1934
The Audubon Association's membership, decimated by the Depression and Rosalie Edge's vendetta against Pearson, falls from more than 7,000 in the late 1920s to 3,400. Pearson is forced out and John Baker, investment banker and birdwatcher, takes over as executive director. Publication of Roger Tory Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds converts thousands of
people to Baker's favorite pastime.
1935
The Audubon Association buys Bird-Lore from Frank Chapman. Roger Tory Peterson, Audubon's education director, redesigns the magazine. Kermit Roosevelt, TR's son, is named Audubon president and works closely with executive director Baker. Robert Marshall, with support from Aldo Leopold and Benton MacKaye, organizes The Wilderness Society.
1936
Baker opens the Audubon Nature Camp on Hog Island off the Maine coast, providing conservation education for adults. The National Wildlife Federation is founded at the suggestion of cartoonist and activist J.N. "Ding" Darling.
1937
Congress, with the Pittman-Robertson Act, uses an excise tax on sporting arms and ammunition to fund wildlife restoration projects. Waterfowl enthusiasts form Ducks Unlimited. Ornithologist James Tanner of Cornell receives an Audubon Research Fellowship for a study of the ivory-billed woodpecker, just as the bird is vanishing into extinction.
1938
The Audubon Association buys a building on Fifth Avenue in New York City, opposite the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
1939
A reorganization act in Congress transfers the Agriculture Department's Bureau of the Biological Survey to Interior, creating the new U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. John Baker funds studies on two more endangered species, the California condor by Carl Koford and the roseate spoonbill by Robert Porter Allen. The results are published later, along with the ivory-bill study, as the landmark Audubon Research Reports.
1940
President Roosevelt signs the Bald Eagle Protection Act. On the advice of a consulting firm, John Baker brings the Audubon Association into the modern era: Bird-Lore's name is changed to Audubon Magazine (later just plain Audubon) and the organization itself becomes the National Audubon Society.
1941
The Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. The Honolulu Audubon Society cancels its Christmas Bird Count because of travel restrictions in Hawaii. Participants on the San Diego count are stopped five times by military personnel on the lookout for "saboteurs and spies."
1942
An atomic reactor goes into operation at the University of Chicago. Eleanor King becomes editor of Audubon and, without John Baker's knowledge, soon finds enough money in the budget to begin paying reasonable fees to well-known writers such as Donald Culross Peattie and Edwin Way Teale.
1943
The Audubon Screen Tours debut this fall in Detroit. A success from the beginning, the program reaches a new audience in dozens of cities throughout the country with its conservation message. Top nature photographers, including Roger Tory Peterson, Olin S. Pettingill, Jr., and Karl Mazlowski, fill an important niche in these pre-TV days.
1944
Congress creates Big Bend National Park in Texas. John Baker, Audubon's
executive director for a decade, is named president by the board of directors and Carl Buchheister becomes his vice-president. Buchheister begins extensive trips to persuade local bird clubs to become Audubon "branches," taking a big step toward the chapter system.
1945
Audubon becomes partners with the Fish and Wildlife Service in the Whooping Crane Project, trying to salvage a species whose population has dwindled to near the vanishing point.
1946
Congress creates the Atomic Energy Commission to guide the awesome new technology toward peacetime uses. The International Whaling Commission is established but is in for rough sailing: General Douglas MacArthur, ruling over U.S.-occupied Japan, jump-starts that war-ravaged country's economy by putting it into the whaling business in a big way.
1947
A long-time Audubon goal is reached with the designation of Everglades National Park. Congress passes the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act, a flimsy defense against the rising postwar tide of powerful, long-lasting pesticides. The first Audubon Medal is presented to Hugh H. Bennett of the U.S. Soil Conservation Service. Audubon Field Notes, the quarterly "birder's bible," appears as a separate publication.
1948
The worst air pollution disaster in U.S. history occurs in Donora, PA, an industrial center where the intense smog is blamed for twenty deaths and at least 5,000 illnesses. After more than 100 failed tries in the past sixty years, Congress finally passes the first Water Pollution Control Act.
1949
A Sand County Almanac, a classic in the literature of nature and conservation written by Aldo Leopold, is published. Olaus Murie, president of The Wilderness Society, eloquently represents his organization and the Sierra Club in a public hearing to help stop a plan to build a dam that threatens Montana's Glacier National Park.
1950
Los Angeles begins its long struggle to force the auto industry to install emission-control devices on its products. A Ford spokesman replies assuringly to the city's complaints: "The Ford engineering staff, although mindful that automobile engines produce exhaust gases, feels that these waste vapors are dissipated in the atmosphere quickly and do not present an air pollution problem."
1951
The Nature Conservancy is organized, revolutionizing the efforts of nongovernmental organizations to preserve biological diversity by setting aside large tracts of natural land.
1952
The nation elects Dwight D. Eisenhower its president. When he appoints two ex-car salesmen to his cabinet, including Douglas "Giveaway" McKay as Interior Secretary, defeated Democratic candidate, Adlai E. Stevenson, remarks: "The New Dealers have all left Washington to make way for the car dealers."
1953
The National Audubon Society again moves its headquarters, to Fifth Avenue and 94th Street. The Society also adopts a flying great egret (one of the chief victims of turn-of-the-century plume hunters) as its symbol.
1954
Supreme Court Justice, William O. Douglas, opposing a highway that would replace the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, organizes a protest hike. Members of The Wilderness Society and National Audubon Society join Douglas on the 189-mile hike along the canal's tree-shaded towpath, and wide media coverage helps trash the plan. Audubon buys the last great stand of bald cypress in Florida's Corkscrew Swamp to establish the crown jewel of its sanctuary system.
1955
Conservationists build one of the most successful political coalitions of the era to fight the proposed Echo Park Dam in Utah's Dinosaur National Monument. This water-storage project would have flooded isolated canyons on the Green and Yampa rivers, but the five-year campaign prevents another loss akin to that of Hetch Hetchy.
1956
The Water Pollution Control Act is strengthened, providing money to build treatment plants. Marie Aull gives 70 acres in Dayton, Ohio, and the Aullwood Audubon Center and Farm is dedicated a year later. Audubon editor, John K. Terres, publicizes huge losses among migrant birds striking the Empire State Building. The building's management turns off the fixed-beam light atop the tower and installs rotating warning lights during migration.
1957
The Public Health Service, the federal agency charged with regulating water pollution, opens hearings on the wastes from packing plants along the Missouri River. Testimony describes blood, hooves, hair, and paunch manure from hundreds of thousands of slaughtered animals, mingled with raw domestic sewage, along a stretch of river tapped by over two million people for their drinking water.
1958
Stung by the launch of the first two manmade satellites in space by the Soviet Union (Sputnik I and II), the U.S. launches Explorer I and begins a nationwide drive to step up science education to help keep pace with Cold War foes.
1959
Queen Elizabeth II joins President Eisenhower in opening ceremonies for the St. Lawrence Seaway, which provides access from the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes--alas, for invading pest organisms such as the zebra mussel, as well as for ships. Carl W. Buchheister succeeds John Baker as president of the National Audubon Society.
1960
Charles H. Callison, a top environmental lobbyist in Washington, joins Audubon. He will focus on public land issues and help push through Congress the wilderness bill (which was finally passed in 1964). Alexander "Sandy" Sprunt, the Society's research director, heads its Continental Bald Eagle Project to chart the numbers, reproductive results, and sharp decline of that species as DDT spreads through ecosystems.
1961
The pollution of shellfish beds around Raritan Bay is blamed for a hepatitis outbreak among 1,000 New Jersey residents. Among new conservation organizations founded this year are the World Wildlife Fund--U.S. and the Society of Tympanuchus Cupido Pinnatus Ltd., dedicated to the preservation of the prairie chicken.
1962
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring is published, and will become the all-time environmental classic. Congress amends the Bald Eagle Protection Act of 1940 to give similar protection to the golden eagle. Ironically, the impetus for the revision is that golden eagles look like the immatures of our national bird.
1963
A massive fish and wildlife kill occurs
in the lower Mississippi River. "The bodies of turtles floated on the waters," The New Republic reports. "Tough 150-pound garfish and catfish weighing 70 pounds surfaced too weak to move. Crabs lay along the banks. Thousands of cranes and robins lay dead." Laboratory tests from some of the estimated five million dead fish implicate endrin, an insecticide related to DDT.
1964
Eight years of persuasion and invective, plus sixty-six versions of the bill, finally result in passage of the Wilderness Act. It amounts to a directive from Congress that federal agencies resist political pressure and save many large tracts of magnificent wild areas from cutting, mining, and other intrusions. The long campaign's "spiritual leader," Howard Zahniser of The Wilderness Society, dies three months before the bill's passage.
1965
Congress approves the Garrison Diversion Project, a colossal billion-
dollar-plus boondoggle mandating 3,000 miles of canals, pipelines, drains, and reservoirs for the benefit of a few hundred North Dakota farmers. Taxpayers protest it will cost at least $700,000 for every beneficiary. Audubon will spend the rest of the century fighting the project in its various guises.
1966
Les Line becomes editor of Audubon, directing a makeover that will soon prompt The New York Times to call it "the most beautiful magazine in the world." With an extensive list of benefactors assembled in part by board members, and the magazine as a lure, membership soars from 36,000 in 1965 to 40,000 at the beginning of 1967, and to 60,000 only a year later.
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