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Louisa Willcox
 Leadership Position: Wild Bears Project Director, Natural
Resources Defense Council
NOLS Graduate: 1975 NOLS Instructor Course; 1976 Baja Sea
Kayaking Course
Since climbing Wyoming’s Grand Teton at age 15, Louisa Willcox has been
a self-proclaimed “wilderness wanderer.” She began instructing for
NOLS in 1975 and continued leading students into the wilderness for the next
decade. Today, Louisa still considers herself a “wilderness wanderer” but
she’s known around the West as more of a wilderness advocate, fighting
to protect the region’s last remaining wild places.
Willcox’s environmental career got underway while she was working for NOLS
in the 1970s. Wyoming, she remembers, was then a hotbed for environmental debates.
When she stopped to listen to the issues, she remembers hearing something very
familiar. “When they were talking about threatened places,” Louisa
says, “I thought, ‘I’ve been there!’” The West’s
mountains, streams and valleys were her classroom, she could walk through many
of these places with her eyes closed, and she wasn’t about to stand aside. “Having
been on NOLS courses and knowing there’s a debate I found myself thinking, ‘I
know these places and I can speak to their value.’”
Eventually, Louisa moved on from NOLS and received a degree
in forestry from Yale University. After two years teaching
in Jackson Hole she became the first
program director for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition (GYC), an environmental
group in Bozeman, Montana. With the GYC she “helped make ecosystem protection
a household concept.”
Today Louisa’s environmental efforts are focused on what she calls “an
animal that’s a barometer for the health of a place.” She’s
talking about bears. “When you’re working on bears,” Louisa
says, “ you’re working on wilderness. The places where bears are
left are the wildest places left.” Willcox is the Wild Bears Project Director
for the Natural Resources Defense Council, an organization that works on myriad
environmental issues all over the world. Since bears only reproduce every three
years on average and have a very low tolerance for human development and interference,
Louisa’s work to protect bears is really about making sure we still have
wild places left.
According to Willcox, NOLS students, more than anyone,
have the capacity to want to protect what’s left of our wilderness areas. “The physical
experience of being immersed in wild places is, perhaps, the best way to inspire
people
to protect them. In a world of increasing asphalt, every acre that a NOLS course
ever brought me into has that much more importance to me. NOLS students who
see the track of a bear understand that our role is one of stewardship and
that we
have to give those creatures a place to be. In granting them a place we are
granting ourselves a place.”
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