Anne LaBastille (A Biography of the Woodswoman)

Award-winning wildlife ecologist and bestselling author Anne LaBastille was a trailblazer in every sense of the word. Perhaps best known for her seminal wilderness book Woodswoman, recounting her years spent living in a remote Adirondacks cabin, and which inspired countless women to shun societal dictates and pursue their passions, LaBastille railed against bureaucracy and patriarchy to become a powerful figure in environmentalism. Anne LaBastille is the first ever biography of this powerful and polarizing woman who dedicated her life to preserving the natural world. 

Born in 1933, LaBastille was raised in a time when women largely stayed at home. A lover of the outdoors, curious, and sharp-witted, LaBastille was determined to become a wildlife ecologist. When urged to conduct research in a lab while completing her master’s degree in wildlife management at Colorado State, she insisted that the best way to study big game – the subject of her thesis – was out in the field. A professor who recognized her grit gave her a truck and his best wishes. After receiving her Ph.D. from Cornell University, LaBastille traveled the world working for the betterment of the environment and its natural inhabitants, especially at Lake Atitlan in Guatemala where she tried for decades to save the giant pied-billed grebe from extinction. 

Throughout the course of her environmental work, LaBastille was an insatiable writer. Beyond Woodswoman and its several sequels, Mama Poc chronicles her time in Lake Atitlan, Jaguar Totem covers her conservation work in in foreign countries across the world, and numerous articles – including at least one in her early career she wrote under a man’s name in order to get published – in National Geographic, Readers Digest, Outdoor Life, and Adirondack Life, among others, relate her adventures and adamant principles of conservation. Throughout her life, LaBastille was awarded the World Wildlife Fund Gold Medal, the Society of Women Geographers Gold medal, and Nature Educator of the Year from the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History. Through personal interviews and archival research, Adirondack Experience museum interpreter and seventh-generation Adirondacker Penny Harr paints an in-depth portrait of LaBastille’s personal and rich inner-life including and beyond her career achievements, breathing life into a legend of wildlife conservation.