The merging of two groups

In 1918, Davidson was an active member of both the BC Mountaineering Club’s natural history section and the Vancouver Arbor Day Association, a group devoted to planting trees in the city for beauty, health and environmental reasons. Davidson called a joint meeting of the two groups in the UBC Biology classroom on Vancouver’s Laurel Street. He recommended uniting the organizations under one constitution, calling it “The Vancouver Natural History Society.” Davidson proposed that the new society do the following:

• develop and spread knowledge of every branch of natural science
• encourage nature study and Arbor Day exercises in schools
• encourage the protection of “useful plants or animals” that might soon become extinct
• establish a museum in which to present the “flora, fauna, geology and anthropology of British Columbia.”

The two memberships approved Davidson’s vision for a merger, and the new organization had a paid membership of 70. The natural history section of the BCMC was interested in learning about nature. In contrast, the Vancouver Arbor Day Association was a political organization that wanted to change the cityscape. By involving the Vancouver Arbor Day Association, Davidson added political activities to the mandate of the Vancouver Natural History Society. Not only did the society intend to share knowledge, it also aimed to reshape society.

To successfully create this merger, Davidson disappointed the Art, Historical and Scientific Association. In 1905, its members had tried to create their own natural history section after a failed attempt to unite with the entomological society. Davidson let down the society’s executive when he chose not to donate specimens to their Vancouver museum. Later, he insulted the society when he called their museum “an old curiosity shop or junk room for the reception of collections which their donors had no further use for.” The museum’s curator, William Ferris, appealed to Davidson and his students to improve the museum by donating specimens. Neither Davidson nor his students appear to have acknowledged this request.

The new natural history society

By forming the new Vancouver Natural History Society (VNHS) on May 10, 1918, Davidson successfully brought members of a mountaineering club and an urban beautification league into the ranks of natural historians — a curious turn of events to say the least. In his opening address, “The Work of the Natural History Society in Relation to Civic Development,” Davidson scolded some people for considering naturalists eccentric old men who collected “fossils, rocks, bugs and plants, and stored them until they became mitey and musty.” Such a view, he said, was “from 25–50 years behind the times.” He also felt that the society should provide a benefit to those outside its membership, saying: “it should render service to the community by helping to advance its educational institutions.”

To Davidson, the definition of naturalist had broadened to include “all who study life and the various factors affecting it.” In making this statement Davidson showed his understanding that botany of the nineteenth century, naming and classifying plant life, was expanding to include ecology, the study of relationships. While nineteenth-century botanists often identified and named plant species, twentieth-century ecologists began to study the relationships between living things and their environment.

The VNHS’s first field excursion was a botanical trip to Burnaby Lake. According to newspaper reports, in its first year of activity the society started an educational campaign to stop the unnecessary destruction of plants. What’s more, Davidson attributed Vancouver’s tent caterpillar infestation to “man’s interference with nature” because the evergreens had been cleared through logging and replaced by a second growth of broadleaf trees.

Most distinctively, however, the group fought for forest preservation and a provincial policy that would promote reforestation. Davidson reported to the natural history society that:

In the near future we hope to have the Faculty of Forestry established for the training of men to preserve our forests as a perpetual national asset, so that this Province may not have the same relation to Cedar, Fir and Spruce that Eastern Canada has to White Pine, almost a thing of the past.