From ANIMAL PEOPLE, December 2000:

Human obituaries


David Brower, 88, died on July 5 at his lifelong home in
Berkeley, California. Brower was a boyhood friend of longtime San
Francisco Zoo benefactor Carroll Soo- Hoo. After graduating from Berkeley
High School together in 1928 they remained in touch until Soo-Hoo died in
1998. Joining the Sierra Club in 1933, Brower was elected to the board in
1941, and was hired as the organization's first executive director in
1952. By the time he resigned in 1969, he had boosted the membership from
2,000 to 77,000, but was best known for activism in the spirit of founder
John Muir, 1838-1914. Muir won federal protection for Yosemite as a
National Park, but lost a bitter fight against building the Hetch-Hetchy
Dam, which drowned a spectacular gorge. Brower was haunted by his
parallel experience in fighting federal plans to build four dams in the
Grand Canyon basin. He halted three at cost of allowing construction of
the Glen Canyon dam to proceed. His national reputation began at a 1954
Congressional hearing on a dam that would have submerged much of Dinosaur
National Monument, when he demonstrated major errors in the math used by
the Bureau of Reclamation to rationalize the project. A Brower decision in
1960 to publish photo collections by Ansel Adams turned the Sierra Club
Books imprint into a business success, but a series of confrontations with
the Sierra Club board, Congress, and the IRS over the growing involvement
of the club in political activity led to the club temporarily losing
tax-exempt status in 1966 and brought Brower's departure three years later,
as well as the 1970 separation of the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund from
the Sierra Club itself. The Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund is now known as
EarthJustice. Brower founded both the John Muir Institute for
Environmental Studies and Friends of the Earth before the end of 1969.
Encounters With The Archdruid, a 1971 volume of biographical sketches of
Brower by John McPhee, boosted Brower to iconic status. He was nominated
for the Nobel Peace Prize in 1978, 1979, and 1998, but was never inclined
to either rest on his laurels or mellow with age. Fired by the FoE board
in 1984, Brower was reinstated a month later, but resigned for good in
1986 after continuing conflict and founded Earth Island Institute, which
took an even more politically radical direction as well as
seeking--uniquely among major environmental groups--to draw support from
the animal rights movement. Brower meanwhile had returned to the Sierra
Club board in 1982. Despite several resignations, he remained on the
board most of the time until early 2000, when he quit again. "The world
is burning," Brower said, "and all I hear from them is violins. May the
Sierra club become what John Muir wanted it to be and what I have alleged
that it was."

Perry W. Gilbert, 87, died on October 15 at his home in Sarasota,
Florida. Supervising routine student dissections of dogfish sharks during
the 1930s as a professor of comparative anatomy at Cornell University,
Gilbert was inspired to seek U.S. Navy funding to research ways to protect
humans from shark attack, but by the early 1970s was more concerned with
protecting sharks from human greed and misunderstanding. Seeking a
nonlethal anti-shark defense, Gilbert at one point tried to train dolphins
as lifeguards. He and a colleague also invented an anesthetic for sharks,
which enabled them to study large sharks close-up in the wild without risk
of a bite. At that, he often said, "you're safer in shark-infested
waters than driving to the beach." His one-word assessment of sharks:
"Beautiful."

William Naser, 48, of Porters-ville, Pennsylvania, was killed
in front of his 16-year-old son on the night of October 27 when he tried to
drag an injured dog off of U.S. 422 and was hit by a pickup truck driven by
Frank Chmura, 46, of New Castle.

Maria Gavara Gomez, 27, of Colombia, drowned on October 22 when
a wave swept her off of rocks at Die Neus, South Africa, during a
whale-watching expedition. In her enthusiasm at seeing whales close-up she
had wandered into an area locally known as extremely dangerous, but not
marked with warning signs.

Theva Pongsuwan, 30, a ranger at the Khao Ang Reu Nai wildlife
sanctuary in Thailand, was fatally shot by two poachers on October 25 when
he ordered them to surrender, but returned fire as he died, killing one
of the poachers.

Mae Noell, cofounder with her late husband Robert of the notorious
Noell's Ark Chimp Farm in Palm Harbor, Florida, died on October 15. The
Noells started a traveling "gorilla show" in 1940. It actually featured
chimpanzees who wrestled volunteers chosen from the audience. The Noells
started Noell's Ark as their winter quarters in 1954. Retiring from the
road in 1971, they bred chimpanzees for the pet trade for some years and
ran the facility as a roadside zoo, which they argued was actually a
sanctuary, since they did take in many abused, aged, or just plain
unwanted exotic pets. Fined and closed by the USDA in 1992 for repeated
violations of the Animal Welfare Act, Noell's Ark was eventually stripped
of its exhibition permit, but won nonprofit status and had begun sending
out mailings soliciting funds with which to make site improvements.