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12. Implacable
- University of Georgia Press
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Friends urged Rosalie Edge to write her memoirs, and at the age of seventy-four she began to compose them, ultimately completing 230 pages of manuscript, which she called “Good Companions in Conservation: Annals of an Implacable Widow.” The New Yorker article’s opening characterization had evidently appealed to her; the words “implacable” and “widow” summed up her essence. But publishers rejected her memoirs. One objected to the title “Implacable Widow” and found her prose to be all parry and thrust, with no personal revelations and little of the literary grace found in her poetry and articles or the penetrating wit of her testimony and speeches. As she revised her memoir in the late 1950s, she wrote as a spectator of the conservation movement rather than as its spearhead, proud that “an army of conservationists had come into being.” In that decade the gentlemanly Sierra Club was being radicalized by David Brower, who perhaps more than any other conservationist of his generation had assumed Edge’s combative mantle. When Brower opposed building a dam within Colorado ’s Dinosaur National Monument, Edge sent circulars to her enormous mailing list and wrote dozens of letters to high government officials. But this time it was she who joined the fight led by both Brower’s Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society. Pulitzer Prize–winning author Bernard DeVoto’s pugnacious articles, rather than Edge’s ecc pamphlets, put the unpleasant facts of the water storage project before the public. [ chapter twelve Implacable implacable [ 247 Edge watched proudly as conservation’s advocates gained “force and momentum year by year.” She seemed confident that what she had begun twenty-five years earlier would result in the saving of “our wild life and its environment.” New federal legislation would be “the most powerful means of promoting conservation,” she predicted, and so it would become. Perhaps Edge was still feeling too proprietary of the conservation movement to name a successor. The Wilderness Society emerged first from her committee’s long shadow, although she clearly admired the Sierra Club’s Brower. The ecc’s spawn would rapidly multiply and take various approaches to the challenge of bringing humanity and nature into sustainable balance. One way or another, in their professions or their personal lives or both, these conservationists had been touched by Rosalie Edge’s spirit of informed activism. Edge’s purchase of Hawk Mountain to save it was Richard Pough’s model for the Nature Conservancy, which he cofounded in 1951. Roland C. Clement , who had met Edge when he was a Boy Scout and was one of the respectful young men who absorbed her pronouncements at Hawk Mountain , became a crusading biologist at, of all places, the National Audubon Society. When he could not persuade the Audubon Society to do everything he wished to halt the use of ddt, Clement did not give up. He remained at Audubon but became the quiet force behind the formation of a new organization , the Environmental Defense Fund. The most famous woman of this post-ecc generation would be the Fish and Wildlife biologist Rachel Carson. Her 1962 book, Silent Spring, about the hazards of ddt is commonly considered the starting point for the environmental movement. But people brought up on the battles defined by Rosalie Edge’s ecc might beg to differ; like Edge they thought the movement had begun twenty-five years earlier and that they had been part of it. In 1960 Rachel Carson’s research on ddt led her back to Hawk Mountain Sanctuary, which she called one of the most “famous vantage points” for watching birds of prey. “As you may possibly have heard from some of our friends in the conservation world,” Carson had written to Edge’s curator, Maurice Broun, “I am at work on a book that will explore some of the effects of chemical pesticides, especially their ecological effects.” The decades of data that Broun had given Carson on immature hawk and eagle migration would prove “especially significant” to her. If so, then Rosalie Edge’s role was also especially significant. Hawk Mountain was her brainchild. She had been the one to insist that Broun count the birds of prey every day of the autumn migration. And fourteen years before [18.117.196.217] Project MUSE (2024-04-17 20:22 GMT) 248 ] chapter twelve Silent Spring’s publication, Edge, as citizen-scientist, offered the government proof that high concentrations of ddt had killed songbirds at a Westchester golf course. Though the...