For Doug La Follette, PhD, stewardship has meant showing up. It has meant driving to the Milwaukee airport to pick up a visiting scientist, teaching a two-week course between legislative sessions, and, year after year, opening his checkbook to support a cabin, a dining hall, Crystal (a big all-seasons cabin), and a new, modern shower house at a research station he first visited nearly five decades ago.

Before he was a politician, La Follette was already active in Wisconsin’s environmental circles. In 1970, as a University of Wisconsin professor, he helped organize the state’s observance of the first Earth Day, held under Wisconsin Sen. Gaylord Nelson, the event’s national founder. That same year, he and Peter Anderson founded Wisconsin’s Environmental Decade, an environmental watchdog group that later became Clean Wisconsin, now one of the state’s leading environmental organizations.

Around that same period, he read Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb and invited its author, then a biology professor at Stanford, to speak to his students. “I went to Milwaukee and picked him up at the airport, and we hit it off, as you might imagine, as a couple of scientists who were concerned about environmental problems,” La Follette said during a recent conversation in Gothic.

Ehrlich later invited him to RMBL to give a talk. “I did that, and I thought it was a wonderful place and I’ve been coming here ever since,” he said. He estimates the year as 1975 or 1978. By then, he had been elected Wisconsin secretary of state, an office he would go on to hold for a total of 44 years, longer than anyone else in state history.

Years later, at a former RMBL director’s invitation, La Follette began teaching a two-week environmental science class at RMBL. It was later cut to one week and eventually dropped because of student housing logistics.

His career brought together science and politics in a way that was unusual at the time.

“Because I was a scientist who had gone into politics, that’s pretty rare. So that’s why [Ehrlich] invited me, and I was interested in continuing to educate people here,” La Follette said.

Asked whether RMBL changed his views on the environment, La Follette said it mostly confirmed them. “Because I’ve always believed in good science,” he said. “So I was very pleased to see what was going on here, and very interested in some of the different projects — [including] the marmot studies and the monument plant studies.”

When longtime RMBL scientist David Inouye recently asked how he was doing, La Follette answered, “Not as well as the monument plants,” and the two laughed. This year’s bloom, as it happens, has been an especially good one.

Among the friendships La Follette made at RMBL, one in particular stands out: billy barr, whose decades of meticulous precipitation and temperature records have become key evidence of a changing climate.

“I got to know billy and we became very good friends,” La Follette said. He still tells people to watch “The Snow Guardian,” the 2016 documentary about barr’s work.

La Follette’s giving to RMBL has supported some of the lab’s most tangible needs. His first major gift helped build the Augusta cabin, matching a National Science Foundation grant that had already funded a companion cabin, Purple. He later helped fund the new billy barr Community Center and the visitor center, which, by his account, was built from a log research building that had to be relocated out of a wetland.

When asked which contribution he is most proud of, he replied, “At the moment, I guess I’d have to laugh and say the new shower house, because I’m sure the students here are having a great time taking showers in a nice new building.”

That impulse, to make RMBL more livable, traces back to his own stays in the cabin he helped build.

“I stayed in Augusta a number of times,” La Follette said. “I guess being here, I saw the need to make this place nicer, if you will, for the students and the researchers because coming here shouldn’t be that difficult in terms of everyday living. Because of that, I did all I could to help support getting the new dining hall to make it a nice place to come and a place you’re not going to fall off of because the stairs are collapsing, for example. And then I’ve always been concerned about the student housing, and right now there’s a real need to do something about that.”

Today, one of La Follette’s priorities is replacing the propane tanks powering stoves in many of RMBL’s cabins.

“We have a plan to get rid of all the propane tanks, which are dangerous, and produce pollution when you use them in a stove,” La Follette said. “And most all the cabins have gas stoves. And it’s not healthy for them either to have the stoves where they’re sleeping. So that would be a great project for someone who has a few dollars to spend.”

When John Hausdoerffer, PhD, RMBL’s director of storytelling and advancement, noted that removing the tanks would also help with wildfire mitigation, La Follette agreed.

“Well, yeah, I mean, if one of those tanks explodes, that’s a real disaster.”

He is just as insistent about ongoing operating support. “I would urge people to remember that ongoing contributions of $5,000 or $10,000, $20,000 a year are important to keep this place going,” he said.

Asked why RMBL still matters to him after all this time, La Follette pointed to the science and the people.

“Well, I guess the reason it always has: because it’s important for the science,” he said. “And now, like I say, because climate disruption and the problems it’s causing have finally reached the level of general awareness, if you will. That means what goes on is even more important in some ways. And besides, I also have friendships here with lots of people, and those friendships make it a continuing thing of importance to me.”

RMBL is approaching its centennial, having been founded in 1928 by John C. Johnson, a biology professor from what was then Western State College in Gunnison. Asked what he hopes for the lab’s second century, La Follette returned to the changes he has witnessed during his own nearly 50 years at RMBL.

“It’s almost been a hundred years since this place was started with a professor from Gunnison that had the foresight to start this place and buy up the mining claims and so forth,” he said. “And a lot’s happened here. It’s gone from a place where people lived in tents and didn’t have any water to drink, really, to a modern, high alpine research station, one of the best in the world. And so my hope for the next 100 years is that we continue that and continue to make the improvements we need to continue to provide those kind of services.”

— Suzanne Ennis
Communications Manager
Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory

Top: Doug La Follette, PhD, at RMBL in August 2026, with Gothic Mountain in the background. Photo by Suzanne Ennis