May 6, 1999 | Read Time: 5 minutes
As the world’s biological riches continue to decline at an alarming rate, an unusual opportunity presents itself for donors who may be accustomed to endowing buildings, schools, and programs for the good of the community: endowing a species.
Traditionally, species often have been named for the naturalists who discovered them, or sometimes for the people who sponsored the scientific expedition on which the discovery took place. But why not name newfound or threatened life forms for donors committed to their study and preservation? Surely that would be a longer-lasting legacy than an edifice of concrete, or an endowed university chair.
The need is great. According to the conservation biologist Edward O. Wilson, at least 27,000 species a year are becoming extinct worldwide. That’s 74 a day, or three an hour. Twenty per cent of the world’s freshwater fish species are either gone or threatened, while 50 per cent of fish species in the United States are imperiled. Nearly 700 American plant species are in imminent danger of disappearing. If we do not take major steps to avert this extinction crisis, writes Professor Wilson, the earth will lose a fourth of all its species in the next 50 years — with rates of extinction rising as more and more habitat is lost.
Much could be done with fairly modest financial support to halt this terrible decline. A donor, for example, could decide to support a particular type of work designed to find out all that can be known about just one endangered organism. Donors could finance naturalists’ efforts to discover what the species is and how it relates to other species, or scientists’ efforts to study its chemical makeup to learn whether it might have useful purposes for humans, such as helping to treat disease.
Another option for a donor would be to finance the publication of articles and books about the species and its place in the biosphere, thereby promoting public awareness of the species’ importance as part of an interconnected web of life. If a donor is truly committed to supporting even one threatened species, then that donor deserves to put his or her name on it so everyone will know that the money is going to an important cause.
The idea certainly is not unprecedented. BirdLife International, a British charity, last year received $105,000 at auction for the naming rights to a Colombian bird. The money was used to support a 3,000-acre reserve in the Colombian jungle, and the winning bidder, Bernard Master, gave the bird his own last name.
And just two months ago, the ornithologist Bret Whitney donated to the Texas Audubon Society the naming rights to a species of antshrike — a robin-sized bird with blue and orange plumage and a strange call — that he had discovered in Brazil. Although Mr. Whitney subsequently withdrew his offer after no one met the Audubon Society’s minimum auction bid of $200,000, the charity is exploring ways that interested donors can earmark their donations for specific species. Their “watchlist” on the Internet displays many threatened species and describes the efforts in which the society is engaged to prevent habitat fragmentation, promote education, and combat pollution and other adverse effects of development in the protection of many well-known but imperiled birds.
Birds are an entry point for conservation for many of us. But how might one endow, say, the jaguar? Buy habitat in order to save it. Purchase wildlands that are currently on the market, getting them out of the hands of developers before it is too late. Much of the terrain needed by these magnificent and rare animals is presently for sale — at prices as low as $20 an acre. Indeed, a preserve of 200,000 acres or more could realistically be created through wildlands philanthropy in an area of northern Sonora, Mexico, that is deemed by conservation biologists to be critical for the recovery of these animals, whose range extends into the southern United States. To have jaguars roaming our desert mountains is a symbol as powerful as the bald eagle that graces our official seals and our currency.
Wildlands philanthropy is nothing new or radical. It is among the most venerable of ways that species and spaces have been protected throughout American conservation history. Acadia National Park was secured by the wealthy conservationist George Dorr. The Grand Tetons, St. John in the Virgin Islands, Redwood National Park, and other sites exist due to the generosity of the Rockefellers. Ted Turner and Jane Fonda have preserved more than a million acres in the American West. And Doug Tompkins, former president of the retail-clothing chain Esprit, who has now left the business world to devote himself full time to wildlands philanthropy through his Foundation for Deep Ecology, and his wife, Kris, have saved over a million acres in southern Chile and Argentina, including the 700,000-acre Pumalin Project, a stronghold of the famed 3,000-year-old Alerce tree.
Conservation knows no borders. Hundreds of regional and local land trusts have worked hard to secure wild habitats, as have the larger land-acquisition groups, including American Land Conservancy, the Conservation Fund, The Nature Conservancy, the Open Space Institute, and The Trust for Public Land. Still, there is so much land for sale that is of greatest value for species other than our own. Conservation buyers — people of means willing to invest in the capital of life itself — have boundless opportunities.
A donor who takes a stand for one species will soon discover the interconnectedness of life. To save a species, we must save ecosystems, the places in nature in which they live. Concern for a beleaguered individual species, be it a magnificent tiger or a nearly invisible snail darter, should lead rapidly to concern for the whole natural and human community — which is what philanthropy is about. Working together, we may easily blend our individual contributions into unified public support for the whole environment and its entwined systems.
John Davis is a program officer for biodiversity and wilderness at the Foundation for Deep Ecology, in San Francisco. David Rothenberg is an associate professor of philosophy at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, in Newark.
