Ruth Patrick looks at slides with diatoms at the Academy of Natural Sciences in the 1940s.ANSP ARCHIVES COLL. 457Ruth Patrick, an ecologist who used biodiversity to measure waterways’ health, died yesterday (September 23) at a retirement community in Lafayette Hill, Pennsylvania. She was 105.
“She was worried about and addressing water pollution before the rest of us even thought of focusing on it,” James Gustave Speth, a professor at Vermont Law School, a former Dean of the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, and a co-founder of the National Resources Defense Counsel, told The New York Times in an e-mail.
Patrick was born in 1907 in Kansas City, Missouri, and grew up exploring the natural world with her father. “At night, my father, who was a lawyer and fairly well to do, would roll back the great wooden doors of the library and go in and open his rolltop desk,” Patrick recalled for an article published in 2007 in The Philadelphia Inquirer. “And if I had been a ...
