Through Storm and Drought Through Storm and Drought
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Edith and Frederic Clements (public domain)
Nature

Through Storm and Drought

The Life of Edith and Frederic Clements
Paulina Wilk
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time 15 minutes

For years, they traversed prairies, deserts and wetlands. They traveled through storms and floods, climbed peaks to admire mountain flowers. They were the first to understand the climate was changing and these changes needed to be countered. Meet Edith and Frederic Clements: itinerant ecologists, who helped revive a barren land and saved America from hunger.

“Why wait?” he asked her on a spring day in 1899, after returning from a research trip on the prairie, somewhere north of Lincoln, Nebraska. It was a beautiful, sunny day. They had just found a pretty mimosa with pink, furry blossoms. Frederic was right, there was no reason to wait. They didn’t want to be apart. They had everything in common, especially their passion for exploring the world of plants and watching life unfold. Edith was supposed to go to Omaha on vacation, whereas Frederic was to stay on campus to teach summer courses. But, as she wrote years later, “the thought of separation was intolerable.” They met at the university in Lincoln. He was a lecturer, and she was still a student. In her free time, she was involved in the life of her sorority, played tennis, was captain of the basketball team and practiced fencing. At the end-of-year ball, Frederic got as many as three dances with her. That’s how it all began.

The Environmentalist Power Couple

They got married quickly and quietly. Even their closest friends found out after the fact. Both of them thought their families would approve of the decision. Their parents didn’t care much for festivities and shunned glamor. Marriage seemed like an obvious choice, after which they didn’t look back; they had no doubt. There was too much to do together; awaiting them was a life almost always on the road, in the field, in awe of nature.

Was it a great love story? Without question. Although Edith and Frederic Clements left very little writing that was intimate in character, their letters testify to the passion of the affection. Based on Edith’s memoir Adventures in Ecology: Half a million miles…from mud to macadam, published in 1960—fifteen years after Frederic’s death—it can be assumed that their life together was a wonderful adventure. It sparkled with extraordinary events, Full of insatiable curiosity, travel, work, and research, as well as a visionary spirit, rare among scientists. Today, the memory of the Clements has been painstakingly restored, but in the 1930s and 40s they were well-known and—called upon for help—all over America.

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