# Talk:Margaret Nygard

SusanW - My sisters and I are impressed with the wikipedia article that you appear to have spearheaded.  Thank you for the hard work and persistence you have shown.  Our mother would approve of your work.  There are a few corrections we would like to presue.  Instead of us making them directly, we feel it best to provide you the opportunity as you are knowledgeable in the workings of Wikipedia.

Kerstin's name is misspelled.  Kerstin Maria Cruden Nygard
Margaret became a US citizen as she recognized the importance of change through the ability to vote in local and national elections.
It would be more correct say Margaret was a conservationist and an environmentalist rather than an educator or teacher.  Margaret, although having taught a few courses here and there over a broad number of years, she would have never thought of herself as a teacher or educator.  She was never a social worker although in a sense her life work on environmentalism was ultimately for social improvement.  A favorite quote she often used was an environmentalist's work is never done.  Her speech at the acceptance of the Alexander Caulder award further talks of celebrate successes for 5 minutes and then move on to the next issue to solve.

She was the recipient posthumously of The Order of The Long Leaf Pine  in 1995.  This is the highest recognition by the governor, in this case James B. Hunt, of an individuals service to the state.

Here is a note the family has sent to UNC Southern Historical Collection attempting to remove the teacher and social worker as her profession discussions from their bio.

Environmentalist Margaret Cruden Nygard 1925-1995
Born in Nasik, India, Margaret Nygard, was schooled annually in England, then sent alone to Canada, when her school was bombed during WWII. She met her husband Holger Nygard upon entering the University of British Columbia early and earned her doctorate in English from the University of California at Berkeley at the time she had her third child of four. When the family moved to Durham, North Carolina for Holger’s professorship at Duke, they found their home-place in the historic Miller Cole’s house by the Eno River. Upon learning the river was to be dammed for a reservoir, she and Holger started the hard fight in 1964 to preserve it as wilderness parkland, organizing with others the Association for the Preservation of the Eno River Valley.
She was a tireless, charismatic activist in working to save the river, and was effective across the state, reaching out to work with other conservation groups and assisting with governmental planning for open space in an increasingly urbanized region. Her particular focus as an environmentalist was protecting the state park system, regarding what was good for Eno parkland to be good for all. Through her leadership, most of the river has been protected as a fifty mile stretch of natural land. Her efforts first brought the Nature Conservancy into North Carolina for an Eno project and she implemented the use of the first environmental impact statement in the state, which literally stopped the bulldozers at West Point on the Eno.
She regarded the work of preserving the river to be “unending,” so the organization still works on to complete the state park and protect the river. The first recipient ever of the Alexander Calder Conservation Award, presented to her by Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall in Washington, DC, Margaret was posthumously awarded the Order of the Longleaf Pine by Governor Jim Hunt and placed in the North Carolina Conservation Hall of Fame.
Note: The family wrote this short biography for the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources for the
recent “She Changed the World” event celebrating the contributions of N.C. women. There are two errors now published in her life story which the we wish to firmly correct for the record. She has been described to have been a social worker, and this statement is completely untrue, with no basis in fact. (Despite the kind posthumous award she received mistakenly stating so.) She also has been described to have been a teacher, in part because she did teach sophomore and freshman level English Literature at UC and UBC as a qualified graduate student in the 1940’s. But the time she spent between 1972-73 at Durham Technical Institute teaching Western Literature was a singularly brief episode, which lasted less than a year. She would not have wanted the time spent teaching when she was a young woman in college and a few months at Durham Tech to cause biographers to define her professional occupation to have been teaching, it simply was not. Her true occupation was as an environmentalist and conservationist for thirty years. Her family knows that once the effort to create the park and preserve the Eno was underway it was an overriding concern and became the work that demanded her full-time attention.
~ Kerstin, Erik, and Jenny Nygard in 2021

You are welcome to contact us to assist you if necessary.  Keep up the good work!
KECN (talk) 17:43, 17 February 2023 (UTC)

KECN Thank you! Some of these are easy fixes, some not so much. But I'll see what I can do. Kerstin's name and removing teacher are simple. For becoming a US citizen and the The Order of The Long Leaf Pine, I'll need sources, i.e. newspaper clippings, journal articles, etc. If you have something that documents that, you can e-mail me from the "email this user" link on my page. Otherwise, I shall try to search for something that confirms that. SusunW (talk) 19:37, 17 February 2023 (UTC) (Note: two "u"s no "a")
KECN I was able to find sourcing on the Long Leaf Pine honor, but I see nothing about her being naturalized. If you can provide me with a published source for that, I am happy to make that correction. Again, I appreciate your willingness to ensure that our article accurately reflects your mom's life and contributions. SusunW (talk) 21:58, 17 February 2023 (UTC)
I was just trying to email a copy of the naturalization document stamped May 21, 1993, No. 20559867 completed in Charlotte, NC. KECN (talk) 00:25, 18 February 2023 (UTC)