Notable Ecologists, Environmentalists, & Conservationists Posters “B...-”
for science & social studies classrooms, home schoolers, offices.

William Bartram
Archie “Grey Owl” Belaney
Janine Benyus
Wendell Berry

R. D. Blackmore
Stewart Brand
Louis Bromfield

William Bartram
b. 4-20-1739; Kingsessing, PA
d. 7-22-1823

William Bartram, the son of botantist John Bartram, was noted from his youth for his botanic and ornithological drawings. William was the author of “Bartram's Travels”, which described his four year visit to eight southern colonies beginning in 1773.

Bartram's Garden, the oldest surving botanic garden in North America, is on the site of the Bartram family farm.

Archie “Grey Owl” Belaney
b. 9-18-1888; Hastings, England
d. 4-13-1938; Saskatchewan

Archibald Belaney took the name “Grey Owl” when he chose to live as a member of the First Nations as a adult. He wrote numerous articles and toured, making him one of the “most effective apostles of the wilderness”.

Janine Benyus
b. 1958

Science writer Janine Benyus demonstrates how nature's solutions to situations should be the creative jumping-off points for solutions, developing, or simply revitalizing processes or products.

• Biomimicry Institute

Wendell Berry
b. 8-5-1934; Henry Co., KY

Author and farmer Wendell Berry is well known for his advocacy of “sustainable agriculture, appropriate technologies, healthy rural communities, connection to place, the pleasures of good food, husbandry, good work, local economics, the miracle of life, fidelity, frugality, reverence, and the interconnectedness of life.”

Berry also taught creative writing at the University of Kentucky.

Wendell Berry quotes ~
• “Don't own so much clutter that you will be relieved to see your house catch fire.”
• “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility. To cherish what remains of it and to foster its renewal is our only hope.”
• “Do unto those downstream as you would have those upstream do unto you.”
• “It may be that when we no longer know which way to go that we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”
• “A community is the mental and spiritual condition of knowing that the place is shared, and that the people who share the place define and limit the possibilities of each other's lives. It is the knowledge that people have of each other, their concern for each other, their trust in each other, the freedom with which they come and go among themselves.”
• “A proper community, we should remember also, is a commonwealth: a place, a resource, an economy. It answers the needs, practical as well as social and spiritual, of its members - among them the need to need one another. The answer to the present alignment of political power with wealth is the restoration of the identity of community and economy.”
• “Let us have the candor to acknowledge that what we call “the economy” or “the free market” is less and less distinguishable from warfare.”
• “A corporation, essentially, is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance.”
• “Rats and roaches live by competition under the laws of supply and demand; it is the privilege of human beings to live under the laws of justice and mercy.”
• “Whether we and our politicians know it or not, Nature is party to all our deals and decisions, and she has more votes, a longer memory, and a sterner sense of justice than we do.”
• “One of the most important resources that a garden makes available for use, is the gardener's own body. A garden gives the body the dignity of working in its own support. It is a way of rejoining the human race.”
• “We have lived our lives by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. We have been wrong. We must change our lives so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption, that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and learn what is good for it.”
• “Nobody can discover the world for somebody else. Only when we discover it for ourselves does it become common ground and a common bond and we cease to be alone.”
• “There are no unsacred places; there are only sacred places and desecrated places.”

R. D. Blackmore
b. 6-7-1825; Longworth, Berkshire (now Oxfordshire), England
d. 1-20-1900; Teddington, Middlesex

Richard Doddridge Blackmore, one of the most famous authors of his time, is now remembered for his 1869 romance novel Lorna Doone. He was also an early environmentalist, choosing to cultivate fruit on his small market garden and fighting the encroaching railways.

Stewart Brand
b. 12-14-1938; Rockford, IL

Best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, Steward Brand also founded a number of organizations including The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link’), the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation.

Stewart Brand quotes ~
• “In our researches on the likely economic apocalypse it's become clear what is the prime survival tool for hard times: friends. Good friends. Lots of them.” ~ Whole Earth Epilog (1974)
• “When a fantasy turns you on, you're obligated to God and nature to start doing it - right away.”
• “Science is the only news. When you scan through a newspaper or magazine, all the human interest stuff is the same old he-said-she-said, the politics and economics the same sorry cyclic dramas, the fashions a pathetic illusion of newness, and even the technology is predictable if you know the science. Human nature doesn’t change much; science does, and the change accrues, altering the world irreversibly.”
• “Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.”
• “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” ~ 1968 Whole Earth Catalog opening sentence.

Louis Bromfield
b. 12-27-1896; Mansfield, Ohio
d. 3-18-1956

Louis Bromfield, who was awarded a Pulitizer Prize for his novel Early Autumn (1927), is nearly forgotten five decades after his death. Bromfield was also an agrarian reformer who set up an experimental farm and retreat, Malabar, in rural Ohio where friends such as Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, visited.

Louis Bromfield quote ~
• “As soils are depleted, human health, vitality and intelligence go with them.”

David Brower
b. 7-1-1912; Berkeley, CA
d. 11-5-2000

Environmentalist David Brower was the founder of the Sierra Club Foundation, the John Muir Institute for Environmental Studies, Friends of the Earth (1969), the League of Conservation Voters, and Earth Island Institute (1982).

David Brower quotes ~
• “We must begin thinking like a river if we are to leave a legacy of beauty and life for future generations.”
• “When people say, ‘You're not being realistic,’ they're just trying to tag some thoughts that they can't otherwise handle.”
• “Bring diversity back to agriculture. That's what made it work in the first place.”
• “The more we pour the big machines, the fuel, the pesticides, the herbicides, the fertilizer and chemicals into farming, the more we knock out the mechanism that made it all work in the first place.”
• “What's even more unsettling is the way these people hide what they're doing from the public. They strip the labels off miracle wheat when they ship it, for instance, and say, ‘Watch out. Don't plant too much and don't depend on it too much.'”
• “Even if you build the perfect reactor, you're still saddled with a people problem and an equipment problem.”
• “What happens when the guy who runs the reactor gets out of bed wrong or decides, for some reason, that he wants to override his instruction sheet some afternoon?”
• “I believe that the average guy in the street will give up a great deal, if he really understands the cost of not giving it up. In fact, we may find that, while we're drastically cutting our energy consumption, we're actually raising our standard of living.”
• “Is the minor convenience of allowing the present generation the luxury of doubling its energy consumption every 10 years worth the major hazard of exposing the next 20,000 generations to this lethal waste?”
• “Understanding how DNA transmits all it knows about cancer, physics, dreaming and love will keep man searching for some time.”

Lester R. Brown
b. 3-28-1934; Bridgeton, New Jersey

Author, farmer, and environmentalist Lester R. Brown is the founder of Worldwatch Institute and Earth Policy Institute.

“...farming is all I ever wanted to do with my life. You have to know soils, weather, plant pathology, entomology, management, even politics. It's the ideal interdisciplinary profession.”

Lester Brown quotes ~
• “The challenge is to build a new economy and to do it at wartime speed before we miss so many of the nature's deadlines that the economic system begins to unravel.”
• “Humanity's collective demands have exceeded the earth's regenerative capacity by 26 percent. It is fearful that there are still large numbers of people dreaming the ‘American dream’, hoping to consume like the Americans.”
• “Environmental scientists have been saying for some time that the global economy is being slowly undermined by environmental trends of human origin, including shrinking forests, expanding deserts, falling water tables, eroding soils, collapsing fisheries, rising temperatures, melting ice, rising seas and increasingly destructive storms.”

John Burroughs
b. 4-3-1837; Roxbury, New York
d. 3-29-1921; near Kingsville, OH

Naturalist John Burroughs was intrumental in the evolution of the U.S. conservation movement through his ability to “record his own unique perceptions of the natural world.”

Born on the family farm in the Catskill Mountains, Burroughs spent his youth working on the farm and observing nature. He taught school in order to pay for advanced education that introduced him to the work of Emerson and Thoreau.

In his long life Burroughs was friends with Jay Gould, a hometown classmate, the poet Walt Whitman, Theodore Roosevelt, John Muir, Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison.

• John Burroughs Association

John Burroughs quotes ~
• “I still find each day too short for all the thoughts I want to think, all the walks I want to take, all the books I want to read, and all the friends I want to see.”
• “Joy in the universe, and keen curiosity about it all - that has been my religion.”
• “Blessed is the man who has some congenial work, some occupation in which he can put his heart, and which affords a complete outlet to all the forces there are in him.”
• “For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice - no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.”
• “The lure of the distant and the difficult is deceptive. The great opportunity is where you are.”
• “The smallest deed is better than the greatest intention.”
• “The lesson which life repeats and constantly reinforces is ‘look under foot.’ You are always nearer the divine and the true sources of your power than you think.”
• “To treat your facts with imagination is one thing, to imagine your facts is another.”
• “The tendinous part of the mind, so to speak, is more developed in winter; the fleshy, in summer. I should say winter had given the bone and sinew to literature, summer the tissues and the blood.”
• “The very idea of a bird is a symbol and a suggestion to the poet. A bird seems to be at the top of the scale, so vehement and intense his life. . . . The beautiful vagabonds, endowed with every grace, masters of all climes, and knowing no bounds – how many human aspirations are realised in their free, holiday-lives – and how many suggestions to the poet in their flight and song!”