Peter Raven - A Legacy

We lost a titan in the field this week, Peter Raven. He was a walking legacy, deeply impacting our community in St. Louis, but also conserving plants and land around the world. Friends of the Rainforest was lucky enough to have him on our Board of Directors and as a Strategic Advisor for years.  

Our Board Chair, Maggie Eisenberger, who has been with the organization for over a decade describes working with Peter, and the fierce impression he left on her, and on all of us. 

My friend Rachel Crandell had died a month before they were considering asking me to step in and lead the rainforest immersion trips to Costa Rica. Rachel was known for these trips, and they were so integral to the mission of Friends of the Rainforest, which she founded to support the Children’s Eternal Rainforest. Walking into my first board of directors’ meeting since her passing was nerve-wracking. 

One of the board members was Dr. Peter Raven, a face instantly recognizable to any St. Louisan. I couldn’t have been more nervous if I were meeting the Pope. Someone else gave him my name and said I had worked with Rachel giving presentations and recently completed my Master’s in Tropical Ecology at the Whitney R. Harris World Ecology Center in UMSL. Dr. Raven just waved his hand and said, “She’s in.” 

That was so characteristic of him. He had no patience for dithering. It was never a matter of making exactly the right choice for him but rather making a choice and then making it right. He offered me the opportunity and supported the work to make us successful. He was full speed ahead all the time. At board meetings he would sit next to me and tell me jokes while our Board President went into detail about various aspects of some plan for the group. Dr. Raven, who insisted we call him Peter, just wanted to know what the idea was and how fast we could get to work. 

This impatience came into play in his attitude toward environmental activism in the best way. He saw no point in arguing the relative merits of a variety of actions people could take to help stave off climate change. Just do them all! Do everything you can! There’s no time to lose, in fact, we should have started caring a generation ago, a hundred years ago! 

That was actually a big part of the reason he was on our board. It wasn’t like he didn’t have enough to do running the Missouri Botanical Garden, one of the three most important botanical gardens in the world. He served on boards around the globe, wrote books, gave talks, appeared on television programs (see PBS Scientific American Frontiers from 2001, https://www.chedd-angier.com/frontiers/season11.html). Serving on our board was just one more thing he couldn’t say no to. 

He continued to be engaged even after he retired and his health was failing. He recorded a greeting for us to play at our annual trivia night fundraiser for the tenth anniversary of Rachel’s passing. He represented our organization at a conference we sponsored in Monteverde, Costa Rica, that facilitated collaboration among the various environmental and forest protection groups in the area. He was a featured speaker for us at an event that drew a huge crowd, and he pulled no punches, telling them all they were wasting time and needed to get serious about saving the planet. Now he is gone, a Hero For the Planet in his field, and damn it, he was right. 

His parting words to the forest that he helps leave behind for his children and future generations.