2 / MARCH 2022 PRIME
MEAN
Loreene By Will Barrett - PRIME EDITOR
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ll her life, Loreene Reid has been putting others first. Stemming from an upbringing in Mitchell, South Dakota, where her father emphasized community efforts over individual accolades, she has always been advocating for those who can’t. Most of her life Reid has been working as a conservationist in Alaska, Montana, and Wyoming, but in the last three decades she’s been advocating for the disabled too. In high school she was involved in local politics. Her neighbor was Senator George McGovern, who would eventually run for office as the Democratic nominee in the 1972 Presidential election. His focus in South Dakota was to get everyone access to food, health, and clean water. Reid explains, “with having that kind of role model in your neighborhood, we really sat down at the dinner table and my father would say to us, what did you do for the community today?”. She fought to clean up the environment on a local level, and even campaigned with a
young Al Gore, working on the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act. Conservation campaigns at the grass roots level of the late sixties and early seventies were largely unfunded. “We all just grabbed our sleeping bags and our backpacks and went where we needed to go to do our research, or to do fieldwork, or to sit by politicians’ backdoors and remind them of what needed to be done,” said Reid. “We didn’t know what fundraising really was, we were always in the red from what it seemed”.
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“When you become a birder, you become focused on details that you normally wouldn’t be focused on”. During that time, high schools put a great amount of pressure on choosing a career. Reid knew she wanted to be a wildlife biologist or a forester, however the backup plan she proposed to her teachers was to be a fashion designer. The vast differences between those career paths worried her professors, but Reid was persistent in pursuing her dreams.
Montana State in the Computer Science department in 1975, and eventually made the right connections and enough money to transfer herself to the University of Montana, despite her father’s disapproval. At school in Missoula, Reid joined the Fly Valley Audubon Society and began working on the Montana Environmental Protection Act, a joint effort that fought to protect public lands, water, and wildlife, which was eventually passed in the late eighties. She never finished her undergraduate degree, but to this day, considers herself a jack of all trades, yet a master of none.
She worked full time all through college both at Montana State, and then at her preferred destination, the University of Montana. She envisioned herself at the University of Montana in the wildlife program, but her father thought of it as a hippy school, too notorious for drug use. She initially enrolled at
In 1979, Reid married her partner Matt, and moved to Bozeman in the early eighties where they welcomed their two children, Nicole and Nathan. She then reconnected with the Sacajawea Audubon Society, the group that first sparked her interest in wildlife biology, and helped to put an end to Ski Yellowstone, an attempt by developers to build a resort on a
“When you become a birder, you become focused on details that you normally wouldn’t be focused on.”
As a girl scout, Reid went out with birders from the Sacajawea Audubon Society, where she caught the bug for birds. She says it made her a better student, someone more attentive and appreciative of the small things.
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