Lee Merriam Talbot – 1930 to 2021
A tribute by Russell Merriam Talbot
May 7, 2021
My father, Dr. Lee Merriam Talbot, died last week. He was a truly towering figure. I think of him as an amalgamation of the best aspects of John Muir, Ernest Hemingway, and James Bond. But I think he was humbler and, arguably, more influential than any of those characters.
He was a primary architect and author of, among other things, the Endangered Species Act (ESA), the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA), the Convention on Trade of Endangered Species (CITES), and the World Heritage Convention. He was the Senior Scientist and Director of International Affairs of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) in the West Wing of the White House for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Carter. He was Director General of the World Conservation Union (IUCN). Most recently, he was teaching and advising graduate students at George Mason University as a professor of environmental science and policy through this current semester. Over the course of his careers, he wrote over 300 scientific, technical, and popular publications and advised on environmental issues in over 130 countries.
He also loved racing cars. His first professional race was in 1948 (when he was 18 years old) and his final race was in the autumn of 2017 (when he was 87 years old). For those 69 years, he enjoyed competing – and frequently winning – in a wide variety of vehicles and types of races, including dirt track sprint cars, dirt and ice rallying in production-based cars, and grand prix and road racing in formula cars, sports racers, production, and vintage race cars. For most of this career, his number of choice was #62. Pretty much the only type of racing he had no interest in was oval track racing, which he considered to be boring.
I don’t think he could have accomplished nearly as much as he did without his closest confidant and partner, my mother, Marty Talbot. Within six weeks of their first date in 1959, they had gotten married – in grand style, of course – and traveled to East Africa to conduct scientific research in the Serengeti / Maasai Mara ecosystem. Marty had recently co-founded the Student Conservation Association but decided that a life with Lee was more important than continued leadership there. For the 62 years since then, they supported each other, adventured together, and raised two boys together.
Of course, I knew him as just my dad. Although he was frequently out of town for work, he was a very engaged dad to both my brother and to me when he was around. We bicycled, skied, camped, backpacked, and traveled together. He was my Cub Scout leader when I was young. He arranged his schedule to have summers off while I was in elementary and middle school so that all of us could travel around the country, visiting relatives, friends, and National parks in a van that he let us ‘help’ him convert into a camper in 1983. As I got into rowing, he made a point of traveling to watch me race up and down the East Coast and even in England (twice!!!).
Therefore, it should be no surprise that, as a kid and young adult, I assumed that his life and work was pretty standard fare.
- Don’t most people find themselves in small plane crashes and escape without a scratch?
- Lots of people spend the better part of their first seven years of marriage living out of a Land Rover doing groundbreaking ecological research in East Africa, right?
- It’s normal to regularly return from a long work trip in Asia late on a Friday night and then pack up the race car and tow it to a track early Saturday morning, isn’t it?
- Most kids learn how to behave and be polite when foreign dignitaries come over for dinner, don’t they?
- Being charged by a lioness while you’re alone on foot and needing to sever her vertebrae with a single shot as she is pouncing on you happens to most everyone at some point, right?
Watching James Bond movies seemed like a slightly modified version of regular life (with certain obvious differences).
His passing, well into his 91st year, was both inevitable and inconceivable. I intellectually know that no one can live forever, but I also know that my father was not an ordinary person.
While making an early ascent of the East Face of Mt Whitney in 1949, his partners and he had to make an unplanned bivouac high on the wall. Everyone at his college thought they had perished. They emerged chilly but unscathed the next day.
He broke his back in the early 1950s when he was a hand-to-hand combat instructor in the U.S. Marines. Military doctors told him he’d never walk again. He disagreed.
During an early running of the Malaysian Grand Prix, his car flipped into a ditch. His legs were wedged in the car, his head was pinned between the car and the ground, and his body sagged into the ditch. Helmets and other safety features were not required, and multiple drivers died during the race. Naturally, he had researched the efficacy of quality helmets and chose to wear the best one he could get. His helmet kept the weight of the car off his head and bystanders helped roll the car off him. He walked away. This is just one of the countless occasions he was in spectacular auto racing wrecks – many of which I witnessed and none of which left him worse for wear.
As referenced above, he survived an airplane crash. While conducting an aerial survey for the government of British Hong Kong in the early 1960s, his plane experienced mechanical problems and crash landed in a harbor, hitting rocks and pinwheeling through the cold, frothing water. He swam to safety, later describing in vivid detail the difficulty of determining which direction was up, while escaping the still-tumbling wreckage.
He and my mom went on backcountry trips into their 80s. One time, maybe about 10 years ago, they were descending a steep pass in the Sierras when a foothold broke and dad tumbled over a hundred feet down a cliff. My mom performed first aid to stop the bleeding, stabilize him, and then helped him hike out to safety. After spending a couple days at the hospital in Bishop, he was released looking like someone who had been attacked by a grizzly bear. Within a month, the scars had healed, and he was back at work. They returned the following summer for more big-mountain scrambling.
Medical issues simply did not stick with him. He refused to even mention his prostate cancer in public in the late 1990s, perhaps because of the social stigma around cancer at the time or perhaps because the brachytherapy treatment he chose was successful and did not impact his quality of life. In the mid-1980s, a doctor noticed an abnormality in his hemoglobin and diagnosed him with primary myelofibrosis, a bone marrow cancer with a life expectancy of five to ten years. Of course, he ignored it and continued living his life to its fullest. Over thirty years later, in 2018 while working in a remote region of Laos, the condition became critical, soon requiring regular blood transfusions, eventually one every week or so. We later learned that he had been functioning for years with half the red blood cell counts of normal men. In early 2019, he found a stage two clinical trial out of Mt Sinai in New York for a new treatment of the disease. His body responded well to the experimental medication and reversed his dependence on transfusions. He went for over a year without needing a single transfusion. In late March of this year, his use of the medication was put on hold due to another, minor medical condition. Unfortunately, the weeks that followed witnessed a rapid drop in his red blood cell counts and resulting complications. With no medication keeping the myelofibrosis in check, he declined quickly and required almost daily blood transfusions.
He passed peacefully at his home last Tuesday while surrounded by his wife of 62 years, Marty, and his sons, Lawrence and Rusty.
To my knowledge, my dad was never that into poetry, but when I was young, he introduced me to a poem that seems to have been his guiding light and has certainly become mine. The poem is “IF” by Rudyard Kipling and it ends with the following:
“If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds’ worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it,
And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”
We are planning to have a celebration of his life sometime in the coming months.
If you are able to make a donation in his memory, there are two items that we think he would particularly appreciate:
- The Defenders of Wildlife (www.defenders.org) is one of the organizations that he strongly supported.
- Jennifer Lewis and her associates at Que Sera Sera Films have traveled the world to make a film about the achievements of Lee and Marty. They are nearing completion of filming and have received backing from many NGOs, including Defenders of Wildlife, the Rachael Carson Council, Flora and Fauna International, and the Center for Biological Diversity. Tax deductible contributions to assist in the completion of the endeavor can be made here: https://fiscal.thegotham.org/project.cfm/1000/There-are-Still-Wizards/
