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John Aikin
San Francisco Zoo's Director of Conservation
BIO
John Aikin, the San Francisco Zoo's Director of Conservation, has been intimately involved with nature from an early age. When he was 12, his family pooled their money to purchase him a freezer. As his fascination with wildlife expanded into falconry and taxidermy, they were tired of sorting through frozen chicks, magpies and the occasional barn owl looking for ice cream in the kitchen refrigerator. By the age of sixteen, John had started a vertebrate museum for his high school. After a few distractions from academics, like opening a rehabilitation facility for wildlife, he secured a diploma in zoology from San Francisco State University. Since then, John has made a career of wildlife conservation at the San Francisco Zoo.
For eight years he served as the Curator of Planning and Design, translating between the planners and the zoologists. As the Director of Conservation since July of 2006, John works to enact policy and implement programs focused on wildlife conservation. While he administers conservation grants to organizations throughout the world, some of his favorite projects are close to home - in California.
From 1985 to 2007, the Zoo operated the largest and most successful captive breeding effort in the world for bald eagles, hatching and releasing 103 eagle chicks on the Channel Islands of California to restore a naturally-breeding population to a place where they once thrived. Having helped to reestablish the species over a significant portion of its former range in California, the successful program achieved its ultimate goal in 2007 when the federal government removed the bald eagle from the endangered species list.
The survival of wildlife and wild places rests in the collective hands of us all. But unfortunately, the biggest challenge to worldwide conservation efforts is our ability to influence people to alter their daily activities in ways that will preserve the environment, biodiversity, and ultimately, ourselves. John believes that people have the intelligence and compassion to turn the current extinction crisis around; they just need some help to get motivated. That's why the zoo has set a goal of inspiring the one million people who visit the Zoo each year to take some form of conservation action. Over 150 million people in America, and more than 650 million worldwide, visit accredited zoos each year. Individually and collectively, zoos already have tremendous reach into large audiences of interested individuals who come to them to be entertained, amazed, moved, and even inspired.
John's dream is to inspire a love of wildlife and a commitment to conservation.
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