Crusader Losing Optimism for Saving Environment : ‘Woodswoman’ Calls Mountains Home

LAKE GEORGE, N.Y. —  To the readers of her best seller, she is the reclusive “woodswoman,” chopping kindling, embracing the trunks of ancient pines and serenely contemplating the mauve and lavender sunsets at the secret wilderness sanctuary she built from unpeeled logs.

To Maya Indians living near a mile-high lake in Guatemala, she is affectionately known as “Mama Poc,” leader of an apparently futile struggle to save a homely little diving bird whose existence is threatened by voracious bass, reed-cutting basket makers, luxury condominiums, political turmoil and an earthquake that cracked the lake bed like a clay bowl and caused a devastating drop in the water level.

Ecological Crusades

From her cabin of rough spruce in one of the most remote reaches of the 6-million-acre Adirondack Park, Anne LaBastille conducts ecological crusades in some of the most remote jungles and savannas of the southern hemisphere.

In 20 years as an ecologist and natural history writer, she has taken up the fight against acid precipitation, destruction of rain forests and the slow extinction of the flightless pied-billed grebe, or Poc, of Guatemala’s Lake Atitlan. For her efforts, she has won the World Wildlife Fund’s gold medal for conservation and, last spring, the Explorers Club’s Citation of Merit.

But although she speaks fervently against the multinational corporations that she says ravage a delicate tropical ecosystem to grow peppercorns or cheap beef for American fast-food restaurants, LaBastille doesn’t act like a strident pursuer of a cause.

Childlike Delight

On the contrary, it is with an almost childlike, wide-eyed delight that she tells of catching a meal of piranhas in an Amazon River lagoon, listening to the bullfrogs booming in her lake or watching the glow of inspiration in the faces of young women who come to her “women in wilderness” workshops at colleges and conference centers.

“I love to give lectures,” she said. “The kids get so excited to see another perspective on life, to see women can do something besides being teachers or nurses.”

She shows them slides of Valerie Taylor, the Australian underwater photographer who appeared in the film “Blue Water, White Death”; Kess Hillman, who is working to save white rhinos in Africa, and other women who were included in her book “Women and Wilderness,” which recently came out in paperback.

LaBastille is a small woman with a soft, girlish voice and a broad smile that has etched long creases across suntanned temples. Her forearms, extending from rolled-up red flannel shirt sleeves, are lean and sinewy from a lifetime of chopping wood.

Cabin Off Limits

Her coarse, graying blond hair was caught in pigtails, from which strands were snatched by the wind as she emerged from her pickup truck with her German shepherd, Condor, for a hike near Lake George.

She insisted on Lake George, in the southeastern foothills of the Adirondacks near her rented winter house, for an interview. Her real home, her log cabin, is off limits to outsiders. “That’s my home, my sanctuary. I don’t let anyone up there.”

It was her book about how she came to build the cabin and live in the woods that made LaBastille something of a cult hero among the down-vest-and-rucksack set of the 1970s.

“Woodswoman,” published in 1976 and now in its eighth printing, chronicles how the ecologist set out on her own after a failed marriage. It is a Thoreauvian celebration of self-reliance and communion with nature in which she tells of embracing trees to feel their “life energy,” gazing at a scarlet sunset from a mountaintop tent, bathing in a horse trough under falling snowflakes.

Changed Name of Lake

To avoid visits by curiosity-seekers, she changed the name of the lake. But that was taken as a challenge by some readers who have figured out where the cabin is and shown up at the dock proud of their detective work.

“Creeps come out of the woods. One day I was out on the deck typing in my bikini,” she said. “A guy came up in a kayak--said he’d been looking for me for a year and a half. He takes all these topographical maps out of his pack, said he put them up on the wall and used clues from the book to figure out where I was. I suppose he expected me to congratulate him, invite him in for a drink. But I was furious. I wouldn’t let him set foot on my land.”

LaBastille said she is working on a sequel to “Woodswoman.” She said it will have a more serious, pessimistic tone, reflecting such ecological problems as the acid rain that has depleted her lake of fish, otters, ospreys and other creatures and is killing the red spruce.

“I used to be all bouncy and buoyant,” she said. “Now I’m more pessimistic. People who work for the environment are facing tremendous obstacles--politics, economic pressures, over-population, corporate greed. The idea that the Amazon rain forests are being cut and burned so we can raise cheap cattle for 39-cent hamburgers in Milwaukee--that’s crazy.”

Political Turmoil

Her youthful optimism, she said, was devastated when political turmoil scuttled her years of work trying to save the pied-billed grebe in Guatemala. She discovered the bird, similar to a loon, while conducting a wildlife tour in 1965. The bird lived only on Lake Atitlan and was virtually unknown in the scientific literature. She made it the subject of her doctoral work at Cornell University and set out to convince the Guatemalan government to establish a preservation program.

Through her efforts, Guatemala’s first wildlife refuge was established, with a visitor center, promotional postage stamps and posters, and a program to get the local natives to use the bird as a motif in their crafts. A local coffee farmer named Edgar was appointed warden at the preserve.

Then came the 1976 earthquake, wealthy people with vacation homes, a 14-story condominium complex and, ultimately, political violence. “In 1980, I must have had blinders on--I never suspected the political violence. But the next year, Edgar stopped writing. I later learned he’d been machine-gunned by guerrillas on his farm. I’ve never gotten over that. The whole program came to a screeching halt.”

Population Down to 55

When she did a census in May, 1983, she found the grebe population, which had risen to 230 birds in 1975, down to 55. “In my opinion, the only hope is a captive breeding program, like they’ve done with the California condors . . . but I’m pessimistic. I think it’s a lost cause. There’s a rule in ecology that if you get down to 50, there’s too little genetic variability to survive.

“Well, so what? There are millions of people starving, people murdered by guerrillas, who cares if there’s one less bird?” she said. “But I feel if we let one species disappear, another next year, we’ll be an impoverished world.”

In her travels as an ecologist and writer, she has seen the flames and smoke as some of the 50 million acres of tropical forests destroyed each year were cleared for farming. She has been barred from visiting national parks in Central America because of the revolutions in Nicaragua and El Salvador.

“It makes me marvel at what a unique place we have here in the Adirondacks,” she said. “Everywhere else in the world, parks are infiltrated by mining, petroleum interests--it’s almost impossible to keep places safe from politics and corporate greed.”

Active Role

As a member of the Adirondack Park Agency, which regulates land use in an area of forests, hamlets and mountains the size of Vermont, LaBastille takes an active role in preserving what she considers one of the most beautiful regions in the world.

But even with strict regulation, she said, there is a constant struggle against damaging forces.

“Acid rain has destroyed all the virgin red spruces around my cabin,” she said. “They dropped their needles; the wood was just like papier-mache when I cut them. The same thing is happening to 2 1/2 million acres in the Black Forest in Europe.”

The latest threat to the wilderness, she said, is from dumpers of toxic and radioactive wastes.

“Here I thought I was getting away from it all with my cabin in the woods, away from the problems and pollution of civilization,” she said. “And now here they want to dump radioactive waste in my backyard. You just can’t get away from it.”