Beatrice E. Willard, an inspiring and beloved teacher of alpine botany and ecology and a pioneer in alpine tundra research, died recently in her longtime home of Boulder, Colorado. Over 4 decades of professional activity she educated generations of traditional and nontraditional students in the principles of ecology and alpine tundra landscape ecology and worked tirelessly to bring attention to the importance of integrating ecological concepts into mainstream American engineering design and construction projects. She helped set the standard for environmental approaches to development projects. She was famous for teaching students “belly botany”—lying on their stomachs face to face with the world of alpine plants.
Bettie was born in Palm Springs, California, to Stephen H. and Beatrice A. Willard, and grew up in a family of inspired naturalists. Her father was an accomplished landscape photographer and painter, and the family wintered in Palm Springs and summered in the Sierra Nevada near Mammoth Lakes, where Stephen had photographic studios. As a child Bettie learned the plants and animals of deserts and mountains. By the age of 12 she was leading natural history tours around Mammoth Lakes and by 18 ran her own guiding business. This keen awareness and understanding of nature and the desire to share information with others was the main creative and professional theme of her entire life.
Bettie received a B.A. in biology from Stanford University in 1947 and in 1948 attended the Yosemite Field School of Natural History, where she learned nature interpretation, a skill that she would perfect and pass on to all her students. She later obtained a general secondary credential at the University of California, Berkeley, which allowed her to become a high school teacher in Tulelake, California. She dreamed of becoming a National Park Service naturalist-interpreter, a field that was largely closed to women in the 1940s, and eventually worked as a summer interpreter at Lava Beds National Monument and Crater Lake National Park.
A turning point in her life came in 1953 when she received a Ford Foundation Fellowship, which was available only to teachers in the country's poorest school districts. Her fellowship proposal, inspired by C. Hart Merriam, was to study the similarities of “mountaintop” tundra across the Northern Hemisphere by comparing European and North American mountain vegetation. The 1-year salary and travel expenses allowed Bettie to move to Europe and study alpine tundra ecology in the Alps, Scandinavia, and British Isles. In Europe she was fortunate enough to meet Braun-Blanquet, Ludi, du Reitz, and other influential plant ecologists of the day.
The fellowship required that she return to teaching, which she did for 2 years. However, her quest to become an alpine ecologist led her to the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and its founder and director, John W. Marr, who encouraged her to come to Boulder to enter graduate school. Bettie moved to Colorado in 1957 and began in earnest the study of alpine tundra on Trail Ridge in Rocky Mountain National Park. At this time the National Park Service was set to kick off “Mission 66,” which included a large-scale facilities development project within national parks. Bettie worked with Rocky Mountain National Park staff to analyze previous human impacts within the park, a project that provided an important introduction to the effects of humans on mountain landscapes and helped fund her graduate education. Bettie's Ph.D. dissertation, completed in 1963, was a classification and description of alpine plant communities on Trail Ridge using Braun-Blanquet floristic-phytosociological methods that she had learned during her tenure in Europe (Willard, 1979). This was one of the first uses of this approach in the Western Hemisphere and helped fulfill Bettie's goal of comparing alpine tundra in the Americas with that in Europe.
Working along Trail Ridge Road in Rocky Mountain National Park exposed Bettie to the large-scale disturbances to alpine tundra created by visitors. The road provided vehicle access to the tundra, but there were few formal parking lots or trails to overlooks. Human foot traffic had heavily impacted the tundra in many areas, and areas bare of plants were eroding. In 1959 Bettie established permanent exclosures and monitoring plots in two alpine areas, Forest Canyon Overlook and Rock Cut, to study the recovery of alpine plant communities from human disturbance. Bettie monitored these plots annually for nearly 40 years, producing one of the longest known records of alpine tundra vegetation recovery. With John Marr, she published several papers using data from the early years of her studies (Willard and Marr, 1970, 1971; Marr and Willard, 1970). Her observations and data clearly indicated that full recovery of these tundra communities would take many hundreds of years. She also worked with the Park Service in the development of trail systems to channel visitors and limit their impact
After completing graduate school Bettie began work at Thorne Ecological Institute, a private nonprofit organization, because she wished to apply her ecological knowledge to real-world problems and thought that decision-makers in the United States generally had little knowledge of how ecosystems functioned. She organized and ran Seminars on Environmental Arts and Sciences (SEAS) in Aspen, Colorado, to bring together leaders in business, industry, engineering, and government and teach them the basic principles of ecology. These seminars, which ran regularly from 1967 to 1984, helped decision-makers develop new ways of looking at landscapes and integrating ecological concepts into their designs for mines, roads, pipelines, and other projects. With the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) in 1969, many activities on federal lands required environmental analyses for impact statements. Thorne Ecological Institute was one of the few organizations that had worked to analyze the environmental effects of large development projects, and Bettie became a leader in integrating ecological analyses into traditional engineering approaches.
Her experience with SEAS and knowledge of industry and ecology led to her appointment by President Richard Nixon to the Council of Environmental Quality in 1972; she served on the council under Presidents Nixon and Ford for nearly 5 years. She worked tirelessly while in Washington, D.C., on projects such as the Trans-Alaska Pipeline to make certain that the environment was protected while development occurred.
After returning to Colorado, she was asked to start a Department of Environmental Sciences at the Colorado School of Mines, one of the world's foremost schools of minerals engineering. Introducing classes on environmental sciences and engineering ecology into a highly conservative engineering school was one of the most challenging and frustrating parts of Bettie's life. She conceived and developed 28 courses, several of which she taught, and hired several new faculty members before leaving to pursue more outdoor activities and writing. For her work at Mines, she was presented with the Outstanding Environmental Leadership Award from the United Nations.
For the rest of Bettie's life, she focused largely on teaching and writing. Many will remember her for the hundreds of classes she taught through the Rocky Mountain Nature Association, the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies (ACES), and the Keystone Science School, which focused field experiences on landscape patterns, plant adaptations, plant identification, biogeography, and disturbance ecology. She will also be remembered for her writings in popular books: Mammoth Lakes Sierra with Dean Rinehart and Elden Vestel (1959), Land Above the Trees with Ann Zwinger (1972), Alpine Wildflowers with Michael Smithson (1980), A Roadside Guide to Rocky Mountain National Park with Susan Foster (1990), and Plants of Rocky Mountain National Park with Linda Beidleman and Richard Beidleman (2000). She will also be remembered for her efforts with Estella Leopold toward the establishment of Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument and for helping to start several conservation organizations in Colorado. Above all, Bettie will be remembered for her tireless and boundless energy; for her laughter, generosity, and wit; and for inspiring generations of amateur and professional botanists, ecologists, and alpine enthusiasts.
