The Quiet Conservationist
Buff Bohlen, a Harvard-educated, former army sergeant who fought in the Korean War and U.S. State Department embassy officer who monitored Soviet economic aid in mid-1950s Afghanistan and political activities in Egypt, meets almost no popular definition of the word – at least, not if his early career is anything to go by.
Nevertheless, Bohlen is the recipient of ASF’s 2002 Lee Wulf Conservation Award for his efforts to preserve endangered, wild Atlantic salmon. In his later career, spanning three decades, he served as: Deputy Assistant Secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks at the U.S. Department of the Interior; Acting Assistant Secretary supervising the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Park Service, and Bureau of Outdoor Recreation; Senior Vice-President of World Wildlife Fund; and Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs.
In the 1970s, at Interior, he co-authored the 1973 U.S. Endangered Species Act, and helped negotiate the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. He also negotiated the five-nation Agreement on Conservation of Polar Bears, and the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Convention on the Protection of Migratory Birds. He chaired the U.S. government’s Alaska Planning Group, and was instrumental in laying the foundation for the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. He personally negotiated a 3-million-acre, three-way land exchange among the federal government, the state of Alaska and an Alaskan Native corporation which preserved the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge and enabled the creation of Lake Clark National Park..
During the 1980s at World Wildlife Fund, he was responsible for public policy and international conventions pertaining to wildlife conservation. In the early 1990s, as Assistant Secretary at the Department of State, he was responsible for all international issues relating to ocean policy, fisheries, environmental protection, conservation of natural resources, global warming, health, population, sustainable development, science and technology, and nuclear non-proliferation and safety.
Acknowledging his contribution to salmon conservation, ASF Chairman Donal O’Brien, Jr., had this to say last November about Bohlen, an ASF director since 1997: “He was instrumental in helping to negotiate this year’s historic long-term agreement to suspend Greenland’s commercial Atlantic fishery. The suspension of this fishery, the last to target wild Atlantic salmon of North American origin, should allow at least 20,000 more salmon to return to American and Canadian rivers to spawn in 2003. His leadership ensured the success of the collaboration between ASF, the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.”
So, no, Buff Bohlen, is not a conservationist, any more than the men who went to the moon were, simply, pilots. Though his handiwork is evident in many important pieces of U.S. environmental legislation of the past 30 years, and though he has helped negotiate many international accords designed to protect the planet, he prefers to think of himself as merely lucky. “I think there was a lot of ‘right time; right place’ for me,” he says. “But, honestly, when it comes right down to it, how do you define a person’s life?”For Edwin Upton Curtis Bohlen, life began in Boston in the fall of 1927. His father, Henry, was a Philadelphian; his mother, Margaret, a well-born Beantown lady. “We had great links to the city,” he says. “My maternal grandfather, Edwin Upton Curtis, was a mayor of Boston and later commissioner of police during the great Boston police strike of 1919. Calvin Coolidge who was then Governor of Massachusetts gained renown for bringing out the state militia to put down the strike and restore order. Of course, the story in my house was always that it was my grandfather’s action that helped install Coolidge in the White House as the 30th president.”’
Henry, also known as “Buff” died in 1933. “My paternal grandfather first got the nickname because of the colour of his hair,” Bohlen says, “and it passed down through the generations to me.” Margaret later married Carleton Pike of Lubec, Maine. As a result, Bohlen spent his childhood summers wetting lines in the lakes and rivers of the U.S. and Canadian Maritimes. “My stepfather was a great sportsman,” he says. “He was an angler and a hunter. Lubec being a border town, he had some great friends in New Brunswick, including members of the Restigouche Club. I kept my last name, but I acquired my love of all things outdoors because of my youthful experiences with Carleton Pike.”
Winters were spent in Boston. Bohlen attended private school and entered Harvard University in 1946 where he studied government relations. “Although many members of my family had been public servants, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do,” he says. “Of course, government work was always in the back of my mind, but, well, things were happening in the world, and I think I was most interested in being a part of those things.”
After graduation, Bohlen enlisted in the army. The Korean War was underway, and he wanted to serve. He spent two years in the army, including a tour of duty in Korea as a sergeant in military intelligence. “I had some very interesting experiences”, he says, “and it gave me a taste for international affairs.”
Following the war, Bohlen became a foreign service officer. Toward the end of 1955, when his bosses were looking for young officers to go to Afghanistan, he volunteered. “That really was a fascinating time,” Bohlen says. “It was right after Khrushchev had visited Kabul and committed, for the first time, international aid to a country outside the Soviet Bloc. So, naturally, there was intense interest in Washington about what, exactly, was going on there. I served in the economic section of our embassy. My job was, well, to observe.”
Official duties aside, what Bohlen observed was a nation only recently opened to westerners, a land of dramatic and beautiful incongruities – arid plains, high and forbidding mountain passes, low and lush valleys. “I had a great friend in the embassy,” he says, “a fellow foreign service officer who spoke six languages. In my first year there, we travelled together in northern Afghanistan where he often needed to use all six. The people we encountered were wonderful. They were the most hospitable people I have ever met. I really fell in love with the
place.”
The following year, Bohlen fell in love again – this time with another State Department employee, Janet Trowbridge. “We hit it off. We both liked to travel and see new places and meet new people. After we were married I took her through the remote, central part of Afghanistan, going south-west from Kabul and then north over the major mountain range. We crossed chasms with roaring streams over bridges made of what looked like saplings woven together. And the primitive roads through the mountains required constant backing and filling to navigate the tight hairpin turns.”
Bohlen’s next assignment brought him, with Janet, to the embassy in Cairo where he served in the political section. It was a long way from Kabul, in both distance and circumstance. “We lived very well there in a luxurious apartment on an island in the middle of the Nile,” he noted. “We had never lived so well before, and I can say that we never will again.”
By the mid 1960s, Bohlen was already a field-tempered veteran of foreign adventure. Assigned to the East Africa desk in Washington, his path seemed settled. Another trip with Janet, however, set motion to events that would ultimately change the course of his life.
“In 1964, we rented an old Peugeot and toured about 3,000 miles all over Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya,” he says. “Janet became so enthralled with the natural beauty and wonders of that part of Africa – and I must say that I was bowled over as well – that when we returned home she decided to go to work for Russell Train, the founder of the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, which was in the business of training Africans to assume management of their national parks.”
In the ensuing years, Bohlen grew to know and respect Train and the conservation efforts to which he had devoted his life. In 1969, after Train was appointed Under Secretary of the Interior in the Nixon Administration, he asked Bohlen to come work for him. “It wasn’t an offer I wanted to refuse,” Bohlen says. “I could see a lot of opportunity in working on things that were important to me personally.”
In fact, Train stayed for only a year before accepting a job as the first chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality. Bohlen remained at the Interior Department, becoming an assistant first to Secretary Wally Hickel, and later to Hickel’s successor, Rogers Morton. The latter soon appointed Bohlen to be deputy to Assistant Secretary Nathaniel Reed (an ASF director since 1996) who was responsible for supervising the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and what was then known as the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. Those were heady days, and there were times when Bohlen found his diplomatic skills well challenged. “One day, for instance,” he says, “the Director of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation came to us and announced that he wanted to abolish the bureau – the very organization that he ran. It kind of blew us away. Obviously Nathaniel said no, but we thought it was the strangest attitude we’d ever seen in a fairly high-ranking government bureaucrat, responsible for environmental programs.”
That bureaucrat was James Watt who briefly served as Secretary of the Interior a decade later in the Reagan Administration, where he promptly achieved his objective by abolishing the bureau before arranging his own demise by describing key members of his staff as, “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.”
In the early 1970s, the battles over environmental protection in the United States were only beginning. And Bohlen found himself, once again, on the front lines. “Several scientists convinced me that the declining populations of great whales should be protected,” he says, “by adding them to the endangered species list. At that time the U.S. was a major importer of whale teeth for scrimshaw and sperm whale oil, and we still had an active whaling operation in California. Our proposal to list the eight species of great whales was strongly opposed, even by Interior’s own lawyers. In order to be listed at that time under the 1969 Endangered Species Act, a species had to be biologically endangered throughout its range. Obviously, this was difficult to prove for species that travel the world’s oceans.”
Bohlen also ran into vigorous opposition from the Commerce Department and the U.S. Navy. The latter insisted that sperm whale oil from these magnificent creatures was absolutely essential to national defense, to the proper functioning of the nation’s nuclear submarine fleet. At that time, no suitable synthetic lubricants had been developed because it was simply cheaper to buy whale oil.
In the end, Bohlen convinced Secretary Hickel to list all eight species of great whales as endangered. “It was a courageous move on Hickel’s part,” he says. “The immediate effect was to halt all imports of whale products and put the California whaling company out of business. . .But our frustrating experience with the great whales convinced us that a stronger, more flexible law was needed.
What started as an effort to amend the 1969 law eventually produced the new and powerful Endangered Species Act of 1973. “We drafted the legislation and President Nixon sent it to the Congress, where it passed overwhelmingly,” Bohlen says. “Now, thinking back, it was quite amazing, because you could never get a law like that passed today. The lobbyists would kill it or, at best, the sections in the Act that had teeth would have their incisors removed.”
Meanwhile, Bohlen had also become involved in what would become a nationwide campaign to preserve the wildlife and vast wildlands of Alaska. “I spent nine years working on the Alaska Lands Act,” he says, “including a year as a Congressional staffer. It was a real labor of love. Janet and I have great personal affection for that state. We’ve backpacked in its mountains and floated down its rivers. We loved its wild, brilliant, majestic scenery. There is so much of Alaska that is truly wild and shows no evidence of man’s intervention.”
The Act set aside 102 million acres of Alaska to be protected in perpetuity.
By the 1980s, during the Reagan Administration, Bohlen had retired from government service and went back to work for Russell Train who was then president of World Wildlife Fund. Train hired him as senior vice president, having previously hired his wife Janet, who was by then a writer and editor, as director of communications. “Those were fun years,” Buff says, “all of us working together on the causes we really believed in. One gets a different perspective trying to influence government policy from the outside. But even without the government machinery that used to support me, a lot can be accomplished.”
In 1990, Bohlen was lured back to government when President Bush appointed him Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. “My job there was fascinating,” he says, “and it afforded me a fresh opportunity to get involved in international conservation. Fortunately, Secretary James Baker was very supportive of our work.”
That support allowed Bohlen to successfully negotiate the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, despite considerable opposition elsewhere in the Administration, and to serve as deputy head of the U.S. delegation at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, having led U.S. negotiations at all the U.N. meetings preparatory to Rio.
Bohlen retired again in 1993, but was soon reemployed as a part-time, special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, negotiating major purchases and exchanges of lands to be added to National Parks or National Wildlife Refuges in Alaska, Colorado, Florida and Utah.
In the 1970s, at Interior, he co-authored the 1973 U.S. Endangered Species Act, and helped negotiate the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. He also negotiated the five-nation Agreement on Conservation of Polar Bears, and the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Convention on the Protection of Migratory Birds. He chaired the U.S. government’s Alaska Planning Group, and was instrumental in laying the foundation for the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act. He personally negotiated a 3-million-acre, three-way land exchange among the federal government, the state of Alaska and an Alaskan Native corporation which preserved the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge and enabled the creation of Lake Clark National Park..
During the 1980s at World Wildlife Fund, he was responsible for public policy and international conventions pertaining to wildlife conservation. In the early 1990s, as Assistant Secretary at the Department of State, he was responsible for all international issues relating to ocean policy, fisheries, environmental protection, conservation of natural resources, global warming, health, population, sustainable development, science and technology, and nuclear non-proliferation and safety.
Acknowledging his contribution to salmon conservation, ASF Chairman Donal O’Brien, Jr., had this to say last November about Bohlen, an ASF director since 1997: “He was instrumental in helping to negotiate this year’s historic long-term agreement to suspend Greenland’s commercial Atlantic fishery. The suspension of this fishery, the last to target wild Atlantic salmon of North American origin, should allow at least 20,000 more salmon to return to American and Canadian rivers to spawn in 2003. His leadership ensured the success of the collaboration between ASF, the North Atlantic Salmon Fund, and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation.”
So, no, Buff Bohlen, is not a conservationist, any more than the men who went to the moon were, simply, pilots. Though his handiwork is evident in many important pieces of U.S. environmental legislation of the past 30 years, and though he has helped negotiate many international accords designed to protect the planet, he prefers to think of himself as merely lucky. “I think there was a lot of ‘right time; right place’ for me,” he says. “But, honestly, when it comes right down to it, how do you define a person’s life?”For Edwin Upton Curtis Bohlen, life began in Boston in the fall of 1927. His father, Henry, was a Philadelphian; his mother, Margaret, a well-born Beantown lady. “We had great links to the city,” he says. “My maternal grandfather, Edwin Upton Curtis, was a mayor of Boston and later commissioner of police during the great Boston police strike of 1919. Calvin Coolidge who was then Governor of Massachusetts gained renown for bringing out the state militia to put down the strike and restore order. Of course, the story in my house was always that it was my grandfather’s action that helped install Coolidge in the White House as the 30th president.”’
Henry, also known as “Buff” died in 1933. “My paternal grandfather first got the nickname because of the colour of his hair,” Bohlen says, “and it passed down through the generations to me.” Margaret later married Carleton Pike of Lubec, Maine. As a result, Bohlen spent his childhood summers wetting lines in the lakes and rivers of the U.S. and Canadian Maritimes. “My stepfather was a great sportsman,” he says. “He was an angler and a hunter. Lubec being a border town, he had some great friends in New Brunswick, including members of the Restigouche Club. I kept my last name, but I acquired my love of all things outdoors because of my youthful experiences with Carleton Pike.”
Winters were spent in Boston. Bohlen attended private school and entered Harvard University in 1946 where he studied government relations. “Although many members of my family had been public servants, I wasn’t really sure what I wanted to do,” he says. “Of course, government work was always in the back of my mind, but, well, things were happening in the world, and I think I was most interested in being a part of those things.”
After graduation, Bohlen enlisted in the army. The Korean War was underway, and he wanted to serve. He spent two years in the army, including a tour of duty in Korea as a sergeant in military intelligence. “I had some very interesting experiences”, he says, “and it gave me a taste for international affairs.”
Following the war, Bohlen became a foreign service officer. Toward the end of 1955, when his bosses were looking for young officers to go to Afghanistan, he volunteered. “That really was a fascinating time,” Bohlen says. “It was right after Khrushchev had visited Kabul and committed, for the first time, international aid to a country outside the Soviet Bloc. So, naturally, there was intense interest in Washington about what, exactly, was going on there. I served in the economic section of our embassy. My job was, well, to observe.”
Official duties aside, what Bohlen observed was a nation only recently opened to westerners, a land of dramatic and beautiful incongruities – arid plains, high and forbidding mountain passes, low and lush valleys. “I had a great friend in the embassy,” he says, “a fellow foreign service officer who spoke six languages. In my first year there, we travelled together in northern Afghanistan where he often needed to use all six. The people we encountered were wonderful. They were the most hospitable people I have ever met. I really fell in love with the
place.”
The following year, Bohlen fell in love again – this time with another State Department employee, Janet Trowbridge. “We hit it off. We both liked to travel and see new places and meet new people. After we were married I took her through the remote, central part of Afghanistan, going south-west from Kabul and then north over the major mountain range. We crossed chasms with roaring streams over bridges made of what looked like saplings woven together. And the primitive roads through the mountains required constant backing and filling to navigate the tight hairpin turns.”
Bohlen’s next assignment brought him, with Janet, to the embassy in Cairo where he served in the political section. It was a long way from Kabul, in both distance and circumstance. “We lived very well there in a luxurious apartment on an island in the middle of the Nile,” he noted. “We had never lived so well before, and I can say that we never will again.”
By the mid 1960s, Bohlen was already a field-tempered veteran of foreign adventure. Assigned to the East Africa desk in Washington, his path seemed settled. Another trip with Janet, however, set motion to events that would ultimately change the course of his life.
“In 1964, we rented an old Peugeot and toured about 3,000 miles all over Uganda, Tanzania and Kenya,” he says. “Janet became so enthralled with the natural beauty and wonders of that part of Africa – and I must say that I was bowled over as well – that when we returned home she decided to go to work for Russell Train, the founder of the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation, which was in the business of training Africans to assume management of their national parks.”
In the ensuing years, Bohlen grew to know and respect Train and the conservation efforts to which he had devoted his life. In 1969, after Train was appointed Under Secretary of the Interior in the Nixon Administration, he asked Bohlen to come work for him. “It wasn’t an offer I wanted to refuse,” Bohlen says. “I could see a lot of opportunity in working on things that were important to me personally.”
In fact, Train stayed for only a year before accepting a job as the first chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality. Bohlen remained at the Interior Department, becoming an assistant first to Secretary Wally Hickel, and later to Hickel’s successor, Rogers Morton. The latter soon appointed Bohlen to be deputy to Assistant Secretary Nathaniel Reed (an ASF director since 1996) who was responsible for supervising the National Park Service, the Fish and Wildlife Service, and what was then known as the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation. Those were heady days, and there were times when Bohlen found his diplomatic skills well challenged. “One day, for instance,” he says, “the Director of the Bureau of Outdoor Recreation came to us and announced that he wanted to abolish the bureau – the very organization that he ran. It kind of blew us away. Obviously Nathaniel said no, but we thought it was the strangest attitude we’d ever seen in a fairly high-ranking government bureaucrat, responsible for environmental programs.”
That bureaucrat was James Watt who briefly served as Secretary of the Interior a decade later in the Reagan Administration, where he promptly achieved his objective by abolishing the bureau before arranging his own demise by describing key members of his staff as, “a black, a woman, two Jews, and a cripple.”
In the early 1970s, the battles over environmental protection in the United States were only beginning. And Bohlen found himself, once again, on the front lines. “Several scientists convinced me that the declining populations of great whales should be protected,” he says, “by adding them to the endangered species list. At that time the U.S. was a major importer of whale teeth for scrimshaw and sperm whale oil, and we still had an active whaling operation in California. Our proposal to list the eight species of great whales was strongly opposed, even by Interior’s own lawyers. In order to be listed at that time under the 1969 Endangered Species Act, a species had to be biologically endangered throughout its range. Obviously, this was difficult to prove for species that travel the world’s oceans.”
Bohlen also ran into vigorous opposition from the Commerce Department and the U.S. Navy. The latter insisted that sperm whale oil from these magnificent creatures was absolutely essential to national defense, to the proper functioning of the nation’s nuclear submarine fleet. At that time, no suitable synthetic lubricants had been developed because it was simply cheaper to buy whale oil.
In the end, Bohlen convinced Secretary Hickel to list all eight species of great whales as endangered. “It was a courageous move on Hickel’s part,” he says. “The immediate effect was to halt all imports of whale products and put the California whaling company out of business. . .But our frustrating experience with the great whales convinced us that a stronger, more flexible law was needed.
What started as an effort to amend the 1969 law eventually produced the new and powerful Endangered Species Act of 1973. “We drafted the legislation and President Nixon sent it to the Congress, where it passed overwhelmingly,” Bohlen says. “Now, thinking back, it was quite amazing, because you could never get a law like that passed today. The lobbyists would kill it or, at best, the sections in the Act that had teeth would have their incisors removed.”
Meanwhile, Bohlen had also become involved in what would become a nationwide campaign to preserve the wildlife and vast wildlands of Alaska. “I spent nine years working on the Alaska Lands Act,” he says, “including a year as a Congressional staffer. It was a real labor of love. Janet and I have great personal affection for that state. We’ve backpacked in its mountains and floated down its rivers. We loved its wild, brilliant, majestic scenery. There is so much of Alaska that is truly wild and shows no evidence of man’s intervention.”
The Act set aside 102 million acres of Alaska to be protected in perpetuity.
By the 1980s, during the Reagan Administration, Bohlen had retired from government service and went back to work for Russell Train who was then president of World Wildlife Fund. Train hired him as senior vice president, having previously hired his wife Janet, who was by then a writer and editor, as director of communications. “Those were fun years,” Buff says, “all of us working together on the causes we really believed in. One gets a different perspective trying to influence government policy from the outside. But even without the government machinery that used to support me, a lot can be accomplished.”
In 1990, Bohlen was lured back to government when President Bush appointed him Assistant Secretary of State for Oceans and International Environmental and Scientific Affairs. “My job there was fascinating,” he says, “and it afforded me a fresh opportunity to get involved in international conservation. Fortunately, Secretary James Baker was very supportive of our work.”
That support allowed Bohlen to successfully negotiate the Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty, despite considerable opposition elsewhere in the Administration, and to serve as deputy head of the U.S. delegation at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro, having led U.S. negotiations at all the U.N. meetings preparatory to Rio.
Bohlen retired again in 1993, but was soon reemployed as a part-time, special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Bruce Babbitt, negotiating major purchases and exchanges of lands to be added to National Parks or National Wildlife Refuges in Alaska, Colorado, Florida and Utah.
Finally, in 2001, at age 73, Bohlen left public life – in a fashion. Called upon by the Board of the Atlantic Salmon Federation to help negotiate an end to Greenland’s commercial harvest of wild Atlantic salmon, he applied his legendary negotiating skill one more time. It worked, again.
“Let me be clear about this,” he says. “Our mission at ASF is to conserve and restore North American salmon runs. The fact that salmon are not returning to our rivers to spawn could be a function of changing ocean temperatures, too many predators or a lack of nutritious prey. But, certainly, without a suspension of commercial fishing on wild salmon, the entire species is in peril of extinction. And that’s as much a long-term economic development issue in the North Atlantic, as it is an environmental one.”
For now, one of the unsung architects of 20th Century environmental policy is content to work on these issues, as he likes to say, behind the scenes. It suits him. It appeals to his sense of service. “I was fortunate to have tumbled into something I cared deeply about,” he says. “I don’t say that I pursued any master plan to define myself as one thing or another. I just followed my nose and heart to make the most of the opportunities that chance afforded me in my life.”
And, without definition, what a life it has been.
“Let me be clear about this,” he says. “Our mission at ASF is to conserve and restore North American salmon runs. The fact that salmon are not returning to our rivers to spawn could be a function of changing ocean temperatures, too many predators or a lack of nutritious prey. But, certainly, without a suspension of commercial fishing on wild salmon, the entire species is in peril of extinction. And that’s as much a long-term economic development issue in the North Atlantic, as it is an environmental one.”
For now, one of the unsung architects of 20th Century environmental policy is content to work on these issues, as he likes to say, behind the scenes. It suits him. It appeals to his sense of service. “I was fortunate to have tumbled into something I cared deeply about,” he says. “I don’t say that I pursued any master plan to define myself as one thing or another. I just followed my nose and heart to make the most of the opportunities that chance afforded me in my life.”
And, without definition, what a life it has been.
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