Milwaukee Journal, Wednesday, May 11, 1994 page D3 (Lifetime-Science & Technology section)

Botany, activism guided professor's hand

by Paul G. Hayes, Journal Science reporter

In 1973, Hugh Iltis called then-President Richard Nixon's energy conservation program mere "peanuts", a plan undertaken by an "environmental butcher" who was listening to "economic bamboozlers."

That was Iltis all right, a man who more than earned his reputation for rhetorical excess. His passion for the causes of environmental protection, energy conservation, biological diversity and human population control often led him into shocking talk.

He maintained his style through 41 years of teaching botany, retiring last year. Because of that, his former students, many of them professors themselves, as well as colleagues and admirers, gathered in Madison on Saturday to honor their outrageous mentor.

Outrageous ? In 1970, when it was a crime in Wisconsin to publicly display birth control devices, he held up a bent coat hanger in a packed auditorium and called it an IUD for an elephant and dared the sheriff's deputies in the audience to arrest him. Then he held up a disc about the size of a Frisbee and said it was a diaphragm for a rhinoceros, and a large plastic garbage bag, which he said was a condom for a whale. There were no arrests.

Audiences found Iltis exhausting or stimulating, enraging or inspirational. Either way, he was in demand. During 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, he said he delivered 61 speeches throughout the nation, including Alaska, in addition to his lectures as professor of botany at the University of Wisconsin -Madison.

His prediction that Nixon's energy program would be ineffective proved correct. So did his prediction in 1970 that if world population growth continued unchecked, governments would act to limit families. Coercive birth control began in China, the world's most populous country, in the 1980's.

But Iltis' flamboyance gained him some critics on his own campus, he said last week, and he blames these people for his never gaining an endowed professorship, which would have enabled him to train many more botanists and ecologists for the fight to save the planet. Still, many that Iltis did train were on hand to honor him at the banquet and roast. Iltis himself led a field trip into Abraham's Woods in Green County on Sunday.

That was appropriate, for Abraham's Woods was the first tract of land to be preserved by the Wisconsin Chapter of the Nature Conservancy, in 1961, and Iltis was one of the chapter's founding members. The woods is a botanical jewel that contains both a remnant oak and maple forest and dry prairie characteristic of presettlement Wisconsin.

The weekend for Iltis, now 69, began on Friday, when John Doebley, professor at the University of Minnesota- St. Paul, lectured on the evolution and origin of corn. That, too, was appropriate because Iltis is known nationally as the discoverer of plants in Mexico that evolved into modern corn. He and Doebley worked together to discover and describe Zea diploperrenis in the 1970s.

On Saturday, 17 working botanists, all of them former Iltis students, presented a day-long symposium, discussing balsa wood, squash and other subjects one would expect of botanists.

Iltis came to the UW 39 years ago. Under his direction, the UW's herbarium, a nationally important collection of plant specimens that was begun when Wisconsin's pioneer scientist, Increase A. Lapham donated his collection 140 years ago, grew to about 1 million specimens.

Although Iltis officially retired last summer, he continued to work, sometimes 12 hours a day, he said, with the herbarium. After two heart attacks, one three years ago and the other last year, he has put some limits on his out of state travel. Even so, Iltis said, he has been retained on a part-time basis for another three years to serve as director of the herbarium.

In 1992, Iltis won a national award from the National Wildlife Federation as conservationist of the year. He said he received no words of congratulations from the university officials, with one notable exception : Football coach Barry Alvarez sent him a nice letter.