Before she presided over the highly controversial, and widely regarded successful reintroduction of the gray wolf into the northern Rocky Mountains as the nation’s first woman director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Mollie Beattie worked for many years directly with Vermont landowners, local leaders, and industry to bring middle ground to economic use and environmental protection of forest resources.
According to the Christian Science Monitor, she taught forestry to landowners for the Vermont Extension Service and co-authored “Working With Your Woodland, A Landowner’s Guide,”’ published by the University Press of New England in 1983, before becoming Vermont’s first female forest commissioner1.
As a full time forester with the non-profit Windham Foundation, Beattie spearheaded development of the well-known Grafton Conferences, which gather civic and industry leaders to explore critical issues that help shape public policy in Vermont. At these two-day conferences, participants have discussed land use, employment, housing, tax policies, agriculture, transportation, renewable energy development, education, women’s issues and more.
“It was a way to get people thinking in new ways about new and old problems,’' Mollie told the Monitor in 1988.
The Grafton Conferences began in 1984 and the resulting stakeholder reports were used in key Vermont local and state public policy debates. Mollie continued her work at the local, state, and national levels until she died from brain cancer in 1996 at age 49.
Learn about the Grafton Conference forums on the Windham Foundation website.
