Anne LaBastille: A Biography of the Woodswoman

by Penny Harr

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, which recounts 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. She 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 University, she insisted that the best way to study big game – the subject of her thesis – was out in the field. 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.

LaBastille was also an insatiable writer, chronicling her time in Lake Atitlan and her conservation work around the world for publications such as National Geographic, Readers Digest, Outdoor Life, and Adirondack Life, among others. She was awarded the World Wildlife Fund Gold Medal, the Society of women Geographers Gold Medal, and Nature Educator of the Year from the Rodger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History. 

Through personal interviews and archival research, Adirondack Experience interpreter and seventh-generation Adirondacker Penny Harr paints and 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. 

286 pages, hardcover

ISBN: 9781493093809