Linda Roth

September 5, 1949 - November 6, 2006

Harvard-Radcliffe Class of 1971 Obituary from the 50th reunion Red Book.

Linda Carolyn Roth, of Monticello, Florida, died November 6, 2006. A native of Great Lakes, Illinois, she was born September 5, 1949. She lived in Jordan J while at Radcliffe and was a member of the Crimson staff, Phi Beta Kappa, and Phillips Brooks House, receiving her AB, summa cum laude, with the Class in 1971. The Class has no information about her career or surviving family.

Corrections

Linda has two surviving sisters. V. Louise Roth, is a Professor of Biology at Duke University. She studies the biological bases of homology, variation, and parallel evolution and focuses on evolutionary changes in size and shape in mammals. Linda's other sister, Susan Orenstein, is Professor Emerita of Pediatric Gastroenterology at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. Her mother's brother, David Hubel, won a Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1981 on the basis of his research into information processing and development in the visual system. In short, these four family members all did important biological research in very different subfields: forest ecology, mammalian evolution, pediatric gastroenterology, and the neurophysiology of vision.

According to her sister Louise, Harvard's account of Linda's life in its obituary for her may accurately capture what happened in Cambridge, MA but is otherwise strange.

Lin was ‘native’ of Great Lakes, IL, only in the sense that she was born there and may have lived there for a year or so. Our family moved frequently. She continued to move often.

Immediately after college, she worked briefly for the United Farm Workers before moving to Holyoke, MA. She lived for a couple of years in San Juan, PR, before returning to school to get her Masters in Forestry/Environmental Sciences at Yale. She spent the next ~5y teaching Ecology at Central American University in Managua (during the very fraught Reagan years), returned to the US where she and E. Rolando López-Gutiérrez (who had also taught at UCA) married and she earned her Ph.D. in Geography at Clark University (with dissertation work in the Dominican Republic). During the war with contras, she composed and sang protest songs in front of the US Embassy in Managua. She also picked coffee in the Nicaraguan countryside during those very dangerous times. Rolando died in 2011.

At the time of her death, she resided in Georgetown SC and was an Assistant Professor, Dept. Forestry & Natural Resources at the Baruch Reserve, Clemson University. Her last publication, which won multiple awards, was a volume titled ‘Life at the Water’s Edge’. (Fond of puns, she was also proud of having been born on Labor Day.)

Lin had not meant for 'Life at the Water's Edge' to be her last publication. During her final illness, she did extensive fieldwork to produce documentation for her project on the restoration of longleaf pine communities.

In short, after her June 1971 graduation, Linda earned advanced degrees, did important research, worked to advance social and environmental justice, and had adventures to fill several lifetimes before she died at home of cancer.

Activist Scholar

The Linda Roth Memorial Activist Scholar Award given to undergraduates in the Geography Department at Clark University is in honor of her. The award recognizes that "Linda Roth was a graduate of the geography Ph.D. program at Clark and was a life-long social justice and environmental activist as well as a very accomplished, award-winning forest ecology scientist. This award is given to an outstanding global environmental studies major who embodies the principles of scholarship and activism that she demonstrated during her life, from the U.S. to Nicaragua, Belize, and the Dominican Republic."

Research Ecologist and Forest Scientist

A faculty member and Extension Specialist at Clemson University’s Baruch Institute of Coastal Ecology and Forest Science since 2001, she authored Life at the Water's Edge, a research-based publication on shoreline buffering that won numerous awards. After completing a Masters at the Yale School of Forestry in 1979, she spent much of the 1980s teaching at the Escuela de Ecología y Recursos Naturales, Universidad Centroamericana in Managua, Nicaragua. In 1988 she returned to the U.S. and entered the geography program at Clark University; her dissertation was on traditional knowledge and management of subtropical dry forest in the Dominican Republic. A deep commitment to social and environmental justice, a love of music, and a strong sense of political engagement informed her time at Radcliffe and her life in the years after college. Ellen Rothman



First Female Scientist

Linda's 2001 appointment at the Belle W. Baruch Institute of Coastal Ecology and Forest Science at Clemson University is recognized as a milestone; she was one of the first two female scientists to join the staff.

No Linda

Linda was visiting me at our cottage in the middle of the Berkshire woods. She went off midday for a solitary woodland exploration. Hours went by, the sun was setting, dinner was on the table. No Linda. We were about to call Search and Rescue when she wandered in nonchalantly and sat down. Just another day totally immersed in nature with no regard to the passage of time. Stephen Lewis

The apple

Right after college, Linda signed up to teach elementary school in Spanish to Latino kids in Holyoke Mass. She lived frugally in a tiny apartment and dedicated all her time to the kids. Once we were having dinner in her apartment and she was eating an apple. She ate the outside, the inside, the stem and the pits. There was nothing left. I'd never seen any human do that before. "Why waste anything", she said. Stephen Lewis


Open Space

My parents had an old renovated farmhouse circa 1790 in the high Berkshires in the town of Otis, on 125 acres of woods, the same place where she wandered off for 12 hours. She wanted to have some of her Holyoke kids come to the freedom of the open space from the crowded city of Holyoke, so they could "run and run" as she put it. She ferried five or six of them up there one day and we had a great time, despite the fact that their parents had dressed them in "Sunday best". Stephen Lewis

Linda/Lin/Line/Olvidada

Louise says that Linda preferred to be called ‘Lin,’ in part because much of her world spoke Spanish, and being introduced as "linda" ('pretty') did not appeal to her. (In addition, "th" in English words corresponds to "t" in Spanish cognates; e.g. theme/tema, theory/teoria, theology/teología. Given this pattern, native Spanish speakers tend to pronounce English "th" as "t" and pronounce "Roth" as "Rot." So the English name "Linda" sounds like the Spanish word for 'pretty' and the Spanish pronunciation of Roth sounds like "Rot.") Louise says that Linda joking referred to herself as "Fea Basura" 'ugly trash' but that would have been characteristically self-deprecating. A closer gloss would be "Basura bella" 'gorgeous garbage.' She gave "Lin Roth" as her name as editor of her volume "Life at the Water's Edge."

But Linda also went by other names; the Jordan J cookbook hints at a couple of them. Her recipe for Spanish Omelets gives her name as "Line" while someone appropriating her meringue recipe gave her nickname as "Olvidada" ('forgotten'). Her name fog was just part of what made her mysterious.