Folks,
I regret to report that Joel Hedgpeth died this past Friday morning,
July 28, 2006, at the age of 94, in Hillsboro, near Portland, Oregon,
at his daughter's home. Joel would have turned 95 on September 29.
A brief obituary appears in today's Santa Rosa [California] Press-Democrat
http://www1.pressdemocrat.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060801/NEWS/608010329/1033/NEWS01
(with minor errors about where and when Joel took his college
degrees, and about the Treatise he edited).
A very brief biographic note about Joel is appended below. A longer
biography is under preparation.
Please forward this on to those who may be interested.
Best wishes,
-- Jim Carlton
_______________________
Joel Hedgpeth was one of the great icons of 20th century marine
biology. His archives contain correspondence with every well-known
marine biologist of the 20th century. Joel was a world-class expert
on pycnogonids, wrote hundreds of articles and essays (including many
philosophical and environmental pieces in the Quarterly Review of
Biology, disguised as book reviews), edited the massive volume 1 of
the Treatise on Maine Ecology & Paleoecology in 1957, still a gold
mine of obscure 19th and 20th century literature and known in earlier
years as "The Big Red Book"; edited and authored much of Between
Pacific Tides through several editions (and objected very vigorously
when Stanford University Press declined to name him the editor of the
5th edition of BPT), became a champion of the rare freshwater
Californian shrimp Syncaris pacifica, and monitored the state of the
environment from the 1930s through the 1990s. Joel's first
scientific publication was in 1939, and he will appear as a co-author
of the pycnogonid chapter in the 4th edition of Light's Manual (now
the Light & Smith Manual) due out in early 2007 (University of
California Press).
Joel took his undergraduate degree in 1933, his Master's in 1940
under S. F. Light (on diaptomid copepods), and his Ph.D. in 1952
under Ralph I. Smith, all at the University of California at
Berkeley. His doctorate was on the distribution and ecology of
invertebrates along the Texas and Louisiana coasts. Joel traveled
extensively, including Pt. Barrow, Alaska; much of Europe; three
visits to Antarctica, and one expedition to the Galapagos Islands
(producing one of the first essays on the intertidal life of the
Galapagos), although he never took a formal sabbatical. He was
director of the extinct Pacific Marine Station (Dillon Beach, CA) and
the OSU Marine Science Center (Newport, OR), served on innumerable
panels and committees, received the Browning Medal in 1976 for
environmental stewardship (often proudly pointing out how he had made
the "EPA hit list"), wrote Seashore Life of the San Francisco Bay
Area, and could speak knowledgeably about thousands of species of
marine invertebrates and vertebrates around the world. He was honored
in 1976 by a special symposium at the Linnean Society of London (a
Hedgpeth festschrift resulting from that meeting was published in the
Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society in 1978).
He founded the Society for the Prevention of Progress, and wrote
poetry under the pseudonym Jerome Tichenor (for whom he had special
stationery printed, showing Joel's famous red squirrel logo, and with
an extensive entry at the bottom on a "bardic tradition" that the
first environmental impact report was submitted by a delegation of
squirrels at the time of Elizabeth I: the stanzas are written in
Welsh and English). Joel had an abiding interest in poetry of the
sea, and produced a 500-page unpublished manuscript on sea poetry.
Our last extensive conversations were in November 2000 (when Joel and
I sat on his couch in Santa Rosa, and turned each page of Seashore
Life, discussing the needed revisions), and December, 2001. I last
saw him in 2005. In 2001, at the age of 89, Joel still fluidly laced
his conversations with phrases in Latin, German, Welsh, and Russian
(and expected his listeners to keep up). Joel Hedgpeth lead a long
and distinguished career as a scientist, environmentalist, writer,
poet, historian, traveler, critic, and philosopher, and represented
the grand tradition of an earlier generation who took great pride in
the depth of their knowledge of the natural world.
-- Jim Carlton, August 1, 2006
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.bio.net/bionet/mm/annelida/attachments/20060801/25c7759d/attachment.html
