature recycles everything; nature rewards cooperation; nature banks on diversity; nature demands local expertise; nature curbs excesses from within; and nature taps the power of limits. David Perlman of the San Francisco Chronicle called biomimicry ‘one viable answer 118 to the wake-up call that Rachel Carson sounded a generation ago in Silent Spring’. Following publication, Benyus co-founded the Biomimicry Institute. She aims to inspire innovation in businesses committed to sustainability and has clients including Interface, Arup Engineers, Hewlett-Packard, Patagonia, NASA, Novell and Procter & Gamble. Her favourite role is as ‘biologist at the design table’, inspiring designers and innovators with examples from nature whose well-adapted designs are the results of over 3.8 billion years of evolution. While writing and lecturing at the University of Montana, Benyus continues to work towards the restoration and protection of wildlands around her home in Stevensville, Montana, in the northern Rocky Mountains. An educator at heart, she believes that the better people understand the genius of the natural world, the more they will want to protect it.

Ü

“

Life creates conditions conducive to life.

x www.biomimicry.net

”

 Janine M. Benyus, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature

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(New York: HarperCollins, 2003)

1997 1997

Dan Morrell 1962–

Carbon offsets Recovering from serious injuries after a car crash, Dan Morrell, a British music and video game entrepreneur, began to conceive a project for planting trees to offset carbon dioxide emissions. In the early 1990s there was little interest in climate change among companies, the media or individuals and the idea gestated, but, in 1997, with a former Eurotunnel senior executive called Sue Welland, Morrell founded Future Forests Ltd. Helped by Richard Tipper, a carbon emissions expert, Future Forests developed an auditing programme to measure how many tons of carbon dioxide a company or individual generates and then calculating how many trees would need to be planted to absorb those emissions. ‘We were able to work out exactly how many trees would absorb the emissions of one car, one aircraft flight, one toaster, whatever’, Morrell explained. The company pushed the boundaries and initiated some of the ideas that have now been widely adopted, such as legal contracts for carbon credits, carbon calculators, positive, benefit-led messaging rather than trying to catalyse action through bleak scare tactics. In the years that followed, a growing number of clients underwent a Future Forests audit. Among these were the car hire company Avis Europe plc which supported the planting of more than 26,000 trees around the UK to help compensate for carbon dioxide produced by its head office and 160 branches. Rock and film stars have been attracted to the idea. The Rolling Stones commissioned an assessment for a nine-day British tour and decided to contribute to the planting of a 2,800-tree forest on the Scottish island of Skye. Hollywood actor Leonardo DiCaprio has become a CarbonNeutral citizen and contributed to the 280 planting of thousands of trees for a forest in Mexico to offset the estimated 11 tons of carbon dioxide he produces each year. His offset portfolio also includes alternative-energy projects, a micro-hydro dam in Germany and biomass gasifiers in India. The director and star of the global warming disaster movie The Day After Tomorrow, Roland Emmerich and Jake Gyllenhaal, were also involved as were Cameron Diaz, Brad Pitt, Massive Attack and the Foo Fighters. Since the early 2000s, the work Future Forests was doing for companies was less concerned with forestry and more involved with technology carbon offsets (solar, hydro, etc.) and fuller carbon management. In 2005, therefore, to reflect this broader scope, the business rebranded as the CarbonNeutral Company. Since Dan left the business to set up GlobalCool, the CarbonNeutral Company has expanded its scope and international reach. It is now the world’s leading brand for action on climate change.

Ü

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“

For too long people have blamed governments, industry and emerging economies for global warming and have abdicated personal responsibility by highlighting the faults in others and then continued as normal feeling their own personal impact is too small to make any difference.

”

x www.carbonneutral.com

1997 1997

Annie Kajir 1973–

Indigenous lawyer versus international logging interests As a volunteer for a public-interest environmental law organisation, Annie Kajir visited many of the remote communities in her native Papua New Guinea conducting legal awareness trainings. Timber historically is a corrupting force in the politics of Papua New Guinea, whose government has long-standing, lucrative relationships with timber interests. Although the country’s constitution guarantees the land rights of traditional communities living in the forest, the reality is far different. Kajir has found evidence of widespread government corruption that has allowed these companies to act as a law unto themselves, ignoring the terms of the government-issued timber permits and terrorising local communities, at gunpoint in some cases, into signing over their land rights. In 1997, Kajir successfully defended a precedent-setting appeal in the Supreme Court of Papua New Guinea that forced the logging industry to pay damages to indigenous landowners. Two years later, Kajir set up the Environmental Law Centre. In her campaigning, Kajir has been physically attacked several times. Robbers have forced their way into her home to steal her computer with files on all her legal cases. Recently she has become involved in another case, acting on behalf of indigenous landholders. The landholders are suing the multinational logging conglomerate Rimbunan Hijau, the Papua New Guinea Minister of Forestry and the Forest Authority for removing the requirement in timber permits for consent from landowners before logging can begin. Kajir, whose advocacy goes on, was one of the recipients of the 2006 Goldman Prize.

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Landowners depend entirely on their forests as a means of survival so they must be properly informed on the impacts of logging on their land before

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signing away their customary birth-given rights to these natural resources. It will be genocide if the robber barons continue to roam at will or plunge deeper into our last remaining rainforests.

”

x www.elaw.org

1997 1997

Julia ‘Butterfly’ Hill 1974–

Living in Luna On 10 December 1997 an unknown, 23-year-old Arkansan woman named Julia ‘Butterfly’ Hill climbed up into Luna, a 55 m tall, 600-year-old California redwood tree (Sequoia sempervirens). She expected to spend two to four weeks supporting a non-violent protest against the destruction of the tree and of the surrounding forest. But she stayed . . . and stayed. Enduring the stormiest, coldest winter in northern California’s recorded history, Hill withstood harassment from Pacific Lumber Company’s all-night spotlights and bullhorns, and from the buffeting by a giant logging helicopter hovering close overhead in an attempt to dislodge her with wind blasts of over 100 mph. Hill resolutely refused to leave the tree. As the days became months, reporters began seeking her out for interviews and environmental organisations such as Earth First! took up the cause. Gradually, she learned how to eloquently defend what was left of the once vast redwood forest ecosystem. Apart from photojournalists and television crews, popular folk singers came to visit Luna and its stubborn occupant. In 1999, from the branches of the tree, she founded the Circle of Life Foundation in order to inspire new activists to join the sustainability, environmental and social justice movements. A concert for the Foundation in the southern Humboldt town of Redway saw 800 tickets sold out in 20 minutes. On 18 December 1999 – after 738 days – Hill abseiled slowly down from her beloved tree. Pacific Lumber had agreed not to cut down Luna or any other redwood within a three-acre buffer zone, on condition that Hill paid them $50,000 to donate to Humboldt State University for scientific research. Hill also pledged never to trespass on Pacific Lumber lands, although she could visit Luna on 48 hours’ notice to the company.

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Hill has continued her work as an activist. In 2003 she organised the first-ever We The Planet tour, combining celebrity/musician speakers and activists in an informal, living-room-style dialogue with youth across the country. In 2000 the city of Berkeley, California, designated 2 April Julia Butterfly Hill day.

“

We have the power to change our world. It is not an issue of whether or not we can make a difference. The truth is that we do make a difference. Everything we do, say, and think shapes our reality. It is time that we join our bodies, minds, hearts, spirits, and voices and call for peace on the Earth and peace with the Earth.

”

x www.circleoflifefoundation.org

Hill and Jessica Hurley, One Makes the  Julia ‘Butterfly’ Difference: Inspiring Actions that Change our

World (San Francisco: Harper, 2002)

1998 1998

Klaus Töpfer 1938–

Environmental sustainability and the United Nations During the early 1990s, Klaus Töpfer was German Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety. During this time, he introduced ground-breaking regulations on waste and recycling, as well as the German Green Dot ecolabelling scheme. The 1991 Ordinance on the Avoidance of Packaging Waste (Verpackungsverordnung) made industry responsible for its packaging waste, including the costs of collecting, sorting and recycling packages after consumers discard them. According to Töpfer, the Packaging Ordinance ‘marks the final abandonment of the throwaway society’. Töpfer also initiated several laws to ban the use of environmentally harmful chemicals such as ozone-depleting substances. In 1992 Töpfer contributed to the success of the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro and was one of the prime movers in negotiations on the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. With such a record, there was little surprise when, in 1998, Töpfer was appointed executive director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) based in Nairobi, Kenya. At the time of his appointment UNEP was in decline, with funding cuts, low staff morale and a growing feeling that donor 277

nations might seek its closure. Töpfer was to turn UNEP around, focusing on reorganising its priority areas and organisational structure, and linking its work directly with other UN agencies, such as the UN Development Programme. This fitted with Töpfer’s commitment to sustainable development and people in the developing world. Among the milestones of his tenure are a number of important environmental agreements, including the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety, which addresses the issue of genetically modified organisms, and the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants. Töpfer was also closely involved in behind-the-scenes negotiations in support of the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, which came into force in February 2005. Perhaps the most significant outcome of Töpfer’s time at UNEP was the increased importance given to environmental considerations by the international community. Environmental sustainability is an explicit objective of Millennium Development Goal 7, and a thread that runs through all the rest. The importance of the environment for development, and the role of UNEP, was reaffirmed at the 2005 Earth Summit.

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The environment is not a luxury good, only affordable when all other problems have been solved. It is the oxygen that breathes life into all our aspirations for a healthier, fairer and more stable world.

”

x www.unep.org

1998 1998

Carl Safina 1955–

Song for the Blue Ocean Carl Safina grew up in the 1950s on Long Island where he developed his life-long passion for fishing. After concluding that overfishing would seriously impact fish stocks, Safina became an advocate for the very creatures he grew up hunting. He began to study the ecological relationships between seabirds and fish, which eventually led to his PhD in ecology from Rutgers University in 1987. Noticing declines in sea turtles, white marlin, sharks, tuna and other species, it seemed to Safina as though a kind of last buffalo hunt was occurring in the seas. In 1990, he founded the Living Oceans Programme at the National Audubon Society. Safina has engaged in many successful marine conservation efforts. He has helped overhaul federal fisheries laws in the US, including a ban on fishing with driftnets, and has persuaded fishermen to abide by international agreements to restore depleted populations of tuna, shark and other fish, as well as bycatch (animals caught unintentionally), such as dolphins and sea turtles. In 1995 he was a

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force behind the passage of a new UN fisheries treaty and, in 1996, the US Congress incorporated some of his ideas in the Sustainable Fisheries Act which required rebuilding marine wildlife populations depleted by fishing. In the late 1990s Safina raised awareness of declining shark populations and, by 1998, in the absence of an official recovery plan, he and other activists had succeeded in persuading several prominent restaurateurs in Boston, New York and Washington DC to remove swordfish from their menus. In 1996, Safina published Song for the Blue Ocean. It documents his travels in seven countries (US, Panama, Honduras, Nicaragua, Palau, Hong Kong and the Philippines) and the conservationists he met. It is a first-person, present-tense narrative for a general audience, an account of marine exploitation and of the potential for regeneration. 118 The book has been compared in importance to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring decades before.

Ü

“

I am drawn to the wild not because it is wild but because it is sensible, logical, ordered, stable, resilient. Wild nature is everything we’re struggling to regain.

”

x www.carlsafina.org

Safina, Song for the Blue Ocean: Encounters along the World’s  Carl Coasts and beneath the Seas

(New York: Henry Holt & Co., 2006)

1998 1998

Hammerskjoeld Simwinga 1962–

Saving the elephant By the end of the 1980s massive poaching for the ivory trade had decimated elephant herds throughout Africa, and the population in North Luangwa National Park in Zambia had plunged from 17,000 to 1,300. Though international authorities shut down the ivory trade in 1990, poaching remained a way of life for many in the Luangwa Valley. Hammer Simwinga began working for the North Luangwa Conservation Project in 1994. Run by two American zoologists, Mark and Delia Owens, the project aimed to protect elephants in the North Luangwa National Park where local economies still relied heavily on income from poaching. In 1997 the Owens, denied 279

additional funds by the Zambian government, were obliged to hand the project over to their former partner, the Frankfurt Zoological Society. The project might have closed had not Simwinga expressed his determination to continue. In 1998, taking neither salary nor title, and with no transportation other than a bicycle, Simwinga took over running the project. He created wildlife clubs and offered micro-loans to encourage women villagers to open general stores and grinding mills, providing economic alternatives to ivory. Subsistence farmers were helped with seed loans, transportation and technical assistance to help them grow proteinrich crops with better yields so they did not have to depend on ‘bushmeat’. Simwinga tied the entire project to protection of wildlife, thus supplanting an illicit economy based on poaching with a legal one. Eventually Simwinga formed a new Zambian non-governmental organisation and soon an ever-increasing number of village leaders in areas outside the national park were following the Luangwa model. As a result, illegal elephant poaching is now 98 per cent controlled and the bushmeat trade is minimal. Wildlife has returned to the area, including elephants, hippos, Cape buffalos and puku. In 2007 Simwinga was awarded the Goldman Prize.

“

Conservation of wildlife communities is not possible in the long term without simultaneously meeting the basis needs of local human communities.

”

x www.owens-foundation.org

1998 1998

Leonardo DiCaprio 1974–

The 11th hour In 1997, Titanic became the highest-grossing feature film ever produced, taking over $1 billion around the world and making the lead actor 23-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio a superstar. Long before he achieved fame, DiCaprio had been concerned for endangered wildlife and the environment. In 1998 he had set up a foundation to foster environmental awareness through participation with such organisations as the Natural

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Resources Defense Council, Global Green USA, the International Fund for Animal Welfare and National Geographic Kids, to name a few. In 2000, DiCaprio served as Chairman of Earth Day and hosted festivities in Washington DC. 212 The following year he joined Arthur C. Clarke and the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund to persuade the public to boycott mobile phones containing the mineral coltan (short for columbite-tantalite), a metallic ore comprising niobium and tantalum. Illegal mining of coltan has been taking place in the Kahuzi Biega National Park, Rwanda, home of the mountain gorilla. These illegal mining activities are destroying the gorilla’s habitat, while miners have also been killing gorillas to sell as bushmeat. DiCaprio invested in a multi-million-dollar campaign to promote the sale of ‘gorilla-friendly’ mobile phones using legally mined coltan that does not harm the gorilla population. In 2003 the DiCaprio Foundation took part in Reef Rescue, dedicated to preserving coral reef habitats. DiCaprio drives a hybrid-electric car, heats his home with solar power and always flies by commercial airliner rather than the fuel-intensive private jet typically used by most Hollywood superstars. He also buys carbon credits to offset emissions caused by his travel and work. DiCaprio created, co-wrote and narrated The 11th Hour, a feature-length documentary premiered at the Cannes film festival in 2007. The film examines the state of the global environment through interviews with more than 70 leading environmental thinkers (many of whom are profiled in this book). It includes visionary and practical solutions for restoring the planet’s beleaguered ecosystems. The film is codirected and written by Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, co-founders of Tree Media Group. The team has previously collaborated on Global Warning and Water Planet, short films that can be seen on DiCaprio’s website.

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When I was very young, biology, the diversity of life, was one of my main interests. I know there’s this image people have that I’m this spoiled, cocky punk of an actor. Honestly, that’s not who I am. I really care that so many species have been wiped out, like genocide of entire races. I believe in the divine right of all species to survive on this planet. So I decided I want to be active as an environmentalist. I learned. I asked experts. I got active.

”

x www.leonardodicaprio.org

1999 1999

Yann Arthus-Bertrand 1946–

Earth from the air From an early age, Yann Arthus-Bertrand had been passionately concerned about the planet. In 1974, while managing a wildlife reserve in the Allier region of south281

ern France, he had been among those who voted for France’s first ecologist presidential candidate, René Dumont. Soon after, Arthus-Bertrand went to Kenya where he studied and photographed lions. He also became a hot-air balloon pilot and began to photograph the Earth from the air. By 1990 he had built up a highly successful photographic agency called Altitude. He now decided to embark on his most ambitious project: a photographic inventory of the Earth from an altitude of between 500 and 2,000 metres. Encouraged by UNESCO, Arthus-Bertrand spent a total 3,000 hours in a helicopter looking down on some 85 countries. The book, La Terre vue du Ciel (The Earth from the Air) was published in 1999. It has sold over 2 million copies and been translated into 23 languages. It also became the subject of an open-air exhibition in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, held in May 2000 and visited by some 2.5 million people. Since then, this exhibition has travelled to almost 60 other venues in the world. The Earth from the Air chronicles not only a beautiful world but also one suffering from overpopulation, shrinking biodiversity, polluted lands and oceans, a changing climate and a shortage of drinking water. In September 2004 a one-hour feature film inspired by Arthus-Bertrand’s work and using many of his images appeared in cinemas across France. The same month, WWF France and Arthus-Bertrand announced their decision to work together to set up a centre to educate the public about sustainable development. The site chosen, the Longchamps Estate near Paris, will become a laboratory, theatre and exhibition space.

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We need to set up big projects aimed at heightening public awareness of social and environmental issues to which we are all exposed. Developing global consciousness is the only way to curb this trend and to ensure sustainable development.

”

x www.yannarthusbertrand.com

Arthus-Bertrand, The Earth from the Air  Yann(London: Thames & Hudson, rev. edn 2002)

1999 1999

Jorge Viana 1960–

Using our land with wisdom In the late 1990s a $43 billion long-term programme called Brazil Advances was announced by the Brazilian government. It included a plan to pave a 1,770 km highway through the heart of the Amazon rainforest. Among those opposing Brazil Advances was Jorge Ney Viana, son of a congressman and a forestry graduate. Inspired by the anti-logging campaigning of Chico 231 Mendes, Viana formed an unusual coalition, the Acre Popular Front consisting of

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left-wing parties, environmental organisations, Indian tribes, rubber tappers and Roman Catholic groups. The coalition’s goal was to create ‘a kind of Finland of the Amazon’ in the state of Acre. Viana’s plan was to treat the forest like a garden, caring for it in a sustainable manner, creating a ministry for extractive industries, encouraging peasants to cultivate rubber, brazil nuts, natural oils and medicines from local plants. He also wanted entrepreneurs to build eco-friendly hotels. Not everyone agreed with Viana’s proposals. Police discovered a plot to assassinate him, later linked to a powerful state politician. The year after, in 1998, Viana’s political opponents reportedly bribed election officials to keep him off the ballot paper. After an uproar, his candidacy was reinstated. In 1999 Viana was elected governor of Acre and began to put his proposals into operation. He pledged that 4 million hectares of forest – one-quarter of Acre’s territory, about the same size as the Netherlands – would be harvested and logged only in a sustainable manner and certified to standards laid down by the Forest Stewardship Council. In late 2006 Viana announced plans to make cattle ranchers reforest up to 30 per cent of the land that they had cleared for grazing. The state government of Acre has established a nursery growing seedlings of species such as mahogany which will be given to ranchers to plant. The state government is seeking to move away from a model of economic development based on burning forest and grazing cattle to one where the local economy rests largely on the sustainable use of forest products, with as much processing done inside the state as possible to enhance return on investment.

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We want to show that it is possible to live off the forest without destroying it. We want to improve the living conditions of people who live in the forest. We want to make Acre a sustainable development reference for the Brazilian Amazon and the rest of Brazil.

”

2000 2000

Gordon E. Moore 1929–

Microchips to the rescue In 1965 a Californian transistor manufacturer called Gordon E. Moore predicted that the number of transistors the semiconductor industry would be able to place 283

on a computer chip would double every two years. Moore’s Law become the guiding principle for the delivery of every more powerful microchips at proportionally lower costs. The mercurial success of Moore’s Intel Corporation’s Pentium range eventually made Moore the fifth richest person in North America with a net worth of $26 billion. In 2000, Moore and his wife Betty created a multi-billion-dollar foundation to promote, among other concerns, international biodiversity conservation. The key long-term projects are the Andes–Amazon initiative, marine conservation initiative and the wild salmon ecosystems initiative. The Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation is also a key supporter of Conservation International (CI). From 1987 CI had been focusing on the 25 ‘hotspots’ identified by Norman Myers 202 as epicentres for potential species loss. Funding from the foundation to the tune of $261 million in December 2001 and an additional $17 million in 2005 has helped CI significantly scale up its efforts in slowing the rate of species extinctions across the world and in developing marine conservation science. Among other things, the funding has supported a Centre for Applied Biodiversity Science which can respond more swiftly to emerging biodiversity threats and helped CI transform itself from a centralised, Washington DC-based operation into a more efficient, decentralised organisation, operating directly and through partners in more than 40 countries. In 2006 the Save-the-Redwoods League announced the acquisition of 32 hectares of undeveloped forest land adjacent to the Portola Redwoods State Park in San Mateo County, California. The league planned to transfer the property to the State Department of Parks and Recreation for inclusion in Portola Redwoods State Park, which has some of the tallest and most majestic ancient redwoods in the Santa Cruz Mountains. The acquisition was made possible by a $1 million grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation.

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We believe that it is possible that in 20 years enough of the Amazon landscape can be protected and wisely managed to ensure its long-term ecological function and extraordinary concentration of terrestrial and aquatic biodiversity.

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x www.moore.org

2000 2000

James Gustave ‘Gus’ Speth 1942–

Global 2000 In 1982 ‘Gus’ Speth, a highly respected professor of environmental and constitutional law at Georgetown University, set up the World Resources Institute (WRI) and

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served as its president until January 1993. WRI is an environmental think-tank based in Washington DC. Speth was then a senior adviser to President-elect Clinton’s transition team, heading the group that examined the US role in natural resources, energy and the environment. In the early 1970s, while in his last year at Yale Law School, Speth had been a co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council, going on to serve as US President Jimmy Carter’s principal adviser on environmental matters at the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ). During this period the CEQ, under the chairmanship of Speth, produced the landmark Global 2000 Report which predicted that the world at the turn of the century would be ‘more crowded, more polluted, less stable ecologically, and more vulnerable to disruption than the world we live in now’. The report was widely read and more than 1.5 million copies sold. From 1993 to 1999 Speth served as administrator of the UN Development Programme. His mandate was to ‘reform, reshape and revitalise’ an agency beset by charges of inefficiency and by declining financial support from industrialised countries, the US in particular. Created in 1970, the UN Development Programme was essentially an organisation that transferred technical assistance grants to underdeveloped countries. Unfortunately, the money often did not reach its intended recipients. Speth soon began to streamline the agency and effect fundamental changes in its operation. Funding from donor nations increased. In assessing Speth’s tenure, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan described him as ‘one of the UN’s most effective and articulate leaders’ who had advanced ‘a vision of development that is both sustainable and centred on the real-life experience of human beings’. Speth achieved this by putting a premium on projects that could help alleviate poverty without destroying the natural environment. Since 1999 Speth has been Dean of Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. His book Red Sky at Morning was published in 2004. Here, he warns that, in spite of all the international negotiations and agreements of the past two decades, efforts to protect Earth’s environment are not succeeding. He proposes comprehensive, viable new strategies for dealing with environmental threats around the world.

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Looking back over the past two decades, it cannot be said that my generation did nothing in response to Global 2000 and similar alerts. Progress has been made on some fronts. There are outstanding success stories, but rarely are they on a scale commensurate with the problems. For the most part, we have analysed, debated, discussed and negotiated these issues endlessly. My generation is a generation, I fear, of great talkers, overly fond of conferences. On action, however, we have fallen far short.

x environment.yale.edu

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Gustave Speth, Red Sky at Morning: America and the Crisis  James of the Global Environment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004)

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2000 2000

Alden ‘Denny’ Townsend 1942–

Saving the elm Between the 1930s and the 1980s, a bark beetle carrying a deadly fungus was responsible for the mass destruction of many millions of American elm trees (Ulmus americana). It looked as if Dutch elm disease (DED) would wipe out an entire species of tree. The great urban elm forests planted in the 19th century were devastated. Among those who set out to save the elm was Dr Alden ‘Denny’ Townsend, a tree geneticist working at the Floral and Nursery Plants Unit of the US National Arboretum at Glenn Dale in Maryland. For three decades, Townsend painstakingly examined thousands of elms in his search for one that was DED-resistant. One 300-year-old New Jersey elm still standing in Princetown cemetery seemed to be a strong candidate. It had been planted some 50 years before the American Declaration of Independence. By cloning this Princetown elm and then injecting the clones with the DED fungus Townsend was able to screen out plants showing signs of DED infection. Two of the clones generated cultivars that were relatively unaffected by the fungus. Named Valley Forge and New Harmony, these two varieties were announced in 1996 and distributed to wholesale nurseries where mass propagation took place. Smaller nurseries then obtained the cultivars and in subsequent years will make them available to the public. In 2004 Townsend received the Luther Burbank Award from the American Horticultural Society ‘in recognition of extraordinary achievement in plant breeding’. He also received a large award plaque that includes a beautiful photograph of the mall on the Penn State campus where many Valley Forge elms have been newly planted. Shortly afterwards, he retired.

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We named them Valley Forge because of the American soldiers who survived the winter at Valley Forge in the Revolution, and New Harmony for the Indiana town known for social innovations in the 1800s – utopia.

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2000 2000

Ken Livingstone 1945–

The green mayor During the 1970s, Ken Livingstone, a resident of the north-west London suburb of Cricklewood, was locally known for his unusual hobby of breeding newts in his garden pond. In 2000, following a career as leader of the Greater London Council, where he became known as ‘Red Ken’ for his left-wing initiatives, Livingstone became Mayor of London. While continuing his interest in newts, he began to introduce measures that would give citizens a cleaner environment. Setting up TfL (Transport for London) in 2000, he introduced a congestion charge to central London. In 2002, he established the London Sustainable Development Commission which introduced an Air Quality Strategy. The following year he launched the Green Compact to ensure that the 2012 London Olympic Games will be the most sustainable in history. In January 2004, Livingstone introduced three single-decker, fuel cell buses, commenting: ‘These buses are the greenest, cleanest and quietest ever.’ Alongside this was the Sounder City noise reduction programme, followed by a new target whereby at least 10 per cent of the energy requirement on all major new developments in London must be met from renewable sources and generated on-site. In 2006 Livingstone targeted London’s 20,000 taxicabs, giving them two years to meet Euro3’s stringent emission standards. Six new hybrid buses went on trial, anticipating that all new buses must be hybrids by 2012. Early in 2007, now nicknamed ‘Green Ken’, Livingstone launched a Climate Change Action Plan, costing a total of £78 million over three years, to make major reductions in London’s carbon dioxide emissions. The plan will aim to green homes, organisations, energy and transport. In June he criticised the Labour government’s ‘negligible’ record on tackling climate change and came out in support of the Tory opposition’s proposed flight tax plan.

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The majority of people on the planet live in cities – and cites can lead the way. I want to develop London as a world leader in sustainable urban planning, design and architecture that will provide a benchmark at which other parts of the UK – and the world – can aim.

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x www.london.gov.uk/mayor

2000 2000

Giorgios Catsadorakis 1949–

Myrsini Malakou 1960–

Transboundary protection of Balkan wetlands The wetlands of Préspa lie at the heart of the Balkans. Straddling Greece, Albania and Macedonia, these wetlands are home to 1,500 species of plant and over 250 bird varieties, including the largest Dalmatian pelican colony in the world. But, in the 1960s, government projects introduced large irrigation systems, commercial fertilisers and mechanised farming, quickly endangering the intricate ecosystem. In 1974, without consulting the local population, Greece gave this region national park status, banned pelican hunting and prohibited the burning of reeds. The 25,000 residents protested angrily. To resolve the conflict two biologists, Myrsini Malakou and Giorgios Catsadorakis, set up the community-based Préspa Centre for Man and Nature to help the local communities seek alternative livelihoods. They taught organic farming and reintroduced traditional practices that sustained both the people and the wetlands. They now act as scientific advisers for the Society for the Protection of Préspa, created in 1990. In 2000, their efforts were rewarded when the prime ministers of Albania, Macedonia and Greece signed an agreement making Préspa the first transboundary protected area in the Balkans. Since then, Catsadorakis has co-founded Med-INA, a non-profit organisation based in Athens which aims to promote harmonious relationships between humans and nature through sustainability and wise use of natural resources. Med-INA’s projects include the Delos Initiative, which aims to investigate the possibilities of synergy in the conservation of the spiritual/cultural and natural heritage of protected natural areas in technologically developed countries. In 2001 Catsadorakis and Malakou were among the recipients of the Goldman Environmental Prize.

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There is a huge single challenge to the modern world: humans must define what prosperity means on a healthy planet capable of sustaining all equally. The effort to find this optimal modus vivendi has no borders, and

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natural entities must be used to inspire, enrich, empower and unite peoples.

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2001 2001

Peter Blake 1948–2001

A racing yachtsman In 1995 the New Zealand racing yacht Black Magic achieved what many had thought impossible when it won the Americas Cup, the sport’s most coveted prize and long believed to be the monopoly of US yachtsmen. The skipper was a highly experienced New Zealand yachtsman called Peter Blake. Knighted the same year, Blake skippered New Zealand to a successful defence in home waters in 2000. Instead of continuing his supremacy in the yachting world, Blake founded Blake Expeditions. Its mission was to undertake voyages to parts of the world that are vital to the health of the planet. He acquired Seamaster, a yacht with strengthened bows and a lifting keel. Early in 2001 Seamaster set out on a three-month voyage to Antarctica where Blake reported that areas normally clogged with ice were now largely open water, raising concerns about climate change. In July 2001, he was appointed special ambassador to the UN Environment Programme. Meanwhile, Seamaster was to spend eight months exploring the Amazon River and the Rio Negro. Tragically, on 6 December 2001, while waiting for customs clearance at the mouth of the Amazon, Seamaster was boarded by pirates who held the crew at gunpoint. Blake rushed on deck with a rifle but was fatally shot by one of the pirates. It was a senseless death for a man who had survived 965,600 km of ocean racing. Following Sir Peter’s death, the UN Environment Programme, the BBC and Saatchi & Saatchi decided to finance Seamaster on another voyage, this time to the coral reefs of Cuba, on to the Galapagos Islands and then to Thailand and Australia. In December 2003, the Sir Peter Blake Trust was established, with the support of the New Zealand government, ‘to help New Zealanders make a positive difference for the planet through activities that encourage environmental awareness and action, and leadership development’. The voyages of Seamaster continue with further visits to both the Antarctic and the Arctic to further assess the effects of global warming.

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It is vital to get people to understand the problems and make them realise it is not just for governments to control. It needs the average person to say enough is enough for the right informed reasons.

x www.sirpeterblaketrust.org

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 Alan Sefton, Sir Peter Blake: An Amazing Life (New York: Sheridan House, 2005)

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2001 2001

Tim Smit 1954–

The eighth wonder of the world In 1987 Tim Smit, a highly successful 33-year-old music composer and producer, ‘retired’ to Cornwall in south-west England to build a recording studio. Instead Smit discovered something rather strange under the brambles of a neighbour’s property – once beautiful Victorian gardens which had long since fallen into decay. After two years of painstaking restoration, Smit’s now legendary marketing skills came to the fore. Today, the award-winning Lost Gardens of Heligan attract 400,000 visitors a year. In 1994 Smit embarked on a new and hugely ambitious project: to transform a disused china clay quarry overlooking St Austell Bay and covering an area the size of 30 football pitches into the Eden Project – the world’s largest greenhouse. Housing two giant transparent biomes, it was to contain plants from all over the world and include water features, cascades and exhibitions to illustrate the fascinating story of man’s dependence on plants. At first, the huge 60-metre-deep crater had no fertile soil and was prone to flooding. But ,by 1998, with the aid of £40 million of national lottery money and the skills of architect Nicholas Grimshaw, building work had got under way and, in March 2001, the Eden Project opened to the public. Within one year, the project had welcomed 2 million visitors. The number is now in excess of 7 million. It has become Britain’s fifth largest tourist attraction, raised £120 million and pumped around £500 million into the local economy. Now employing 500 people in an area of relatively high unemployment, Eden has become one of Britain’s most successful regeneration projects. With hundreds of thousands of plants, representing 5,000 species, the Eden Project is also home to many kinds of wildlife. Built into the side of the old quarry walls, one of the giant conservatories is a majestic rainforest cathedral while the other biome is host to the fruits and flowers of the Mediterranean, South Africa and California. The latest addition to the site is the Core, which opened in September 2005. This provides the Eden Project with an education facility, incorporating classrooms and exhibition spaces designed to help communicate Eden’s central message about the relationship between people and plants. Accordingly, the facility has taken its inspiration from plants, most noticeably in the form of the soaring timber roof which gives the building its distinctive shape. The Eden Project is a spectacular achievement and has been called ‘the eighth wonder of the world’ by journalists. Smit is now seen as something of a guru for social enterprise – a British motivator and a radical thinker who has proved that it is possible to make social and environmental change happen in the most unlikely ways. 290

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We have intended to create something that not only encourages us to understand and celebrate the world we live in, but also inspires us to action.

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x www.edenproject.com

 Tim Smit, The Lost Gardens of Heligan (London: Orion, 2000)

2002 2002

William McDonough 1951–

Cradle to cradle In 1977, while still a student at Yale University, William McDonough designed and built the first solar-heated house in Ireland. By the mid-1980s he was commissioned to design the Environmental Defense Fund headquarters – the first green office in the US. In 1989, he won a competition for a skyscraper in Poland for which he proposed that the developer plant 25 km2 of trees to offset the building’s carbon emissions. In 1991, the city of Hannover, which was preparing to host the 2000 World Expo, commissioned McDonough and his partner, German chemist Michael Braungart, to draw up official sustainability-based guidelines. The resulting Hannover Principles were presented to the UN Earth Summit at Rio the following year, setting out for the first time guidelines for sustainable building design. Following a number of large corporate projects for Gap, Nike and Herman Miller, McDonough was commissioned to totally convert Ford Motor Company’s huge River Rouge plant at Dearborn, Michigan, to run on sustainable lines. The 20 year, $2 billion project included a 102,000 m2 ‘living’ roof covered in low-growing sedum plants to moderate the internal temperature of the building and save energy. Sedum leaves also store water and the roof was designed as part of a rainwater treatment system designed to clean 20 billion gallons of rainwater annually, so sparing Ford from a far more costly mechanical treatment facility. While working with Ford to develop the first entirely recyclable automobile, in 2002 McDonough co-authored with Braungart Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. With the twin goals of eliminating waste and increasing profits, the book aims to transform industrial manufacturing processes. It has since become a classic of sustainable design and been translated into a dozen languages.

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We’d have to ask the question: how can something be high-quality design if it makes you sick or destroys the planet?

x www.mcdonough.com

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McDonough and Michael Braungart, Cradle to Cradle:  William Remaking the Way We Make Things

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(San Francisco: North Point Press, 2002)

2002 2002

Anita Studer 1952–

The one-millionth sapling In 1976, a Swiss ornithologist called Anita Studer began visiting Brazil to study its rich bird life. Five years later, in the Pedra Talhada forest near Quebrangulo in the north-eastern state of Alagoas, she came across a rare blackbird, locally known as the anumará (Curaeus forbisi). When she told her academic supervisor in São Paulo about her discovery, and her desire to study the anumará, he advised her to hurry up as the bird’s habitat, the surrounding forest, would disappear in nine or ten years. Studer became fully aware of the extent of the habitat destruction while flying over Brazil’s north-east region when she noticed a green spot in the middle of an arid area. ‘An island in the middle of the desert’, she called it later. It was the last 4,500 hectares of rainforest remaining in the whole region – a dot in a territory three times the size of France – the massif of the Pedra Talhada. While everybody knows of the great Amazonian rainforest, many are ignorant of the existence of the northeastern Brazilian forest, and with good reason – there is very little of it left. Before European colonisation, Brazil was home to two primary forests – the Amazon and the Atlantic rainforests, the latter covering the entire coastline from south of Bélem to south of São Paulo along a stretch of about 3,200 km with a surface area of 1 million km2. But now, after 500 years of exploitation, as much as 99% of the Atlantic rainforest had been destroyed. After a night of reflection, Studer decided that if she could save the forest then she would have all the time in the world to study the anumará. But she needed local support. This was problematic because the forest was perceived by local people simply as a shelter for game and a home for dangerous animals. The local authorities saw it exclusively in terms of economics, a place where trees could be cut down and animals hunted. The mayor of the town of Quebrangulo, on whose territory the forest is partly located, explained that he would certainly lose the next election if he committed himself to the preservation of animal and plant species rather than to the construction of a road or a hospital. In return for the mayor’s help, Studer promised to find the funds necessary to rebuild a school destroyed about a decade earlier. To ensure financial support for her undertaking, she founded Nordesta Education and Reforestation in Geneva on 15 May 1985. The dual aims of Nordesta are 292

to preserve the tropical rainforest and improve the living conditions of rural populations in Brazil. Later, in 1989, she launched the Arco Iris (Rainbow) project to plant indigenous trees further afield. On 1 June 2002 more than 3,000 people paraded through the Brazilian village of Quebrangulo to plant saplings. One of these was the one-millionth sapling in Studer’s plan to reforest the region. By this time, 10,000 schoolchildren had been involved, tree nurseries established, schools built and scholarships set up. On the same day, children in 18 other villages in 16 of Brazil’s 26 states planted their first saplings in other reforestation programmes. Simultaneously, projects were launched across the Atlantic in the Portuguese-speaking island republic of Cape Verde, 500 km from West Africa, and also in the French-speaking West African republic of Guinea. At one point, the local people began calling the forest ‘Anita’s forest’ but she soon discouraged that. She sees the forest as something that will outlive a single human life.

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The hand that plants rarely destroys what it has planted.

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x www.nordesta.org

2002 2002

Cormac Cullinan 1962–

Wild law Cormac Cullinan’s early legal career was relatively conventional. From being a part-time law lecturer and antiapartheid activist, he began practising as a shipping lawyer in Durban, South Africa, and later as an international commercial and tax lawyer in Luxembourg and London. In 1992 Cullinan completed a master’s degree in environmental law at the University of London. The following year he founded EnAct International, an environmental law and policy consultancy in London. Six years later he returned to Cape Town, South Africa, and became a partner in the specialist environmental law firm Winstanley, Smith & Cullinan Inc.

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From 2000 Cullinan collaborated with the Gaia Foundation in London and a network of individuals in different countries to initiate the process of developing an ecocentric approach to law and governance. In 2003 he published the book Wild Law: A Manifesto for Earth Justice. In this, he advocates a complete overhaul of the current legal system, giving ‘human rights’ to the planet and other living creatures. Seen through the lens of this new legal understanding, known as Earth jurisprudence, the whole of nature is like a corporation or ‘great body’ that only works well when each component flourishes. In practice, this would mean that no development projects could take place without considering the rights of minerals in the ground, of other species, of rivers, of mountains and, indeed, of entire ecosystems. When things went wrong, cases would be tried in conventional courts of law where evidence would be heard from those best placed to represent the rights of these entities. Since 2005, the UK Environmental Law Association has organised an annual conference entirely based on Wild Law.

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Fundamentally changing our governance systems will require more than reforming existing laws or making new ones. We need to take a long hard look, not only at our legal systems, but, more importantly, at the legal philosophies that underlie them. Only by creating a vision of an ‘Earth Jurisprudence’ will we be able to begin a comprehensive transformation of our governance system.

x www.enact-international.com

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A Manifesto for Earth Justice  Cormac Cullinan, Wild Law: (Dartington, UK: Green Books, 2003)

2002 2002

Li Quan 1962–

Save the Chinese tiger Of eight subspecies of tigers, only five have survived. Among these, the Chinese – or south China – tiger (Panthera tigris amoyensis) is the scarcest. Experts maintain that there are just 20–30 of these tigers left in the wild, with around 60 captive in Chinese zoos. The south China tiger is considered to be the ‘stem’ tiger, the subspecies from which all other tigers evolved. But it is critically endangered. In 1999 Li Quan, born and bred in Beijing with a master’s from Philadelphia’s Wharton School of Business, was worldwide head of licensing for the Gucci fashion house when she went on an ecotourism holiday in Africa. She returned with a mission – to use the African conservation model to save the south China tiger. Quan planned for Chinese tiger cubs to be transported to a camp in South Africa 294

for ‘rewilding’. They would be introduced into suitable areas developed as tiger reserves. Suitable areas of land, abundant prey and wildlife management expertise would be required for such a programme to be effective and sustainable. In 2001 the organisation Save China’s Tigers (SCT) was founded and quickly recruited famous patrons such as actors Michelle Yoeh and Jackie Chan. In 2002 Quan’s husband, investment banker Stuart Bray, acquired 33,000 hectares of land in South Africa. The following year Quan set up an operational team of South African’s top scientists and conservationists who had previously worked successfully in bringing several species back from the brink of extinction, building viable populations. SCT is an integral partner in a Chinese Tiger Action Plan involving the Chinese Wildlife Research and Development Centre of the State Forestry Administration. Two cubs, Cathay and Hope, were selected from Chinese zoos and flown over to South Africa. By July 2004 the tigers had caught their first wild prey – an African antelope; rewilding was under way. More cubs followed. Reintroduction of the first tiger into Chinese reserves is planned for 2008 to coincide with the Beijing Olympics.

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The end goal of this project is actually to reintroduce the Chinese tigers back to where they came from. That means the Chinese wild.

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x www.savechinastigers.org

2003 2003

Arnold Schwarzenegger 1947–

The governator In October 2003 Arnold Schwarzenegger, a 56-year-old former Austrian-American bodybuilder and Hollywood action film star, was elected 38th Governor of California. His most famous role had been as The Terminator, but it soon became clear that it was certainly not this Republican’s intention to terminate California’s environment. Instead, there has been a wealth of radical environmental initiatives. 295

In 2006, he signed the US’s first environmental law of its kind, committing the state to lowering its greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by 2020 and setting up an international programme to provide manufacturers with incentives to lower carbon emissions, which is supposed to begin by 2012. He has vowed to fight any attempt to drill for oil off California’s coast. Other developments include: the Million Solar Roofs by 2018 Initiative; a plan to establish a Hydrogen Highway by 2010; a growing fleet of public fuel cell cars and buses; a university-based Centre on Energy Efficiency; and the Sierra Nevada Conservancy, placing 10 million hectares under conservation management. Schwarzenegger has also been pressing the case for a waiver from the federal government to allow California to implement vehicle greenhouse gas limits. In California, Schwarzenegger’s pro-environmental position is part of a bipartisan tradition. Since the 1960s, bedevilled by the worst air quality in the US, California has led the nation in tackling pollution. In 1961 it required the first vehicle emissions control technology in the nation; this legislation continues to be the toughest in the country. Environmental groups, rarely inclined to support a Republican, have praised Schwarzenegger’s initiatives. ‘Schwarzenegger has really taken the lead on greenhouse gases, more so than almost any American politician,’ said Frank O’Donnell, President of Washington DC-based Clean Air Watch. ‘His state is at the leading edge of many of our problems, but it’s also at the leading edge of many of their solutions.’ Schwarzenegger has asserted that his embrace of environmental issues has helped prompt other Republicans to change their tune on supporting strong US action to tackle global warming. Republican presidential hopefuls for the 2008 elections are likely to be taking his advice.

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California as you know is big, California is powerful and what we do in California has an unbelievable impact . . . We are sending the world a message, what we are saying is we’re going to change the dynamic on greenhouse gases and carbon emissions.

”

2003 2003

Geoffrey Hawtin 1949–

A champion of global crop diversity In 2003 Geoff Hawtin, a Canadian-born expert in agriculture and arid regions, was put in charge of the establishment of an organisation to support the long-term conservation of genetic resources around the world – the Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) based at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome, Italy. 296

An increasingly unpredictable and changing climate, and a world population expected to reach 9 billion by 2050, is likely to place unprecedented demands on agriculture. Conserving the vast diversity of crop varieties is the only way to guarantee that farmers and plant breeders will have the raw materials needed to improve and adapt their crops to meet these challenges – and provide food for all of us in the future. Hawtin’s huge mission at the GCDT was to ensure the conservation and availability of crop diversity for food security worldwide. Although there are more than 1,400 crop diversity collections around the world, many of these are located in countries that are politically unstable or that face environmental threats. For example, in Afghanistan in 2002 looters dumped stocks of carefully labelled seeds as they ransacked buildings in Ghazni and Jalalabad. All they had wanted were the containers. The seeds of various strains of wheat, barley, chickpeas, lentils, almonds, pomegranates and melons – which would have been planted in the event of drought, plant disease or some other disaster – were lost. 177 In August, 2005 Hawtin was replaced as executive secretary by Cary Fowler who paid him the following tribute: ‘It is through Geoff Hawtin’s foresight and leadership that we now have in the Trust a tool that the early giants of the plant genetic resources world might only have dreamed of on a particularly starry night . . .’ In 2006 the Norwegian government announced a plan to build a ‘doomsday vault’ to store as many known seeds as possible, approximately 10,000, by 2007. The bank is sited in a cave at Longyearbyen, on one of the Svalbard islands in the Spitsbergen Archipelago. The seed bank will have top-security, blast-proof doors and two airlocks and the interior will remain below freezing point. The seeds are to be provided through the GCDT.

Ü

“

Sustainable development must be based on sustainable agriculture.

”

x www.croptrust.org

2003 2003

José Andrés Tamayo 1958–

The priest from Olancho The woodlands of south-eastern Honduras host a wide variety of forest ecosystems, including mountaintop cloud forests, rare old-growth pine forests and lowland tropical rainforests. They are home to more than 500 bird species and a wide array of other endangered animals and plants. But in recent years more than half of the 5 million hectares of forest in this isolated Olancho region have been destroyed by unregulated logging. Soil erosion is widespread, water levels are dangerously low and natural springs have dried up completely. The region is controlled by powerful

297

landowners, logging companies, drug traffickers and crime barons. With almost no formal authority in the Olancho area, those who oppose logging have been threatened and even murdered. Padre José Andrés Tamayo, a Roman Catholic priest from Salama in Olancho, was not willing to stay silent. He mobilised residents and founded the Environmental Movement of Olancho (MAO), a coalition of farmers, community and religious leaders, and young people, to exert pressure on the Honduran government to act on illegal logging. Although the Mayor of Salama had reportedly said on a number of occasions ‘the environmental problem in Olancho will only be resolved by ordering the killing of Padre Tamayo’, in 2003 the priest led a regional campaign that stopped the development of a major highway that would have increased access to forests and led to new sawmills. Later that year, Tamayo led 3,000 people on the March for Life, a 120 mile week-long trek to Tegucigalpa, the nation’s capital. It brought the environmental debate onto the national stage and inspired other rural communities to organise against logging. In recognition of his efforts, Tamayo was presented with the 2003 Honduras National Human Rights Award. In June 2004 more than 5,000 people joined a second March for Life, drawing attention to alleged corruption in the government’s National Forestry Agency. The march led to a government investigation, prompting the resignation of the agency’s general manager. MAO’s next project is the Continental March, from Panama to Mexico, to protest against the uncontrolled extraction of natural resources, privatisation and globalisation.

“

Natural resources and life itself are human rights; therefore, to destroy God’s creation is to attack human life; our last remaining option is to defend life with our own life.

”

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2003 2003

Jim Ball 1961–

What would Jesus drive? In 1990 Baptist Reverend Jim Ball had a life-changing conversation with Bonnie Gisel, a fellow student at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey, during which she helped him understand that Christ’s reconciliation included all of creation. In 1994, Ball began to research environmental problems, with special emphasis on global warming. His PhD in theological ethics focused on how evangelical Christians have responded to the climate change crisis. Ball began teaching at Montclair State University. In 1998 he wrote a primer for Christians entitled Planting a Tree This Afternoon: Global Warming, Public Theology and Public Policy. It was published by Evangelicals for Social Action. Two years later, Ball became Climate Change Policy Coordinator for the Union of Concerned Scientists, based in Washington DC, going on to found the Evangelical Environmental Network, a Christian non-governmental organisation which publishes Creation Care magazine. In the summer of 2003, Ball and his wife drove a Toyota Prius hybrid car from Texas through the Bible Belt. The sign written on the car doors read: ‘What Would Jesus Drive?’ During the trip, the Balls stopped at evangelical churches and radio stations to talk about the moral and ethical implications of burning fossil fuel, sparking debate over global warming and raising awareness about the moral dimensions of transport choices. In 2006 Ball brought together a group of conservative Christian leaders to create the Evangelical Climate Initiative. Their mission was to back a campaign calling on the US government to enact legislation to curb carbon emissions. A statement from the group, published as a full-page advertisement in the New York Times, implored: ‘Christian moral convictions demand our response to the climate change problem.’ It carried the signatures of 86 evangelical leaders, including 39 college presidents, leaders of aid groups and pastors of churches.

“

Is it loving your neighbour to put them at risk of all these threats of climate change? Is it doing unto others as you would have them do unto you? I don’t think so.

”

x www.creationcare.org

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2004 2004

Robert F. Kennedy Jr 1954–

Against river pollution In 1962 Robert F. Kennedy Jr’s uncle, US President John F. Kennedy had made a nationwide tour in support of environmental concerns and, the following year, had received Rachel Carson at the White House. Meanwhile, Kennedy Jr’s father, Bobby 118 Kennedy, had taken him boating and pointed out the pollution on the Hudson River; and it was to protect this river that Kennedy Jr’s environmental work first began. In 1984, Kennedy joined the Riverkeeper organisation to satisfy the 1,500 hours’ community service to which he had been sentenced for drugs offences. He worked with the group to sue alleged polluters of the Hudson River. After his 1,500 hours were complete, the group hired Kennedy as its chief prosecutor. Kennedy has won numerous lawsuits for the Riverkeeper, prosecuting governments and companies for polluting the Hudson and Long Island Sound. He has argued cases to expand citizen access to the shoreline, and sued treatment plants to force compliance with the Clean Water Act. In 1998, Kennedy, Chris Bartle and John Hoving created a bottled water company, selling a product called Keepers Springs. All the profits from this venture are donated to the Waterkeeper Alliance – an umbrella organisation that unites all Waterkeeper organisations. Each Waterkeeper organisation is devoted to the preservation of specific watersheds. The alliance coordinates issues affecting the more than 150 Waterkeepers that work to protect rivers, lakes, bays, sounds and other water bodies around the world. It is the fastest-growing grassroots environmental movement in the world. As president of Water Alliance, in 2001 Kennedy travelled to Belize to negotiate for citizens opposed to a Canadian-backed hydro dam which was threatening to drown a key rainforest wildlife refuge. Kennedy described the project’s sponsor as ‘a billion-dollar multinational trying to enrich its North American shareholders at the expense of the environment of the peoples of Belize . . . [This] is the worst example of globalisation.’ Kennedy has written several books. The Riverkeeper (1997) and Crimes against Nature (2004) decry the poor environmental record of President George W. Bush when compared to past administrations, both Republican and Democrat. He has also worked on the presidential campaigns of Al Gore (2000) and John Kerry (2004). Since May 2005 Kennedy has been a contributing blogger at the Huffington Post, a blog run by progressive commentator Arianna Huffington. In September 2005 he wrote a piece entitled ‘For Those That Sow the Wind Shall Reap the Whirlwind’ in which he linked the increasing strength of hurricanes such as the catastrophic Hurricane Katrina to global warming, citing President Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol and limit carbon emissions as a contributing factor.

Ü

300

“

I don’t even consider myself an environmentalist anymore. I’m a free-marketer. I go out into the marketplace and I catch the polluters who are cheating the free market.

x www.robertfkennedyjr.com

”

F. Kennedy Jr, Crimes against Nature: How George W.  Robert Bush and his Corporate Pals are Plundering the Country

and Hijacking our Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial, 2004)

2004 2004

Zhao Hang 1962–

China’s automotive helmsman When CATARC (China Automotive Technology and Research Centre) was established in 1985, few people had made the calculation that China’s breakneck industrial and economic growth would entail the production of 5 million vehicles per year and an astronomical increase in the importation of oil. With a projection of 300 million cars on the roads of China by 2030, CATARC’s director, Zhao Hang, felt that something must be urgently done to address the consequent carbon dioxide emissions and their potentially catastrophic effect on the health of both China and the planet. He sought help, visiting experts in Japan, Detroit, California and Illinois to discuss a radical strategy. In 2004 Hang signed a ground-breaking agreement with Larry Johnson, director of Argonne National Laboratory’s Transportation Technology Research and Development Center in Illinois, to exchange information to promote the commercialisation of energy-efficient vehicles and clean transport fuels in China. Returning home, Hang fought hard to implement fuel economy standards for his country that would be 20 per cent tougher than those in the US. He then steered the measure through China’s central government where it was approved unanimously. The new standards, implemented in 2005, will reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a country that is already home to 16 of the world’s 20 most polluted cities. They will also save more than 1 billion barrels of oil by 2030 and force car-makers to clean up their act. By 2008, 90 per cent of the SUVs currently built in the US will no longer be able to be legally sold in China, as they will not comply with the new emissions standards. In July 2006, after a year’s preparation, CATARC launched a new car assessment programme, staffed by hundreds of technicians, with Hang at the helm.

“

China understands that climate change is a very big challenge in human history. It is a matter in our own interest to ensure that our growth is sustainable – and to impose limits on our contribution to this problem.

301

”

2004 2004

Olya Melen 1980–

Her first ever court case In 2004, without public notice and in violation of international and national environmental laws, the Ukrainian government began dredging and shoring up narrow and shallow sections of the Danube Delta to create a canal that would enable large vessels to travel directly between the Danube River and the Black Sea, with potentially disastrous ecological consequences. They had not counted on the opposition of a 24-yearold lawyer called Olya Melen who was working for an organisation called Environment-People-Law (EPL) based in Lviv. The moment she heard about the project Melen filed lawsuits to prevent the canal’s construction. In her first ever court case Melen opposed a team of experienced lawyers seeking to end the protected status of rivers and ponds in the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve. Despite being publicly accused as a traitor and a Romanian spy, Melen broadened her strategy. Aware that Ukraine was bound by numerous international conventions, EPL filed complaints with several international environmental conventions to force the Ukrainian government to justify its canal plans at a time when it was seeking acceptance to the European Union. In her first significant victory, Melen proved that the environmental impact assessment of the canal, which had been approved by the Minister of Environment, was inadequate. The judge ruled that the canal development flouted environmental laws and could adversely affect the Danube Delta’s biodiversity. Although the first phase of the canal had already been completed, Melen’s high-profile challenge did, initially, play a pivotal role in prompting the new government that swept into office after the Orange Revolution of December 2004 to reject plans for the second phase of the proposed canal. Despite this, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko has publicly voiced his support for the completion of the canal. Melen and her colleagues at EPL are equally determined to protect the most sensitive areas of the Danube Delta Biosphere Reserve. Melen was a recipient of the Goldman Environmental Prize in 2006.

“

As a public interest environmental lawyer, my goal is to seek the rule of law to preserve nature for present and future generations. Our fragile Mother Earth badly needs legal defenders.

”

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x epl.org.ua

2005 2005

Dorothy Stang 1931–2005

‘The death of the forest is the end of our life’ In 1966 Sister Dorothy Stang, an elementary school teacher with the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, left her native US for Brazil. The new mission of this 35year-old nun was to help poor farmers build independent futures for their families in Anapu, a city in Pará state on the Amazon’s southern edge. Almost 40 years later, Stang, now a naturalised Brazilian, was still working with the Catholic Church’s Pastoral Land Commission, defending the rights of rural workers and attempting to protect the huge areas of pristine jungle nearby. Her work was not without its dangers. Around 1,400 people had been killed in the conflict in Pará state alone since 1985. Stang herself had received a succession of death threats from loggers and landowners. She was often pictured wearing a T-shirt with the slogan ‘A Morte da Floresta é o Fim da Nossa Vida’ which is Portuguese for ‘The Death of the Forest is the End of our Life’. On the morning of 12 February 2005 Stang was at the isolated Boa Esperanca settlement when four men, two of them with guns, approached her. According to witnesses, while at gunpoint she read a line from the Gospel of Matthew (5:6): ‘Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for justice, for they shall be satisfied.’ She was shot and killed at point-blank range. Sister Dorothy’s funeral was attended by thousands of settlers who crowded the Trans-Amazonian Highway to accompany her coffin. Many mourners held saplings to symbolise the jungle she died defending. In the months that followed, over a dozen memorial services were held in her memory, from Liverpool in the UK to Phoenix, Ohio, USA. Just two weeks after her death another Brazilian, Dionisio Ribeiro Filho, was shot in the head for defending an Atlantic rainforest reserve from poachers and illegal palm tree cutters. Stang’s ‘martyrdom’ was given widespread international media coverage. It led to the Brazilian government announcing a crackdown on illegal logging and intensifying the process of creating nature reserves.

“

I don’t want to flee, nor do I want to abandon the battle of these farmers who live without any protection in the forest. They have the sacrosanct right to aspire to a better life on land where they can live and work with dignity while respecting the environment.

”

 Binka Le Breton, The Greatest Gift: The Courageous Life and Martyrdom of Sister Dorothy Stang

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(New York: Doubleday, 2008)

2005 2005

Greg Nickels 1955–

A mayor to lead other mayors On 16 February 2005, following US Senate refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, Greg Nickels, the 50-year-old Mayor of Seattle, decided to make contact with other mayors across the US to join with him in taking local action to try to implement the spirit of the protocol. During the previous winter, Nickels had been receiving disturbing briefings from officials that the unusual lack of snow was having a detrimental effect on the city. He decided that something must be done. His first outreach was to similarminded cities such as Portland and San Francisco and then to cities such as Minneapolis and Burlington. By 30 March 2005 ten mayors representing more than 3 million Americans had issued a joint invitation to 400 other mayors. Following a very positive response, on 13 June 2005 the US Conference of Mayors unanimously passed the Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement. By December 2005, with the backing of 170 mayors from 39 states, Nickels travelled to Montreal, Canada for the UN Climate Change Conference. By November 2007 710 mayors representing over 51.2 million Americans had accepted Nickels’ challenge to tackle climate change. Cities from Miami to Atlanta from Denver to Los Angeles are implementing a host of greenhouse gas control strategies – adding new bicycle paths and bus routes to reduce car use, planting trees, buying hybrid vehicles for their police departments and pushing local utilities to use more renewable energy. By cutting their emissions, these cities have already saved a total of $700 million, undermining the Bush administration’s claim that Kyoto would destroy the US economy.

“

I knew this idea would resonate in Seattle, a very environmentally conscious city, but I didn’t know how it would be received in a lot of other cities.

”

x www.usmayors.org/climateprotection

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2006 2006

Jean-Michel Cousteau 1938–

From father to son

Ü

123 The son of ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau, Jean-Michel Cousteau spent much of

his childhood exploring the world’s oceans aboard Calypso and Alcyone. He first dived with an aqualung in 1945 when he was seven years old. After his mother’s death in 1990 and his father’s in 1997, Cousteau founded Ocean Futures Society in 1999 as a non-profit organisation to serve as a ‘voice for the ocean’ by developing marine education and conservation programmes. In 2002 Cousteau became the first person to represent the environment at an Olympic opening ceremony – the 19th Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Among the 70 films produced by Cousteau is Voyage to Kure about the northwestern Hawaiian Islands, a 1,930 km chain of islands and atolls that form one of the most remote places on Earth. In April 2006 Cousteau was invited to the White House to show Voyage to Kure to US President George W. Bush. The president later stated that he received ‘a pretty good lecture about life’ over dinner that night from 153 Cousteau and marine biologist Sylvia Earle of the National Geographic Society. At the same time, encouraged by Hawaii’s Governor, Linda Lingle, Bill Brown, the Director of the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, was drawing up boundaries for a project to make the north-western Hawaiian Islands into the world’s largest marine protection area. Covering 140,000 square miles – more than 100 times the size of Yosemite National Park – it would be a sanctuary to 7,000 species of birds, fish and marine mammals, a quarter of them unique to the area. On 15 June 2006 Bush signed a law designating the north-western Hawaiian Islands as the US’s 75th National Monument. In October 2006 Cousteau and an expedition team including his son Fabien and daughter Céline began filming along the Amazon River. Twenty-five years ago Cousteau and his father had travelled the entire length of the Amazon to assess its environmental health. Cousteau has now returned to reassess and record the changes that have occurred to Earth’s greatest river system.

Ü

“

Is it too late to prevent us from self-destructing? No, for we have the capacity to design our own future, to take a lesson from living things around us and bring our values and actions in line with ecological necessity. But we must first realise that ecological and social and economic issues are all deeply intertwined. There can be no solution to one without a solution to the others.

”

x www.oceanfutures.org

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2006 2006

James E. Hansen 1941–

Speaking out against climate censorship In the mid-1960s Jim Hansen, studying mathematics and physics at the University of Iowa, was attracted to James Van Allen’s space science programme in the physics and astronomy department. A decade later Hansen began focusing on research that tried to understand climate change resulting from anthropogenic (human-made) activities. Since 1981 Hansen has headed the NASA Institute for Space Studies in New York City, a division of the Goddard Space Flight Center. In the 1988 Hansen’s testimony to a US congressional committee helped raise broad awareness of climate change. Hansen testified that the time had come to recognise that the ‘greenhouse effect’ was real and that new and cleaner sources of energy had to be found. Time has validated his position. In 2005 and 2006 Hansen claimed in interviews with the Washington Post and the New York Times that NASA administrators had tried to influence his public statements about the causes of climate change. He said that NASA public relations staff had been ordered to review his public statements and interviews after a December 2005 lecture he had given to the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. In the talk, he said that significant emission cuts could be achieved with existing technologies, particularly in the case of motor vehicles, but that without leadership by the United States climate change would eventually leave the earth ‘a different planet’. Furthermore, Hansen has appeared on television claiming that White House staff edited climaterelated press releases reported by federal agencies to make global warming seem less threatening, and that he has been unable to speak freely without the intervention of other government officials. ‘In my more than three decades in the government I’ve never witnessed such restrictions on the ability of scientists to communicate with the public’, he said in one of his many public appearances. On 16 March 2006, 285 NASA scientists and engineers signed a Statement of Support for NASA’s Commitment to Openness which fully supported Hansen. Hansen believes that the tipping point for catastrophic global climate change is upon us and that if, in ten years, the human population is unable to reduce greenhouse gases the oceans might rise as much as three metres by 2100.

“

Who is going to bear the moral burden? The politicians who deny there is a problem today will no longer be in office once the effects of global warming are felt.

”

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2006 2006

Al Gore 1948–

An Inconvenient Truth Having studied the effects of greenhouse gases at Harvard University, Democratic senator Al Gore held the US Senate’s first hearing on the science of climate change in the late ’70s. In 1988, when he first ran for President, one of Gore’s primary motivations was ‘to push the global warming issue’. Four years later, Gore wrote Earth in the Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. In this he states: ‘We must make the rescue of the environment the central organising principle for civilisation . . . I have become very impatient with my own tendency to put a finger to the political winds and proceed cautiously. Every time I pause to consider whether I have gone too far out on a limb, I look at the new facts that continue to pour in from around the world and conclude that I have not gone far enough . . . the time has long since come to take more political risks – and endure more political criticism – by proposing tougher, more effective solutions’. It became the first book written by a sitting senator to make the New York Times bestseller list since John F. Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage in the mid-1950s. The same year, 1992, Bill Clinton, who calls Gore ‘one of the greatest political and scientific minds of our time’, asked him to be his running mate for the presidency. While Vice-President from 1993 to 2001, Gore helped President Clinton work with the big three US auto-makers to begin research and development on alternative fuels and hybrid vehicles, as well as supporting new technologies and creating new jobs to clean up toxic waste sites. In the late 1990s Gore became a leading figure at the climate change summit in Kyoto. But to his annoyance, the US Senate refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, calling the evidence ‘inconclusive’. Ultimately unsuccessful in his controversial and closely fought bid for the White House in 2000, Gore began to travel the world, giving a riveting presentation entitled ‘Global Warming: A Planetary Emergency’, a lecture and multimedia display that sets out the causes and consequences of what Gore calls ‘the collision between civilisation and Earth’. In May 2006 Gore was able to carry his warning to an even wider audience by appearing in a Paramount Pictures documentary An Inconvenient Truth based on his presentation. Produced by Jeff Skoll, eBay founder and social philanthropist, the film won Best Documentary Oscar in 2007 and is the third-highest grossing documentary in US film history. 307

In October 2007, Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The Nobel committee described Gore as ‘probably the single individual who has done most to create greater worldwide understanding of the measures that need to be adopted [to combat global warming]’.

“

My fellow Americans, people all over the world, we need to solve the climate crisis; it’s not a political issue, it’s a moral issue. We have everything we need to get started, with the possible exception of the will to act; that’s a renewable resource, let’s renew it.

x www.climatecrisis.net

”

Truth: The Planetary Emergency of  Al Gore, An Inconvenient Global Warming and What We Can Do About It (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006)

2006 2006

George Monbiot 1963–

An environmental risk-taker Having originally qualified as a zoologist, George Monbiot has never shied away from risk. Working as an investigative journalist in Indonesia, Brazil and East Africa, he has been shot at, beaten up by military police, shipwrecked and stung into a coma by hornets. He returned home to the UK after contracting cerebral malaria in north-eastern Kenya and being pronounced clinically dead. Back in the UK, Monbiot joined the road protest movement. He has continued as a radical environmental campaigner through a series of books and in his weekly column for British newspaper the Guardian. His books include Amazon Watershed, which explores the ecological and human costs of the timber industry in Brazil, and Captive State: The Corporate Takeover of Britain, which examines the role of corporate power within the UK and argues that corporate involvement in both local and national politics is a serious threat to democracy. His 2003 book, Age of Consent: A Manifesto for a New World, attempts to set out a positive agenda for change in the global justice movement. In 1995 Nelson Mandela presented Monbiot with a United Nations Global 500 Award for outstanding environmental achievement. 308

Published in 2006, his latest book, Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning, tackles global warming. In it Monbiot argues that developed countries need to reduce their carbon emissions by 90 per cent by 2030 in order to prevent disastrous changes to the climate. The book is full of suggestions on how such a radical plan could be achieved in the UK including: issuing every citizen with a personal carbon ration; new environmental building regulations; banning ordinary (incandescent) lightbulbs and patio heaters; constructing large offshore wind farms; replacing the national gas grid with a hydrogen pipe network; creating a new national coach network to make journeys using public transport faster than using a car; requiring all petrol stations to supply leasable electric cars; scrapping road-building and roadwidening programmes; reducing UK airport capacity by 90 per cent; and replacing all out-of-town superstores with delivery warehouses.

“

Tell people something they know already and they will thank you for it. Tell them something new and they will hate you for it.

x www.monbiot.com

”

the Planet Burning  George Monbiot, Heat: How We Can Stop (London: Penguin, 2007)

309

Index of Planet Savers Abbey, Edward 139 Abouleish, Ibrahim 183 Adams, Ansel 58 Adamson, Joy 115 Ali, Sàlim 89 Anderson, Ray 253 Appius Claudius Caecus 14 Archontónis, Dimítrios 258 Aridjis, Homero 213 Arthus-Bertrand, Yann 281 Åström, Carl Sverker 141 Attenborough, David 191 Audubon, John James 26 Bahuguna, Sunderlal 197 Balfour, Lady Eve 81 Ball, Jim 299 Bartholemew, Patriarch 258 Bateman, Robert 175 Bazalgette, Joseph 36 Beebe, William 71 Belaney, Archibald 79 Benyus, Janine M. 273 Berry, Wendell 129 Blake, Peter 289 Blom, Gertrude Dudy 85 Bombard, Alain 98 Bookchin, Murray 120 Borlaug, Norman 86 Borman, Randall 252 Bové, José 270 Boyle, Robert H. 133 Boza, Mario 148 Braun, Emma Lucy 95 Brockovich, Erin 264 Brosnan, Pierce 271 Brower, David 145 Brown, Lester R. 173 Brundtland, Gro Harlem 225 Buckminster Fuller, Richard 65 Buddha, Siddhartha Gautama 13 Burroughs, John 46 Buxton, Edward North 52 Cade, Tom J. 149 Caecus, Appius Claudius Cameron Patterson, Clair Carr, Archie 91 Carson, Rachel 118

14 128

Carter, Jimmy 196 Catlin, George 28 Catsadorakis, Giorgios 288 Chadwick, Alan 135 Chapman, John 22 Chavannes, Jean-Baptiste 170 Chief Seattle 30 Chouinard, Yvon 221 Chuwa, Sebastian 262 Cleghorn, Hugh 30 Colborn, Theodora 261 Commoner, Barry 132 Comte de Buffon 20 Coolidge, Harold J. 94 Corbett, Colonel Jim 77 Cousteau, Jacques-Yves 123 Cousteau, Jean-Michel 305 Craighead, Frank 110 Craighead, John 110 Crutzen, Paul 168 Cullinan, Cormac 293 Curry-Lindahl, Kai 100 Daly, Herman 136 Darling, Frank Fraser 103 Darling, Jay Norwood ‘Ding’ 69 Darwin, Charles 34 Dasmann, Raymond 111 De Buffon, Comte 20 De la Fuente, Felix Rodriguez 124 Denver, John 182 Desai, Pooran 255 Devi, Amrita 18 Diamond, Jared 201 DiCaprio, Leonardo 280 Diesel, Rudolph 50 Dilg, Will 59 Douglas, Marjory Stoneman 89 Douglas, William O. 106 Doulton, Henry 27 Dower, John Gordon 87 Dubos, René 138 Duehring, Cindy 220 Dunphy, Milo 67 Dunphy, Myles 67 Durrell, Gerald 112 Earle, Sylvia 153 Edge, Rosalie 70

310

Ehrenfeld, David 185 Ehrlich, Anne 144 Ehrlich, Paul 144 Eibl-Eibesfeldt, Irenäus 102 Elkington, John 227 Elton, Charles Sutherland 64 Ericsson, John 37 Evelyn, John 16 Figuères, José Maria 254 Fischer, Joschka 215 Ford, William Clay, Jr 272 Foreman, David 233 Fossey, Dian 212 Fowler, Cary 177 Francis of Assisi 14 Fraser Darling, Frank 103 Fuller, Richard Buckminster

65

Gadgil, Madhav 206 Gaines, David 186 Galdikas, Biruté 159 Galster, Steven R. 257 Gandhi, Mohandas K. 63 García, Neftalí 125 Gee, Edward Pritchard 122 Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas 155 Ghigi, Alessandro 61 Gibbs, Lois 187 Goldsmith, Edward (‘Teddy’) 150 Gómez-Pompa, Arturo 237 Goodall, Jane 116 Gorbachev, Mikhail 248 Gore, Al 307 Green, Martin 208 Grey Owl 79 Grinnell, George Bird 40 Grosvenor, Gilbert H. 57 Gruber, Pat 242 Grzimek, Bernhard 109 Haagen-Smit, Arie 96 Haig-Brown, Roderick 78 Hamilton, Alice 55 Hang, Zhao 301 Hansen, James E. 306 Hardin, Garrett J. 142 Hawken, Paul 250 Hawtin, Geoffrey 296 Hayes, Denis 154 Heim, Roger 93 Hill, Julia ‘Butterfly’ 276 Hill, Octavia 47 Holmgren, David 184 Houghton, John 209 Howard, Albert 66 Hulot, Nicolas 228 Hunter, Robert 47 Huxley, Julian 114 Illich, Ivan

167

Janzen, Daniel 226 Johnson, Claudia ‘Lady Bird’ Jonas, Hans 189 Juul, Johannes 43 Kajir, Annie 275 Kakabadse, Yolanda 194 Kano, Takayoshi 169 Keeling, Charles David 108 Kelly, Petra 207 Kennedy, Robert F., Jr 300 Kpanou, Jean-Bosco 210 Kroegel, Paul 53 Kuroda, Yoichi 230 La Cour, Poul 43 Laing, Harrison Ngau 229 Leakey, Richard 232 Leclerc, Georges-Louis 20 Lemke, Birsel 251 Leopold, Aldo 75 Li Quan 294 Linnaeus, Carl 19 Livingstone, Ken 287 Lloyd Wright, Frank 73 Lovejoy, Thomas E. 199 Lovelock, James 190 Lovins, Amory 203 Lubchenco, Jane 268 Lugari, Paolo 137 Lutzenberger, José 156 Lyons, Oren 151 Maathai, Wangari 198 Malakou, Myrsini 288 Malthus, Thomas 23 Marsh, George Perkins 35 Marshall, Robert 76 McDonough, William 291 McHarg, Ian L. 106 McTaggart, David 163 Meadows, Donella H. 164 Mee, Margaret 104 Melen, Olya 302 Mellanby, Kenneth 117 Mendes, Chico 231 Mittermeier, Russell A. 178 Molina, Mario 168 Mollison, Bill 184 Monbiot, George 308 Moncrieff, Perrine 84 Monod, Théodore 80 Mooney, Pat 177 Moore, Gordon E. 283 Morrell, Dan 274 Morris, William 41 Morton, Julius Sterling 38 Muir, John 44 Munn III, Charles A. 260 Myers, Norman 202

311

126

Nader, Ralph 130 Naess, Arne 160 Narain, Sunita 235 Nearing, Helen 101 Nearing, Scott 101 Ngau Laing, Harrison 229 Nickels, Greg 304 Nikitin, Alexandr 263 Nogueira-Neto, Paulo 172 Odum, Eugene 99 Ohl, Russell 83 Ohmura, Atsumu 214 Olmsted, Frederick Law 33 Orrego, Juan Pablo 243 Osborn, Henry Fairfield, Jr 93 Owings, Margaret 140 Patkar, Medha 219 Patriarch Bartholemew 258 Patrick, Ruth 90 Patterson, Clair Cameron 128 Pauli, Gunter 247 Paxton, Joseph 29 Payne, Roger 157 Penn, William 17 Peterson, Roger Tory 72 Philip, James ‘Scotty’ 49 Phillips, Mrs 42 Pinchot, Gifford 48 Poivre, Pierre 21 Porritt, Jonathon 209 Potter, Beatrix 60 Prance, Ghillean 121 Prince Charles 218 Pritchard Gee, Edward 122 Putnam, Palmer C. 83 Quan, Li

294

Rabinowitz, Alan 195 Raven, Peter 158 Rawnsley, Hardwicke 47 Redford, Robert 176 Richards, Ellen Swallow 39 Riddlestone, Sue 255 Robèrt, Karl-Henrik 234 Rockefeller, Laurance S. 81 Roddick, Anita 181 Rodriguez de la Fuente, Felix 124 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano 68 Roosevelt, Theodore 51 Rothschild, Miriam 97 Rowland, F. Sherwood 168 Ruckelshaus, William D. 152 Rudorff, Ernst 42 Rupert, Anton 143 Safina, Carl 278 Sarasin, Paul 56 Saro-Wiwa, Ken 259

Schaller, George 113 Schmidheiny, Stephan 240 Schumacher, Ernst Friedrich 165 Schwarzenegger, Arnold 295 Scott, Peter 88 Seattle, Chief 30 Seeger, Pete 147 Selous, Frederick Courtney 54 Seo, Danny 236 Shiva, Vandana 204 Siddhartha Gautama Buddha 13 Simwinga, Hammerskjoeld 279 Smit, Tim 290 Speth, James Gustave ‘Gus’ 284 St Francis of Assisi 14 Stang, Dorothy 303 Stewart, Elihu 49 Strong, Maurice 245 Studer, Anita 292 Suzuki, David T. 238 Szafer, Wladyslaw 103 Tamayo, José Andrés 297 Tansley, Arthur George 74 Thompson, Lonnie 174 Thoreau, Henry David 31 Tickell, Crispin 180 Tolba, Mostafa Kamal 161 Töpfer, Klaus 277 Townsend White, Lynn, Jr 134 Townsend, Alden ‘Denny’ 286 Train, Russell E. 127 Vargha, János 222 Vernadsky, Vladimir Ivanovich 62 Viana, Jorge 282 Von Humboldt, Alexander 24 Von Uexküll, Jakob 200 Von Weizsäcker, Ernst Ulrich 267 Ward, Barbara 131 Watson, Paul 179 Wenshi, Pan 265 Westing, Arthur H. 162 White, Gilbert 22 White, Lynn Townsend, Jr 134 Williams, Craig E. 216 Williams, Terry Tempest Williamson, Mrs 42 Wilson, Edward O. 244 Windsor, Charles 218 Wirth, Timothy E. 268 Wolf, Hazel 188 Woodwell, George M. 211 Worede, Melaku 192 Yablokov, Alexey V. Yaroshinskaya, Alla Zhao Hang

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301

248 223

Index of organisations 1001 Club

143

Acre Popular Front, Brazil 282 ADENA, Association for the Protection of Nature, Spain 124 African Biodiversity Network 193 African Blackwood Conservation Project (ABCP) 262 African Wildlife Leadership Foundation 141 Against Animal Testing 182 Agapan 156 Agenda 21 194, 225, 245 American Association for the Advancement of Science 269 Arbor Day movement 36, 38-39 Bellona Foundation 264 Better World Fund 240, 268 BioBrasil 261 Biomimicry Institute 253, 273 BioRegional Development Group 255-56 BirdLife International 192 Boone and Crockett Club 41 Borneo Resources Institute (BRIMAS) 229 British Ecological Society 74 Brundtland Commission 172, 225 Bullitt Foundation 155 California Air Resources Board 96 Canadian Forestry Association 49 Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems (UCSC) 136 Center for Health, Environment and Justice (USA) 188 Center for the Biology of Natural Systems (USA) 132 Central American Alliance for Sustainable Development 254 Centre for Alternative Technology (UK) 166 Centre for Ecological Sciences (India) 206 Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (UK) 118 Centre for Environment and Development (Switzerland) 162 Centre for Environmental Policy (Russia) 249 Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) (India) 235 Charles Darwin Foundation 35, 102, 115 Chemical Injury Information Network (CIIN) 120

Chemical Weapons Working Group (CWWG) 217 China Automotive Technology and Research Centre 301 Chinese Ministry of Forestry 266 Chipko movement 18, 197-98, 204 Cincinnati Wild Flower Preservation Society 95 Circle of Life Foundation 276 Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste see Center for Health, Environment and Justice Citizens’ Advisory Committee on Environmental Quality 82 Citizens’ Party, USA 132 Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) 69 Clean Air Watch 296 Clearwater 147-48 Conservation Foundation 93, 127 Conservation International (CI) 178, 284 Costa Rica Foundation for Sustainable Development 254 Costa Rican National Park Service 148 Council for Sustainable Development (USA) 152 Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) (USA) 127, 285 Cousteau Society 123 David Suzuki Foundation 239 Deep Ocean Exploration and Research 153 La défense de l’homme et de son environnement 98 Det Naturliga Steget see The Natural Step Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International 213, 281 DiCaprio Foundation 281 Die Grünen (Green Party, Germany) 200, 207, 215-16, 267 Digital Nations Consortium 255 Diverse Women for Diversity 205 Duchy Originals 218 Duna Kör 222-23 Earth 2000 236-37 Earth Council 245 Earth Day 99, 151, 154-55, 158, 176, 236, 239, 281

313

Earth First! 140, 180 Earth Policy Institute 233-34, 276 East European Environmental Research (ISTER) 223 Ecological Charity Fund (Russia) 224 Ecological Society of America 95, 269 Ecology Party see Green Party, UK Ecoropa 98, 150 Eden Project 65, 121, 290 El Eden Ecological Reserve 237 EnAct International 293-94 Environmental Access Research Network (EARN) 220 Environmental Defense Fund 291 Environmental Health Alliance 188 Environmental Health Sciences 261 Environmental Law Association (UK) 294 Environmental Law Centre (Papua New Guinea) 275 Environmental Movement of Olancho (MAO) (Honduras) 298 Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) (USA) 127, 128, 130, 149, 152, 154 Environment-People-Law (EPL) (Ukraine) 302 Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute 193 Evangelical Climate Initiative 299 Evangelical Environmental Network 299 Fauna and Flora International (FFI) 53 Federal Duck Stamp Program (USA) 69 Fish and Wildlife Service (USA) 70, 118, 125 Fondation Nicolas Hulot pour la Nature et l’Homme 28 Fondation Ushuaïa see Fondation Nicolas Hulot pour la Nature et l’Homme Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) (UN) 177, 296 Ford Foundation 86, 136 Forest Service (USA) 48, 51, 107 Forest Stewardship Council 271, 283 Forum for the Future 210 Frankfurt Zoological Society 280 Friends of the Earth (FoE) 146, 182, 210 Friends of the Everglades 89 Friends of the Sea Otter (FSO) 141 Fundação Botanica Margaret Mee 105 Fundación Futuro Latinoamericano 194 Fundación Natura 194 FUNDES 241 Future Forests Ltd 274 Gaia Foundation 156, 190-91, 294 Las Gaviotas 137-38 GlobalCool 274 Global Crop Diversity Trust (GCDT) 296 Global Forum of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival 151

Global Green USA 281 Global Survival Network 257 Goldman Foundation 153, 171, 199, 217, 223, 229, 230, 243, 264, 275, 280, 288, 302 Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation 284 Government Panel on Sustainable Development (UK) 181 Great Apes Survival Project (UN) 233 Green Belt Movement 198 Green Cross International 248 Green Party, Germany see Die Grünen Green Party, Turkey 251 Green Party, UK 150, 210 Green Party, USA 130 Greenpeace 163-64, 179-80, 182, 240, 270 Grupo de Acción por el Biobío (GABB) 243 Grupo de los Cien 213-14 Halki Ecological Institute 258 Hayir! 251 Hazel Wolf Environmental Film Network 189 Heinz Centre for Science, Economics and the Environment 200 Human Rights Commission (UN) 151 Information and Communication Technologies Group and Task Force (UN) 255 L’Institut d’Afrique 80 Institute for European Environmental Policy 267 Institute for Global Environment Strategies 230 Institute for Resource Management (IRM) 176 Institute for Social Ecology (USA) 120 Instituto Nacional de Biodiversidad (Inbio, the National Institute of Biodiversity, Costa Rica) 226-27 Instituto Nazionale per la Fauna Selvatica (Italy) 62 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 209, 308 Intermediate Technology Development Group see Practical Action International Commission on National Parks 100 International Council for Bird Preservation 93, 102 International Forum on Globalisation 205 International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) 271, 281 International Institute for Environment and Development 131 International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre 86 International Network of Resource Information Centres 165 International Plant Genetic Institute 193

314

International Society for Ecological Economics 137 International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources see World Conservation Union (IUCN) International Whaling Commission 88, 156 Izaak Walton League 60

New York Zoological Society 71, 93, 113, 210 New Zealand Native Bird Protection Society 84 New Zealand Ornithological Society 84 Nordesta Education and Reforestation 292 North Luangwa Conservation Project (Zambia) 279

Jane Goodall Institute 117 Japan Tropical Forest Action Network (JATAN) 230 Jersey Wildlife Preservation Trust 112 John Ray Initiative 209

Ocean Alliance 157 Ocean Futures Society 271, 305 One Planet Living 256 Orangutan Foundation International The Other Economic Summit 200

Kenyan Wildlife Service (KWS)

Panda Research Centre, Beijing University 266 Partnership for Interdisciplinary Studies of Coastal Oceans (PISCO) 269 Patrick Center for Environmental Research 91 Peace Parks Foundation 144 Peasant Confederation 270 Peasant Movement of Papaye (MPP) (Haiti) 171 Peregrine Fund 149 Permaculture Institute 185 Petra Kelly Foundation 207 Plant Genetic Resources Centre see Ethiopian Biodiversity Institute Population Connection 145 Practical Action 166 Préspa Centre for Man and Nature 288 Public Citizen 130

232

L’Institut d’Afrique 80 La défense de l’homme et de son environnement 98 Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center Las Gaviotas 137-38 London Sustainable Development Commission 256, 287 Love Canal Homeowners’ Association

126

188

Med-INA (Greece) 288 Millennium Project (UN) 194 Missouri Botanical Garden 158 Monks Wood Research Station, see Centre for Ecology and Hydrology Mono Lake Committee 187 Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) 259-60 Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA) 219 National Academy of Sciences (USA) 158, 220 National Alliance of Peoples’ Movements (India) 220 National Arboretum (USA) 286 National Audubon Society (USA) 26, 72, 155, 187, 189 Living Oceans Programme of 278 National Council of Rubber Tappers (Brazil) 231 National Geographic Society (USA) 57-58, 153, 176, 305 National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (USA) 153 National Park Service (Costa Rica) 148 National Park Service (USA) 58, 82, 95, National Park System (England and Wales) 87 National Trust (UK) 47-48, 61 National Wildlife Federation (USA) 72 Natural Resources Defense Council 176, 240, 285 The Natural Step 234-35 The Nature Conservancy Council 64 New Economics Foundation 166 New York Botanical Gardens (NYBG) 121

159

Rachel Carson Council 141 Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology 205 Riverkeeper 133-34, 300 Rockefeller Foundation 86 Rocky Mountain Institute 204 Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew 105, 121 Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution 209 Royal Geographical Society 181 Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) 43 Rural Advancement Foundation International (RAFI) 177 Russell E. Train Education for Nature Program 127 Sahabat Alam Malaysia (SAM) 229 Save China’s Tigers 295 Save-the-Redwoods League 93, 284 Schumacher Circle 166 Schumacher Institute 166 Schumacher Societies 166 Schwab Foundation 184 Scripps Institution of Oceanography 108 Sea Shepherd Conservation Society (SSCS) 180

315

Seed Satyagraha 63, 205 Sekem 183-84 Sierra Club 45, 58-59, 107, 145-46, 175, 179, 234, 264 Skoll Foundation 227 Society for the Protection of Préspa 288 Society of Wind Electricians 44 Soil Association 81, 166 Solar Energy Research Institute (USA) 154 Special Secretariat for the Environment (SEMA) (Brazil) 172 Stanford Centre for Conservation Biology 145 Stockholm Environment Institute 245 SustainAbility 227-28 Sustainability Institute (USA) 165 Sustainable Development Commission (UK) 210, 256, 287 Swedish Society for the Protection of Nature 100 The Natural Step 234-35 The Nature Conservancy Council 64 The Other Economic Summit 200 Traditional Circle of Indian Elders 151 Tropical Nature 261 Turner Endangered Species Fund 240 UK Environmental Law Association 294 UN Conference on the Human Environment 131, 139, 141, 161, 172, 245 UN Convention on Biological Diversity 161, 254 UN Convention on Climate Change 161, 254, 277 UN Development Programme 278, 285 UN Environment Programme (UNEP) 100, 142, 161, 162, 209, 239, 245, 277, 289 UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) 177, 296 UN Foundation 200, 240, 268 UN Great Apes Survival Project 233 UN Human Rights Commission 151 UN Information and Communication Technologies Group and Task Force 255 UN Millennium Project 194 UN University for Peace 245 UNESCO 100, 102, 117, 206, 282 Man and Biosphere programme of 111-12

Union of Concerned Scientists 240, 299 US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) 127, 128, 130, 149, 152, 154 US Federal Duck Stamp Programme 69 US Fish and Wildlife Service 70, 118, 125 US Forest Service 48, 51, 107 Whale Conservation Institute 157 WildAid 257 Wilderness Society 76, 234, 244 Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust (UK) 88 Wildlands Project 234 Wildlife Conservation Society 114, 148, 195, 260 WildlifeDirect 233 Windstar Foundation 182-83 Wladyslaw Szafer Institute of Botany 103 Woods Hole Research Center 212 World Bank 131, 137, 162, 199, 200, 203, 205, 219, 233, 243, 245 World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) 241 World Commission on Environment and Development (WCED) see Brundtland Commission World Conservation Union (IUCN) 53, 57, 88, 93-94, 94, 102, 115, 178, 194 World Economic Forum 173, 245, 255 World Meteorological Organisation 209 World Parrot Trust USA 261 World Resources Institute (WRI) 152, 284 World Wildlife Fund see WWF Worldwatch Institute 173 Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy 267 WWF (World Wide Fund for Nature) 53, 77, 88, 94, 113, 115, 122, 127, 143, 178, 192, 199, 203, 210, 211, 223, 230, 256, 261, 266, 282, Yale University, School of Forestry and Environmental Studies 285 Zero Emissions Research Institute (ZERI) 247 Zero Population Growth see Population Connection

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Photo credits Page 13 Siddhartha Gautama Buddha: iStockphoto 19 Carl Linnaeus: public domain 20 Comte de Buffon: a portrait by FrançoisHubert Drouais; public domain 25 Alexander von Humboldt: public domain 26 John James Audubon: public domain 28 George Catlin: The White Cloud, Head Chief of the Iowas; © the Yorck Project, licensed under GNU Free Documentation Licence 29 Joseph Paxton: commemorative bust; iStockphoto 32 Henry David Thoreau: public domain 33 Frederick Law Olmsted: public domain 36 George Perkins Marsh: public domain 37 John Ericsson: public domain 44 Poul la Cour and Johannes Juul: windmill; courtesy Danish Wind Industry Association 45 John Muir: public domain 46 John Burroughs: public domain 48 Gifford Pinchot: photo by Pirie MacDonald; public domain 51 Theodore Roosevelt: US Library of Congress Collection; public domain 54 Paul Kroegel: USFWS 55 Frederick Courtney Selous: US Library of Congress Collection; public domain 59 Ansel Adams: The Tetons and the Snake River (1942); courtesy National Archives and Records Administration, Records of the National Park Service 61 Beatrix Potter: Benjamin and Flopsy Bunny; public domain 63 Mohandas K.Gandhi: Gandhi statue in Union Square, New York City; public domain 65 Richard Buckminster Fuller: Biosphere in Montreal; public domain 68 Franklin Delano Roosevelt: FDR in 1933; photo by Elias Goldensky; public domain

70 Jay Norwood ‘Ding’ Darling: ‘Ding’ Darling and the duck stamp; courtesy US Fish & Wildlife Service 72 Roger Tory Peterson: courtesy Roger Tory Peterson Institute 75 Aldo Leopold: courtesy Aldo Leopold Foundation 80 Théodore Monod: public domain 82 Laurance S. Rockefeller: photo by John Bottega, 1965; public domain 86 Norman Borlaug: courtesy The World Food Prize 90 Sàlim Ali: courtesy Madras Naturalists’ Society 91 Ruth Patrick: courtesy The Academy of Natural Sciences 92 Archie Carr: photo by Dr Jeanne A. Mortimer 99 Eugene Odum: Odum (centre) on a field trip with students; photo credit Odum School of Ecology 105 Margaret Mee: Mee in the garden of her home in Santa Teresa; photo by Tony Morrison; courtesy www.margaretmeesamazon.com 110 John and Frank Craighead: Grizzly bears; photo by Chris Servheen; courtesy US FWS 111 Raymond Dasmann: courtesy the University of California, Santa Cruz 113 George Schaller: courtesy Wildlife Conservation Society 116 Jane Goodall: photo by Jeff Orlowski; courtesy www.janegoodall.org 119 Rachel Carson: courtesy US FWS 121 Ghillean Prance: courtesy Sir Ghillean Prance 126 Claudia ‘Lady Bird’ Johnson: photo by Robert Knudsen, White House Press Office (WHPO) 127 Russell E. Train: courtesy US EPA 130 Ralph Nader: photo by David Shankbone 135 Alan Chadwick: courtesy the University of California, Santa Cruz

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136 Herman Daly: courtesy Herman Daly 143 Anton Rupert: photo by Andre-Louise Stroebel 144 Paul and Ann Ehrlich: courtesy Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University 147 Pete Seeger: photo by Fred Palumbo 150 Teddy Goldsmith: courtesy The Ecologist 152 William D.Ruckelshaus: courtesy US EPA 154 Denis Hayes: courtesy Bullitt Foundation 156 José Lutzenberger: photo credit The Right Livelihood Award 158 Peter Raven: photo credit Missouri Botanical Garden 159 Biruté Galdikas: orangutan; photo by Tom Low at Camp Leakey, Tanjung Puting, Kalimantan, Indonesia (2003) 163 David McTaggart: © Greenpeace/Steve Morgan 166 Ernst Friedrich Schumacher: courtesy The Schumacher Society 170 Takayoshi Kano: bonobo; photo credit Kabir Baki 171 Jean-Baptiste Chavannes: standing near a severely eroded section of land in Pere; courtesy The Goldman Prize 173 Lester R. Brown: photo credit Wei Lin 175 Robert Bateman: photo by Birgit Freybe Bateman; courtesy www.robertbateman.ca 177 Pat Mooney: courtesy The Right Livelihood Award 179 Russell A. Mittermeier: © Cristina G. Mittermeier 181 Sir Crispin Tickell; courtesy Sir Crispin Tickell 183 Ibrahim Abouleish; courtesy The Right Livelihood Award 187 David Gaines: courtesy The Mono Lake Committee 188 Lois Gibbs: photo credit The Goldman Prize 190 James Lovelock: photo credit www.ecolo.org 193 Melaku Worede: courtesy The Right Livelihood Award 195 Alan Rabinowitz: photo credit Wildlife Conservation Society 197 Sunderlal Bahuguna: courtesy The Right Livelihood Award 198 Wangari Maathai: photo credit: The Goldman Prize

204 Amory Lovins: photo credit Judy Hill (www.judyhill.com) 205 Vandana Shiva: courtesy The Right Livelihood Award 210 Jonathon Porritt: courtesy Sustainable Development Commission 212 George M. Woodwell: courtesy Woods Hole Research Center 216 Joschka Fischer: public domain 217 Craig E. Williams: courtesy The Goldman Environmental Prize 219 Medha Patkar: courtesy The Right Livelihood Award 222 János Vargha: courtesy The Right Livelihood Award 224 Alla Yaroshinskaya: courtesy The Right Livelihood Award 235 Sunita Narain: courtesy Center For Science and Environment 236 Danny Seo: photo credit Laura Moss 238 Arturo Gómez-Pompa: courtesy El Eden Ecological Reserve 239 David T Suzuki: photo credit Al Harvey 243 Juan Pablo Orrego: courtesy The Right Livelihood Award 244 Terry Tempest Williams: photo credit Cheryl Himmelstein 246 Edward O.Wilson: photo credit Cristián Samper 250 Paul Hawken: courtesy Natural Capital Institute 251 Birsel Lemke: courtesy Right Livelihood Award Foundation (www.rightlivelihood.org) 253 Ray Anderson: courtesy Interface 254 José Maria Figuères: courtesy josemariafigueres.org 256 Pooran Desai and Sue Riddlestone: photo credit BioRegional 258 Dimítrios Archontónis: © www.patriarchate.org 259 Ken Saro-Wiwa: courtesy The Goldman Prize 261 Theo Colborn: courtesy The Endocrine Disruption Exchange 262 Sebastian Chuwa: © Rolex Awards/Tomas Bertelsen 263 Alexandr Nikitin: courtesy The Goldman Prize 266 Pan Wenshi: courtesy Martin Williams 270 José Bové: photo credit Guillaume Paumier

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275 Annie Kajir: courtesy The Goldman Environmental Prize 276 Julia ‘Butterfly’ Hill: photo credit Circle of Life Foundation 277 Klaus Töpfer: courtesy www.un.org 279 Carl Safina: © Carl Safina, Blue Ocean Institute 280 Hammerskjoeld Simwinga: courtesy The Goldman Prize 283 Jorge Viana: photo credit Government of Acre, Brazil 287 Ken Livingstone: photo credit Liane Harris 288 Giorgios Catsadorakis and Myrsini Malakou: courtesy The Goldman Environmental Prize 292 Anita Studer: © Rolex Awards/Marc Latzel

293 Cormac Cullinan: courtesy EnAct International 295 Li Quan: courtesy Save China’s Tiger 298 Father José Andrés Tamayo: Father Tamayo with his parishioners in Salama, Olancho, Honduras; courtesy The Goldman Prize 302 Olya Melen: photo credit Igor Pulup; courtesy The Goldman Environmental Prize 304 Greg Nickels: courtesy Mayor’s Office, City of Seattle 306 James E. Hansen: photo credit Arnie Adler 307 Al Gore: photo credit Brett Wilson 308 George Monbiot: photo credit JK the Unwise

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About the author Kevin Desmond is a researcher–writer, whose earlier work on the history of motorboating makes him perhaps the least likely author to compile this book. However, since 1979, he has devoted much of his energies to promoting the eco-friendly revival of silent battery/solar-powered electric boats on the inland waterways of Europe. In 2005, he launched the idea of a promotional contest for hybrid-electric motorboats – the Mansura Trophy – to be awarded for the first time in 2008. Since 1992, Kevin Desmond has lived in the forested wine-growing region called ‘Entre Deux Mers’ south-east of Bordeaux, France. His daily walks through the local vineyard and woods inspired him to write and illustrate the children’s book Les Lignemons, an adventure story about a group of trees escaping from deforesters. At the end of the book, readers are encouraged to promise to plant at least one tree in their lifetime. A play based on the same story has been performed at French village schools where a tree has then been planted beside the playground. It was during the promotion for Les Lignemons that Desmond realised that a book celebrating the lives and work of those who have been caring for our planet was needed. Initially, he thought he would write about 50 people, but, as the research progressed, it was clear that there were hundreds of potential Planet Savers throughout history. Throughout the three years of research, Desmond has received much encouragement from Sir Ghillean Prance, former Director of Kew Gardens and Scientific Director of the Eden Project. It was in the 1960s that Prance began to alert people about the menace of deforestation along the Amazon. He has now written the Foreword to this book. Kevin Desmond is currently working with the city of Bordeaux on a city-based, global species-saving project called EvE-Urgent!®.

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