Willard Gibbs Van Name (April 18, 1872 - April 25, 1959) was an American biologist and conservationist active in the national conservation movement from the 1920s into the 1950s. In 1929, he and Rosalie Edge established the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC) to combat inadequate wildlife protection policies and to expose the ineffectiveness of major conservation groups at the time, particularly the National Association of Audubon Societies (NAAS - now the National Audubon Society). In addition to successfully challenging NAAS, over two decades the ECC successfully advocated for the creation of Olympic (Washington) and Kings Canyon (California) National Parks, the expansion of existing national parks including Yosemite, and the preservation of other notable natural areas. The ECC was also effective in pressing for regulations to protect wildlife, including opposing the then prevalent practice of systematic predator eradication. The ECC was largely financed by Van Name in its early years.
In 1934, with financial assistance from Van Name, Edge established the world's first preserve for birds of prey - Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, near Kempton. Pennsylvania. The original lease of the land comprising the sanctuary was largely paid for by Van Name, originally as a loan but ultimately as a donation to purchase the property the following year.
Edge and the ECC were considered the most militant conservationist force of the time, serving as a model for the hard-core environmentalists of subsequent generations, according to long-time Sierra Club leader David Brower.
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Biography
Van Name was a biologist at the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in New York City specializing in invertebrates and crustaceans including ascidiacea and isopoda. He was an assistant in the Department of Invertebrate Zoology from 1916-21 and an associate curator from 1926 until his retirement in 1942. He wrote over two dozen articles, pamphlets, journals and books.
Van Name was born in 1872, the first son of Addison Van Name, an American scholar who was University Librarian of Yale University from 1865 to 1904. His mother Julia was the daughter of Josiah Willard Gibbs Sr. and the sister of Josiah Willard Gibbs, both Yale professors.
Van Name lived in New York for most of his life. He was unmarried. He retired from the AMNH in 1942 and became physically incapacitated after fracturing his hip in 1954. He died on April 26, 1959.
Conservation work
In 1929, Van Name and two colleagues from the AMNH, W. DeWitt Miller and Davis Quinn, published a pamphlet entitled A Crisis in Conservation: Serious Danger of Extinction of Many North American Birds. The pamphlet criticized NAAS for opposing measures to regulate and restrict hunting practices that were contributing to the precipitous drop in wild game bird populations in America during that time. Miller was killed in a motorcycle accident shortly after the pamphlet was published. The AMNH, which shared directors with the NAAS, directed Van Name to stop publishing independently unless he obtained prior approval.
Rosalie Edge, a society matron and suffragette who had become an avid birder in her 30s, read A Crisis in Conservation and was outraged. She contacted Van Name, and together they decided to form the ECC, in large part to give Van Name an outlet for publishing his conservation materials without using his name. Over the next two decades the ECC published over 100 pamphlets, many written by Van Name, advocating for various conservation causes.
Edge and the ECC were considered the most militant conservationist force of the time, a model for the dedicated conservationists of subsequent generations, according to conservationist Bill McKibben who wrote, "Edge is one of the people who made Rachel Carson and David Brower possible". Brower himself described Edge and the ECC as "the leading model of conservation advocacy of his youth".
Rosalie Edge was the public face of the ECC's conservation contributions, but Van Name was her "mentor and totally supported her work for many years" according to Edge's son Peter: "Each contributed enormously to their partnership, and together they could do what neither could do separately".
Irving Brant—a journalist who later became a conservation advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and to his Interior Secretary, Harold Ickes—was an early member of the ECC and wrote a number of its pamphlets, while also serving in the nominal position of treasurer. Brant's influence gave Edge and Van Name access to the highest levels of American government during the 1930s.
Brant describes Van Name as the "spiritual godfather and non-wealthy financial backer" of the ECC, adding: "Brilliantly endowed with insight and foresight, Van Name had been the first to call public attention to virtually every assault on natural resources in the 1920s".
Legacy
Multiple sources have described Van Name as a misanthropic, suspicious individual. Dyana Furmansky, Edge's biographer, describes Van Name as homosexual, which "may have been why conventional scientists and manly sportsmen distrusted him....". His friend Irving Brant later wrote of him that: "Experience bred a touch of bitterness in him, along with a tendency to mistake blindness and self-interest for malevolence". A 2006 National Park Service Administrative History of Olympic National Park describes Van Name as an "eccentric and reclusive bachelor" with a "quixotic and even desperate air" who "understood the idea of national parks in a very narrow way".
A 230-word New York Times obituary of Van Name references his career at the American Museum of Natural History and his many letters to the Times addressing various conservation issues. The obituary contains no mention whatsoever of the Emergency Conservation Committee, Rosalie Edge, or Hawk Mountain Sanctuary.
After the New York Times obituary was published, a letter from Irving Brant was published on May 24, 1959. It opened:
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.... 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.