Recently I received an appeal from the development office of one of the institutions of learning I’d attended. For $10,000 I could have a lecture hall seat named for me or someone I chose. It shouldn’t have surprised me. Think of all those dormitories, libraries, laboratories and sports stadia bearing the names of generous donors. In fact a large enough amount can even buy the name of a whole school. The UCLA Medical School became the David Geffen School of Medicine for a gift of $200,000,000 and Cornell Medical School became the Weil Cornell Medical College for the same amount. There are lots of other examples according to a recent NYTimes article by Danielle Ofri who ruminates that since medical students often say they learn most from their patients perhaps the schools and their various parts should be named for patients. An interesting idea. My mind peregrinated.

The present state of  biodiversity appears to be on the cusp of a sixth extinction – the rate of loss of existing species exceeding by orders of magnitude that of new species formation. According to those who study these things, anything approaching this scale of downsizing of life forms has occurred only five previous times in Earth’s history. Each of those episodes has apparently been triggered by a cataclysmic physical event –  a massive meteor strike, widespread volcanic eruptions, a comet collision – that sort of thing. This time the cause appears to be the unintended consequences of the doings of a clever hairless ape making life easier for itself.  So it appears that the burden is on him and her to find a way to turn things around. The problem is that almost any way one can imagine takes lots of money and lots of effort. Generating either will be a challenge but we have looked to the sages of academic institutions for guidance in the past.  Maybe now we should take a cue from their fund raising methods. (Perhaps you can you see where this is going…..)

There are already plenty of eponymous species’ common names and most of them commemorate a long dead 19th century naturalist who was the first to collect a skin and show it around among the naturalist establishment of the time. Think Swainson’s hawk, Dall’s sheep, Wilson’s plover and Thomson’s gazelle. A few names honor even less meritorious individuals. The common Anna’s hummingbird of the West Coast was named by its naturalist discoverer after the wife of an amateur ornithologist friend. (Could there be an interesting back story here?) And the name of the Minke whale seems to have originated as a jibe at a Norwegian whaler who mistook Minkes for the much larger blues. (Is it to honor this confusion that Norway continues to allow the killing of both Minke and blue whales?)

So here is a modest proposal. Change the common names of selected species – particularly endangered or threatened ones – to honor the individuals who have contributed in a major way for their welfare. How about the Carlson’s osprey and the Leopold’s cougar – the former to honor the ground-breaking work of Rachel Carlson showing the devastation DDT causes to bird reproduction and the latter that of Aldo Leopold for defining the critical role of predators in maintaining ecosystem stability. There are other obvious candidates: the Fossey gorilla, the Goodall chimpanzee, the Nielsen orangutan. And there are many less celebrated but equally accomplished individuals: let’s have the Rabinowitz jaguar for Alan Rabinowitz, founder and CEO of Panthera and let’s give Paul Watson due credit for founding Sea Shepherds and co-founding Greenpeace by bumping the bumbling whaler Minke and having instead the Watson’s whale.

Of course, there are many others who have spoken eloquently and effectively about the challenges of conservation and there are plenty of species to go around, but financial support is critical and here is where the conservation community may put the lessons learned from colleges, universities and prep schools to work. Let’s start renaming species to honor individuals who have contribute major financial support to their continued existence! It is, after all, economic forces which are pushing so many species to the brink. And in economic battles, money talks.  For a billion dollars (1/75th of his present worth) we could have the Gate’s tiger. That amount would go a long way towards rescuing the magnificent creature we now know as the Siberian tiger from extinction. For another billion (1/60th of his present net worth) we could have the Buffet leopard prowling the snows of the Himalayas. And for another billion, the grizzly could be renamed the Bezos bear.

To the uninitiated, this all may sound far-fetched and totally unachievable with overwhelming bureaucratic, cultural and behavioral obstacles. But there already is an ongoing process with plenty of examples of successful name changes accomplished by those stereotypically mild-mannered folks, the birdwatchers. Over the past decade the American Ornithological Union has changed the names of multiple species and gotten the changes into common usage. The once-upon-a-time slate colored junco was lumped with the Oregon Junco to become the dark eyed junco. What was once the whistling swan is now the tundra swan. What was once the rufous sided towhee has been split into the Eastern towhee and the spotted towhee. And a couple of birds have even gone from descriptive names to eponymous ones: the fork-tailed emerald is now Canavet’s emerald and the Arizona woodpecker is now Strickland’s woodpecker!

But the naming honor need not be restricted to conservation celebrities and the ultra wealthy. Less enormous contributions could be honored in smaller ways. For coming up with this fundraising idea the Devil’s River minnow could be named after…… me! There are plenty of other obscure endangered species whose nomenclature would be candidates for eponymization to honor modest contributions. And, returning to the institutions of higher learning that inspired this idea, if individual seats in a lecture hall can be had for smaller but significant contributions, one can even imagine the same happening for parts of iconic endangered animals. How about the left canine of the Bezos bear being the (your name here) tooth. Or that lovely fuzzy tail of the Buffet leopard being the (your name here) tail. Given the number of human anatomical eponyms ranging from the Adam’s apple to the zonules of Zinn the possibilities are endless!