From The Archives Of The Struggle Against Climate Change And Animal Preservation-East Coast Version-Professor Johnny Allan-Climate Guru-Moves East

From The Archives Of The Struggle Against Climate Change And Animal Preservation-East Coast Version-Professor Johnny Allan-Climate Guru-Moves East                

By Bart Webber

Reputation is a hard dollar, no question. Take that of one Professor Johnny Allan, Emeritus U/Cal-San Diego who back in the 1970s was treated as a living god among the environmentally conscious, the ecologists, the Sierra Club bureaucracy who used him almost like a poster child to raise funds (if not the rank and file who barely knew his name despite his fame). For those who do not remember his name he was the first to suggest that places like zoos start putting out canisters for donations to endangered species (starting with his own beloved San Diego Zoo where before he was banned from entry was treated with the same distant but real respect as say the Pope of the Catholic religion, pardon if any other religions have a Pope but the Catholics are the only ones I know of what have such a figure, only one I think ever since maybe Avignon or when Attila the much maligned Hun came to town and busted everything in town).

The good professor built on that solid foundation by proposing that zoos, and here he expanded his reach which is how Sierra Club-like organization worshipped at his feet, and concerned animal protection groups like the various save the whale, save the polar bears, save the almost extinct rocker macaw, the save the also almost extinct bantam leopard organizations spruce up their operations by featuring their “poster child” animals on their donation literature. (Ironically, today despite the good professor’s fade from prominence and in some quarters his bad odor, more on this below, those groupings since ceaselessly do such features on their pervasive and endless contribution literature. Without acknowledging who tuned them in to the gold.)

Today, maybe literarily today, we are so wedded to the very real idea that climate change is knocking us for a loop that we forget that such efforts to fight the worst effects of the crisis have been going on for a long time. As I have mentioned previously Johnny was one of the key leaders who noticed something was dramatically wrong back in the 1950s when he was doing research for the government around the effects of nuclear weapons and power plants on planet Earth, a figure out of the mold of John Muir, guys like that. Johnny was one of the early advocates of the very sound idea that we do something about the matter before it got too late, too expensive or we didn’t have the technological resources to combat whatever affront we had made to Mother Nature.

There is more to the Johnny Allan story though and it also relates to the San Diego Zoo with which he was associated with for many years after being stonewalled in government service by the craven bureaucracy which would not publish his results. Johnny put in many years of thoughtful study thinking through the idea of making animals in captivity more comfortable, more in tune with their natural habitats as a way to dramatize what would happen if things were not changed, changed quickly. One of the first things he protested about was the idea of bringing polar bears and penguins to the zoo which would have entailed a vast array of structures and conditions that did not make sense in a semi-tropical climate. I believe he got an award for that long drawn out effort. That struggle against changing habitats became the central thrust of some of his later work when he got, finally got, the zoo (and others followed suit) to make the spaces the animals were caged in more like home. With the added proviso that prominent captions tell the story of those back in the wilderness who are being pushed out or otherwise driven to near extinction.  

Those efforts alone would have assured Johnny an eternal place in the ecological pantheon except for what appears to have been a fatal gene in his makeup. Not only was Johnny when young a brilliant student and polymath but a sneak thief, a confidence man, in short a bullshit artist. Johnny had grown up dirt poor in the rural area south of Stone Mountain in a place that had no name and where the major religion was evangelical snake-handlers and people speaking in tongues so he was from early on was walking contradiction, had his wanting habits on as much as his search for some climate change solution and the like. I won’t go into the details of the six million scams he was involved in while with the Cedar Mill gang working out of Stone Mountain when he was a hungry student, somebody did a book on it so look it up. (Somebody eventually brought that gang low by ratting them out to save his own ass but by then Johnny had left for school and bigger opportunities-legal and illegal.) What brought Johnny down in the end was his inability to separate out his brilliant ideas from his greenhead mad monk desires. Despite his meek demeanor and soft speech, a trademark throughout his career apparently he could not help himself when “gold” was discovered.

Nobody will ever know the full extent of the scams the good professor ran since the government, state and federal, refused to prosecute based on lack of evidence, criminal evidence. What Johnny saw when he looked at the results of pitching the endangered species angle hard by various concerned groups was that their contributions expanded exponentially. With larceny in his heart, and we will leave it at that since no criminal charges were brought, Johnny set up a number of ecological friendly or endangered species organizations like “save the barking puma,” “stop the Artic melt,” things like that using organizational names like High Sierra Club, Greenspace and asking for donations to a post office box in Mendocino. He set himself up as treasurer after creating various bank accounts. The biggest asset though was to pitch his name to the project, to the mailed literature. The money kept rolling in.

When a few contributors who had been solicited several times asked about progress and got stalled at first and then no reply they put investigators and lawyers on the case. Here is the beauty of Johnny operation, a solo job which made sense, he would actually give money to say the Sierra Club or some group doing endangered species work. When the books were checked the ratio of dough given to “administrative” costs was about one to ten. Many, many trips by him and companions to exotic places and some not so exotic were listed.  Nice-for Johnny and whoever. Rather than face the bad publicity and cut real donation flows everybody balked when the feds wanted them “to play ball with the law.” Moreover, Johnny kept his job, got his retirement pay and all.

That is not the end of the story though-the last anybody heard Johnny had tried to interest the folks at Mystic Seaport into making a Sea World-like operation to increase revenue. In a sign, perhaps, of senility or cunning he applied to run the operation and be chief ambassador for the place (see photograph below used in his resume)