From The Archives Of The Struggle Against Climate Change And Animal Preservation-West Coast Version

From The Archives Of The Struggle Against Climate Change And Animal Preservation-West Coast Version

By Bart Webber

Yeah, today I am again on the soapbox (in the old days, the very old days the ordinary old days being my youthful times in the 1960s orators of all kinds would go to a place like Central Park or Boston Common and harangue the crowds on anything from the virtues of socialism to the value of some homemade remedy sold cheaply). As we swelter in the excessive summer heat I want to once again climb on the climate change issue and particularly as it relates to the effect on animal habitats and routines. 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 one of the key leaders who noticed something was dramatically wrong was Johnny Allan, 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.

Johnny Allan, he was from the South so Johnny named not John, had a fistful of degrees and a few awards although not the big one which would have helped his “street cred” as he started sounding the warnings back in the early 1970s. Of course Johnny’s name will always be associated with the now overdone use of animals to get donations to help save them. Johnny was worried about what all the changes would do to the animals in the wilderness when their sources of food got mixed up. Johnny had the very bright idea of going to the people who ran the San Diego Zoo and asked them to install many canisters around the park asking kids, really parents but pitched to kids to throw their surplus coins from their purchases into the kiddy.

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. Johnny put in many years of thoughtful study (see photograph below) thinking through the idea of making animals in captivity more comfortable, more in tune with their natural habitats. 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 effort. That struggle against changing habitats became the central thrust 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. I remember one demonstration inspired by his work by a bunch of UCal/San Diego students protesting that the giraffe should have much more room and larger trees to feed from. Yeah, they don’t make them like Johnny Allan anymore. He did his stuff for free, for love unlike the paid guys these days.