Environmentalist, UNLV professor Deacon retires

Monday, May 20, 2002 | 9:15 a.m.

Forty-one years ago biologist James Deacon left the plains of Kansas for Southern Nevada's deserts and never looked back.

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas professor, who was responsible for getting environmental protection for the rare desert pupfish, retired Sunday.

More than 50 people attended a reception at the UNLV Foundation Sunday afternoon, including friends, faculty, relatives and former students.

The Jim Deacon Scholarship Endowment Fund was announced at a fish fry.

Founder of the UNLV Department of Environmental Studies, Deacon forged a nationally recognized biology program by having students work with faculty members in a research-intense environment.

In the process, he saved a desert fish hardly an inch long and started an in-depth study of Lake Mead that continues to this day. He also had personal battles, struggling with a spinal tumor that left him paralyzed and losing a son, David, 22, in a boating accident early in 1983.

Through it all Deacon has persevered, whirring across the university campus from his office in the McDermott complex in his motorized wheelchair.

Those who have known him even a short while say they find it hard to imagine the UNLV Environmental Studies Program without its chairman.

"He is truly someone who has made a difference on environmental issues in the community and mentoring students and faculty," Helen Neill, acting director of the university program, said. "I can't believe he is leaving."

Deacon forged an interdisciplinary approach to environmental studies that combines policy analysis with hard science for those attempting to solve today's complex ecological problems.

Vicki Tripoli, who has earned her environmental degree, credited Deacon with helping her to get a doctorate through his mentoring. He helped her design a program tailored to her interests, then pushed her to complete it.

About a year after Tripoli started her study program in 1989, Deacon hired her as an assistant to expand the environmental studies program.

"He cautioned me that it would be clerical in nature and would only be funded for six months," she said.

That half-year job stretched into six years. Today Tripoli works in environmental research at Nevada Power Co.

Deacon not only designed a program for achievers such as Tripoli, but sought students from various backgrounds.

He sent Tripoli to recruit students from the Navajo Community College, now Dine College, in Arizona.

"The following term, a new Navajo student had her bike stolen on her first day of classes," Tripoli said. By mid-semester, the student wanted to quit because she said she was so homesick.

Deacon paid for a round-trip ticket for a weekend visit, after learning the Navajo student could not afford the fare, Tripoli said. The student, recovering from her homesickness, ended up with a master's degree and a job with the U.S. Public Health Service, working on the Navajo reservation.

With the late W. Glen Bradley, also a biologist, Deacon involved university students during the 1960s in studying desert fishes. Rare springs popping up in the parched Mojave Desert form oases that harbor life found nowhere else on earth.

The Devil's Hole pupfish survive in a few inches of water lapping at the edge of a rocky shelf in Ash Meadows springs near Death Valley. The pupfish measure less than an inch long and drew the ire of Southern Nevada ranchers and farmers when Deacon suggested that pumping the spring's water threatened them.

In the 1960s Deacon went to court for the Devil's Hole pup- fish. In 1976 the U.S. Supreme Court ordered farmers to limit their pumping, saving the fish.

The farmers retaliated by selling their Ash Meadows land to Preferred Equities, developers who had planned to use the springs' water to fill a manmade lake.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientists, working with Deacon, managed to add several species of fish and plants at the springs to the endangered species list instead, reversing the developer's plan.

Deacon drummed up support for his effort by printing bumper stickers, saying "Save the Pup fish." Nye County residents, with support from the developers, printed and distributed free "Kill the Pupfish" stickers.

In the end, the pupfish battle had a political solution.

Former Sen. Paul Laxalt, R-Nev., introduced a bill in Congress to buy the 12,600-acre Ash Meadows parcel from Preferred Equities and turned it into a national wildlife sanctuary.

President Ronald Reagan signed the measure into law in the fall of 1983. The area became the Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge.

While Deacon's students celebrated the political victory for Ash Meadows, their excitement was subdued, since Deacon's son, David, had disappeared into Lake Mead months earlier. His body was never found.