Willard Van Name, Rosalie Edge, and the Emergency Conservation Committee

One of the great joys of this project has been learning about some of the extraordinary people whose contributions to the environmental conservation movement are underappreciated today, and sometimes even in their own time. Of these, perhaps my favorite characters are Rosalie Edge and Willard G. Van Name. There is a more section on them in the 1916-62 EC History Chapter, and below I provide a link to a contemporaneous magazine profile of Edge. Here I just want to call out some key points, and particularly to shine some extra light on Van Name, a man whose extraordinary contributions have, in my opinion, received an unreasonable lack of recognition and credit.

Rosalie Edge is by far the more celebrated of the two (not a high bar), but Van Name was actually the catalyst for Edge's entry into the conservation movement. In short, Van Name and two colleagues at the American Museum of Natural History published a booklet entitled A Crisis in Conservation in 1929 decrying the decimation of bird populations and the indifference, or worse, of the National Audubon Society and other conservation groups. The AMNH (which shared a number of board members with Audubon) publicly disclaimed Crisis and told Van Name that he would need prior approval before publishing if he wished to keep his job.

Edge, who had become an enthusiastic birdwatcher, received and read A Crisis in Conservation while on a trip to Paris, and was outraged. Upon returning home she and Van Name decided to form the Emergency Conservation Committee, with the help of Irving Brant, in part to provide Van Name a covering organization to publish his writings. (Van Name had also published a book in 1929 entitled Vanishing Forest Reserves which took to task the stewardship of the National Park Service and Forest Service. Both publications are represented in the Collection.)

Stephen Fox (see References) writes that Rosalie Edge's "career with the ECC made her the first woman to have a considerable impact on the conservation movement.' (p. 177). "Under Edge's implacable direction, with Brant's assistance, for the next thirty years it represented in its purest form the Muir tradition of the radical amateur in conservation." (p. 175). David Brower and others cite the militancy of Edge - and by extension Van Name - as a model for the environmental leaders of subsequent generations.

Anyway, the main point I want to emphasize here is what I believe to be the manifest injustice afforded to Van Name's legacy. He was a clearly a prickly, uncompromising misanthrope who, per Furmansky in her biography of Edge (see below), was almost certainly gay. (One example of his inflexible nature - in the mid-1930s he broke with Edge due to her having established cordial relations with a National Park supervisor who Van Name felt had slighted him in the past.)

By all accounts, Van Name generally made no secret of his dim view of humanity. His overall temperament clearly drove the antipathy of many of his contemporaries and subsequent commentators. I believe his personality, and no doubt his sexuality, is why he has never received more than minimal recognition for his significant and far-sighted contributions to the movement.

Though Van Name was not a wealthy man given his work as a biologist at AMNH, he almost single-handedly funded the ECC for years. He substantially funded both the lease and the subsequent purchase of the land that he and Edge converted into the famed Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania.

Both alone and with the ECC, Van Name was a potent and effective environmental advocate for decades, meaningfully impacting the creation of Olympia and Kings Canyon NPs, fighting encroachment on and helping protect critical areas adjacent to other existing NPs, advocating for important wildlife protection measures, and driving real change at the Audubon Society and other private and governmental conservation bodies, among other accomplishments. His conservation focus predated the formation of the ECC by years. His first published letter to the editor in the New York Times, decrying legislative attempts to downsize Yosemite and Sequoia NPs, was in 1923 - incidentally earning a supportive letter published in response from none other than Robert Underwood Johnson. A 1927 Van Name piece generated a rather less enthusiastic response from Stephen Mather, then head of the National Park Service. The last mention of him in the NYT before his death was in 1954.

Despite all of this, the man does not have a Wikipedia page and is an afterthought in even the most detailed histories of the movement. [Dyana Z. Furmansky's excellent biography Rosalie Edge: Hawk of Mercy (2009 - see References), is an exception]. Van Name received the most perfunctory of obituaries in the New York Times, which mentioned neither the ECC nor Hawk Mountain Sanctuary. As outlined in the EC History Chapter, he has been dismissed or denigrated by many of his contemporaries and subsequent commentators. Perhaps most tellingly, an internet search of him pulls up this website on the first page. I've not once seen this website on any internet search about anybody or anything. On any page.

Van Name was undoubtedly a difficult man. But so was Thoreau. He deserves much greater recognition, in my opinion. When Van Name died in 1959, Irving Brant apparently also felt that he was not afforded his due. This is his letter published in the NYT (which was clearly cut down by an editor) in its entirety :

When great and lifelong service to the public is combined with self-effacement, it is possible for a man to depart from this earth so quietly that hardly anybody knows what he has done for those who remain behind.  So it has been with Dr. Willard G. Van Name of the American Museum of Natural History, who died recently in Connecticut at the age of 87.

Few of those who knew Dr. Van Name as a scientist were aware that for a great part of his adult life he devoted the major share of his income and much of his time and energy to a ceaseless campaign against commercial raids on the national park system, to the preservation of scenic areas threatened with destruction, and in behalf of the menaced wildlife of the United States.

In 1924, through pamphlets written and published by himself, he combated a territorial raid on Sequoia National Park and started the enlargement movement that culminated sixteen years later in creation of the Kings Canyon National Park.  His 1924 and 1926 pamphlets against lumbering in Yosemite National Park stirred up the campaign that led to the great Rockefeller purchase of privately owned sugar pines within the park.

Preservation of Forests

Later Van Name initiated the movements that resulted in the Government purchase and preservation of the Carl Inn sugar pines in Yosemite and the Redwood Mountain Sequoia Grove - third largest in the world - on the edge of Sequoia Park.  He was a leader in the final drive, carried to success by Franklin D. Roosevelt, to establish the Olympic National Park, thus saving the wonderful rain forests on the western slope of the mountains.  

Dr. Van Name both suggested and paid the cost of my 1942 pamphlet, published by the Emergency Conservation Committee of New York, urging joint state and Federal action to preserve the South Calaveras Sequoia Grove and the Beaver Creek Sugar Pines in California.

Several years later he enlisted the support of John P. Elliott, retired Los Angeles oilman, who spent more than $75,000 fighting lumber company and Forest Service opposition and stimulating the State of California and the Department of Agriculture to joint action.  Another great Rockefeller gift, combined with the affirmative stand of President Truman and Secretary Brannan (who overruled departmental subordinates), saved both of these scenic forests.  But in the jubilant official announcements in California not a word was said about Elliott or Van Name.

In other fields, Van Name was principal author and sponsor of the 1930 [actually 1929] pamphlet, "A Crisis in Conservation," which helped arouse wildlife protective organizations from lethargy.  He attacked the insect and predator poisoning activities of the old Biological Survey a quarter of a century before the mass of scientists began their outcry against the creation of a wildlife desert.

Not all of Van Name's efforts were successful.  If, at the end, he could have had his choice of the fulfillment of any object for which he worked in vain, I am sure it would be the establishment of a sanctuary for the Alaska brown bear on the new state's Admiralty Island.

Irving Brant.

If this post and the other material about Van Name on the website go even a small way to redressing the unfortunate lack of recognition afforded this man, I would be most gratified. Obviously, many or even most of the authors represented in the Collection have become obscure save in the histories of the movement. But to my mind the disconnect between accomplishment and recognition for Van Name is particularly egregious. Edge and Van Name were badasses. Their bare-knuckled tactics and uncompromising militancy won many critical conservation battles in their own time and served as a blueprint for generations of environmentalists who followed. They each deserve our recognition and respect.

The Collection contains the following materials related to Van Name, Edge and the ECC:

A Crisis in Conservation (1929). The pamphlet which started Edge on the journey and led to the formation of the ECC. By Van Name and his colleagues W. DeWitt Miller and Davis Quinn. [Note that Miller, a prominent AMNH ornithologist who had conducted field studies with Van Name, died in a motorcycle accident weeks after this was published.]

Vanishing Forest Reserves (1929). Van Name's book, a heavily damaged and professionally repaired copy from a prep school library with a handwritten note by a librarian on the fpd noting it had been received directly from the ECC.

The following ECC pamphlets:

The United States Biological Survey: Destruction, not Scientific Investigation... (1930). Uncredited and as such likely by Van Name.

Compromised Conservation (1930) - By Irving Brant

Shotgun Conservation (1931) - By Irving Brant

The Slaughter of the Yellowstone Park Pelicans (1932) - Uncredited

A Last Plea for Waterfowl (1934) - By Irving Brant

The Tragic Truth About the Elk (1934) - By Rosalie Edge

The Proposed John Muir- Kings Canyon National Park (1939) - Uncredited

The Ducks and Democracy (1942). By Rosalie Edge (In the original envelope)

The Collection also contained a personal typed and signed 1935 letter on ECC letterhead from Edge to Milton P. Skinner thanking him for his contribution to the purchase of the Hawk Mountain property. In addition to being the first park naturalist in NPS history, at Yellowstone, Skinner is also listed on some of the ECC pamphlets as having been a member of a board of consulting biologists and conservationists.

[A delightful profile of Edge, which does mention Van Name a few times but gives Edge near 100 pct credit for the ECC's accomplishments, was published in 1948 by The New Yorker magazine. It is somehow vaguely condescending and quite respectful at the same time. It is also beautifully written and very very funny indeed - I laughed out loud several times. The author, Robert Lewis Taylor, was a New Yorker staff writer specializing in profiles who later won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. A link:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1948/04/17/oh-hawk-of-mercy ]