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Ward B. Stone, who as New York State’s maverick wildlife pathologist happy environmentalists however angered his bosses and company polluters by going past his mandate to reveal the risks that PCBs and different poisonous chemical substances additionally posed to people, died on Feb. 8 in Troy, N.Y. He was 84.
The obvious trigger was respiratory failure, his daughter Montana Stone mentioned.
Through the practically 42 years he was employed by the State Division of Environmental Conservation, Mr. Stone and his group carried out 1000’s of necropsies on mammals ranging in measurement from mouse to moose, in addition to on hawks, swans, deer, beavers and bears. The reason for demise included accidents, unlawful looking, deliberate poisonings, and contamination by pesticides and different toxins.
However in the middle of his forensic investigations, and in addition on his personal, he sampled soil, landfill, ash and different residue and was one of many pioneers — together with Gunnar Widmark and Soren Jensen of the College of Stockholm and the biologist Robert Riseborough of the College of California, Berkeley — to find proof that polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, had been ubiquitous within the atmosphere.
“In his place as state wildlife pathologist, Ward Stone shone a lightweight on environmental threats lengthy earlier than others might discover them and gave a science-based voice to nature in occasions of disaster when few different state officers would pay attention,” Roger Downs, conservation director of the Sierra Membership’s Atlantic chapter, mentioned in an announcement.
“His strategies had been generally unconventional,” Mr. Downs added, “however he at all times selected to pursue environmental justice first earlier than pointless paperwork, and the pure world is a greater place due to his fearless advocacy.”
Mr. Stone discovered PCBs on the base of utility poles and different websites; criticized fishermen for weighting their hooks with sinkers product of lead; and even found traces of the insecticide DDT on the grounds of one in every of his personal division’s regional places of work.
Twenty years in the past, on the peak of the West Nile virus epidemic, which Mr. Stone had helped establish, his laboratory was being inundated with a median of 300 wildlife corpses each day. A chrome steel refrigerated cell chest designed for lifeless folks was tailored for big turtles.
Mr. Stone typically ventured past his mandate as a pathologist and leaked his findings to the information media. This led some folks to dismiss him as a brash, untutored interloper.
He loved his repute as a renegade. “I’ve been known as a unfastened cannon,” he as soon as mentioned, “however I at all times know precisely the place I’m firing.”
However there have been additionally different criticisms, which had been substantiated in a report by the state inspector normal.
In 2012, two years after Mr. Stone retired, the inspector normal, responding to years of complaints from state workers and disclosures in The Occasions-Union of Albany, concluded that he had “engaged in persistent misconduct with close to impunity, together with abuse of workers, misappropriation of state assets and insubordination.”
The inquiry claimed that he had used the division’s Wildlife Useful resource Middle in upstate Delmar as his residence; demoralized workers, who complained of verbal abuse and inadequate coaching in security protocols; assigned them private duties, like caring for the chickens he stored as pets for his youngsters; saved firearms on the heart; and didn’t submit data of the time he spent working for the state.
Whereas he collected tens of 1000’s of {dollars} in improper private advantages throughout practically 4 a long time as a state worker, the inspector normal’s report discovered, he was merely warned and never formally disciplined, as a result of division executives overruled his direct supervisors “partly out of concern of damaging reactions from his supporters and the information media.”
Mr. Stone denied or downplayed many of the particular expenses in opposition to him, though he did comply with make modest restitution. He mentioned that he took early retirement as a result of he had a household to assist and the monetary incentive was too tempting to refuse.
“I hate to retire beneath hearth,” he advised The Occasions Union in 2010. “There’s nonetheless a lot science to do.”
Ward Byron Stone Jr. was born on Sept. 28, 1938, in Hudson, N.Y., to Ward and Nellie (Smith) Stone.
Raised in upstate Columbia County, he studied on the Spencertown Academy, a two-room schoolhouse, the place he developed a ardour for nature. He then attended the Nationwide Naval Medical College in Maryland and served within the Navy in Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam.
At Syracuse College, he served on the varsity debate group and earned a Bachelor of Science diploma in 1963 after which a grasp’s diploma in animal pathology and parasitology. He joined the Division of Environmental Conservation in 1969.
“Whereas he cherished pathology,” Montana Stone mentioned of her father in a cellphone interview, “his love for all times and residing creatures was his true inspiration and motivation for persevering with to rehabilitate wildlife of every type, and higher perceive illnesses and toxins that inextricably have an effect on people, wildlife and the atmosphere.”
Mr. Stone and his companion, the ecologist Mary Bayham, who lived in Troy, had 5 youngsters. She survives him; along with their daughter Montana, he’s additionally survived by their youngsters Johnathan, Jeremiah and Ethan Alan Stone; two stepchildren, Thomas and Emily Caraco; and a daughter, Denise Stone, from his marriage to Lorraine Cebula. Mr. Stone and Ms. Bayham’s daughter Therese Rose Stone died earlier than him.
“I’ve spent my life attempting to do one thing in regards to the horrible environmental destruction I noticed, most of it completed by industries with numerous energy,” Mr. Stone mentioned in an interview with The Cobleskill Occasions-Journal in 2016. “I wasn’t in style, however I didn’t let that cease me.”
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