John Wolcott was an expert at reading maps — through layers and layers of history — and also an expert at reading the land, particularly the land that formed his beloved pine bush.

He shared his knowledge and passion with others, helping to save important landmarks and to preserve Albany County’s globally rare pine barrens.

He died on Thursday, Aug. 17, 2023, a month shy of his 91st birthday.

“John was a genius who had a photographic memory,” his family wrote in a tribute, which also described him as “a rebel with a cause, a purveyor of justice and truth.” You can read that loving tribute on our obituaries page.

His longtime friends, Lynne Jackson and her husband, Daniel Van Riper, describe him as a “historian, preservationist, activist, and fierce advocate for the Pine Bush.”

Both Ms. Jackson and Mr. Wolcott were founding members of the not-for-profit organization that, since 1978, has raised consciousness about the worth of the pine bush and fought to protect it from encroaching development. You can read that tribute in our letters section.

We knew John Wolcott mostly through his words, through his decades of writing letters to us. 

Sometimes his words were fiery, as when he wrote to us in December 2009, “A portion of the pine bush is being savagely torn up.” He lamented the loss of more dunes, those vastly underappreciated geological formations.

“There will be nothing left here of the wind-colored sand flat at its windward side. This is a valid geo-morphological dune region type largely ignored for conservation,” he wrote.

Mr. Wolcott went on, “The ‘fair market’ prices that opportunistic developers frequently make for land sought for conservation is a little like ransom.” He challenged the town supervisor at the time, saying he had gone back on his campaign promises, and Mr. Wolcott suggested naming a hiking trail in back of the new development “Path of Broken Promises.”

But many times Mr. Wolcott’s words were filled with a different kind of warmth, not of fire but of love and understanding. This came through as, for decades, he regularly wrote of hikes that he would lead or organize.

While promoting an Earth Day hike in the pine bush, Mr. Wolcott wrote, “As with Christmas, we shouldn’t limit love, kindness, generosity, and helping the needy to one day. So with Earth Day, we need all year to act and speak out for our concern for the Earth and the ways it sustains everyone’s lives and the moreso if it’s treated better and understood better.”

Mr. Wolcott wrote in that long-ago letter, that he would like to set two things straight and both of them spoke to his inclusive nature before “inclusion” was a buzzword.

“Stop calling the original Earth Day ‘The Spring Equinox Earth Day,’” he wrote. “It smacks of geo-centricity, which can be as bad as and perhaps mirror ethno-centricity and chron-centricity by which we ignore the mistakes of the past and fail to learn positive lessons from it.”

Second, he urged in that long-ago letter: “Protecting our environment from climate change and major pollution problems and loss of natural areas is seeking true ‘Homeland Security’ since the Earth is, broadly speaking, our true homeland, and ‘our’ means everybody in our homeland.”

Sometimes his letters were like a combination of a science lesson with a history lesson — always with a world view in mind. One year, for example, he wrote about an upcoming Summer Solstice Wildflower Walk, “The solstice is an excellent reminder of the finely combined and balanced phenomenon that makes Earth habitable, more than any other planet.

“It is a feature of the constant tilt of the Earth’s axis at 23-and-one-quarter degrees to the plane of the ecliptic. This is the annual course of the Earth’s revolution about the sun. Earth in this course stays tilted at the same degree and in exactly the same direction for the entire course.

“This gives us the four seasons or two depending on how you divide the year. Because of this tilt, Midsummer’s Day is the longest day of the year and is when the sun’s rays shine the most directly downward in the Northern Hemisphere. Remember that at this time just the opposite happens in the Southern Hemisphere, where it’s Midwinter’s Day.”

He went on to note, “Midsummer's Day became very important in cold northern lands. It was important to predict and celebrate from remote prehistoric times. Witness Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain in England, or Woodhenge at Cahokia Mounds in Illinois, or the relatively recently discovered Miami Circle.

“Midsummer is, now, observed most enthusiastically in Scandinavia and Latvia, and quite a bit in Ireland, too, where in some locales concerts are held and there are again bonfires in some places.”

Mr. Wolcott went on to encourage those who would take the Summer Solstice Walk to sing or dance or play music along the way but, in a typically low-key humorous vein, he did not recommend bonfires.

While reading Mr. Wolcott’s words was always instructive, watching him read the land was even moreso.

I vividly remember a hike he led well over a decade ago to show us the Road Bender Dune in the pine bush. We left the Pine Bush Discovery Center on a brisk October morning to walk through some beautiful hardwood forests on our way to the Road Bender.

Along the way, Mr. Wolcott explained the three kinds of dunes in the Pine Bush — most are parabolic but there is also at least one hairpin dune and the large U-shaped dune.

We learned that Old State Road was built in 1792 as State Road; we saw an old sand ridge, which we learned was artificial, where farmers in the 1800s had marked off property lines by piling up sand ridges.

By reading the landscape through Mr. Wolcott’s eyes, hearing what he had researched from maps, we saw in a new way sights that had once seemed mundane.

A sand dune was no longer just a sand dune. The natural ones had different shapes because of how they were formed and an artificial one had once been a boundary, now eroded.

But there was more. A hidden treasure as we neared the Hungerkill was seeing an old-growth butternut tree. It was two centuries old, Mr. Wolcott told us. We stood in silent awe, taking in its grandeur.

Mr. Wolcott was someone who knew how to find the wonder in our world and share it with others.