Lee M. Talbot

Lee Merriam Talbot (1930–2021) was an American ecologist, who became Chief Scientist to the Council on Environmental Quality.^[1] He was Director-General of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) from 1980 to 1982.^[2]

Early life

He was the son of Murrell Williams Talbot (Merle), a forester and ecologist, and colleague in the 1920s of Aldo Leopold, and his wife Zenaida Merriam, daughter of Clinton Hart Merriam, an ethnologist and naturalist.^[3][4][5] His father had a career in the Bureau of Plant Industry and Forest Service, becoming an associate director of the California Forest Experiment Station set up in 1926 at the University of California, Berkeley (later the Pacific Southwest Research Station); and was a consultant to the Charles Lathrop Pack Forestry Foundation on watershed management.^[6][7]

After a year at the Smithsonian Institution as Resident Ecologist in 1948–9, Talbot was at Deep Springs College in 1951. He graduated Associate of Arts at the University of California, Berkeley in 1951, and A.B. there in 1953. He then served in South Korea, after the Korean War, in the United States Marine Corps.^[5][8]

Ecologist

In 1954 Talbot was appointed Staff Ecologist of the Survival Service Commission of the IUCN, a post he held to 1956.^[8][9] There was a particular focus on rangeland management.^[10] In his first year, Talbot made a trip stretching from Africa and Indonesia, researching animals such as the Arabian oryx, Indian rhinoceros and Asiatic lion;^[11] he visited around 30 countries over the period.^[12] A 1960 report by Talbot on the plight of the oryx, for the Fauna Preservation Society, led to action on 1963 by the Society to preserve the species in captivity.^[13] In 1955 Hal Coolidge of the IUPN asked Talbot to visit colonial Tanganyika, to investigate whether the Ngorongoro Highlands were to be excluded from the Serengeti National Park. This turning out to be true, Talbot wrote a paper for the British Colonial Secretary, Anthony Greenwood. An ecological study was arranged, backed by the Fauna Preservation Society, and carried out by William Pearsall.^[14]

Talbot met with Paul Brooks of Houghton Mifflin in the fall of 1955. At the meeting Brooks, having been prompted by a book proposal from Rachel Carson raised the issue of the environmental impact of pesticides; and Talbot gave him some history of the concerns of the IUPN (as the IUCN then was) about it going back to their 1949 meeting at Lake Success.^[15][16] Carson's celebrated book, Silent Spring, appeared in 1962.

From 1959 when he married, to 1963, with breaks, Talbot was running an ecological project in East Africa, with his wife Marty.^[8] They were centrally interested in wildebeest, and used a "capture gun", a type of dart gun, to make studies that included tissue samples and parasites.^[17] While there Talbot was involved via Nick Arundel in discussions that led to the African Wildlife Foundation. He also helped convene the 1961 Arusha Conference at which game wardens discussed anti-poaching. They indicated the wildlife trade as a driver, and Talbot took that conclusion forward to the IUCM.^[18]

In 1965 Sidney Dillon Ripley hired Talbot to work for the Smithsonian Institution on its activities in international conservation, Marty Talbot also getting a research post.^[19] The Talbots worked in 1967 with the filmmaker Des Bartlett.^[20] From 1968 Talbot worked under Helmut Karl Buechner at the Smithsonian's Office of Ecology.^[21] In 1970, with David Challinor and Francis Raymond Fosberg, Talbot was involved in research on the Mekong Delta and the ecological impact of dams and irrigation.^[22]

Government scientist

The Council on Environmental Quality was created in 1970 by the National Environmental Policy Act. Russell Train, its first chair, recruited Talbot as one of its main advisers. He then worked towards the 1972 United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, and made sure that endangered species were considered, with the World Heritage Convention also endorsed by the United States.^[23] At the conference that preceded CITES, Talbot worked closely with Nathaniel Reed, and together they used that experience to contribute to the drafting of the Endangered Species Act of 1973.^[24]

The neologism "sustainability" in the broad ecological sense dates from that period, variously attributed to the Stockholm conference, to Thomas Sowell discussing Say's law, or (in the German language) to the Swiss civil engineer Ernst Basler (see de:wikt:Nachhaltigkeit). Talbot used it in a speech in 1980.^[25] The editors of Foundations of Environmental Sustainability (2008) wrote:

Lee Talbot's career marks, and substantially helped to bring about, the transition from the concept of conservation to the concept of sustainability.^[26]

Later life

Talbot was chosen Director-General of the IUCN in 1980, over Don McMichael and Adrian Phillips who was the IUCN Director of Programmes.^[27][28] He was met by immediate financial troubles. These he met by an outside audit and retrenchment, with voluntary reductions in senior staff, and by prioritizing the Conservation for Development Centre. He also sought external governmental funding.^[27]

In later life, Talbot was an academic at George Mason University, from about 1992.^[29]

Works

• A Look at Threatened Species (1960)^[30]
• The Wildebeest in Western Masailand, East Africa (1963), with Martha Talbot^[31]
• Conservation of the Hong Kong Countryside (1965), report with Martha Talbot. In 1965 Talbot and his wife were working for the International Commission on National Parks.^[32]
• The Meat Production Potential of Wild Animals in Africa: A Review of Biological Knowledge (1965), Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux^[33]
• Wild Animals as a Source of Food (1966)^[34]
• Conservation in Tropical South East Asia: Proceedings (1968), editor with Martha Talbot^[35]
• Man, Beast and the Land, NBC-TV film (1968); an account by Lee and Martha Talbot of their ecological studies in the Serengeti National Park.^[36][37][38]
• To Feed the Earth: Agro-ecology for Sustainable Development (1987) with Michael J. Dover, for the World Resources Institute.^[39]
• Biological Diversity and Forests, with Daniel Botkin, in Narendra P. Sharma (ed.), Managing the World's Forests: Looking for Balance Between Conservation and Development (1992). This was a World Bank paper from 1991.^[40]

Family

Talbot married on 16 May 1959 Martha Hayne (Marty), daughter of Francis Bourn Hayne and his wife Anna Walcott.^[41] She was founder with Elizabeth Cushman of the Student Conservation Association,^[42] had graduated from Vassar College in 1954, and had gone to work for the National Parks Association.^[41] The couple had met at the Sierra Club.^[43] They had two sons, Lawrence and Russell Merriam.^[41]

Notes

1. Baier, Lowell E. (25 July 2023). The Codex of the Endangered Species Act: The First Fifty Years. Rowman & Littlefield. p. xxxvii. ISBN 978-1-5381-1208-3.
2. "A tribute to Lee Merriam Talbot (1930 – 2021), IUCN". www.iucn.org. 17 May 2021.
3. "Lee Talbot - Endangered Species Coalition". endangered.org. 8 November 2013.
4. Palmer, T. S. (1954). "In Memoriam: Clinton Hart Merriam". The Auk. 71 (2): 131. doi:10.2307/4081567. ISSN 0004-8038. JSTOR 4081567.
5. "B&C Member Spotlight - Dr. Lee Merriam Talbot". Boone and Crockett Club. 26 April 2023.
6. Talbot, M. W.; Cronemuller, F. P. (1961). "Some of the Beginnings of Range Management". Journal of Rangeland Management (14): 95–102.
7. Godfrey, Anthony (2013). "The search for forest facts: a history of the Pacific Southwest Forest and Range Experiment Station, 1926-2000". Gen. Tech. Rep. PSW-GTR-233. Albany CA: U.S. Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Pacific Southwest Research Station. 542 p. doi:10.2737/PSW-GTR-233.
8. Smithsonian Research Opportunities. Office of Academic Programs, Smithsonian Institution. 1968. p. 164.
9. Adams, William Mark (2013). Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation. Earthscan. p. x. ISBN 978-1-84977-041-5.
10. Talbot, Lee Merriam; Talbot, Martha H. (1963). The Wildebeest in Western Masailand, East Africa. Wildlife Society. p. 13.
11. Bont, Raf De (11 May 2021). Nature's Diplomats: Science, Internationalism, and Preservation, 1920-1960. University of Pittsburgh Press. p. 239. ISBN 978-0-8229-8806-9.
12. Affairs, United States Congress Senate Committee on Interior and Insular (1959). National Wilderness Preservation Act: Hearings Before the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, United States Senate, Eighty-fifth Congress, Second Session, on S. 4028, a Bill to Establish a National Wilderness Preservation System for the Permanent Good of the Whole People, and for Other Purposes ... U.S. Government Printing Office. p. 601.
13. Nicholls, Henry (30 September 2010). The Way of the Panda: The Curious History of China's Political Animal. Profile. p. 120. ISBN 978-1-84765-291-1.
14. Adams, William (17 June 2013). Against Extinction: The Story of Conservation. Routledge. p. 1953. ISBN 978-1-136-57218-0.
15. Holdgate, Martin (8 April 2014). The Green Web: A Union for World Conservation. Routledge. p. 275 note 6. ISBN 978-1-134-18930-4.
16. Harroy, Jean-Paul (1950). Proceedings and papers : International Technical Conference on the Protection of Nature, Lake Success, NY, 22-29 August 1949. UNESCO.
17. Roosevelt, Kermit (1963). A Sentimental Safari. Knopf. p. 164.
18. Rockwood, Larry; Stewart, Ronald; Dietz, Thomas (4 June 2008). Foundations of Environmental Sustainability: The Coevolution of Science and Policy. Oxford University Press. pp. 42–43. ISBN 978-0-19-804226-6.
19. LaFollette, Marcel Chotkowski (10 January 2013). Science on American Television: A History. University of Chicago Press. p. 250 note 49. ISBN 978-0-226-92201-0.
20. Hartley, Jean (2010). Africa's Big Five and Other Wildlife Filmmakers: A Centenary of Wildlife Filming in Kenya. African Books Collective. p. 70. ISBN 978-9966-7244-9-6.
21. Smithsonian Institution (1969). Smithsonian Year. Smithsonian Institution Press. p. 289.
22. Research, United States Department of State Office of External (1969). Government-supported Research: International affairs. Office of External Research, Department of State. p. 47.
23. Rockwood, Larry; Stewart, Ronald; Dietz, Thomas (4 June 2008). Foundations of Environmental Sustainability: The Coevolution of Science and Policy. Oxford University Press. p. 32. ISBN 978-0-19-804226-6.
24. Rieser, Alison (15 July 2012). The Case of the Green Turtle: An Uncensored History of a Conservation Icon. JHU Press. p. 197. ISBN 978-1-4214-0619-0.
25. Sumner, Jennifer (1 January 2005). Sustainability and the Civil Commons: Rural Communities in the Age of Globalization. University of Toronto Press. pp. 79–80. ISBN 978-0-8020-7999-2.
26. Rockwood, Larry; Stewart, Ronald; Dietz, Thomas (4 June 2008). Foundations of Environmental Sustainability: The Coevolution of Science and Policy. Oxford University Press, USA. p. v. ISBN 978-0-19-530945-4.
27. Holdgate, Martin (8 April 2014). The Green Web: A Union for World Conservation. Routledge. pp. 163–165. ISBN 978-1-134-18930-4.
28. "Phillips, Adrian Alexander Christian". Who's Who. A & C Black. Retrieved 8 August 2023. (Subscription or UK public library membership required.)
29. "In memoriam: Lee Talbot". George Mason University.
30. Talbot, Lee Merriam; Commission, International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources Survival Service (1960). A Look at Threatened Species: A Report on Some Animals of the Middle East and Southern Asia which are Threatened with Extermination. Fauna Preservation Society for the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.
31. Talbot, Lee Merriam; Talbot, Martha H. (1963). The Wildebeest in Western Masailand, East Africa. Wildlife Society.
32. Owen, Bernie; Shaw, Raynor (1 October 2007). Hong Kong Landscapes: Shaping the Barren Rock. Hong Kong University Press. p. 112. ISBN 978-962-209-847-3.
33. Talbot, Lee Merriam (1965). The Meat Production Potential of Wild Animals in Africa: A Review of Biological Knowledge. Commonwealth Agricultural Bureaux.
34. Talbot, Lee Merriam (1966). Wild Animals as a Source of Food. U.S. Department of the Interior. Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife.
35. Talbot, Lee Merriam; Talbot, Martha H. (1968). Conservation in Tropical South East Asia: Proceedings. International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources.
36. "African Media Program". africanmedia.msu.edu.
37. "Screening and Reception for NBC Film "Man, Beast, and The Land"". Smithsonian Institution Archives. 10 May 1968.
38. Nature and Resources. UNESCO. 1970. p. 17.
39. Dover, Michael J.; Talbot, Lee M. (1987). To Feed the Earth: Agro-ecology for Sustainable Development. World Resources Institute. ISBN 978-81-204-0352-9.
40. Cleaver, Kevin M. (1992). Conservation de la Forêt Dense en Afrique Centrale Et de L'Ouest. World Bank Publications. p. 350. ISBN 978-0-8213-2256-7.
41. Who's Who in Science and Engineering 2008-2009. Marquis Who's Who. December 2007. p. 1779. ISBN 978-0-8379-5768-5.
42. "SCA Founder, Liz Putnam". Student Conservation Association.
43. Schleper, Simone (21 January 2020). "Understanding Women's Contributions to Ecological Field Research". Environmental History Now.

External links

• Lee M. Talbot, 2009 citation from The Explorers Club