CHARLESTOWN — From her childhood in Virginia through her adult life in New Hampshire, Janice “Jan” Lambert found her bliss and contentment outdoors, whether walking along trails, exploring aquatic life in their watery habitats or studying and writing about the natural world.
“Being in the woods was always where she felt most at home,” said Martha Maki, Lambert’s eldest daughter. “Even in her last couple of months, she couldn’t take being cooped up inside all day.”
Lambert, who died on April 24 at age 70, is remembered by family and friends for her spiritually-driven devotion to environmental education. Led by her love of God and nature, Lambert strived to teach others to cherish the world’s beauty, authoring publications, building relationships globally with environmentalists and scientists and sharing her passion for the outdoors with those around her.
“I think Jan’s vocation was to be a messenger,” said Susan Langle, an Episcopalean priest and friend of Lambert. “She was a writer, a visionary, a prophet and a lover of this earth.”
Lambert was born in Washington, D.C. in 1951 to Charles and Margery Albright and grew up in the Virginia suburbs. Her father was a doctor and her mother was a medical office assistant, who later became an artist. She had two siblings, Charles Albright Jr., and Julie Albright.
In 1969 Lambert met her husband John Lambert at an intercollegiate gathering of outdoors enthusiasts, while attending Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg.
The Lamberts married in 1973 and moved to New Hampshire where they purchased 30 acres of undeveloped woodlands in the hills of Charlestown.
Over the next couple of years the Lamberts created their homestead clearing several acres of land and constructing a half-mile road up the hillside to where they would over about a two-year period, doing much of the work themselves, including clearing several acres of land and constructing a half-mile road to where they would build their house.
Janice Lambert contributed to the labor, clearing brush, operating the couple’s small bulldozer and helping her husband apply finish to the house.
“She enjoyed it,” John Lambert said. “It was a labor of love to her.”
For 10 years the Lamberts, along with their two daughters, Martha and Mary, lived off the grid, without electricity, because the town power lines did not run close enough to their property. The family used propane-fuel to operate the kitchen appliances and the house’s lights. A windmill supplied the energy to pump water from the well to the house. The family’s vacuum cleaner was charged on a generator.
The family had no television during this period and frequently turned to the outdoors for their recreation. Lambert maintained vegetable gardens and raised farm animals, including horses and ponies, which she taught to pull a cart for the children to ride. Martha and Mary would explore the woods or play in their treehouse. During the winter the children would invite their friends to sled down their hill.
The family finally acquired electricity in 1987 when the utility company expanded the power lines closer to the Lambert property.
“I remember it being in the middle of the summer and we were hot,” Maki said. “The first thing my mom did was take us to the store and buy a bunch of electric fans.”
In regard to environmental initiatives Lambert literally and figuratively dove into her projects.
From 2005-2009 Lambert removed milfoil, an invasive aquatic plant, from ponds in Vermont for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Lambert devised the removal system herself. Wearing a wetsuit, Lambert would snorkel along the pond surface and dive below to pull any milfoil she spotted, which she then tossed into her inflatable raft for disposal.
According to family members, Lambert’s removal method exemplified her personal love of immersing in aquatic ecosystems for exploration.
“I’m pretty sure she designed this job herself first and then convinced them that it had to be done so they would pay her,” Maki laughed.
During the 80s and 90s Lambert monitored frog populations in local wetland habitats to assist a nonprofit ecological study, using a tracking process known as “frogging.”
Each summer Lambert and her friend Jenny Wright, of Unity, would visit 10 assigned locations at night to listen for frog calls during their mating season. The pair would then record whether the frog calls, if present, were solitary, a few with occasional overlaps or a large chorus.
“We had to do it three or four times per summer,” Wright said, who monitored for about 12 years until the study ended around 1997. “We first did it when the wood frogs were out, and then when the spring peepers came, and then for the green frogs and leopard frogs.”
In 2012 Lambert partnered with her friend Carmen Bywater to launch The Valley Green Journal, a quarterly agricultural and conservation journal covering the Connecticut River Valley region, including Windsor and Windham counties in Vermont and Sullivan and Cheshire counties in New Hampshire. The team produced the publication for nine years, with Lambert serving as editor until 2020, when she stepped down due to her declining health.
“We were a force of nature when we (worked together),” said Bywater, who served as publisher. “We really felt that we were making a difference. We were connecting people, encouraging and educating people and were trying to open people’s eyes to the beauty of the world around them.”
“The Valley Green Journal was an amazing publication,” said Sullivan County Director of Natural Resources Lionel Shute. “It brought forward all kinds of wonderful and positive things that are happening in the environment, here in this place, that nobody knew about.”
In 2015 Lambert published her first book, Water, Land and Climate: The Critical Connection, a collection of articles from Lambert and contributing writers aimed to educate people in ways to recapture rain in the earth’s water cycle.
Lambert developed the book with Slovak hydrologist Michael Kravchik, whose work in water conservation and renewal influenced Lambert’s desire to increase attention to the importance of water conservation.
“The need of a constant supply of water for the human body … is also the need of the landscapes that we call home, our particular portion of Planet Earth,” Lambert wrote in her book’s forward. “Nature knows how to cycle and recycle water in a most efficient and elegant manner … If we interrupt those cycles and prevent rains from soaking into the land, our landscapes become dehydrated with unhealthy consequences.”
These interruptions, according to Lambert, include human overdevelopment of land, particularly excessive paving for roads and parking lots, which impede the earth’s ability to recapture rainwater into its water system.
Matt Maki, Lambert’s son-in-law, said Lambert’s work regarding rain recapturing strategies inspired him in 2020 to create a rain garden on his property, a landscaping design that collects rain runoff from roofs, driveways or streets to allow the water to soak into the ground. Grasses and perennials in the garden provide aesthetics while also helping to transfer the water back into the cycle.
In addition to nature, Lambert loved to play music and shared that passion through teaching music to children, including to her daughters and in her church’s Sunday school program.
“It’s because of her that music has always been a part of my life and why it was my favorite way to entertain myself as a kid,” Martha Maki said.
Lambert’s religious life led her to explore many denominations, including Episcopal, Methodist and Christian Science. Yet the core of Lambert’s spirituality remained constant, in which her relationships with God and with nature were intertwined and inseparable.
“She was about being in the present, in the here and now, with all that is beautiful in the world,” Langle said.
To explore Lambert’s writing, visit the Valley Green Journal’s archives at www.valleygreenjournal.com or download a free copy of Water, Land and Climate: A Critical Connection at https://bio4climate.org.