Southern Maryland Audubon has named Rick Posey and Mary Mosher its “Conservationists of the Year” for the couple’s decades-long support of environmental education for Charles County youth.
The couple provides 10 acres of extraordinary wetlands, forests and meadows to the Charles County Public Schools for its Nanjemoy Creek Environmental Education Center (NCEEC) on a lease of $1 per year.
The center provides environmental education to 10,000 Charles County students each year on the property and in its outreach programs. That includes its Meaningful Watershed Educational Experience for county fifth graders who participate in day-long field trips to the center to explore their own connections to the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay.
“The Nanjemoy Creek Environmental Education Center is an extraordinary gift to the children of Charles County,” said Molly Moore, president of Southern Maryland Audubon. “There is no more important part of education than connecting children with nature and the natural world they are inheriting. Rick and Mary and their family are truly conservation heroes.”
Rick Posey’s father, Calvin Posey, founded the education center in southern Charles County with the Charles County Public Schools in 1989. His son and daughter-in-law have continued the support, recently renewing the lease for another 25 years at the $1 annual fee. The couple said their will has established the lease to continue as a gift with the third generation of their family—daughter Irene.
“Rick remembers as a child, his father always had nature and the environment at the center of much of what they did as a family,” Robert Lukinic, Southern Maryland Audubon’s Conservation chair, said in announcing the chapter’s highest award. “Like his father, Rick never misses an opportunity to share natural history and help open the yes of others to the awe of nature.”
The award was presented at Southern Maryland Audubon’s annual meeting and potluck picnic at Maxwell Hall in Hughesville, MD.