Pine
Barrens scientist, educator dies at 93
Bridged conservation biology, environmental movement
By KIRK MOORE
and PAULA SCULLY
V. Eugene Vivian, a scientist and educator who taught
thousands of schoolchildren about the Pine Barrens and
trained a generation of environmental workers, died Sunday
at age 93, family and friends said.
"As a mentor and a friend and someone I admired, he's right
on the top of the list. He was a really great man," said
Stafford Township Councilman John Spodofora, who worked
closely with Vivian on school programs and the township
Environmental Commission. "He touched a lot of lives during
that time, working with the kids."
As a college science professor in the 1960s and '70s,
Vivian bridged traditional North American conservation
biology with the nascent environmental movement,
emphasizing field studies for students in the forests and
marshes of southern New Jersey. As momentum built in the
1970s for preserving the 1 million-acre Pinelands region, a
number of Vivian's students became involved.
Jeanette Lloyd of Beach Haven found the oldest pitch pine
in Manahawkin while she was a teacher in the Stafford
school district, and Vivian had worked with her to save it.
With Vivian's help, she and Spodofora developed a a program
to make Stafford elementary students aware of their
environment, using field programs to study the environment
in person instead of through textbooks.
"It was wonderful for me and wonderful for the children and
the parents who accompanied us," Lloyd said. "We went to a
lot of places we wouldn't have gone if it weren't for Dr.
Vivian. People can go to the cranberry bogs at the end of
Oxycocus Road. We went thought them to find endangered
species. We also found the headwaters for the Mill Creek
and the Cedar Creek in Manahawkin.
"We walked out in the woods. We walked the stream. We did
neat things that brought science to life. He opened a whole
world that we didn't even know about, and for that, I'm
eternally grateful to him," Lloyd said. Vivian was a
professor of environmental studies at Glassboro State
College, now Rowan University, and chaired the science
department until he retired in 1984. He remained active in
environmental affairs, working as a consultant, educator,
and chairman of the Little Egg Harbor Township
Environmental Commission, where he also started the
township's recycling program. He later moved to Edgewater
Park in Burlington County.
After a stint at Paterson State College, Vivian joined the
Glassboro faculty in 1955, and by the mid-1960s he was
drawing attention with his innovative approach to teaching
biology in the field. The National Wildlife Federation
named him the 1967 "national conservationist of the year."
That was when he founded the Conservation and Environmental
Studies Center at Whitesbog in Pemberton Township —
an old berry farming village that became the place where
many young students first learned about the Pine Barrens.
"We had students coming from all over New Jersey to learn
about the Pine Barrens," said educator Terry O'Leary, who
was a graduate student with Vivian in 1976 and worked with
him on Whitesbog, later going on to teach environmental
ecology and field ecology on the staff of the Pinelands
Regional School District.
"He truly loved the Pine Barrens and was responsible for
introducing tens of thousands of schoolchildren to the
beauty and mystery of this wondrous region," said Michele
Byers, executive director of the New Jersey Conservation
Foundation, who worked with Vivian in the early 1980s when
she was a young foundation staffer based at Whitesbog.
Vivian, Byers and others eventually organized the Whitesbog
Preservation Trust to restore historic buildings in the
secluded village. For years before that, the environmental
studies center operated out of the old village general
store, and trained a generation of outdoor educators there,
many of them Glassboro graduates.
"He was a fascinating man. To work in the outdoors with
him, you learned something every minute. He loved science,
and he loved telling stories," recalled Lois Schoeck of
Toms River, a retired teacher who studied with Vivian at
Glassboro and became one of his original staff members at
Whitesbog.
"He was much better as a professor outdoors than indoors,"
Schoeck added. "I was not a science person. . . . He took a
city person and taught me most of what I know about the
outdoors."
"He donated the first cache of books to open the library
here," said naturalist Chris Claus at Cattus Island County
Park in Toms River, where Vivian served on the board of
trustees. The library is named for Vivian.
As a consultant, Vivian helped southern Ocean County towns
deal with environmental issues and create environmental
commissions and ordinances.
His field survey worked identified rare plants and animals
in the Forked River Mountains of western Lacey and Waretown
(Ocean Township), and he helped the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service with their enhancement of Cedar Bonnet Island,
along Route 72 in the middle of Manahawkin Bay. The
freshwater pond for waterfowl there was his brainchild,
O'Leary said.
Vivian students have been prominent in environmental
causes, such as Rowan professor Gary Patterson, who became
an early member of the state Pinelands Commission and was
the university's environmental education master's program
advisor until 2004.
"I was writing a piece (on Sunday) for the Pinelands
Preservation Alliance, commenting on a teacher training
program, and how this maintains a long tradition started by
Dr. Vivian," said Bob Bartlett, a Barnegat Light
photographer and author who profiled Vivian in his 2007
book "People of the Pines."
"And then I got a call from his wife," Bartlett added. "It
all started with him."
From the Asbury Park Press
If you would like to make a donation to the Natural
Resource Education Foundation to Honor Dr. Vivian, please
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