When Earth Day approaches, we tend to think about the leading figures in conservation: John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Walt Disney.
If that last name seems out of place, it may be because Disney’s role as a conservationist is highly debated and historically murky—in large measure because Disney himself publicly and repeatedly shunned the title of conservationist. But, dig a little deeper, and a picture emerges of a man who cared tremendously about conservation and used his position to communicate environmentally-progressive messages to his audiences. Disney was the ultimate stealth conservationist.
The centerpiece of Disney’s conservation work was his True Life Adventures films. This collection of over a dozen short and feature-length nature documentaries brought nature to millions of people from 1948 (Seal Island) well into the 1960s. From the beginning, Disney pushed back against the idea that these films had an educational purpose. His 1948 Los Angeles Times announcement of the series emphasized that these films would be “keyed to entertainment,” and that the “unique material already being edited will be distinctively Disney in character.” In 1954 Disney added, “We’d have to do the films our way or not at all. Anything carrying the Disney names was going to mean entertainment—this I insisted on.”
Yet even as entertainment was emphasized, early reports suggested that education was a conscious and deliberate goal: “…our most resourceful storyteller premises his whole approach on the proposition that people—picture audiences—want to know things rather than escape realities.” By 1957, the studio had embraced its role as an educator. In fact, a Disney executive told 400 Los Angeles teachers and school administrators that “fifty per cent of Walt Disney’s forthcoming productions will have educational implications,” all while pointing to images from the Disney nature films.
From the beginning, Disney ensured that his films were made in collaboration with serious conservation and educational organizations. 1952’s Water Birds was filmed in cooperation with the National Audubon Society and the Denver Museum of Natural History. The Museum’s director received “top billing” along with “other naturalists who had photographed footage used,” as was trumpeted by the museum’s own annual report that year. Many of the bird sound recordings in the films came from Cornell University’s Laboratory of Ornithology. Similarly, White Wilderness was made in cooperation with various branches of the Canadian Wildlife Service.
PictureTitles from the series demonstrate their educational nature.
Disney went further still.
Daniel Gifford celebrates an unsung conservationist:
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Anna Feigennbaum at the Atlantic takes us through the century long history of tear gas: In August 1914, French troops fired tear-gas grenades into German trenches along the border between the two countries. While the exact details of this first tear-gas launch are fuzzy, historians mark the Battle of the Frontiers, as World War I’s first clashes between France and Germany came to be known, as the birthday of what would become modern tear gas. Sheena Morrison is writing a three part history of the American Hobo. Follow this link for part one. “Missing Inventor Found in Reno Hobo Jungle,” read the 1958 headline of the Tucson Daily Citizen. Elmer Meukel, a 41-year-old self-taught engineer, who deserted his wife and three children, was found by a reporter after three months of life as a hobo, hitchhiking and freight-hopping in one of the transient hobo communities. “Bills were piling up,” explained Meukel. From the article it is not clear whether he intended to drift indefinitely or – like the hobo of the late nineteenth century – left his home in search of work. Two hundred years ago this summer, in the midst of midterm election campaigns, the Democratic NH Patriot printed in Concord raged against their arch-nemesis Daniel Webster and the Federalist peaceniks who opposed their war against Britain: The federalist tell us that the first Embargo destroyed our commerce, when it is notorious that this measure prevented millions from capture under the British orders and French decrees. The embargo was not laid till those orders and decrees swept us of every vestige of commerce. The inland farmers who led supported the Democratic Party and led the charge for war with Britain in 1812 over *cough* sailors rights, did pretty well out of the conflict. What were those seacoast Federalists whining about, anyway? From Concord's NH Patriot, June 24, 1814 The Ruinous War! In the 1960s the Nashua River was starved of oxygen, biologically dead, and one of the ten most polluted rivers in the United States. The sludge-filled river, which flows through New Hampshire and Massachusetts, was a different color every day, depending on what was discharged that day. People could smell its stench from a mile away. Continued below the fold -
I wasn't sure exactly when I would run up against out and out racism as I read through the NH Patriot. With the February 1st, 1814 edition I came across a whisper of the characteristic denigration of African-Americans which would become so extraordinarily pronounced and relentless in the following decades. Following the American Revolution there was an enormous momentum toward the extension of rights to all citizens. Slavery was peacefully extinguished throughout the North. In the South a huge wave of emancipations led some to believe that slavery there would naturally go the same way, eventually worn away by the salutary influences of the new Republic. Women were even granted the right to vote in New Jersey. As Democracy really took hold in America, and the polite maneuverings of Jefferson and Hamilton gave way to a real party system dominated by printers and professional political machines competing for the votes of white men, women and minorities were shoved to the side. Piece by piece, the right to vote fell apart where it had daringly been extended, and became the exclusive property of European men. In previous posts I've outlined how the Democratic-Republicans held, as a central belief, the idea that Federalist elites were pro-British and anti-Democratic aristocrats who were more than a little friendly to the idea of breaking up the American union - then the only republican nation in a world of kings. The Hartford Convention did nothing to dissuade them. In an uncertain and intense political conflict with the Federalist Party at the state level, NH Democrats were locked in a recurrent defense of southern, slave-holding Democratic Presidents against their New England detractors. The conviction that abolition was a wedge issue cynically employed by their political enemies to exalt aristocrats, weaken the Democratic Party and break up the union of the states remained firmly in place until well after the Civil War. And so the routine and unrelenting denigration of African-Americans as unworthy of freedom and political participation became for the editors of the NH Patriot synonymous with their advocacy of liberty and democracy. In this piece the editors of the NH Patriot take on the supporters of the Federalist governor John Gilman, who was elected amid the backlash against the regionally unpopular War of 1812. A puny federal paper says, the character of Governor Gilman ‘has been established more than a score of years, and has gathered brightness with every year.’ It is the nature of things valuable, as well as those good for nothing, to rust when out of use. The finest gold, the most inestimable diamond, before it has received its polish, appears of no more value than the bar of lead or the insignificant pebble. We shall by and by see whether the political character of Governor Gilman can bear a decent scouring – whether the outside rust does not give place to inside blackness and corruption, more disgraceful than the dark tinge of an Ethiopean skin – whether he who was worth the “plumage of a swan” is anything more than a “pampered goose? The following letter appeared in the NH Patriot, printed in Concord, on July 20, 1813 as the War of 1812 raged. It would be two more decades before newspapers began hiring reporters. It was in snippets like these that the public followed wars and other events: Extract of a letter from captain Cooper to Charles K. Mallory, esq. Lt. Governor of Virginia |