A Woman of the Woods: Susan R. Schrepfer, 1941-2014

Susan Schrepfer, who died on March 3, taught several generations of environmental historians how to see the forest and the trees.

Which is another way of saying that Susan thought large and small, urged her colleagues and readers to integrate big-picture ideas with their localized manifestations, and through her impeccably researched and gracefully written books helped us rethink our complicated (because constructed) relationship to the natural world.

A long-time member of the history department at Rutgers University, Susan earned her academic degrees from UC Santa Barbara and UC Riverside. Critical to her craft, though, was her successful stint as a researcher at the Forest History Society (FHS), then located in Santa Cruz (it now calls Durham, NC home). Working through its jam-packed archives, which contain an unparalleled collection of business records of the American timber industry, personal papers of foresters and conservationists, hard-to-find Forest Service records, and long-out-of-print newspapers, and by conducting interviews with some of the key contemporary players, Susan carefully tracked the paper trail that is the historian's special charge.

These many and varied materials allowed her to reconstruct how her subjects thought and acted. Shifting through agency documents, Sierra Club memoranda, and issues of the defunct Overland Monthly or American Lumberman, for example, revealed the differing approaches scientists, activists, and entrepreneurs adopted toward forest management.