Estella Bergere Leopold dies at age 97; Climate clues found in ancient pollen
Estella Bergere Leopold, a botanist who examined ancient pollen to illuminate the effects of climate change — and who, as the last child of pioneering environmentalist Aldo Leopold, helped maintain her father’s legacy as the founder of the modern conservation movement — died in February 2015. 25 in a retirement home in Seattle. She was 97.
The Aldo Leopold Foundation announced her death.
Aldo Leopold was widely regarded as the most important American ecologist of the 20th century and a founder of the modern conservation movement. His five children all followed his example, entering the natural sciences and becoming outspoken advocates of environmental protection.
Strictly speaking, Estella Leopold was a palynologist, which means she studied pollen, in her case in fossilized form. She extracted it from rocks formed by ancient swamps and shallow seas, then analyzed it for clues about long-ago climate changes.
Some of her first breakthroughs came after studying fossilized pollen deposited along coasts (or what were coasts at the time) and pollen found further inland. The further inland a plant species is, she found, the faster its evolution, thanks to greater swings in seasonal temperatures — a clue to how modern climate change might also be driving faster evolution.
She was also an ecologist and environmentalist and was inspired by her father long after his death in 1948.
During the early part of her career, when she worked for the US Geological Survey in Colorado, she led the fight to protect the fossil-rich Florissant Valley, southwest of Denver, from developers looking to build suburbs.
She helped found a group, the Defenders of Florissant, which pushed for legislation to protect the area while taking legal action to block development. In 1969, after several difficult years and with the excavators ready to go to work, Congress passed a law setting aside the valley as the Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument.
After working for the Geological Survey for twenty years, Dr. Leopold to Seattle to head the Geological Survey Quaternary Research Center at the University of Washington, where she was also a professor.
There she turned her attention to seismic research and spent several years mapping the fault line that runs beneath Seattle. After the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, she led the successful effort to make the summit a national monument as a way to preserve it for researchers.
In 1982, Dr. Leopold and her siblings established the Aldo Leopold Foundation to further their father’s legacy and promote environmental awareness.
“We all have this love for the country, and Aldo Leopold’s work is not a thing of the past, but is the work of today,” she said in 1998 at a conference in honor of her father. “It has led to an awareness of many new areas that today are at the cutting edge of ecological implications.”
Estella Bergere Leopold was born on January 8, 1927 in Madison, Wisconsin. Her father taught at the University of Wisconsin, and her mother, Estella (Bergere) Leopold, helped him with his research.
Aldo Leopold was best known for promoting the wilderness conservation movement, urging governments to set aside large tracts of virgin land for their own sake rather than for recreation. When she was eight, her family moved to a farm on the Wisconsin River, where her father wrote the book that made him famous, “A Sand County Almanac.”
She was the youngest of five siblings: A. Starker Leopold was a zoologist, Luna Leopold a hydrologist, Carl Leopold a plant physiologist, and Nina Leopold Bradley a conservationist.
“I was very young and my father asked what I wanted to be,” said Dr. Leopold in 2011 to On Wisconsin, an alumni magazine of the University of Wisconsin. “I said, ‘A bugologist.’ And he said, ‘What?! Why is that?’ And I said, ‘Because everything else is taken.’
She chose botany instead. She received a bachelor’s degree from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1948, a master’s degree from the University of California, Berkeley in 1950, and a doctorate from Yale in 1955, all in botany.
No immediate family members survive.
Dr. Leopold retired from the University of Washington faculty in 2000, but remained active in the environmental movement. She wrote a number of books about her life and her family, including ‘Saved in Time: The Fight to Establish Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, Colorado’ (2012) and ‘Stories From the Leopold Shack: Sand County Revisited’ (2016).
In 2010, she received the International Cosmos Award, a $500,000 prize given by the Expo ’90 Foundation of Japan for promoting “the harmonious coexistence between nature and humanity.”
She was also a longtime member of the National Academy of Sciences, having been inducted in 1974. Two of her brothers, Starker and Luna, were already there; it was the first time that three siblings were members of the institution.