Outdoor News
The Incomparable
Joel Vance B
y now, most of you know that one of the most powerful voices for conservation has fallen silent. Joel M. Vance, treasured friend and mentor to generations of outdoor communicators, died peacefully on Dec. 9. If I remember right, he was 86. His career, like his personality, was outsized. It would take a book to do justice to his legacy. What I know best about Joel is how he affected me. So I’ll stick to that and trust that what I saw of Joel is representative of his life.
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CONSERVATION FEDERATION
Like most of you, my first exposure to Joel came through the pages of the Missouri Conservationist. The one thing everyone recognized in Joel was his gift for humanizing any subject. It didn’t matter whether he was describing a quail hunt, profiling a citizen conservationist, explaining why Missouri needed a conservation sales tax or documenting his own misadventures. His prose always brimmed with the warmth and zest for life that were the hallmarks of his own personality. He had the rare gift of being able to “write funny,” as he put it. His humor emphasized human foibles and the slapstick aspect of outdoor misfortunes.
