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Show MURIE MARDI On her 100th birthday, her son pays tribute | By Martin Murie politically driven “wildlife management" When my mother went to New York City to receive the Audubon Medal my sister Joanne and J met with her at a hotel in Manhattan. The next night we’d be with a crowd in the Hilton Hotel, picking away at banquet fare, listening to the resulting skirmishes, both inside and practices had to be challenged. The outside of government, were usually, not always, played by the rules of civilized discourse, but they were demanding, politically fraught, jobs and reputations at stake. Mardy and Weezy could tell you many a tale. buzz of high-end political talk, waiting for our mother to stand up, be honored, and say something. The three of us were a long way from home and decades had rolled away between us and small town life in Jackson’s Hole, the "real" Jackson’s To understand any one of those four, then, you have to relate to all four. Mardy did not stand alone as anything like a “matriarch” of the conservation Hole, long before our mother became somewhat of a celebrity, tagged by the media as “Matriarch" of the Conservation Movement. Joanne told me, "I’ve read it (Mardy’s speech). It’s okay.” But I was nervous. Our mother, always so competent and confident in small town and outback movement, nor did she think of herself in that way. She was a partner, as she and Olaus and Ade and Weezy discovered that they had worked themselves into a life work places, how would she perform? None of us three kids, by the way, thought of those places as wilderness areas. Desert or mountain, sage plains or high alpine, they were simply where the family went, because that’s where Olaus’s assignments directed him. And the more wild animals the better. Well, next night on the stage Mardy did fine, opening with a confession that her role in wilderness preservation was to serve tea and cookies. There was a lot of truth in that. Not only was Mardy a superb organizer of social gatherings, and they couldn’t back away from it. And through it all, Mardy Olaus and Mardi were a team, always had been, from the time of their honeymoon on wilderness trails in Alaska. They were in love, partners for life. | Jackson, Wyoming. 1920s those gatherings she hosted on the big front porch of the house were frequent and they offered a quiet space in the Snake River bottoms, a chance to unburden and share concerns. _ Not quite that simple: Olaus and Mardy were a team, always had been, from the time of their honeymoon on wilderness trails in Alaska. They were in love, partners for life. Olaus was one of a diverse band of government servants ... zoologists, geologists, foresters and others in various niches of federal and state bureaus ... many of whom were discovering ecology. Aldo Leopold, a perfect example, began as a federal forester whose top priority was to find ways of increasing deer and other "big game” populations, for sportsmen, but he learned from on-the-ground research and experience that nature is incredibly complex, each of its components meshed in relationships. That was what those scientists, in or out of government agencies, were discovering, and it changed their lives. Still too simple. Olaus and Adolph, brothers, were a team too. They'd grown up in poverty in Moorhead, Minnesota, near a patch of yet-undeveloped country at the edge of the city where foxes and mink and muskrats and other wild critters lived. Great for playing Indian, or simply finding out.about animals:-They called it "The Wilderness," and they, like so many other future biologists, devoured the - books of Ernest Thompson Seton. Many struggles later, Olaus, working for the Bureau of Biological ‘Survey (Now Fish and Wildlife Service) and Adolph as National Park Service biologist, married. sisters. And so Louise (Weezy) and Adolph (Ade) and Mardy and Olaus, were a foursome, That in itself is a long, fascinating story. I’ll just say that Ade and Olaus honored scientific findings about caribou and wolves, mountain sheep and cattle and coyotes and other predator and prey species by taking those findings seriously. That meant that crude and/or and Weezy were the organizers of households and families, whether in tents or on the road or in city or town. They became adept at what to take and what to leave behind. There was none of this nonsense about wilderness travel for the sake of proving oneself, of enduring pain and danger. No, the objective was to be safe, and comfortable. After all, there was work to be done. If you read back into the journals of other wilderness travellers you will find that same emphasis: safety Mardi with a howling coyote pup, near Jackson Hole, Wyoming. |