Nature's Scion

A critical compendium of the life, work, and photo-documentary archive of American zoologist Harold Coolidge Jr., whose pioneering study of primates and leadership role in co-founding the first international conservation organization helped shape the global environmental movement.

Told through transcripts of interviews conducted in the years following Coolidge receiving the J. Paul Getty Award for Conservation (1980), Nature's Scion centers on the first-hand account of Coolidge’s expeditions to Liberia, Congo, and Southeast Asia, shedding light on the moral responsibility of human encounters with animals in the wild and on how a movement originating in the ethos of hunting and the patronage of colonialism became focused on stewardship and global cooperation.

Coolidge dedicated his life to the animals he studied, later co-founding the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) after the Second World War. His interviews offer insight into the people who became "nature's diplomats" as well as intimately connecting readers to postwar institutions that have altered our laws and perception of natural environments. Recounting the Harvard African Expedition to Liberia and the Belgian Congo in 1926–27 and the 1928–29 Kelley-Roosevelt Asian Expedition, which he led for Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History, Coolidge takes us into the most exciting and controversial realms of species research and exploration. Understood within the changing context of colonization in the early 20th century, the expeditions Coolidge participated in were not only important for our understanding of the animals themselves, but also for the role of medical science in natural history and the emergence of institutionally separate fields of study.

Coolidge’s account allows us to understand the origins of modern-day conservation as a movement pioneered by a community of men who were not just passionate conservationists, but also hunters and outdoorsmen. While Coolidge’s own views about the Western presence in Africa and Southeast Asia keep pace with social developments of his time, as they shift and modernize, they demonstrate achievements of involving more stakeholders and voices. Additional framing content is offered by Chief Conservation Officer of re:wild, Russell Mittermeier and professor of art, Miles Coolidge.

Harold Jefferson Coolidge Jr. (1904–1985) was a highly-recognized American primatologist and a founding director of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), where he served as president from 1966–72. He became director of the Pacific Science Board of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences for 25 years after serving in the OSS, where he was awarded the Legion of Merit in 1945. He was a curator at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology and one of his many papers forms the basis of the modern taxonomy of gorillas. In 1980, Coolidge was awarded the J. Paul Getty Wildlife Conservation Prize. As a descendant of Thomas Jefferson, he is buried at Monticello. See Wikipedia for a complete bio. Russell A. Mittermeier is Chief Conservation Officer of Re:wild (formerly Global Wildlife Conservation). He served as President of Conservation International from 1989 to 2014, then Executive Vice-chair from 2014 to 2017. He specializes in the fields of primatology, herpetology, biodiversity and conservation of tropical forests, and advocates for species survival around the world as well as eco-tourism. In addition to other central roles with the WWF and IUCN, he served as a Vice President of the IUCN from 2009–12. See Wikipedia for a complete bio. Miles Coolidge is a Canadian-American photographer and professor of art at the University of California, Irvine. His photographs, recognized for his focus on subjects that blur the line between architecture and landscape, have been exhibited by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim, NY; LACMA and MOCA, Los Angeles; the Albright-Knox Museum, SF MOMA; the Third Triennial of Photography, Graz, Austria; Socrates Sculpture Park, Queens, NY; and the Fort Lauderdale/Hollywood International Airport, Broward County, Florida, among many other national and international venues. He lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Rebecca Hardin is professor of sustainable development in the Keough School of Global Affairs at the University of Notre Dame. She is a core faculty affiliate of the Keough School's Pulte Institute for Global Development. Hardin collaborates with philanthropic institutions such as the New America Foundation and its Public Interest Technology University Network. Her commitment to open software ecosystems began in actual ecosystems of the Central African Republic while a Peace Corps volunteer and Fulbright researcher in the 1990s. Her dissertation research in contemporary and colonial archives unearthed patterns over time in local and transnational geopolitics of environmental stewardship and exploitation in Equatorial Africa.