Laura Lynne Williams

In 2019, WWF Russia established an award in her honour. The Laura Williams prize is annually given to the most prominent young Russian environmentalists and conservation scientists. The prize pool is financed by her family, friends, and colleagues.

On October 27, 2018, Williams fell from an untamed horse. She suffered multiple grave injuries and passed away in Suzemka at a local hospital.

Upon her return to the Bryansk Forest, Williams started working with horses, her life-long passion. She studied equine-assisted therapy in Australia and got a certificate from the International Association for Horse Assisted Education, trained as an equine facilitator in Germany. In 2015, she launched her ‘Human and Horse’ training program based on immense psychological benefits offered by communication with horses. She had a herd of nine horses rescued from slaughter-houses or neglected by previous owners. In Chukhrai village the horses were healed, trained, and given better life conditions. Her idea was to facilitate communication between horses and people on an equal basis. The program did not include horse riding because it requires human dominance.

In 2008, she published a book, The Storks’ Nest: Life and Love in the Russian Countryside, based on her life and work in Russia.

Williams and her sons followed Shpilenok and in 2006, Williams helped establish the WWF office in Kamchatka. In 2009, she headed the Kamchatka’s Wild Salmon Center. As recalled by Guido Rahr, WSC executive director, the center’s performance declined dramatically in Kamchatka and they needed someone who could understand its specifics both regarding people and nature. Her work laid a foundation for all WSC future operations in the region.

In 1999–2000, Williams continued her education and received a Master's Degree in conservation biology at Yale University.

In 1993, WWF offered Williams to go to Russia and establish a WWF branch there to access biodiversity in the country and challenges to protect it. In the same year, she came to Moscow and together with Vladimir Krever, they opened a small office in an apartment in a residential building close to Tulskaya metro station. With time, Krever and Williams managed to raise more than $10 mln for many environmental projects at Russian nature reserves. Their help played a decisive role because in the early 1990s, the country suffered from the hardest economic crisis and its nature reserves received almost no financial support from the government.

In the late 1990s, Shpilenok’s eldest son Tikhon was appointed director of the Kronotsky Nature Reserve in Kamchatka. Igor, with his second son, Peter, moved there to help fight commercial poaching of bears and salmon that was ruining the local ecosystem. During the breeding season, one group of poachers collected more than a ton of caviar daily, throwing away the dead fish. The poachers were supported by both local law enforcement and criminal gangs. Tikhon, Igor and Peter invited some of the best inspectors from other Russian nature reserves and managed to almost completely eliminate the illegal caviar business. They received multiple threats and managed to survive only due to wide media attention brought to their case. Igor’s brother Dmitry, made a film on salmon that won numerous international awards.

She entered Cornell University in 1988. That year, answering one of her professors as to why she wanted to study Russian, Williams answered that "Russia is a big country and it has to have a lot of wildlife." In 1990, she first arrived in Russia for a two month language study course. In 1991, she graduated from Cornell as a Bachelor in International Environmental Politics.

Laura Lynne Williams (May 21, 1969 – October 28, 2018) was a Russian-American ecologist, founder of the Russian World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) branch and WWF office on Kamchatka. She was also director of the Wild Salmon Center, as well as a journalist, writer, and equine-assisted therapist.

Williams was born in New York, May 21, 1960. Her parents were a lawyer and a doctor. For the first two years of her life, she lived in South Dakota where her father served in Rosebud Indian Reservation. When she turned two, her parents divorced and her mother took the children to Denver, Colorado. In 1978–1984, she attended Graland Country Day School. In 1984–87, she studied at the Fountain Valley School in Colorado Springs, Colorado.