Ecological Conservation

In 1973, George Lindsay, one of Baja California’s most eminent botanists, visited the islands of the Sea of Cortés together with Charles Lindbergh, Joseph Wood Krutch, and Kenneth Bechtel. Lindbergh, one of the most celebrated popular heroes of the twentieth century, had become by that time a committed conservationist, interested in the preservation of whales and in the conservation of nature at large. Joseph Wood Krutch, a naturalist, had written The Forgotten Peninsula, one of the first natural history descriptions of Baja California. George Lindsay had helped organize a series of scientific explorations into the Sea of Cortés and the peninsula of Baja California, first from the San Diego Natural History Museum, and later from the California Academy of Sciences (Banks 1962a,b; Lindsay 1962, 1964, 1966, 1970; Wiggins 1962). Kenneth Bechtel, a philanthropist from San Francisco, had given financial support to the Audubon Society in the 1950s and 1960s to study the sea bird rookery at Isla Rasa, which had been decreed a protected area by the Mexican government in 1962. Bechtel was interested in showing the Sea of Cortés to people who might be aroused by its astounding natural beauty and who might help to protect it. For this purpose, he organized the trip and invited Lindbergh to visit the region. The group flew a chartered Catalina flying-boat that allowed them to get to small and remote islands. They landed in the water and then piloted up to the beach so they could have shade under the wing. They visited many of the islands, starting from Consag north of Bahía de los Ángeles, and ending up in Espíritu Santo, east of the Bay of La Paz. It was a wonderful and memorable trip. Two or three months later, both Lindbergh and Lindsay traveled to Mexico City to watch the Mexican premiere of a documentary film on the Sea of Cortés by the California Academy of Sciences that Kenneth Bechtel had sponsored (see chap. 1). Taking advantage of the opportunity, and also of his immense popularity, Charles Lindbergh requested to see the president of Mexico, Luis Echeverría.