Carl George, Professor Emeritus at the Biology Department of Union College, died in December at age 95, leaving his wife Christine, and legions of friends at Union College, and around the world.
Carl came from humble origins in Michigan and Ohio, farmed as a young man, and studied and respected farming all his life. He evolved into a teacher and professor of biology at American University in Beirut, Lebanon, where he opened the university’s marine biological station, and at Union College, Schenectady beginning in 1967.
The biology departments in which he taught informed but did not limit his thinking or constrain his endeavors. He creatively explored the sciences, the arts, and the humanities, and led, created, or co-created many constructive institutions or movements, including the Adirondack Chapter of The Nature Conservancy.
Carl and his wife Gail, Paul Schaefer, Arthur Savage, Wayne Byrne, Winnie LaRose, Bob Hall, and others forged the nascent Adirondack chapter in 1971 out of the Eastern New York Chapter of TNC which Carl had chaired. Peg Olsen, TNC’s Adirondack executive director, visited Carl earlier this year to convey special recognition.
Carl authored Fishes of the Adirondack Park (1979) and led student underwater vegetative studies in Lake George (near Dome Island), studies housed at the Darrin Freshwater Institute (RPI).
Carl co-created, with fellow Prof. Twitty Styles, UNITAS at Union College; led the college’s efforts to restore the Nott Memorial; and, again with Twitty, Yusuf Abdul-Wasi
and others Carl helped create “the Environmental Awareness Network for Diversity in Conservation” or EANDC. He became an educational leader of the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks and helped found Adirondack Wild: Friends of the Forest Preserve.
He was steward of the Reist Wildlife Sanctuary in Niskayuna (Hudson-Mohawk Bird Club), and with Dick Tucker he initiated The Adirondack Chronology (Adirondack Research Library of Union College).
Inclusiveness and Carl’s search for greater understanding of people, cultures, and ideas from other lands, other faiths, and backgrounds was an essential aspect of his makeup. He had 100 provocative ideas to share with any human being at any given time – and he followed up most of his ideas. His fascination with patterns he studied in nature, plants, trees, rocks, the atmosphere, the landscape was endless.
As one Adirondack Wild director put it simply and directly after his death, “it was an honor to know him.” Carl George embraced Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic, whereby “the land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (A Sand County Almanac), but Carl did so with an originality all his own.
Carl wrote poems to honor an individual or his version of The Land Ethic. When in 2002 the Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks was in the midst of its centennial
campaign to open an Adirondack Research Library and Center for the Forest Preserve at Paul Schaefer’s home, Carl wrote and recited this poem to help us. It is so characteristic of him.
Can You Feel the Greenness?
“Can you feel the greenness? Are you part of it?
Grasp the air and hold it firmly in your hands.
It is this air we all breathe, plant and animal alike.
Touch the ground; press gently your fingers into its flesh.
Can you feel the ancient love of its soil and rock,
Its elements born in the death of great, flaring stars?
Do you wonder on the planning, the order, and the design?
Thinking deeply one must sense our commonality,
Farmer, physicist, captain, clerk, tree, grain of sand,
All properly in awe and striving to understand.
We are all part of the growing, emerging whole.
Yet, we tremble beneath the weight of a snowflake’s form.
Oceans are birthed by slowly parting rock;
Mountains rise, are adorned with life and wear away;
Lake basins are carved, filled with water and life,
Then lost to slithering streams of sand and silt;
Cities rise in tense glory, then melt away
Into rubbled pasture, forest and swale where blackbirds call.
There is reassuring pattern to this all and it thrives.
Know this. Believe this, and walk with affirming flowers,
Companions in our sharing, the dandelion a society
As sure as those who gather here in the wilderness.
This temple, this citadel, this crafted arena of muses.
We are blessed in this community – of this be sure.
Do we abuse the flow of these events, this inflorescence?
With godlike fire and knowing do we singe the ties,
Advantage the sand of marauding deserts,
And defile clear waters in their pursuit of the sea?
Do we splendor in vain and then waste into skeletal cadavers
Lacking the soil or grave space for rebirth.
Do we stray from the glory of universal plan
To grow anxious and seek salving séance?
Gathering, as we gather now, with enlightened concern
Toward knowing, toward saving, toward rebuilding,
We pray for the wisdom and other means to live
And to have lived with more than tangible wealth.
Let us rejoin the soil with some record of right action.
Let us leave good memories strewn about like flowers.
Let us look all about and be charmed by the view
Of strong friends who swell with uniting light.
Let us join the compelling Universe
To reach horizons beyond our imagination.”
This poem was first published in The Forest Preserve, 2003, the magazine of The Association for the Protection of the Adirondacks.
Photo of Carl George leading a talk on invasive garlic mustard in June 2008 at the Reist Wildlife Sanctuary, Niskayuna, NY (courtesy David Gibson).
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