Ellen Viereck's love for the natural world started at an early age. "I was born in 1928. When I was three, my mom had a pet squirrel, and I would dig the holes in the ground and he would put his acorns in," Ellen recalls. "So early on I had a connection to nature."
Ellen's connection to nature was nurtured by an influential teacher. "My fourth grade teacher ran a summer camp in New Jersey," Ellen says. "She taught us how to identify birds and catch newts, and we would go on all sorts of explorations. She was from Minnesota and had tons of bear stories, and we would lie under a tree and have her tell them to us over and over."
Ellen graduated from Vassar in 1949 with a degree in conservation, but not before marrying her husband in the middle of her senior year.
"My senior paper was on game management in Alaska," Ellen says. "After we graduated, we drove our 1932 Buick with wooden-spoke wheels to Alaska. We damaged our last tire and were forced to stop in a remote, largely uninhabited part of British-Columbia until a replacement could be flown in. We found a couple from Oklahoma looking for help building a cafe. They couldn't pay us, but we said that's OK, just feed us and house us. Three and a half weeks later, our tire arrived and we continued on to Alaska."
Ellen and her husband traveled to Juneau to receive their assignment with the Alaska Native Service: a post on King Island, a remote arctic island in the Bering Straight, 90 miles west of Nome, and within sight of Siberia. For two winters and three summers they lived on King Island, teaching school and performing medical work in the native village.
Ellen and her husband returned to New England to pursue Master's degrees in education from Plymouth State College in New Hampshire. Between the spring and summer semester, Ellen had her first child. "I only missed one day of class," says Ellen.
In 1954, Ellen and her husband accepted teaching positions in Bennington, Vermont. They bought a farm house built in 1785, where they raised their four children, and tended to an immense garden and several horses, and where they still live today.
In Bennington, Ellen taught junior primary-a class for young students in need of extra help in their studies. Her approach to teaching, using bird identification as the basis of the program, was unconventional, but effective.
"I had 26 bird flash cards pinned under a bird feeder just outside the window at the children's eye level. The students learned to match the bird to the bird card instead of matching clown faces in a work book. I gave a Roger Tory Peterson bird guide to the student who learned the most birds," Ellen says. "Kids would fight over those cards, but they learned to read."
Ellen didn't just teach environmentalism; she lived it. In 1974, she testified at a public hearing in favor of the proposed Eastern Wilderness Areas Act. Warner Shedd, a state leader in the conservation community, heard her speak and invited her to join the Vermont Alliance of Conservation Voters, on whose board she later served.
In the 1970's, Ellen was compelled to take legal action to save a place she loved. "The Forest Service had proposed a 350-acre clear-cut for the Lamb Brook area, a very heavily used bear area in the Green Mountain National Forest. My brother-in-law and I sued the Forest Service to protect the area." Thanks to Ellen's courageous stand for wilderness, the Lamb Brook area has so far remained wild and free.
Ellen was also deeply involved in the passage of the Vermont Wilderness Act of 1984, which established four new wilderness areas.
Today, Ellen serves on the board of Forest Watch, and has been deeply involved in the revision of the management plan for the Green Mountain National Forest. "They tell me I went to 70 different meetings for this current forest plan," says Ellen. "The plan is a step in the right direction, but we would like more wilderness. The Green Mountain National Forest is a day's drive from Boston, New York City, New Haven, Philadelphia, and Baltimore-for millions of people who need a little peace and quiet in their lives."
In April, Vermont's legislators heeded the public's cry for more wilderness and introduced the Vermont Wilderness Act of 2006, which would provide statutory protection for the areas recommended for wilderness by the Forest Service, along with Glastenbury Mountain and Romance/Monastery Mountain-deserving areas not recognized by the agency. On September 29, the U.S. Senate passed the New England Wilderness Act, which would designate wilderness in New Hampshire's Sandwich Range and Wild River areas along with many of the places proposed by the Vermont Wilderness Act. However, at the insistence of Vermont's Governor who would have otherwise opposed the legislation, the bill excluded a 6,000-acre portion of forest land in Glastenbury Mountain, an area prized by local conservationists and by Ellen personally, who has worked for decades to protect this special place.
"I personally attended at least 70 public meetings during the Green Mountain forest plan revision," says Ellen. "Over the past few years, everyone has had a chance to say their piece and be heard, and we've made compromise after compromise to please as many stakeholders as possible. A poll by the University of Vermont showed that 85 percent of Vermonters want more wilderness. So for the governor to suddenly, at the last minute demand that this part of Glastenbury Mountain be excluded from protection is absolutely outrageous."
Although the loss of these lands from the wilderness bill is a huge disappointment, Ellen and her fellow activists remain hopeful that the legislation will go on to pass the House of Representatives during the November "lame duck" session of Congress, and be signed into law this year.
Ellen offers sound advice-a by-product of decades of wilderness advocacy-for fellow citizens who want to save the places they love. "You have to be willing to speak your mind. You have to be brave and you have to really care. And you have to go to meetings-and I hate meetings-but you have to go to meetings to do anything good. And you have to stay involved."
Ellen has accomplished great things for Vermont's wild forests through her own actions, and by inspiring and organizing others who care about wilderness. "I don't know if we would have had such a good proposed Glastenbury wilderness area without her," says Peter Sterling with the Vermont office of The Wilderness Society. "She has been instrumental in getting other local people to be active. Energetic, passionate people, like Ellen who live near the areas we're working protect have been the driving force for protecting wilderness in Vermont for decades."
"It's been a rich and interesting life," says Ellen. I've met so many wonderful people through my forest work."
Ellen stands shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the greatest wilderness advocates our nation has seen, and we wish her continued success in saving Vermont's wild forests.
