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By Susan Breitkopf
This article was published in Museum, January/February issue of 2008.
In 1896, a group from Chicago’s Field Museum packed up their gear and sailed to Africa on the first natural history museum expedition to the continent. The goal was to document the wildlife of the “Dark Continent” and bring back samples of fauna that people in Illinois would never see in their backyards. The mission was a success: The researchers returned with 200 mammal skins, 300 birds, a mass of reptiles, “half a barrel of fish” and all manner of skeletons, not to mention weapons, utensils and garments.
It was a victory for conservation of African species, they wrote. Then zoology curator Daniel Giraud Elliot reported back to the museum’s director from what is now Somalia, “We will make the [museum] lick all creation as a scientific museum and a Mecca for all naturalists to visit.”
Although education was a noble cause, even 112 years ago there were concerns about extinction. “They recognized the problems even from that expedition. The leader was writing about the disappearing wildlife,” says Mark Alvey, the museum’s current administrative director and unofficial historian. “They didn’t necessarily see the irony. A lot of those guys wore both hats. They wanted to collect but saw it should be limited.”
The Field staff and those at other natural history museums of the late 19th century viewed their spoils as part of the educational mission. How else would Windy City schoolchildren see these wonders? “That was the end of the Colonial age,” says Alvey. “The people from the West still thought they could go in and do whatever they wanted.”
The sense and sensibility of natural history collecting has undergone a thorough transformation, taking on a heightened sense of ethical, oral and environmental responsibility. The Field Museum, in many respects, has led the way. The exploitation and outright poaching of a bygone era have been replaced by collaborative partnerships, mutual instruction and a newfound respect. And, not insignificantly, a new hope for the future.
Today, the changes are enormous. Archaeologists and curators at natural history museums are excruciatingly careful to respect host countries and environments where they conduct research. While large art museums, such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Los Angeles’s Getty Museum have recently returned antiquities that were identified as ill-gotten, natural history museums have largely been able to steer clear of such controversies. One reason is that natural history collections’ value is weighed differently. A dried leaf taken from Kenya may be invaluable for the clues it gives us about the ecosphere, but it does not have the same market value as a Greco-Roman-era vase.
But the days of natural history museums flying under the radar could come to an end if a country of origin starts asking for the return of specimens taken in the pre-permit days. While natural history museums are largely out of the current conversation, botanists, mainly at pharmaceutical companies, are seeing pushback from countries that want a piece of the pie on discoveries that lead to big money.
“Patrimony issues are big in the botanical world,” says Michael Dillon, chair and curator of the Field’s botany department. He tells of a flower commonly known as a Peruvian Lily that the Dutch took from Peru. It is now the most common plant in restaurant floral arrangements and translates to some serious bank that the Peruvians will never see a dime of. The powers of Peru are taking measures to prevent a similar occurrence.
Pop culture tips its hat to what Dillon calls “baling hay”—going into a country and grabbing samples, no questions asked. Indiana Jones, a fictional archaeologist at a Bay Area university, risks life and limb to pillage from native people. In the Raiders of the Lost Ark, the audience is led to believe that Jones is in the right—that the natives have no right to hoard their cherished golden god—one that their forebears set up elaborate pitfalls to protect. Jones fails at his attempt and returns empty-handed to California, where the local museum curator visits him. “I’m sure everything you do for the museum conforms to the [fictional] International Treaty for the Protection of Antiquities,” says the curator with a sly smile.
John Simmons came into the picture in the waning days of the Indiana Jones era. The former collections manager of the Natural History Museum and Biodiversity Research Center at University of Kansas, Lawrence, and now a museum consultant, has done fieldwork in Latin America for 32 years. “I’ve seen the pendulum swing from one end to the other,” he says. In 1971, he went to the Amazon to collect. “You didn’t need permits; you showed up and did what you wanted. That’s just the way it was done.”
What happened? Well, a series of events, really. In large part the difference was the passage in 1972 of Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species (CITES), which ordained that all collecting had to fit with the host country’s laws or collectors could be prosecuted. CITES, which has been signed and ratified by 168 nations, was drafted as a result of a resolution adopted in 1963 at a meeting of members of the World Conservation Union. The text of the convention was signed by representatives of 80 countries in Washington D.C., in 1973, and the treaty came into force in 1975.
An early predecessor of CITES, the Lacey Act, passed in 1901, did curtail insensitive and immoral behavior to some extent, but it was originally intended to rein in trade in feathers. “People were slaughtering any bird with cool feathers,” says Simmons. “[The act] was intended to protect migratory birds and then was extended to include all plants and animals.” Although it was not widely enforced, it stipulated that the collector—read: curator—could be held legally responsible.
The 1972 Rio Accords also had some impact, although the U.S. has never been a signatory. Discussion at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment led to the United Nations Environment Programme, which put forward the concept of sustainable development as an alternative approach to one based purely on economics. Subsequent years and summits laid a foundation for a partnership between developing and more industrialized countries based on mutual needs and common interests. In the U.S., it was the Endangered Species Act, passed in 1973 and designed in part to hem in economic growth and development that puts creatures at risk for extinction.
Not that the environment is unrelated to natural history museums, but the most relevant outcome of the Rio Accords was the Convention on Biological Diversity. Governments, with the exception of some—notably the U.S.—agreed that the integration of environmental and development concerns will lead to improved standards and better protected and managed ecosystems. Also in the mix was this: “States have a sovereign right to exploit their own resources . . . [but] not cause damage to the environment of other States.” In other words, your actions—even on your own land—may affect others.
And those are the rules that Dillon and others live by. He has done field research for three decades and currently studies the flowering plants of the Andes in Peru and Chile. He has seen evidence of change firsthand. “In 1978, there was not a single paper authored by a Peruvian scientist in 60 years of research,” says Dillon, who looks the part of the swashbuckling field researcher with his mustache waxed to turn up at the ends, yet is betrayed by his warm demeanor. “We wanted to bring Peruvians into the process. There’s a much greater sense of community between scientists and host countries.”
The Field Museum mission, as of 1992, sets up the institution to study nature and culture in all its “diversity, similarities and interdependencies” to “better understand, respect, and celebrate” all that is natural. The museum’s scientists research in 70 countries worldwide. Collections total 23 million specimens and objects centering on anthropology, biology, geology and zoology. Incorporated in 1893 as the Columbian Museum of Chicago, it originally housed biological and anthropological collections, such as a wombat, a Tasmanian devil and an ivory-billed woodpecker, for the World’s Columbian Exposition. In 1905, the name was changed to the Field Museum of Natural History to honor the museum’s first major benefactor, Marshall Field, and to reflect its focus on the natural sciences. In 1921, it moved to its present site on the lakefront Museum Campus that includes the John G. Shedd Aquarium and Adler Planetarium.
But the Field was a museum that almost wasn’t. Toward the end of the world’s fair, Edward E. Ayer, the museum’s first president, tried to gather funding and support to keep the museum open. Retail magnate Marshall Field was a primary target, but Ayer’s many asks were stonewalled. “I don’t know anything about a museum and I don’t care to know anything about a museum,” said Field. “I’m not going to give you a million dollars.”
Ayer persisted. “You can sell dry goods until Hell freezes over . . . and in twenty-five years you will be . . . absolutely forgotten,” Ayer told him. “From the perspective of natural history, you have the privilege of being the educational host to the millions of people who will follow us in the Mississippi Valley. . . . [Chicago’s children] haven’t the remotest opportunity of learning about the ordinary things they see and talk about and hear about every day of their lives.”
To that Field replied, “You have been here forty-five minutes—you get out of here.”
Yet what Ayer said must have struck a chord because Field eventually forked over the money. And now his legacy lives on in the museum, while his eponymous department store was recently bought out and turned into a Macy’s.
Back in the early days of the Field, funding research and recovery expeditions required big bucks from an eager philanthropist. “In the ’20s, old, rich dudes funded the expedition and maybe went with you,” says Alvey. “That was the age of big philanthropy. At its founding, the museum had limited resources. Donors would pony up cash for expeditions.” These days, research is funded mainly by grants from the likes of the National Science Foundation and the MacArthur Foundation. Despite that, Alvey says, “The nuts and bolts come from curators’ fundraising efforts. If they weren’t hungry, they wouldn’t get as much done.”
Carl Akeley, the “Father of Modern Taxidermy” who worked at the Field in the late 19th century and then went on to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, was a beneficiary of those “old, rich dudes.” In his expeditions, he probably never gave permits or local scholars a second thought. Despite this, Akeley was instrumental in setting up the first game preserve in Africa even though he was famous for killing a cheetah with his bare hands. In an essay in the spring 2007 Framework, “The Cinema as Taxidermy: Carl Akeley and the Preservative Obsession,” Alvey wrote:
The fact that Akeley would collect—hunt—species that he knew were already vanishing seems ironic; indeed, collecting “voucher specimens” remains a central paradox of museum collecting. But then as now, the scientific value of systematic collections is fundamental for charting taxonomy, evolutionary relationships, and biodiversity. And for Akeley and his peers, the taxidermy mounts were educational tools designed to bring the public face to face with African wildlife, and ponder its ecological future.
Akeley, undoubtedly a product of his times, nevertheless provided a positive model for modern-day curators and researchers. Which is why these days the name of the game is working well with others, a game at which the Field is a world leader.
Tim White, president of the Society for the Preservation of Natural History Collections and assistant director for collections and operations at the Peabody Museum of Natural History, Yale University, has worked in paleontologic field research for 25 years. “The world is getting smaller and smaller,” he says. “None of us work in a vacuum anymore.”
White has been working over the last few years with the Natural History Museum of Crete, developing an exhibition on the biodiversity of Crete that traveled to the Peabody and then to Crete. “We sent our ornithologist to Crete and vice versa,” he says. As it turns out, the Greek island’s topography has a lot in common with that of Horse Island off the Connecticut coast. That island, owned by Yale, serves as the Peabody’s ecological laboratory. The exchange includes establishing research projects between scientists and students of the two universities, sharing best museum practices in education and exhibit development, developing two exhibits on biodiversity and establishing a permanent discovery center at the Crete museum and an experimental classroom at the Peabody. Both groups brought different things to the table, to everyone’s benefit. “It’s just getting critical mass,” says White. “It helps if you have 10 or 12 people who are authorities or experts.”
Likewise, much of the work Daniel Brinkmeier does is bolstering museums in other countries. As the manager of international community outreach for the Field’s environmental and conservation programs, he partners with research institutions, conservation organizations, local communities and government agencies to provide collections, scientific research and educational resources. “We can’t just sit here in Chicago and focus on our local audience,” he says. “This is our chance to give back to the institution.”
Brinkmeier began working in Bolivia 18 years ago. In 2002, he received funding through an AAM and State Department program then called IPAM (International Partnership Among Museums) to revive a museum in Cobija. “It wasn’t part of a mission or strategy,” he says. “What caught our eye was that it was a university museum defunct for 30 years with a few things in a closet: some old jars and plastic buckets with some rotting specimens in them.”
Brinkmeier and his cohorts developed the museum as a vehicle for training students at the nearby university. The Field also brought Bolivian students and staff to Chicago for internships. ”We used IPAM as a springboard to develop a small museum and collection,” he says. “Now they could say, oh, we know what a museum is.”
Many dollars—from both IPAM and the Field—and five years later, the museum is self-sustaining. “We’re weaning ourselves away so that it’s theirs now,” he says. “What do we get out of it? A good feeling. We have an interest in supporting biodiversity. If we can get a population in Bolivia that understands the value of what they have there and the richness of their natural resources, we’ve done our job. That’s what we want.”
As much as Brinkmeier’s work is focused on giving back, there has to be something in it for the Field. “You want the U.S. institution to get as much out of it as well—and we do—we can’t be completely altruistic,” he says. The Cobija museum serves as a base for conservation work, including teacher training, school environmental education and community conservation programming. One of the goals is to make the area known as Pando in northern Bolivia a conservation state that has biodiversity protection systems. “The museum is a vehicle that can help us to make that happen,” he says.
Whereas Gary Feinman, former chair of the Field’s anthropology department and curator of Mesoamerican archaeology and ethnology, has research as his main goal, he too finds himself spending a large percentage of his time giving back. That wasn’t the case at the museum’s inception. “Research was almost entirely to get collections,” he says. “We went out to bring things back. The collection of pieces used to be the full reason for international expeditions 75 years ago; now it’s a much, much smaller part.”
Now archaeological materials are all but prohibited from entering the U.S. “That has changed the focus of international ventures,” says Feinman. After making all the appropriate contacts and getting all the appropriate permissions (not to mention enough grant money to get there), you can study the materials in the country, take some pictures and help local museums with collections management and exhibitions. But that’s about it.
With all the red tape it takes to research abroad, one could ask, why even bother? Feinman argues that it is necessary to establish the museum’s credibility. “There is a need for lifelong learning about the earth and its diversity,” he says. “If you think of the Field as an institution of public learning, then it’s very important we have some kind of credibility in the larger world of natural history. The research that we do is part of what we do to establish ourselves as reputable authorities.”
Feinman says giving back also comes in the form of economic support, adding that in a small way he is bolstering the local economy by providing jobs. “Jobs are scarce,” he says. “I employ people for several months.” He has also trained locals with little education to carry out such tasks as creating maps on graph paper. “It benefits us as well, but it gives them satisfaction and pride when they don’t have extensive education.”
Despite the do-gooder aspects, the legacy of colonialism remains and is still on the minds of curators. “That’s certainly something I worry about,” says Feinman. “I’ve tried to collaborate. They teach us a certain amount and we teach them a certain amount.” But, he argues, outside researchers provide resources that poorer countries don’t necessarily have. Oftentimes, he says, “if somebody didn’t come in from outside the site would erode or be looted.”
However, he says, the delicate dance continues. “It’s a constant give and take because, on the one hand, you don’t want to be a colonialist and don’t want to always set yourself up as the authority, but I’ve spent 30 years studying the valley of Oaxaca. There are only probably a handful of people in the world with this knowledge. Use it as not the last word, but the present word on extensive research.”
And, along those lines, overinclusiveness has its pitfalls, too. “Multivocality without filter has some danger when treated as equal,” he says. “When it comes to something like science, not every idea has the same weight.”
On his own impetus, Mark Alvey has pored over old annual reports, museum publications and fundraising letters in the 17 years he’s worked at the Field. Conservation, he maintains, is not new to the Field or other natural history museums. “One of the things that strikes me when I go back through the reports is that we think of environmentalism as new, but there are letters about protecting the wildlife of Africa. In the 1930s, a curator wrote columns in the museum’s magazine about the need for conservation. What’s changed now is that it’s much more action-oriented. The urgency is much greater and more documented.”
What’s more, the Field has been ahead of the curve on ethics. The museum’s anthropology department wrote a policy statement on the acquisition of antiquities in the 1960s—years before other museums and institutions even considered the issue. The statement declares in no uncertain terms that materials must be acquired from other countries responsibly and legally. “The museum profession is not innocent of responsibility,” the statement reads. The museum was also looking to pay the same heed to flora and fauna when it issued a pact with 28 other museums that safeguarded rare species, “Guidelines to Biological Field Studies.” That was in 1970.
As a result of these and other guidelines, today there’s a whole different ballgame. Simmons was ushered into that game as he entered herpetology at the cusp of the big changes. “By the time I went into the field, you didn’t just go get animals,” he says. “You would not go to a country without contacts. You were extremely limited in what you were allowed to bring out.”
These days the booty is more digital than physical. Case in point: A recent video clip on the Field’s website shows Greg Mueller, a fungi expert, coming across a giant mushroom in the Costa Rican rainforest. “There’s just nothing like this in Illinois!” he exclaims as he lovingly fondles the fungus as one might a newborn. But nowhere in the video do you see him snatching a sample. No, he has to be satisfied to come home with just the footage.
Present-day researchers have had some time to get used to this, though. “The idea that you would go in and collect whatever you wanted and leave nothing behind is neocolonialism. It’s exploitation,” maintains Simmons. Beyond that, the current way of doing business has benefits that extend past protecting the host country. “A lot of old-time collectors had no interest in working with foreign scientists or students,” says Simmons. “Forcing people to get permits has forced people to pay more attention to their colleagues. In the end, it works out to be a big plus.”
But every plus side has a detractor. “People are far more aware of their flora and fauna as part of the their cultural patrimony. The present systems are not perfect,” says Simmons. “Often, good scientific work is hampered or stopped by bureaucrats who are enforcing rules they do not understand.” Simmons found this out when conducting faunal surveys in Paraguay in 1998 and 2000. He and his colleagues were limited in the number of specimens they were allowed to collect. “At the end of the trip, half of the specimens we collected had to be left behind in a Paraguayan museum, yet while we were in the field, we daily saw habitat being destroyed by logging, burning and the illegal conversion of forest to agricultural land,” he says, but “the motivation to protect their wildlife is genuine. Wildlife is a valuable resource, and [they want to] avoid being taken advantage of by others.”
When you think back to the herds of African animals killed in the name of natural history on that very first expedition in 1896, you can’t blame countries like Paraguay for being so protective. But Indiana Jones is dead and gone. The new model, more sensible and far more defensible, has a better chance of being sustainable, too. In another hundred years, scientists from the Field and other museums may still find flora, fauna and artifacts to collect in other countries, where the specimens will remain.
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