Dr. Oakleigh Thorne II
By Katherine Creel

Dr. Oakleigh Thorne II wants you to pet a cockroach. Or taste the salt left behind after marsh water has evaporated, help band a cliff swallow or listen to swallow song. Whatever it is you choose, he wants you to get in touch with nature.

In an age of iPods, cell phones and chat rooms, that might seem like a tough challenge, but luckily, Dr. Thorne has a passion for nature and a way of getting things — lots of things — done. The Thorne Ecological Institute, which has been connecting kids to the environment for more than 55 years, is only one of his many notable contributions to the Boulder community.

Located just off Arapahoe Avenue, on the dead-end side of 63rd Street, the 44-acre Sombrero Marsh is just the place to make that kind of connection. The City of Boulder bought the grassy salt marsh, once a dumping ground for anything from junked cars to old appliances, from the Boulder Valley School District in 2000, with the agreement that the Thorne Ecological Institute, founded by Dr. Thorne in 1954, would call a one-acre corner of it “home.”

The Institute’s single building, built in 2001, boasts an array of solar panels and a 40-foot wind turbine on the outside, and a classroom and learning laboratory on the inside.

“Kids need to get over their fear of creepy crawlies,” Thorne says, holding the insect gently so that a visitor could pet it. He places the insect back into its plastic cage, and, leading the way to the classroom, explains how he got over any such fear long ago.

“I was lucky,” he says. “I grew up on Long Island, on 80 acres of land that had woods and streams and a lake. I was just a nature boy.”

That was before World War II, before interstates and parkways crisscrossed the island. Every day after school, he says, he would explore the wilderness around him. He began taking pictures of birds when he was only 8, and banded his first one about five years later.

He was lucky not only in his natural environment, but also in his educational one. At Millbrook High School, in Millbrook, N.Y., biology teacher Frank Trevor brought nature to the classroom or his students to nature.

It was in the summer of 1953, during the summer between his first and second years of graduate school at Yale, that Dr. Thorne had his first encounter with nonprofit, and it turned out to be an pivotal one.

As part of his summer project, he helped Dr. Richard Pough of the New York Museum raise money to save the “Sunken Forest” on Fire Island from looming commercial development. He started pounding the pavement and soon had his first donation: a $15,000 grant from the Old Dominion Foundation. The money, however, could only be given to a tax-exempt, nonprofit organization, and in 1953, establishing an organization as a nonprofit took two years. The trees couldn’t wait that long.

Fortunately for the Sunken Forest, Dr. Pough had set up his own nonprofit group almost exactly two years earlier, and that $15,000 donation became the first grant given to The Nature Conservancy, now an international organization with more than one million members.

“I learned the value of a nonprofit,” he says. When he graduated a year later and came out West, he served as The Nature Conservancy’s first Colorado representative.

He did quite a few things when he got to Boulder, actually. At the same time he was setting up Thorne Ecological Institute, he bought two old fraternity houses and opened Thorne Films Inc. which at one point employed 40 people. The roughly 800 films that came out of that studio covered topics as varied as one-celled organisms, artistic techniques and the Klondike gold rush — using original footage shot by Thomas Edison.

The company logo, a picture of the head of a long-eared owl, inspired the name of the record company he opened a few years later as an outgrowth of running a film studio. The company produced albums of almost all kinds, including recordings of a Hungarian string quartet that was in residence at the University of Colorado, and four albums of steam engine recordings.

Unfortunately, both Owl Records and Thorne Films Inc. closed in 1974, a result, Thorne says, of President Nixon vetoing the health, education and welfare bill that provided much of the funding for schools. The Thorne Ecological Institute, however, has thrived over the past 56 years, and its home on the Sombrero Marsh now helps achieve its goals of education and appreciation.

Under the leadership of Dr. Betty Willard, the institute’s first executive director, Thorne Institute played a major role in setting up the Colorado field office of The Nature Conservancy, the Audubon Society of Greater Denver, the Aspen Center for Environmental Sciences (ACES), the Keystone Science Center, and the Colorado Open Space Coordinating Council.

Through its Seminars on Environmental Arts and Sciences, held from 1967 through 1984, the Institute also actively taught the principles of ecology and the cost of environmental mismanagement to businesses and government leaders.

“We invited the enemy,” Thorne says. “Power companies, oil companies, anyone who was affecting the environment.” As a result, in 1960, the Institute helped draft the first-ever environmental assessment, a document he says became the model for later Environmental Impact Statement requirements under the National Environmental Protection Act.

Not content to merely teach children and adults about nature and the environment, Dr. Thorne also helped ensure that there would be enough nature left for kids to experience. With University of Colorado professors Bob McKelvey and Al Bartlett, he helped found PLAN-Boulder in 1959, a citizens group dedicated to developing sound environmental policy.

Nature and education have been at the heart of almost all of Dr. Thorne’s pursuits, and now the Long Island nature boy is the teacher, sharing with children the same kind of experiences he grew up on.

“I banded my first bird when I was 13,” he says, “and now here I am teaching 12- and 13-year-olds to do the same thing.”

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