June 20, 2023
by Roger Gray
Ward Stone, a long-time friend of many Sierra Club members and a staunch Sierra Club supporter, died on February 8, 2023. Author John McPhee once described former Sierra Club executive director David Brower as an “archdruid.” Similarly, Ward Stone was our local arch-environmentalist.
Photo Credit: Times Union
Ward was a Navy veteran. He attended the National Naval Medical School in Maryland and served in the Navy in Korea, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Vietnam.
He graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Science degree, followed by a master’s degree in animal pathology and parasitology. He was hired by the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation in 1969 as the State Wildlife Pathologist, a position he held for over 40 years. In 2003 Ward was awarded a Doctorate of Science from the State University of New York for his cumulative life’s work (validating those of us who referred to him as “Dr. Stone” for many years).
In the 1970s, Ward’s extensive sampling, identification, and publicizing the existence of toxic levels of Mirex, a pesticide, in salmon and other fish in Lake Ontario, resulted in the NYS Department of Environmental Conservation issuing a ban on consumption of fish caught in the Lake.
A 1989 article about Ward in the Buffalo Daily News (which, coincidentally, appeared on the same page as a review of environmentalist Bill McKibben’s book, “The End of Nature”), is entitled “Ward Stone: Feisty Bureaucrat.” The article describes Ward as the “hardest working employee of the Department of Environmental Conservation,” and “…he has gone out of his way to help people living near hazardous waste sites identify dangerous levels of chemicals.”
He received an EPA award for his work identifying West Nile virus in New York in 1999, the first identified outbreak in the Western Hemisphere.
His identification of Epizootic Hemorrhagic Disease (deer wasting disease) in 2007 was the first confirmed instance of the virus in New York State.
Also in 2007, he was a co-author of a paper describing the newly identified white-nose syndrome epidemic in bats.
In 2009 the National Sierra Club awarded Ward its Distinguished Service award for his work with the Atlantic Chapter identifying toxins from Albany’s trash incinerator, and for his years of work identifying the pervasiveness of toxic PCBs in the environment. In making the award, the Club noted, “Ward’s commitment to wildlife and environmental protection, coupled with his willingness to push forward against conflicting corporate and government interests, has garnered him the support and admiration of many of the media, community organizations, and the general public.”
"When Ward sank his teeth into an issue, he was relentless -- if evidence showed the existence of contaminants, he would not let the information be suppressed, whether by industry, or by his bosses at DEC. It was always an education and an inspiration to work with him," said Aaron Mair, former National President of the Sierra Club, and organizer of the effort to close Albany’s ANSWERS incinerator; he later served as volunteer chair of the Club's 'Clean Up The Hudson River!' campaign.
Ward’s obituary in the New York Times is entitled, “Ward Stone, Wildlife Coroner Who Warned Against PCBs, Dies at 84.” As the Times reported, in the course of his investigations as State Wildlife Pathologist, and also on his own, he sampled soil, landfill, ash and other residue and was one of the pioneers, in the 1970’s — along with Gunnar Widmark and Soren Jensen of the University of Stockholm and the biologist Robert Riseborough of the University of California, Berkeley — in finding evidence that toxic polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, were ubiquitous in the environment.
“Ward shone a light on environmental threats long before others could notice them; he gave a science-based voice to nature in times of crisis when few state officials would listen,” Roger Downs, Conservation Director of the Sierra Club’s Atlantic chapter, said. “His methods were sometimes unconventional, but he always chose to pursue environmental justice first before pointless bureaucracy; the natural world is a better place because of his fearless advocacy.”
As reported in the Albany Times Union, Ward viewed his role as a pathologist as wide-ranging. He was the first to identify and publicize PCB contamination in fish, working with members of the Mohawk Community at the Akwasasne reservation along the St Lawrence River. “It was environmental justice before there was any such term,” remarked Fred LeBrun, a longtime Times Union columnist who accompanied Stone on outings — sometimes in the dead of night — to find PCBs or other pollutants that had been illicitly dumped in the woods.
Ward worked with the Sierra Club for more than a decade with the Club’s “Clean Up The Hudson River!” campaign, seeking EPA enforcement of a plan to require the General Electric Corporation to dredge PCB-laden toxic sediment from the Hudson River below GE’s Hudson Falls plant where PCBs had been dumped for decades.
“Not only was he a great scientist, but he played an integral part in raising public awareness about PCB contamination in the Hudson River. His involvement was essential in tracing the pollution from the source to the public impact, drawing a straight line from contamination in fish to the GE discharges in the Upper Hudson River,” stated Chris Ballantyne, former Northeast Regional Director of the Sierra Club.
When taking sediment samples with Sierra Club volunteers, Ward would say that he could smell the PCBs. In an oft-told story, Ward once smelled PCBs through his open car window and followed the smell to a motel parking lot that had been sprayed with PCB-saturated oils over the years to keep the dust down. The site was subsequently identified as a hazardous waste site and cleaned up in 1998 under the State’s Superfund law.
Ward also worked with the Arbor Hill Concerned Citizens, in collaboration with the Sierra Club Hudson Mohawk Group, to identify PCBs, lead, dioxin, and other toxics in emissions from the ANSWERS incineration plant in downtown Albany. Assisting the groups’ campaign, he oversaw emissions tests showing that the ANSWERS incinerator was in fact spewing toxins over the surrounding neighborhood. Located in the Sheridan Hollow area next to the city's Arbor Hill neighborhood, the incinerator became an early symbol of how disadvantaged communities were bearing a disproportionate burden of pollution. The joint efforts resulted in it being shut down in the mid-1990s.
“Ward was instrumental in holding the DEC accountable for all kinds of malfeasance and misfeasance,” recalled LeBrun, who cited their prior blind eye toward the problems that the ANSWERS plant had created. “He was always at odds with his bosses,” he added.
“While he loved pathology,” Montana Stone said of her father, “his love for life and living creatures was his true inspiration and motivation to better understand diseases and toxins that inextricably affect humans, wildlife and the environment.”
“I’ve spent my life trying to do something about the terrible environmental destruction I saw, most of it done by industries with a lot of power,” Ward said in an interview with The Cobleskill Times-Journal in 2016. “I wasn’t popular, but I didn’t let that stop me.” “I have been called a loose cannon,” he said, “but I always knew exactly where I was firing.”