Rosalie Edge, Hawk of Mercy: The Activist Who Saved Nature from the Conservationists

Abstract

The career of Mabel Rosalie Barrow Edge (1877–1962) as a conservation activist began when she was in her early fifties. The founder of the Emergency Conservation Committee (ECC), Edge campaigned to end the use of poison for wildlife control, and she exposed the conflicts of interest in private and government organizations while also advocating for the establishment of two new national parks and the preservation of sugar pines at Yosemite National Park. Along the way she created Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in Pennsylvania and argued against the National Audubon Society's for-profit trapping of animals in its refuges. Edge was a multitasking conservation activist. Using previously unavailable primary sources, Dyana Z. Furmansky offers an engaging portrait of Edge as activist while piecing together the story of Edge as a daughter, wife, mother, friend, and colleague. In the 1930s William Temple Hornaday called Edge “the only woman in conservation” (p. 218); Edge's son Peter gave Furmansky a suitcase filled with his mother's papers to recover “a forgotten bit of history” (p. xiii).