Lee Botts was 8 years old, a child of northwest Oklahoma and already a keen observer of the region’s violent dust storms when, in the depths of the Depression, she had her first lesson in taking sensible measures to fix environmental damage .

One morning her grandfather lifted her onto his saddle and rode out with her to a pasture to inspect a row of drought-resistant trees that he had planted to halt erosion. They found that the trees, together forming what was called a shelterbelt, were, supported by a federal New Deal soil conservation program, growing just fine.

The lesson stayed with her, she later said, arousing in her a passion to help protect the earth and kindling a seven-decade career in environmentalism — in her case far removed from that parched Oklahoma soil.

She became a writer, a grass-roots organizer, an educator, and a municipal and federal government official whose work would touch practically every drop of water and every mile of shoreline in the Great Lakes basin while educating tens of thousands of people in its ecology.