[Congressional Record Volume 142, Number 100 (Tuesday, July 9, 1996)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E1223-E1224]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                       REMEMBERING MOLLIE BEATTIE

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. GEORGE MILLER

                             of california

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, July 9, 1996

  Mr. MILLER of California. Mr. Speaker, I am saddened to note today 
the passing of Mollie H. Beattie, the recently resigned Director of the 
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
  Ms. Beattie was a dedicated, intelligent, and determined 
administrator of the Service. During her 3-year tenure, she insisted 
upon basing her agency's actions on two very sound criteria: scientific 
knowledge and the law.
  For that, she was criticized, second guessed, and vilified by some, 
but treasured and respected by far more. She had one of the toughest, 
but most important, jobs in Washington, and we will miss her thoughtful 
leadership.
  I would like to share with my colleagues a moving tribute to Director 
Beattie written by Ted Gup for the Washington Post. I know that all of 
my colleagues join with me in expressing our deep condolences to her 
husband, Rick Schwolsky, and the rest of her family and her friends in 
Vermont, in Washington, and through the country.

                [From the Washington Post, July 1, 1996]

 Woman Of the Woods--Mollie Beattie, a Natural As Fish & Wildlife Chief

                              (By Ted Gup)

       Her obituary last week was correct in every particular: Her 
     name was Mollie H. Beattie. She was 49, the first woman to 
     head the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. As reported, she 
     succumbed to a brain tumor, dying Thursday in a hospital in 
     Townshend, Vt.
       Hers appeared to be a short and public life, reduced to 
     milestones of schools attended, positions held, survivors 
     left behind. But obituaries, even more than most news 
     accounts, demonstrate to those who know the subject how stark 
     is the distance between mere accuracy and truth. Mollie, as 
     she was known to one and all, was many things, but never a 
     creature of Washington, never a composite of accomplishments 
     and, most certainly, not a public being.
       True, she had allowed herself to be thrust into the center 
     of an intensely public debate, selected to hold aloft the 
     tattered banner of conservation and the Endangered Species 
     Act, which she viewed less as an act of civil legislation 
     than divine ordination. But Mollie's brief and quiet sojourn 
     in Washington--less than three years--left a lasting mark on 
     both the physical landscape of the nation and the political 
     terrain of conservation ethics.
       I first met Mollie shortly after she arrived in Washington. 
     She had consented to a series of personal interviews for a 
     profile I was writing. I remember her pageboy haircut, her 
     radiant face, utterly devoid of makeup, and her smart blue 
     suit with brass buttons--a visible concession from someone 
     who otherwise lived in jeans. Later I would speak with her 
     about topics as diverse as tropical forests, endangered 
     species and the National Biological Survey.
       No sooner had she arrived than she put the agency on notice 
     that change was in the offing. In the long hallway leading to 
     the director's office, there is a portrait gallery of former 
     directors--then black-and-white photos of middle-aged white 
     men in stiff white shirts, dark jackets and Windsor knots. 
     Mollie chose a color photo of herself in hip waders, holding 
     a pair of field glasses and standing at the edge of the 
     water. Just behind her, on the opposite shore, can be seen a 
     Kodiak bear. It was a statement that needed no elaboration.
       Conservationists immediately embraced her appointment as 
     the ultimate victory. She was one of their own. But Mollie 
     shunned the notion of being an eco-evangelist, combining hard 
     science (a degree in forestry from the University of 
     Vermont), a master's in public administration from Harvard, 
     and a child's sense of awe. It would prove to be an 
     irresistible combination for political friend and foe alike.
       She came by her love of nature honestly. Her grandmother 
     Harriet Hanna was a self-educated botanist and landscape 
     artist who knew every tree by its Latin name and, like all 
     the girls in the family, was richly eccentric. ``Her 
     wackiness intrigued me as a kid,'' Mollie told me. ``She 
     seemed a little freer than everybody else.'' Mollie recalled 
     that her grandmother would be seen outside in her nightgown 
     at 5 a.m., toting her 4-10 shotgun in search of opossums 
     disturbing her garden. Her home was part animal shelter, part 
     clinic--home to lame deer, birds with broken legs and 
     raccoons that had become dependent on her largess. ``I got 
     her ethic that if it moves, feed it,'' and Mollie.
       Mollie's mother, Pat also has a fiercely independent streak 
     and devotion to nature. Pat Beattie never told me how old she 
     was, only that she was ``well over 65.'' She lives in a log 
     cabin among eight acres of sagebrush south of Ketchum, Idaho. 
     She rides horses climbs rocks and drives a Ford pickup. ``As 
     I get older, I like the wilds better,'' she told me years 
     ago.
       As a young girl, Mollie would catch mice in the winter and 
     make them a home in an aquarium feeding them hamster food. In 
     spring, when food was more plentiful, she would release them. 
     And always she had a gift for persuading even nonbelievers 
     that nature was worth saving. When she was 8 and on a family 
     vacation in California, she came upon a house sparrow with a 
     broken wing. Against her mother's advice, she persuaded a 
     pilot with United Airlines to allow the bird to ride with him 
     in the cockpit from California to New York where she intended 
     to nurse it back to health. The bird sat on the compass of 
     the DC-7 all the way across the country. The pilot then drove 
     the bird to his home in Putnam County but when he showed it 
     to his wife, the bird keeled over dead. Four decades later, 
     Mollis was still in mouring.
       Her mother worried how Mollie would fare in Washington, a 
     place where capitulation often passes for compromise. Her 
     fears were unfounded. Mollie could be tough. Just ask Ralph 
     Wright, former Vermont speaker of the house. ``Mollie just 
     didn't take any crap from me,'' Wright once told me. ``She 
     stood up to me when I tried to push her around. She gave it 
     right back. I didn't mess with Mollie anymore.'' Mollie took 
     a certain pride in standing her ground. She bristled when 
     Wright once suggested she was a daughter of privilege. ``I'm 
     as shanty Irish as he is--on both sides!'' she boasted.
       Still, she was conciliatory by nature, uncomfortable with 
     confrontation, not out of weakness but out of belief that 
     even the human habitat--perhaps especially--was big enough to 
     accommodate all species and manner of ideas. She had a 
     supremely quiet confidence. ``I've always worked hard never 
     to allow my lifestyle to rise to the level of my income or my 
     expectations of my career to be one of an endlessly accending 
     trajectory,'' she told me shortly after assuming office. 
     ``I've worked very hard on those two things so I'm always 
     free to go, because I know where my lines are. If you have to 
     put it on the line, you have to put it on the line. There's a 
     place past which it isn't worth it.''
       Heading the agency was not an easy job for Mollie. She told 
     her sister shortly after arriving that it was a great job--
     for 10 people. She maintained a dizzying schedule. Once, 
     flying over Iowa, she could not remember if she was flying to 
     the East or West Coast.
       A few months after her arrival here I asked her what was 
     the hardest thing about Washington, expecting her to cite the 
     withering assault on conservation issues or the late-night 
     hours in the office. Not Mollie. ``My hardest adjustment?'' 
     She repeated. ``The lack of darkness at night, living in a 
     place that's never quiet. The confinement of it. I'm used to 
     absolutely unadulterated privacy. That's hard. It's a real 
     loss that I can't just wander off into the woods.''
       Mollie was neither ideologue nor politician. She held to 
     the same positions in her personal life as her public life. 
     Her mother recalls that Mollie shamed her into avoiding the 
     purchase of any colored tissues, warning that the colors were 
     slower to break down in the soil.
       Fifteen years ago she let her guard down and admitted she'd 
     gone to forestry school ``damn well determined to subvert the 
     system.'' And she did just that. She helped to elevate the 
     level of national debate while lowering levels of distrust 
     and enmity that characterized much of the conservation issues 
     in the '90s. During her brief watch at the Fish and Wildlife 
     Service, another 15 wildlife refuges were added, more than 
     100 conservation habitat plans were agreed on between 
     landowners and the government, and the gray wolf was 
     reintroduced into the Northern Rockies. The wolf was one of 
     her two favorite animals, the other being coyotes. ``There's 
     something so wily and elusive and mysterious--they almost 
     seem magical, the coyotes.''
       She knew how to reach out to those with whom she disagreed. 
     A woman--and a non-hunter at that--she presided over an 
     agency long in the sway of the hook-and-bullet crowd. Within 
     days of her arrival she told a gathering, ``My father was 
     seriously wounded in a hunting accident, and my uncle still 
     carries a bullet behind his heart.'' She then

[[Page E1224]]

     went on to talk about the decline in hunting accidents, 
     praising hunter safety. She was one of the boys. She could 
     talk the talk and walk the walk.
       She always took the broad view of nature and of man's 
     relationship to it. ``I believe there's only one conflict,'' 
     she told me, ``and that's between the short-term and the 
     long-term thinking. In the long term, the economy and the 
     environment are the same thing. If it's unenvironmental it is 
     uneconomical. That is a rule of nature.''
       Last month legislation was introduced in the House and 
     Senate to name an 8-million-acre wilderness reserve in the 
     Arctic National Wildlife Refuge after her. Not a bad way to 
     be remembered.
       Toward the end, friends and family began exchanging 
     ``Mollie stories.'' Steve Wright recalled how five years ago 
     he had passed her on a country road and recognized her 
     license plate--``4STR''--for ``forester.'' He chased her down 
     on his new motorcycle, a 1200cc Harley-Davidson, finally 
     catching up with her at a gas station. Mollie took one look 
     at his cycle, hiked up her skirt, threw one leg over the 
     sissy bar and sped off. She turned around to wave goodbye as 
     she barreled at top speed up Vermont's Route 100. Ten minutes 
     later she returned the bike. Vintage Mollie Beattie.
       Mollie's last day of consciousness was Tuesday, a time when 
     closest friends and family gathered at her bedside at the 
     Grace Cottage, part of a tiny village hospital. Present too 
     was Dozer, her big brown mutt with crooked ears and graying 
     muzzle. It was said that the nurses spent as much time 
     feeding Dozer as caring for the patients--again Mollie's 
     talent for getting others to provide for nature. Toward the 
     end, in a moment of solemnity, Mollie was asked if there was 
     anything else she needed. After a second's reflection, a 
     mischievous glint came into her eyes. ``Potato chips,'' she 
     said. The room erupted in laughter.
       There was always a sense that the world had come to 
     Mollie's door, and not the other way around. Atop her 
     stunningly understated three-page resume was her address, a 
     box number on Rural Route No. 3, in Grafton, Vt. She lived a 
     mile from the nearest utility pole in a house of wood she and 
     her husband, Rick Schwolsky, built amid 142 acres of beech, 
     birch and maple--red and sugar--on a gentle south-facing 
     slope. There she kept her bees and shared the honey with an 
     occasional black bear, driving him off only when he took too 
     much.
       There was no television in her house, and in the living 
     room hung a painting of a woman standing with her hand on an 
     oak tree. The woman is depicted speaking, but instead of 
     words, oak leaves are coming out of her mouth. The picture 
     was titled ``A Woman Who Speaks Trees.'' It was one of the 
     few possessions that Mollie said really meant anything to 
     her. I can think of no more fitting epitaph. Mollie, too, was 
     ``A Woman Who Speaks Trees.''

                          ____________________