Richardson Environmental Leadership Award for ‘… inspiring all of us to care for the nature of Maine and its wild places.’” This is his eleventh book in the nature/environment field. Bennett jointly received from the Conservation Voters of Maine the Harrison L. He received the Percival Baxter Award for Leadership in Wilderness Preservation from the Maine Chapter of the Sierra Club, the Environmental Activist Award for protection of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway from the Natural Resources Council of Maine, and the Teacher of the Year Award from Maine Audubon Society. He was among one-hundred educators selected by Unesco to participate in the first world environmental education conference in Belgrade Yugoslavia, and at the organization’s invitation, he wrote a book on evaluating environmental learning for teachers. He served as the first environmental education school curriculum specialist in the Maine State Department of Education, and later, he spent many years at the University of Maine at Farmington as a professor of science education. Since then, much of his professional life has been devoted to teaching, writing, and illustrating books in the fields of science and environmental education, natural history, and human relationships with nature. in Resource Planning and Conservation from the University of Michigan with a special emphasis in environmental education. After completing a four-year apprenticeship in cabinetmaking through the Maine State Apprenticeship Council, he went on to receive a bachelor’s degree in industrial arts education and a master’s degree in science education, teaching both subjects in the Yarmouth, Maine, school system. Since then, while pursuing a varied career, he has retraced much of each route Thoreau traveled in the Maine woods. Bennett began painting and photographing the north woods in his home state of Maine in the late 1950s and early 1960s when he began canoeing the Upper West Branch of the Penobscot River and the Allagash Wilderness Waterway and backpacking in Baxter State Park. River Voices: Perspectives on the Presumpscotĭean B. Wildflowers of Chebeague and the Casco Bay Islands

The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau