New York Zoological Society. Office of President. Fairfield Osborn records

Henry Fairfield Osborn Jr. (January 15, 1887-September 16, 1969, called Fairfield or Fair), was the longest-serving President of the New York Zoological Society, holding the position from 1940 until 1968 after having joined the NYZS Board of Trustees in 1923. Osborn could be said to have been raised with the Society, as his father, Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1935), was one of NYZS’s founders and himself served as President from 1909 to 1925.

Prior to Fairfield Osborn’s election to the NYZS presidency, he served as the Society’s Secretary (1935-1940). One of his last tasks in that position was to oversee the Society’s pavilion at the 1939-1940 World’s Fair in Queens. The exhibit, which included crowd favorites such as the Bathysphere in which NYZS’s William Beebe and his collaborator Otis Barton made their record-setting undersea explorations, the giant panda Pandora from the Bronx Zoo, and an electric eel exhibit from the New York Aquarium, was by most measures a success.

Upon taking over as President, Osborn expanded NYZS both at home and abroad. On the Zoo and Aquarium front, Osborn was, along with the Bronx Zoo’s General Directors, one of the driving forces behind the development of several major exhibits at the Zoo. Additionally, he was a strong supporter of creating a new building for the New York Aquarium, whose original location at Battery Park had been shut down by Robert Moses in 1941, forcing the Aquarium to operate out of temporary tanks in the Lion House of the Bronx Zoo until the opening of the new Aquarium at Coney Island in 1957. The research scientists that had been housed at the old Aquarium were also forced to find temporary quarters during its closure, and the Society rented laboratories at the American Museum of Natural History to accommodate them. Osborn successfully advocated for a proper set of marine laboratories sited at the Aquarium for these scientists. When this building opened in 1967, it was named the Osborn Laboratories of Marine Sciences (OLMS) in his honor.

Beyond New York City, Osborn was equally committed to the conservation of wildlife and wild places in the United States and across the globe. He drove NYZS to increase its commitment to field conservation from the passion of a few dedicated individuals to an institution-wide endeavor. Under his auspices, NYZS started funding several outside researchers’ field projects each year; these efforts would eventually grow into WCS’s current robust Global Conservation Program. Meanwhile Osborn both kindled and harnessed the philanthropic urge to support these efforts in his fellow NYZS trustees by working with them to establish the Conservation Foundation with a mandate to raise awareness about threats to the environment.

Regarded as one of the foremost conservationists of his era, Osborn was a frequent lecturer to groups concerned with environmental issues, and he published several popular articles and books on the threats of human activity to the natural world. His books Our Plundered Planet (1948) and The Limits of the Earth (1953) argued for the importance of man’s cooperation with nature, the protection of natural resources, and limits to the world’s population. Prior to these, he had served as editor of The Pacific World (1944), a publication intended to provide American soldiers stationed in the Pacific during World War II with information about the area’s oceans, land, peoples, and animals.