Protector of the realm

Call it the butterfly effect.

- K Narayanan

If there are rare fish protected in certain oceans, and unique lepidoptera still flitting about in certain patches of rainforest, they can in many ways be traced to a single person.

In 1946, just after it was announced that he would be the first director-general of a new UN agency called Unesco (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization), Julian Huxley wrote UNESCO: Its Purpose and its Philosophy, a manifesto for the body.

Its mission, the evolutionary biologist said, would be twofold: to protect, preserve and present existing elements of world heritage, and to actively conserve nature and "its living beauty".

Huxley's manifesto was typical of the man: ambitious, farsighted, daring, and rooted in his idea of an evolutionary humanism.

His mission statement would expand the meaning of the word “heritage”, and in doing so would yield some of the most powerful initiatives of the otherwise largely ineffective United Nations.

One of these would be the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN, founded in 1948), whose Red List shapes wildlife conservation around the world.

Another would be CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora), born in 1975.

Huxley was born in 1887 in London. His paternal grandfather was Thomas Henry Huxley, the scientist and educator who coined the word "agnostic" and was known as Darwin's Bulldog for his fierce defence of the theory of evolution. His maternal greatgrandfather was Thomas Arnold, the godlike headmaster of Rugby School (immortalised in the Thomas Hughes novel, Tom Brown's Schooldays).