Ted Smith, an undaunted visionary

Theodore M. Smith, whose career at Ford included being country representative in Indonesia and a special assistant to the Foundation’s president, died September 1 when he fell during a hiking trip in the Mission Mountain Wilderness in Montana, where he lived. He was 71. 

Ted was on a camping trip with several family members in an area near Mission Falls. He had just completed a 90-minute hike with his brother, Roger, and their two dogs and was starting back to their camp when he slipped and fell down a steep slope and over a ledge. He died of head trauma.

“Ted was where he loved to be,” said his brother. “He was with people (and dogs) who loved him. There was smoke from forest fires around us but the valley we were in was crystal clear. It could not have been a more glorious day.”

Ted had returned to his home state two years ago after a long professional career that began as a smokejumper during summers while he was in graduate school and ended as executive director of the Henry P. Kendall Foundation in Boston. His was a lifetime devoted to conservation, nurtured by early years of camping and hiking in the mountains of western Montana.

“Even when I was ten, twelve years old,” he once told an interviewer, “our parents would drive us to the wilderness at the end of the road and say, okay, pick you up in a few days.” Recalling those days he said, “My roots put me in awe of nature, and that’s nature with a capital N.”

 His leadership abilities were apparent early too, when he was elected student body president at Missoula County High School, from which he graduated in 1959. He was a graduate of Pomona College and earned a doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley. It was while in college that he worked for three summers as a smokejumper for the U.S. Forest Service, flying out of Missoula and Fairbanks, Alaska.

He was a U.S. State Department contract employee in Vietnam in 1965 and joined Ford in 1967, staying until 1979. His work there began and ended as country representative in Indonesia, interrupted by a two-year stint working on the Foundation’s budget under MacGeorge Bundy.

Then came six years as president of the John D. Rockefeller III Agricultural Development Council, founding director of the Consultative Group on Biological Diversity, and consultant to the World Bank, USAID and the Rockefeller Foundation.

In 1993 he became executive director of the Kendall Foundation, where he developed American and Canadian programs on ocean fisheries policies, landscape conservation, watershed management and, especially in his later years there, climate change and energy conservation.  

One of the key groups that Ted funded during his tenure at Kendall is the Yukon Conservation Initiative, or Y2Y, a joint Canadian-American not-for-profit organization that works to preserve and maintain the wildlife, native plants, wilderness and natural processes of the mountainous region stretching from Yellowstone National Park to the Yukon Territory. 

He was a member of its board at his death, one of many organizations on whose boards he served.

“Ted was a universally acknowledged conservation leader,” Y2Y said in a statement on his death, “an undaunted visionary…and a true friend to those with whom he worked. His smile was warm and he possessed an unforgettable personality.”

He once wrote, “There’s only one landscape, and the only way to take care of it is to treat it as a whole.”

Will Hertz remembers Ted Smith as “one of my favorite people at the FF. He served in a variety of functions, all with conspicuous skill and originality. Ted showed his gift for innovation on both local and regional problems in his programming with Kendall.”

One example Will noted was that Kendall, reacting to the accidental deaths of several grizzly bears on roads in the Canadian Rockies, funded elevated “bear crossings” at key points in their habitual wanderings. “Ted told me the bears caught on quickly,” Will said.

In his president’s message in  the July issue of the newsletter, Shep Forman wrote of two recent visits he had with Ted Smith at his home in Polson, Montana, at the foot of Flathead Lake. “….we share the exceptional collegial bond that the Ford experience provides and that brings us all together as LAFFers,” Shep wrote.

Ted Smith is survived, in  addition to his brother, by two stepdaughters, two granddaughters, two nephews and a niece. His wife, Mary, preceded him in death. They had been married 31 years.