Another Woodswoman tribute
Here’s another read for this morning. The Adirondack Almanack’s John Warren offers a long and lovely remembrance of Anne LaBastille.
LaBastille was an outspoken proponent of environmental conservation whose book Woodswoman reached a national audience and served as inspiration for legions of women interested in the outdoors. At the same time she was a controversial Adirondack figure who served as Adirondack Park Agency (APA) commissioner from 1975 to 1993, a tenure that showed her to be a tenacious defender of the wild character of the Adirondack Park.
Warren tells her history of environmental activism, from a BS in Conservation of Natural Resources from Cornell in 1955, research of mule deer in Colorado and the giant pied-billed grebe in Guatelmala, to her popular success as the writer of Woodswoman in 1976:
LaBastille wrote in Woodswoman that she came to the Adirondacks to “sit in my cabin as in a cocoon, sheltered by the swaying spruces from the outside world.”
LaBastille died Friday at age 75.
Find the whole post, and lots more from the Almanack, here.
I read her autobiography and was especially interested in her fight to save the endangered Grebe species on Lake Atitlan, Guatemala. When I was in Guatemala last, I asked some of the Indians who lived on the side of the lake where she did her grebe research and conservation effort how the birds were doing. They said they had eaten them all (sad).
Sorry Peter, the dislike check was an accident… There is no undo.
Sorry Peter, the dislike check was an accident… There is no undo.