Environmental historian William Cronon.

With the 40th anniversary of the landmark federal Clean Water Act approaching in mid-October, ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College will observe the occasion with a talk by influential environmental historian William Cronon at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 20, in the Olin Arts Center Concert Hall, 75 Russell St.

Cronon’s talk, titled The Riddle of Sustainability: A Surprisingly Short History of the Future, is the Charles and Virginia Tangney History Lecture at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. Open to the public at no cost, the event is the second installment in this fall’s Civic Forum Series, produced for ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ by the Harward Center for Community Partnerships.

The talk is jointly sponsored by the history department, the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, and the environmental studies program, as well as the Harward Center. For more information, please call 207-786-6202.

Cronon is Frederick Jackson Turner and Vilas Research Professor of History, Geography, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He studies American environmental history and the history of the American West.

He is a national leader in the study of past human interactions with nature, concentrating on how people depend on the ecosystems around them to sustain their material lives, how they modify the landscapes in which they live and how ideas of nature shape the world around us.

Cronon heads UW-Madison’s Center for Culture, History and Environment, which brings together scholars from disciplines as diverse as anthropology, history and forestry to study environmental and cultural change throughout human history.

He has written and edited several prize-winning books, including Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (Norton, 1991), which was awarded the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize for best non-fiction work in 1991 and was one of three nominees for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize in History.

Oct. 18 is the 40th anniversary of the Clean Water Act of 1972, one of two transformational pieces of environmental legislation championed by the late U.S. Sen. Edmund Muskie, Democrat of Maine. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ has a special interest in this legislation that launched a massive cleanup of the nation’s waters.

A member of the college’s class of 1936, Muskie was a native of Rumford and grew up near the Androscoggin River, which by the mid-20th century was one of the U.S. waterways most badly affected by industrial and municipal pollution. The Androscoggin has long been the focus of research by ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students and faculty, including one chemist, Walter Lawrance, who was the state-appointed Androscoggin rivermaster.

Pat Webber, newly appointed director of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library, poses in Riverside Cemetery near campus, where he leads an annual ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ history tour. Photograph by Phyllis Graber Jensen/ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ College.

For Pat Webber, becoming director of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ was in the cards.

As a boy, Webber recalls taking out his baseball card collection and scatter the dog-eared cards on the floor and sort them by the players’ last names.

Then he’d scatter the cards again, and sort them by team. And scatter again, and sort yet another way.

“I should’ve realized when I was 8 that I was going to be an archivist,” says Webber.

The college archivist since 2006, Webber was the Muskie Archives’ acting director this past academic year following the departure of Kat Stefko for a post at Duke University.

Gene Wiemers, vice president for information and library services and college librarian, says that Webber’s appointment, following a national search, “reflects well on his training and experience. The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ archives operations require archivists who are both innovative and committed to the user. Pat embodies and builds on this tradition.”

Wiemers adds that Webber is “an expert on ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ and Muskie history, and he has played a key role in promoting the use of the archives and special collections among students, faculty, staff and the general public.”

Webber came to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ from the Special Collections Research Center of North Carolina State University in Raleigh, N.C., where he earned a master’s in public history in 2003. He earned a master’s in history from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2001 and bachelor’s from the College of William & Mary in 1988.

In May 1980, Edmund Muskie ’36 is sworn in as secretary of state under President Carter (left) by Frank Coffin ’40 (right), chief judge of the 1st Circuit. Also looking on are his daughter Ellen Muskie Allen (second from left) and wife Jane Muskie (second from right). Photograph by Bill Fitzpatrick/White House, courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

As its name suggests, the archives’ centerpiece collection is the papers of Ed Muskie, 1936 ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ alumnus, U.S. senator, vice presidential and presidential candidate and secretary of state.

“For almost every issue of national importance during his time, you’re going to find some information in the Muskie Collection,” Webber says.

The archives has two other identities: It’s the official repository for college records (this was Webber’s area of focus prior to his appointment as director), and it also holds a diverse collection of rare books, oral histories, photographs and films, manuscript collections and other items.

Among the recently processed collections generating interest are the papers of Professor of Chemistry Walter Lawrance. As the state-appointed “river master” of the Androscoggin River from 1947 to 1978, he had legal power to control the amount of pollution discharged into the river by the three major paper mills located along it.

Much of the thanks to digitizing efforts by environmental studies faculty and students working with the archives.

The papers of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ chemistry professor and Androscoggin “river master” Walter Lawrance (right, in 1949) are now online. Photo courtesy of the Edmund S. Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

And as his card-collecting past suggests, Webber’s mission is to keep this complex collection of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ history preserved, sensibly organized and accessible to today’s academic community.

For Webber and the archives staff, “accessible” has a proactive meaning.

Webber has taught or co-taught the history Short Term course “Introduction to Archives and Archival Science,” and he leads a popular tour of nearby Riverside Cemetery, the resting place of many early ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ leaders and professors.

“Every cemetery plot tells a story,” he says. “Language professor Benjamin Hayes and science professor Richard Stanley served ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ for a combined 64 years in the 1800s. Their friendship was likely very strong: Their families share a single plot.”

Webber says it’s important for the archives to keep one foot in the past and one in the present.

For example, students and professors who are curious about ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ inclusive history are always captivated by the college’s 1950s-era enrollment and career publications: one version for men and one for women.

“But they don’t just want to look at, say, When a Girl Goes to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ in historical context,” Webber says. “They want to go beyond that and ask, ‘What does this say about ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ today?’ We’ve been inclusive for 150-plus years, but how has that really played out?”

The women’s dining room in Rand Hall, circa 1920. The archives supports faculty and students looking at how ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½’ inclusive ideals have played out in reality. Photograph courtesy of the Muskie Archives and Special Collections Library.

Webber recalls how Professor of History Margaret Creighton and her students took on that question. For her course “A Woman’s Place,” examining gender and geography in the U.S. from 1800 to today, students looked at dining at ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, which was not coeducational until the 1960s.

From looking at historical materials, including articles in The ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ Student, “the project morphed from ‘Here’s where women used to eat, and here’s where men used to eat,’ into a discussion of the culture of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ dining today, the politics of who sits where and that sort of thing,” Webber says.

Early in his career, Webber did archeological fieldwork, then worked in the geotechnical services field in the construction industry for nearly a decade. Then he switched to archival work. “I’ve gone from archeology to geology to archives, so at least I’m getting more modern,” he jokes.