Susan Rita Schrepfer (1941–2014) was an American environmental historian.Peter Mickulas
In Memoriam: Susan Rita Schrepfer, 1941-2014
''Perspectives on History'', December 1, 2014. Accessed September 6, 2020.

Life

Susan Schrepfer was born in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

in 1941, and grew up in

Gilroy, California Gilroy is a city in Santa Clara County, California, United States, south of the San Francisco Bay Area. It had a population of 59,520 as of the 2020 census. Gilroy's origins lie in the village of San Ysidro, which developed in the early 19th ...

. After graduating from high school in Gilroy, she worked as a farm labourer before studying history at the University of California, Santa Barbara, receiving her AB in 1963. She gained an MA (1965) and a PhD in history at the University of California, Riverside. As a researcher at the

Forest History Society The Forest History Society is an American non-profit organization dedicated to the preservation of forest and conservation history."Forest History Society." Echo Project. Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. http://echo.gmu. ...

, Schrepfer combined archival research and oral history to reconstruct the differing priorities of environmentalists, scientists and

timber industry Lumber is wood that has been processed into uniform and useful sizes (dimensional lumber), including beams and planks or boards. Lumber is mainly used for construction framing, as well as finishing (floors, wall panels, window frames). ...

executives in nineteenth- and twentieth-century America. In 1974 she joined

Rutgers University Rutgers University ( ), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of three campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's C ...

as an assistant professor of history. She revised her PhD dissertation, publishing it as ''The Fight to Save the Redwoods'' (1983), winning the Forest History Society's Biennial Book Award. In 1988 she helped found the Rutgers Institute for High School Teachers, a collaboration between the state university's history faculty and

New Jersey New Jersey is a U.S. state, state located in both the Mid-Atlantic States, Mid-Atlantic and Northeastern United States, Northeastern regions of the United States. Located at the geographic hub of the urban area, heavily urbanized Northeas ...

's school teachers. In 2005 she published ''Nature's Altars'', praised by one reviewer as "the best monograph in US environmental history yet to appear to use gender as its central category of analysis”. Diagnosed with

pancreatic cancer Pancreatic cancer arises when cell (biology), cells in the pancreas, a glandular organ behind the stomach, begin to multiply out of control and form a Neoplasm, mass. These cancerous cells have the malignant, ability to invade other parts of ...

, she was given only months to live in 2008. She died on March 3, 2014.Department of History: Susan R. Schrepfer
Rutgers University. Accessed September 6, 2020. She is survived by her daughter, Amy, and step-daughter, Cecilia. She was predeceased by her partner, Edward Ortiz.

Works

* (with Edwin van Horn Larson and Elwood R. Maunder) ''A history of the Northeastern Forest Experiment Station, 1923 to 1973''. Upper Darby, PA.: Forest Service, 1973. * ''The fight to save the redwoods: a history of environmental reform, 1917-1978''. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983. * (ed, with Philip Scranton) ''Industrializing organisms: introducing evolutionary history''. New York: Routledge, 2003 * ''Nature's altars: mountains, gender, and American environmentalism''. Lawrence, Kan.: University Press of Kansas, 2005

References

External links

* Char Miller
A Woman of the Woods: Susan R. Schrepfer, 1941-2014
KCET, April 9, 2014. {{DEFAULTSORT:Schrepfer, Susan R. 1941 births 2014 deaths Environmental historians American historians Rutgers University faculty American women historians 21st-century American women