The oceans cover nearly 70 percent of the earth's surface and contain 90 percent of the world's biodiversity. But our beleaguered mother ocean doesn't get the respect she deserves at the National Museum of Natural History. This fall, the new Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals will displace Life in the Sea Hall and its popular exhibit, Exploring Marine Ecosystems. The life- size whale many of us remember from childhood, a mammal, may stay.' But once again, the oceans, now represented by live reef exhibits and a display of the New England ground fishery crashi get short shrift in museum plans.
After repeated setbacks, long-term plans for Life in the Sea Hall's five-year-old exhibits-- plans that include nearly completed biodiversity displays--have been scrapped. This disregard for the representation of the sea is troubling when oceans worldwide are threatened from coastal development, pollution, and overfishing. More troubling, the Exploring Marine Ecosystems' conservation focus will be lost on the whim of a wealthy game hunter.
Smithsonian officials might have discriminated against the self-aggrandizing philanthropist, Kenneth Behring, whose name will be mounted over the north and south entrances to the museum's impressive main rotunda because he is an endangered species hunter. Museum officials have gone too far in allowing Behring to attach strings to his highly publicized twenty million dollar gift, strings that effectively strangle Life in the Sea Hall and Bird Hall. Museum officials even tried to help Behring import wild sheep carcasses listed in the Endangered Species Act. The last time something like this happened, in 1990, a scientist on loan to the Smithsonian from the Interior Department's U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was convicted for smuggling endangered species.
Museum Director Robert Fri and Program Director Robert Sullivan were dining at Behring's California home when the recent scandal broke. According to the Humane Society of the United States, in the fall of 1988, the Museum of Natural History petitioned the Interior Department to waive the Endangered Species Act ban on behalf of the killer of one of the most endangered animals in the world: the Ka-ra-Tau a-rgali sheep from Kazakhstan.
As the story goes, scientists from the former Soviet republic were nicely paid by Behring to give an air of legitimacy to his trophy hunt. They stalked, and Behring shot, rare sheep whose racks of sweeping horns are prized trophies for game hunters. After the kill, Behring donated twenty million dollars to the museum, and about a year later, former Museum of Natural History Director, and current museum scientist, Robert S. Hoffman, who failed to learn the lessons of the 1990 Endangered Species Act scandal, applied for import permits. Animal lovers can only hope that the game eaten by Behring, Fri, and Sullivan at their California soiree didn't sit well.
Nonetheless, former Seattle Seahawks owner Behring will get what he wants. He wants a mammal hall to his glory and to further his killing, stuffing, and donating of animals for tax credits to museums around the country. The man most responsible for this scandal, museum director Fri, says, "The bird and fish displays will be incorporated into other exhibits or refurbished and moved elsewhere in the museum at some point." This isn't entirely true. Current plans close Life in the Sea Hall this fall despite dire estimates that two-thirds of the world's coral will die in the next decade and nearly 90 percent of the world's fisheries are either at or exceed sustainable levels.
Fri speaks of "restoring the rotunda to its Beaux Arts grandeur," but he tends to defer to fast-talking Sullivan, whose penchant for post- modern theory raised the ire of museum scientists early in his nine-year tenure when he contended that the "western-scientific-anthropological world view is merely one more alternative way of knowing and encoding the world, no more valuable or accurate, no less ideological or culture-bound, than any other." Sullivan's first act as program director was to create a task force to "critique exhibits and produce policy and practices manuals on Gender and Race Equity." The results were so- called dilemma labels on the cultural values of science. The labels have since been removed.
Protests from scientists forced Sullivan to back away from his idea of replacing the life-size elephant in the center of the rotunda, a symbol of white capitalist aggression, with a programmable globe. Now the elephant, not the controversial one Behring killed in Mozambique in 1998, but the old elephant, will be moved several feet from the middle of the rotunda. Although not the ostensible .reason for the move, visitors who enter from the north entrance will soon see Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals over the south entrance, and vice versa.
Museum Director Fri thinks that Behring's twenty million dollars is a model for collaboration between private philanthropy and public institutions. How does contributing to the destruction of endangered species and disregarding the oceans provide a good model, Mr. Fri?
Moreover, museum scientists question the way private funds drastically changed exhibit priorities, especially at a time when the oceans face perilous assaults. The museum will retain its Life in Ancient Seas exhibit that uses marine fossils to interpret mother ocean in her youth as the cradle of life on earth. No room remains in the museum for the contemporary oceans at a time when the most diverse environment on the planet is under severe environmental stress from commercial fishing and, among other things, people who poison corals and explode them to catch fish.
Likewise, some of the biggest threats to mammals are game hunters. People like Kenneth Behring and the other Safari Club members Sullivan continues to solicit for donations stop at nothing to win awards in grand slam hunting events that target rare species. Will this scandalous problem be highlighted with one of Sullivan's dilemma labels in the Kenneth E. Behring Family Hall of Mammals?
Len Bracken is the author of Guy Debord - Revolutionary, the translator of Gianfranco Sanguinetti's The Real Report on the Last Chance to Save Capitalism in Italy and the editor of the newsletter Extraphile. His new book, The Arch Conspirator, is available from AUP. Bracken can be contacted at POB 5585 Arlington, VA 22205.