Lee Merriam Talbot (1930–2021) was an American ecologist, who became Chief Scientist to the Council on Environmental Quality.
[3][4][5] His father had a career in the Bureau of Plant Industry and Forest Service, becoming an associate director of the California Forest Experiment Station set up in 1926 at the University of California, Berkeley (later the Pacific Southwest Research Station); and was a consultant to the Charles Lathrop Pack Forestry Foundation on watershed management.
[10] In his first year, Talbot made a trip stretching from Africa and Indonesia, researching animals such as the Arabian oryx, Indian rhinoceros and Asiatic lion;[11] he visited around 30 countries over the period.
[13] In 1955 Hal Coolidge of the IUPN asked Talbot to visit colonial Tanganyika, to investigate whether the Ngorongoro Highlands were to be excluded from the Serengeti National Park.
[21] In 1970, with David Challinor and Francis Raymond Fosberg, Talbot was involved in research on the Mekong Delta and the ecological impact of dams and irrigation.
[23] At the conference that preceded CITES, Talbot worked closely with Nathaniel Reed, and together they used that experience to contribute to the drafting of the Endangered Species Act of 1973.
[24] The neologism "sustainability" in the broad ecological sense dates from that period, variously attributed to the Stockholm conference, to Thomas Sowell discussing Say's law, or (in the German language) to the Swiss civil engineer Ernst Basler (see de:wikt:Nachhaltigkeit).
These he met by an outside audit and retrenchment, with voluntary reductions in senior staff, and by prioritizing the Conservation for Development Centre.