“The universal intellectual, the free-standing man or woman making a living more or less from writing or talking, and being known for that in a variety of old fashioned media has disappeared. We shall not see a return or a revival, I think, of that kind of intellectual.”
So spoke the late Tony Judt in his remarkable 6 February 2007 “Disturbing the Peace” address at Boston College. When William Beebe died in Trinidad on 4 June 1962, the world lost not only its then greatest living naturalist, but also the last of, to borrow Professor Judt’s word, his “kind.” Like the universal intellectuals whose days came to an end with the rise of television and the decline of discursive print media, the days of the universal naturalist – one able to make his or her living publishing – as well as speaking and generally interacting – in both the popular and scientific worlds not only without harm to either but in fact with each enhancing the other had largely by the time of Beebe’s death, disappeared.
Indeed, to one such as myself, born five years after Beebe’s death, achieving a sufficient perception of just how influential Beebe was during his lifetime, how widely read his books were read, how broadly his exploits were followed, and how expansive his seemingly inexhaustible curiosity stretched is difficult. For even taking living scientists with exceptional levels of public activity such as E.O. Wilson or Jane Goodall into account, there is now simply no one, as Carol Grant Gould so compellingly shows in her The Remarkable Life of William Beebe; Explorer and Naturalist, who could be said to be a modern-day Beebe.
Part of Beebe’s remarkable life was, it may be argued, made possible by its being lived at the transition point between the old and modern world. Born in 1877 to a middle-class family in Brooklyn, New York and raised in the then still largely bucolic East Orange, New Jersey, Beebe’s formative years were spent in a location that gave him ready access to fields as well as agreeable proximity to the city and its museums. Combine this with an endless amount of energy, an insatiable curiosity, and parents who were emotionally, socially, and financially (early on that is, until his own success brought him into a reciprocal position) supportive, and the stage was set – all that was needed was for Beebe to apply the necessary effort.
And apply effort he did. Working with a tirelessness that allowed him to enter college at a level far ahead of his classmates, he secured a position as keeper of birds at the newly established New York Zoological Society’s Bronx Zoological Park (now the Bronx Zoo) even before graduation – indeed, as it would turn out, instead of it – and thus begin a career there that would span over half a century in a variety of fields that would, due to the modern trend of extreme specialization in the sciences, be unimaginable today.
From studies of birds to ocean life – first near the surface and eventually that at depths far exceeding any to which anyone else had yet ventured – to entire biological communities, Beebe allowed his curiosity to drive his direction, all the while compiling copious records that became both popular books and scientific papers. He also attracted like-minded souls to him – scientists like John Tee-Van and Jocelyn Crane – whose own interests would develop and flourish in symbiosis with his own, eventually coalescing into the Zoo’s Department of Tropical Research, an entity that Beebe would come not only to define, but in times of national economic hardship even support with the reinvestment of his own salary.
Appropriate to the telling the story of the life of one whose fame was in part derived from the recounting of his adventures in books, Gould’s The Remarkable Life of William Beebe is a compelling adventure in itself. From Beebe’s early education to his final days in Trinidad, Gould’s narrative is rich in the personal stories that made Beebe, Beebe. His two bitter-sweet marriages, the researches and discoveries of both his own as well as those working alongside him, his associations and friendships with a veritable who’s who of his lifetime’s world (Henry Fairfield Osborn, Frank Chapman, William T. Hornaday, Theodore Roosevelt, A. A. Milne, Rudyard Kipling, Walt Disney…), his establishment of research stations in South America and Bermuda; all are woven into Gould’s narrative so skillfully that one can scarcely put the book down, so compelling is each successive chapter.
Alas, as Beebe experienced with the loss of one after another of his tropical research stations due to the unstoppable events of the larger world, and the forces demanding its exploitation for national and private enrichment, so to with his own passing did the world lose not only the man himself but the type of naturalist he so perfectly embodied. As Gould so eloquently summarizes in the epilogue of her book,
Ironically, the very breadth of Beebe’s knowledge and vision have worked against him in the recent era of specialization. His unprecedented study of pheasants set a standard in avian research, but his greatest contributions were not in ornithology. His groundbreaking analysis at Kartabo gave tropical ecology its most powerful research tool, but the field had yet to be born. His study of behavioral adaptations foreshadowed behavioral ecology decades before it became a recognized field of study. His work on moths and butterflies ad beetles and mantids and a host of other insects was often brilliant but he never claimed to be an entomologist. His daring venture into the depths inspired Jaques Cousteau and opened the doors to the fertile field of deep ocean studies but he was no marine biologist. Out of loyalty to the zoo, he published all his research papers in Zoologica, whose proud generalist mandate lost its authority as specialist journals multiplied with the exponential increase of scientific fields.
Of Beebe’s twenty-two published books, only two – Galapagos; World’s End, and Edge of the Jungle – are still in print, both in discount reprint editions. A book he edited, The Book of Naturalists; An Anthology of the Best Natural History, is also still available in reprint form Princeton University Press. Of his published articles, no definitive collection has ever been compiled, and if one were to be, it would fill volumes.
Indeed, the book that is the subject of this very review is now only available from it’s publisher in electronic format. Like most of Beebe’s own works, it can be found with some regularity on the shelves of used bookshops and in libraries, and it is to these places that I strongly encourage my readers to go in search of both it as well as William Beebe’s own writings. Perhaps if enough of us take an interest in Beebe to the point where his own curiosity inspires that in ourselves and his own unwillingness to live in a small, discrete box pushes us to expand our interests howsoever they will in pursuit of the answers to our own questions, the universal naturalist may again become a reality, and if not, then at least our lives will be the more rich for trying.
Title: The Remarkable Life of William Beebe; Explorer and Naturalist
Author: Carol Grant Gould
Publisher: Island Press
Format: e-Book; both hardcover (2004) and paperback (2006) now out of print
Pages: 464 pp., with multiple illustrations
ISBN: 9781610911450
Published: electronic edition – September 2012 (first print edition originally published November 2004)
