A Steward Of The Land
Source: The Day
July 13, 2007
Connecticut College has distinguished itself for its work in ecology, and an emblem of that achievement has been the Connecticut College Arboretum and the legacy of a popular botany professor there by the name of Richard H. Goodwin.
Dr. Goodwin, who died last Friday at the age of 96, was responsible both for establishing at Conn one of the nation's first college curriculums on human ecology and for putting the concept of man's living in harmony with nature into practice in the form of the arboretum. Originally 90 acres and now more than four times that size, the arboretum's lush and interesting vegetation compensates for the college's carbon imprint by consuming the amount of carbon gases the college's activities put into the atmosphere every year.
Dr. Goodwin was an early leader in land conservation and in the Nature Conservancy, in which he served as president in the 1950s and 1960s. In that role, he led in negotiating what was at the time the largest land-acquisition deal in its history, protecting 6,500 acres on the California coast. His impact was felt much closer to home as well, both in his role as a teacher and environmental advocate on the Connecticut College faculty and champion of land conservation in southern New England. His accomplishments include the expansive Burnham Brook Preserve in East Haddam, to which he donated his own home and property.
Dr. Goodwin, in addition to being a talented and well-liked teacher and pioneer in the practices of land conservation, was a practical man willing to challenge conventional thinking.
He was among the scientists who demonstrated the potential for an unorthodox notion of setting fires to stop them: controlled burnings to limit the spread of forest fires.
More recently and closer to home, he and his long-time colleague at Connecticut College, the late William A. Niering, challenged environmental orthodoxy by supporting a highway project. Drs. Goodwin and Niering argued on behalf of completing Route 11 through Salem, Montville and East Lyme as a “greenway” pro-ject, lined with woods and open spaces. The pro-ject, they maintained, would be environmentally beneficial by trumping housing and commercial development that otherwise would occur in the area crossed by the highway's right-of-way.
Their support of the project helped bring the moribund highway proposal back to life.
Dr. Goodwin's work is honored in Connecticut College's Goodwin-Niering Center for Conservation Biology and Environmental Studies and lives on in the many who benefitted from his views about the importance of being good stewards over the Earth
