In April of 2015, Carl will be the invited speaker at a symposium on Faith and the Environment at Nyack College in Nyack, NY.   Carl will present "The Importance of Aldo Leopold's, 'A Sand County Almanac' to the Environmental Movement and Good Literature."  This version will be read by Carl's oldest son, Kevin, an English Professor at Nyack, as the introductory remarks.

My dad’s first memories, formed when he was about four, were of collecting butterflies, studying flowers, watching birds, listening to bull frogs and having a deep sense that these wonders were created by Someone Who must be Wonderful. Twenty-nine years later he was finally confronted with the reality of his unholiness and this Creator God’s Holiness. Now understanding that this Creator God that he had loved all his life and Jesus were One, he accepted Jesus Christ as his personal Lord and Savior.  Up to then Jesus had only been a historical figure mysteriously behind Christmas and Easter.

My dad received his Doctorate in Evolution from the University of Illinois in 1971. It was here that I was born shortly before my dad had to enter active duty. Since his training had been at the population level and above and he had such a strong attachment to nature, he was a natural candidate for the Chief of Terrestrial Research for the Army’s first Ecological Research Team, a team that was formed at Edgewood Arsenal in Maryland, in part as a response to the emerging environmental movement.

After serving four years on active duty in this position, Captain Pinkham left the active duty part of his military career in Maryland to take up a civilian job in Edgewood’s sister organization at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah.  It was at this remote Army installation where civilians could live on post that a military Chaplain and his wife loved my dad into the Kingdom in the new birth referred to earlier.

My dad continued in the military as a Reservist and capped his 34-year military career as a Colonel serving as the Senior Army judge at the International Science and Engineering Fair and as the US Army Adviser to over 700 Reserve and National Guard Preventive Medicine Science Officers, a category which includes Environmental Science Officers.

After eight years as a civilian at Dugway the Pinkham clan, which now included me and my two brothers, moved back to my mom and dad’s hometown of Northfield, Vermont.  This move was made in obedience to God’s clear call to care for my mom’s mother who was in the throes of Alzheimer’s. Leaving what would have been today a $110,000 job for who knows what, was by no means easy. Suffice it to say God honored their obedience by providing among other things, a part-time teaching job in Human Anatomy and Physiology in Northfield at Norwich University, Carl’s Alma Mater. Over the years, that job grew in commitment as my dad added Environmental Biology and Pathophysiology to his core courses.  My dad retired in 2009 and is now an Active Professor Emeritus.

Between grad school and retirement, my dad solved a long-standing problem concerning the method of identification of clusters of correlated morphological characters; co-pioneered the development of the Installation Environmental Assessment as a baseline document for evaluating the environmental impacts of military actions; co-developed the Pinkham-Pearson Index, now regarded by EPA and several States as one of the half-dozen or so most powerful indexes for assessing the impact of pollution upon community structure in organisms; co-invented the Wallo'Water Plant Protector, a season extender that allows gardeners and farmers to start plants outside 6 to 8 weeks earlier than normal, obtained three patents, and published several manuals and numerous environmental documents under the National Environmental Policy Act and several peer-reviewed papers in the disciplines of paleontology, evolution, science and faith, biomechanics, neurophysiology, and ecology.