Protector of the realm: If there is a ‘father of conservation policy', it is Julian Huxley?

Hindustan Times

19 hours ago

Call it the butterfly effect. Huxley expanded the meaning of the word 'heritage', and this laid the ground some of the most powerful initiatives of the otherwise largely ineffective United Nations. (Wikimedia)
If there are rare fish protected in certain oceans, and unique lepidoptera still flitting about in certain patches of rainforest, they can in many ways be traced to a single person.
In 1946, just after it was announced that he would be the first director-general of a new UN agency called Unesco (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), Julian Huxley wrote UNESCO: Its Purpose and its Philosophy, a manifesto for the body.
Its mission, the evolutionary biologist said, would be two-fold: to protect, preserve and present existing elements of world heritage, and to actively conserve nature and 'its living beauty'.
Huxley's manifesto was typical of the man: ambitious, far-sighted, daring, and rooted in his idea of an evolutionary humanism.
His mission statement would expand the meaning of the word 'heritage', and in doing so would yield some of the most powerful initiatives of the otherwise largely ineffective United Nations. One of these would be the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN, founded in 1948), whose Red List shapes wildlife conservation around the world. Another would be CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), born in 1975.
Huxley was born in 1887 in London. His paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, the scientist and educator who coined the word 'agnostic' and was known as Darwin's Bulldog for his fierce defence of the theory of evolution. His maternal great-grandfather was Thomas Arnold, the godlike headmaster of Rugby School (immortalised in the Thomas Hughes novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays).
One of Julian Huxley's siblings was Aldous Huxley, the writer, philosopher (and teacher at Eton, where he taught French to George Orwell); another, his half-brother Andrew Huxley, won the Nobel Prize in Medicine, in 1963.
In many ways, Julian Huxley represented the best of the classic British University tradition: a deep specialisation (in biology), a strong grounding in the classics and, according to one of his teachers, 'an instinct for the right word and the right cadence'. He even won the prestigious Newdigate Prize for poetry, previously won by Matthew Arnold and Oscar Wilde.
It was this ability to write well that made him one of the great popularisers of science in the 20th century. In 1923, he published Essays of a Biologist, a popular collection of writings on evolution, heredity and human society.
He worked with HG Wells and his son GP Wells, to write The Science of Life (1930), an ambitious attempt to make biology and evolution accessible to the layman.
His Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1942), combined genetics, systematics (understanding the evolutionary relationships between different species), palaeontology, embryology and comparative anatomy into a single sweeping framework, and yet remained accessible to the lay person.
Huxley was a committed eugenicist, believing that some people were genetically unfit for certain roles. In his words, '...a considerable percentage of young men have to be rejected for military service on grounds of physical weakness or mental instability, and… these grounds are often genetic in origin.' His ideas of eugenics, however, were never rooted in race. In his book, We Europeans: A Survey of 'Racial' Problems (1935), he argued that genetic and statistical findings confirmed that variations between individuals from within the same race were greater than the differences between races. In his 50s by the time of World War 2, he criticised Nazi ideas of race purity, calling them a cover for a vile political agenda.
As effective as he was as a scientist and communicator, his lasting legacy has been elsewhere.
'One of the greats'
There are many people who can claim the title of 'mother / father of conservation': Aldo Leopold, the American naturalist and author of A Sand County Almanac; Gifford Pinchot, the American forester and politician; Wangari Maathai, the Kenyan founder of the Green Belt Movement, among others. Huxley could well lay claim to being the father of conservation policy.
As head of Unesco, he hosted meetings and invited natural scientists to explore how this body could coordinate a global conservation effort. He used his vast personal network of scientists, museum directors, naturalists and colonial administrators, many of whom had been active in the pre-war International Office for the Protection of Nature, to create what would become the framework for IUCN.
That wasn't his first such achievement. Huxley, a passionate birder, co-founded the British Trust for Ornithology, in 1933. He was also instrumental to the formation of the UK's Council for Nature, in 1958. A series of articles he wrote for The Observer led directly to the formation of the World Wildlife Fund (now the World Wide Fund for Nature) in 1961.
Incidentally, he also narrated David Attenborough's first nature documentary, Coelacanth (1952), on the rediscovery of the prehistoric fish.
Huxley proposed border-defying World Parks, which today include the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park, established in 2002 across parts of Mozambique, Zimbabwe and South Africa. His push for a centralised, science-based system to track endangered species laid the groundwork for the IUCN Red List, which was born in 1964.
When he died in 1975, aged 87, John Owen, Tanzania's former director of national parks, called him 'one of the world's great men'.
People may be more familiar with the works of his more-famous brother, but Julian Huxley's imprint on our world is an indelible, and even more important, one.
(K Narayanan writes on films, videogames, books and occasionally technology)