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People
After 31 years of service to the eastern Caribbean environment, Edward G. Towle recently handed the presidency of the Island Resources Foundation along to his deputy, Bruce Potter. With offices in St. Thomas, Antigua , and Washington, DC, IRF is well positioned to continue helping small islands develop economically while also protecting their environment. This was the organization's purpose when Towle and his wife Judith founded it 27 years ago. Potter, a former official of the Peace Corps and of Mobil Oil, intends to carry forward this broad agenda, and add new areas of emphasis as well. Towle becomes chairman of IRF's Board.
Laura Johnson, previously Northeast Division Vice President for The Nature Conservancy, has become president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. The fast-growing organization has programs in habitat and species protection, environmental education for adults and children, and advocacy. A century ago, two women founded Mass. Audubon to protest the killing of birds for women's fashions. Johnson is its first woman president.
Carol Ash, previously director of The Nature Conservancy of New York State, is the new executive director of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission. Ash succeeds Robert O. Binneweis, a former National Park Service ranger, who in a decade-long tour of duty did much to advance the cause of the Commission and its 95,000 acres of parkland in New York and New Jersey.
The Chesapeake Bay has lost two of its most admired scholars. The biologist L. Eugene Cronin, professor and director of many marine-related institutions in Maryland and a keen scholar of the blue crab, died in December at age 81 while still at work on a comprehensive crab book. Geologist Randall Kerhin of the Maryland Geological Survey and many other Bay-related institutions, died in January after spending many years mapping coastal erosion, beach loss, and other coastal processes. He was 52.
David B. Struhs, Commissioner of the Department of Environmental Protection in Massachusetts since 1995 and previously a White House official, has been named Secretary of Florida's Department of Environmental Protection. Environmentalists hailed the appointment as a major step forward from Virginia Wetherell, the previous secretary, who according to the Sanibel-Captiva Conservation Foundation was "repeatedly criticized for failing to enforce the state's environmental laws." Florida's Governor Jeb Bush also appointed another environmental leader, J. Allison DeFoor II, as Everglades Policy Coordinator to represent the state as regards the $7.8 billion Central and South Florida Restoration Project. |
