Edward Max Nicholson

Edward Max Nicholson (called Max by his friends; * July 12, 1904 in Kilternan , † April 26, 2003 in London ) was a British environmentalist and ornithologist . He was the co-founder of the World Wildlife Fund .

Background and career

Nicholson was born to English parents in Kilternan, a town south of Dublin in what was then the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland . The family moved to Staines in England in 1910 , where he became interested in bird watching from an early age.

He attended the Sedbergh School in Cumbria and from 1926 the Hertford College in Oxford . Because of his achievements, he received scholarships at both of them . He made history at Oxford and traveled to Greenland and Guyana as a founding member of the University's Exploration Club .

At the age of 21 he published his first book on birds , Birds in England, in 1926 , followed by three more on a similar subject in the following years.

In 1931, he described the possibility of community bird watching in his book The Art of Bird-Watching . This led to the founding of the British Trust for Ornithology in 1932 , where he became the first treasurer and later chairman (1947-1949).

Nicholson's work A National Plan for Britain led to the founding of the influential think tank Political and Economic Planning (PEP), now known as the Policy Studies Institute . In 1940 he entered the civil service and worked for the Ministry of Shipping during World War II and later for the Ministry of War Transport. He attended the Québec and Cairo conferences . After the war he accompanied Winston Churchill to the conferences in Yalta and Potsdam . From 1945 to 1952 he was private secretary to Herbert Stanley Morrison . From 1947 to 1948 he was involved in the founding of the Scientific International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) (today: World Conservation Union ) with Julian Huxley , who later became UNESCO Director General .

In 1949 he drafted Part 3 of the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act, which provided a British Research Council for Science and Biological Service. This was called The Nature Conservancy and existed from 1949 to 1973. During this time, the legal protection of national nature reserves and sites of special scientific interest ( Sites of Special Scientific Interest ) was his task. In 1952 he became the new Director General of the Nature Conservancy, whose post he held until 1966. During his tenure, the organization developed into a research and management institution that promoted ecology , as this was of great importance for land use decisions and land management.

He was a member of the Committee of the Festival of Britain in 1951. 1952 he fell ill during a trip to Baluchistan in Pakistan on polio . In 1961 he was a member of the group that founded the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), at the same time he laid the foundation stone for the International Institute for Environment and Development.

He was editor-in-chief of The Birds of the Western Palearctic (BWP) from 1965 to 1992 , trustee of Earthwatch Europe and from 1980 to 1985 President of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.

Private life

In 1932 he married Mary Crawford, with whom he had two children, Piers and Tom. This marriage ended in divorce in 1964. He married his second wife, Marie Antoinette Mauerhofer in 1965, with whom he had another son, David. His first wife died in 1995, the second in 2002.

Publications

• Birds In England (1926)
• How Birds Live (1927)
• The Art of Bird-Watching (1931)
• The Humanist Frame (1961) (Contribution)
• The System: The Misgovernment of Modern Britain (1967)
• The Environmental Revolution: A Guide for the New Masters of the World (1970)