Wild Women: Female conservationists who made the world better

March is Women’s History Month, a time we honor great American women pioneers like Jane Addams, Eleanor Roosevelt, Harriet Tubman, etc. This month I would like to remember three women who changed our environment for the better.

Rosalie Edge (1877-1962) was a fierce friend of birds in an era that made the passenger pigeon extinct. Edge was a New Yorker active in early suffragette and conservation circles. Her love of birds and distress at their decimation led her in 1929 to create the Emergency Conservation Committee, which sought to preserve all wildlife while it was still abundant. Its motto might well have been “no more passenger pigeons.” In 1934 Edge ended the wanton slaughter of Pennsylvania raptors by creating the Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, 130 miles northeast of Hagerstown. She went on to lobby for the creation of Olympic National Park (1938) and Kings Canyon National Park (1940), while remaining an ardent advocate for all wildlife until her death.

Mardy Murie (1902-2003) was one of America’s most effective wilderness voices. Raised in Alaska, and the first woman to graduate from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Murie would spend the rest of her life protecting the wild Alaska of her youth. She worked with her naturalist husband Olaus Murie to explore the wildlife and wilderness of remote Alaska, including a 1956 scientific expedition to what would become Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1960. After Olaus’ death, Mardy was a powerful voice for the 1964 Wilderness Act and the 1980 Alaska Lands Act, protecting more than 100 million acres of Alaska wild lands. At her death at 101, Murie had developed a national network of wilderness advocates and was widely known as the “grandmother of the conservation movement.”

Of course any list of women conservationists would be remiss if we did not mention Rachel Carson (1907-1964), perhaps our greatest 20th century conservationist of any gender and someone with strong roots here in Maryland. After graduating from Johns Hopkins University, Carson worked for federal conservation agencies while living in Silver Spring, Md. She conducted research in the Chesapeake Bay watershed as an aquatic biologist and edited and publicized the latest scientific research on DDT coming out of the Patuxent Research Refuge in Laurel, Md. Her experiences in Maryland led to her publishing in 1962 the groundbreaking indictment of DDT, “Silent Spring,” a book that both popularized the environmental movement and set many of its goals. The Environmental Protection Agency (1970) and the Endangered Species Act (1973) were but two of the legacies of her one-woman crusade.

There are hundreds of other worthy women conservationists, including Florence Merriam Bailey (1863-1948) who at 26 published the first modern bird guide, or Dr. Eugenie Clark (1922-2015) who taught marine biology at the University of Maryland for decades, and in the process, taught students and the public not to fear but revere the ecological role sharks play in the marine ecosystem.

These women conservationists suggest maybe there is a reason we refer to Mother Nature.

Mark Madison is a resident of Hagerstown and an environmental historian.