THE AUDUBON BULLETIN 
Published Quarterly by the 
ILLINOIS AUDUBON SOCIETY 
Number 163 
Fall 1972 
Critic-At-Large 
‘There Are Many Conservation Organizations, 
But None Has the Unique Audubon Perspective’... 
Our guest critic, Irston R. Barnes, a former chairman of the Audubon 
Society, is nature columnist of the Washington Post, where this appropriate 
75th anniversary essay first appeared. 
by IRSTON R. BARNES 
WASHINGTON — As the Audubon 
Naturalist Society reaches the 75th 
anniversary of its founding, all of 
the Audubon societies are faced 
with a unique and important op- 
portunity. 
The extremely vulnerable birds 
which Audubon societies were 
founded to save have, indeed, 
been rescued from commercial ex- 
ploitation. But today, as never be- 
fore, all wildlife is under destruc- 
tive pressures from burgeoning 
human populations, from develop- 
ment and industrialization, from 
worldwide contamination of the 
environment. 
Unlike 1897, however, many 
other conservation organizations 
have become actively concerned 
with all three of the major threats 
to the quality of life — for wild- 
life and for man. Some are larger 
in membership than the Audubon 
societies. Others are _ politically 
more active and more effective 
with the use of grass-roots mem- 
bership to reach into both federal 
and state governments. But none 
has the Audubon perspective, 
which is uniquely important in de- 
termining the quality of the con- 
servation effort. 
How are the positive aims of con- 
servation to be promoted? It is 
here that the Audubon societies 
have the best, the most meaning- 
ful, answer. If we are ever to have 
a genuine commitment to the res- 
toration and preservation of nat- 
ural values, we must have an emc- 
tional appreciation of the positive 
values of nature. 
WE MUST PERSONALLY ex- 
perience something of nature’s 
beauties and mysteries. We must 
understand how nature creates and 
sustains life, including human life. 
We must sense the rich diversity of 
life, and we must be able to appre- 
ciate something of the ultimate 
rightness, the ethical quality, of 
natural processes. 
We must learn that to live in 
harmony with nature is to share 
in the beneficence of nature and 
that to abuse nature is to invite 
disaster. Studies of evolution have 
