Open this photo in gallery:

On a recent frosty morning, Brenda Beck smiled as she watched a cow moose and her yearling calf striding across a pasture on her small farm in the foothills northwest of Calgary.

Ms. Beck knew that seeing the moose would have thrilled her late father, Tom Beck, who was 92 when he died peacefully in Calgary on Jan. 28 after suffering from dementia.

“I knew Dad would have loved seeing those moose,” she said in an interview. “He always loved seeing wildlife of every kind.”

Wild creatures and his desire to do whatever he could to ensure their future shaped Mr. Beck’s professional and personal life. Not content to be a mere observer, he was a significant – albeit understated – leader of the Canadian environmental and conservation movement.

Mr. Beck was a tradition-defying groundbreaker, devoting much of his 33-year career in the Canadian oil industry to balancing industrial development with the welfare of wildlife, wild places and people who relied on them to live. He was a true pioneer in an industry not widely considered environmentally friendly.

After Mr. Beck retired from the oil patch, he spent many years serving on national and international boards and committees working for wildlife.

“I have huge respect for ‘unlikely bedfellows’ who break ranks and the mould to do the right thing,” Monte Hummel, president emeritus of World Wildlife Fund-Canada, said in an e-mail.

“But it is more impactful and often more credible when industrial advocates step up to speak up. And that’s what Tom represented and did.”

Born in Wishaw, Scotland on March 11, 1932, Tom grew up roaming around the nearby countryside. He regularly snuck into a neighbour’s private woods, where he explored the exciting world of hedgehogs, wild birds, bluebells and primrose flowers. A family friend took the boy fishing for trout and grayling in a nearby river, much of which was privately owned.

Mr. Beck’s journey to Alberta was rooted in tragedy. He was 14 when his dad died in an accident at the Glasgow steel mill where he worked, forcing the only son to quit school to work at the same mill to help support his mother and himself.

In 1947, they immigrated to Canada, joining his older sister, who had moved to Cochrane, Alta., as a war bride after the Second World War.

The young man threw himself into outdoor activities, including fishing and hunting. He honed his skills identifying wild animals and birds, and became familiar with the land that sustains them.

While still a teenager, he landed a job as a lab technician in a concrete plant west of Calgary.

Two years later, Mr. Beck started work in the fledgling oil industry as a draftsman with Amerada Petroleum Corp. After 20 years of learning about the industry, mainly working in production, he resigned after getting an enticing offer from a French oil company exploring for oil and gas in the Arctic, a region where Mr. Beck had long wanted to work.

In 1970, he became environmental co-ordinator for Elf Oil Exploration and Production Ltd., later renamed Elf Aquitaine. After 10 years there, he spent three years with Petro-Canada as director of environmental and social affairs.

Open this photo in gallery:

During the 1970s and 1980s Mr. Beck worked closely with Indigenous people affected by oil and gas exploration on Banks Island, and in communities on Baffin Island, the Mackenzie Delta and Beaufort Sea.

He became one of the first oil company executives to collaborate with northern people, especially the Inuvialuit, strongly advocating the need to involve them in government policies and industrial development. Mr. Beck pioneered the concept of resource planning based on environmental management and principles of conservation – responsible use of the land and wildlife.

Thanks to his efforts, oil companies changed how they did business in the Arctic. Among other concessions, Mr. Beck convinced them to limit industrial activity to winter months to avoid damaging the terrain, and not disrupt snow goose nesting and Arctic fox denning. He insisted on these initiatives for the companies he represented and he advocated for them more broadly through industry associations. He was also instrumental in having Parks Canada approve Aulavik National Park in the High Arctic.

Ray Glasrud, now a rancher in southern Saskatchewan, was a 22-year-old independent wildlife biologist conducting surveys of caribou on Banks Island in the Western Arctic when he met Mr. Beck in the early 1970s.

“I was always suspicious of people in the oil business who said they had an environmental bent but Tom quickly proved to be different,” Mr. Glasrud said in a telephone interview. “He had a deep and abiding interest in the environment. He was able to marry industrial development of the oil industry with conservation of the land.”

Calgarian Barry Worbets, hired by Mr. Beck as an environmental scientist in 1980, worked with him on oil and gas projects in the northern Yukon, Baffin Island in Nunavut and on Alberta’s Eastern Slopes.

“Tom had this soft, warm persona, but like a true Scotsman there were hard and fast ethical lines and a diligence and respectful nature,” Mr. Worbets said in an e-mail.

“He was a master at consultation, collaboration and involvement with people and communities where our industry had planned activities.”

Mr. Beck’s Arctic expertise, including his deep knowledge of the Inuvialuit, led to his appointment in 1987 to the Mackenzie Delta-Beaufort Sea Land Use Planning Commission. The commission developed a plan that set land and wildlife protection as core values, requiring close consultation with local people and community-based planning.

For eight years, Mr. Beck also chaired the Environmental Impact Screening Committee for the Western Arctic Claims Settlement Area, which considered the environmental impact of land-use permit applications by industry, government and the public.

After retiring from the oil industry, he became a consultant, serving for more than 20 years on many national and provincial committees, including the Canadian Environmental Advisory Council, Nature Conservancy of Canada, Canadian Council on Ecological Areas, Arctic Institute, Alberta’s Wildlife Management Advisory Committee, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation Canada, Canadian Nature Federation and World Wildlife Fund-Canada. Mr. Beck was a founder of the Alberta Wilderness Association and a fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society.

He was equally comfortable meeting with federal environment ministers or Arctic hunters concerned about industrial impacts on their traditional hunting areas.

Mr. Hummel of WWF-Canada served for five years in the 1980s on the Canadian Environmental Advisory Council chaired by Mr. Beck.

Open this photo in gallery:

“I remember Tom being a fair, patient chair of our meetings, often injecting humour or a folksy western story to illustrate a point,” Mr. Hummel said.

“He was especially effective with decision-makers because he advocated on behalf of the environment as [being] an ‘unlikely suspect’ from the oil and gas industry.”

Mr. Beck, who had left school at 14 in Scotland, became an adjunct professor of the Faculty of Environmental Design at the University of Calgary. In 1989, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from the university for “being an acknowledged leader of the conservation movement.”

At the ceremony, Mr. Beck was described as a respected negotiator and mediator, “that rarest of persons, a listener, able to hear out all sides of an issue and quietly steer the parties to balanced and informed resolution … as a national voice for balanced development and balanced conservation, he can be considered a true Canadian treasure.”

Soft-spoken and never boastful about his work, he regularly downplayed his own role in achievements, preferring to build up the contribution of others. He once described his own efforts as “the right thing to do” for wildlife and the land and water where they live.

Mr. Beck firmly advocated for the environment in a keynote address he delivered in 1985 to the National Audubon Society at Lake George, N.Y. He said the human urge to dominate has transcended the environment on a host of national and international issues including acid rain, toxic chemicals, aggressive deforestation, fouling of waterways, aerosol propellant contamination of the ozone layer, hunting endangered species, emissions control and nuclear waste disposal.

“We are called to action as environmentalists as never before,” Mr. Beck said.

“At the root of this concern is our knowledge that the environment is really not political. It has properly no connection to our ephemeral, human concerns – it transcends them.”

He called on the Canadian and U.S. governments to work toward a “continental conservation policy” to address issues such as a clean-up of the Great Lakes, environmental effects of continental water diversion schemes, teaching industry on how to achieve environmentally sustainable economic development and educating the public to identify areas where better management of human activities is needed.

Mr. Beck said protecting the environment requires society to “fit business into the environment.”

“We have no more right to saddle future generations with a massive environmental deficit than we do to leave them with a fiscal deficit.”

In 1987, Mr. Beck was instrumental in establishing the Ann and Sandy Cross Conservation Area, a 1,942-hectare (19.42-square-kilometre) wildlife-rich piece of native grassland and forest a few kilometres southwest of Calgary. For years, it stood as the largest donation of private land ever made in Canada for conservation purposes.

Mr. Beck also convinced the Toronto-based Nature Conservancy of Canada to establish a Western Canada office in Calgary, which has since conserved more than 14 million hectares of nature-rich land and water.

Mr. Beck’s commitment to all things wild naturally extended to his personal life.

He was married for 70 years to Shirley (née Enokson), a nurse, and they raised five children in a modest bungalow in Calgary. The family regularly camped, fished and hiked, and Mr. Beck hunted game birds and animals. He passed on his deep appreciation for nature to his family.

“Bits and pieces of all that Dad loved about the outdoors is in all of us,” noted his daughter, Ms. Beck.

In the early 1970s, the Becks bought a piece of forested rolling foothills in the Wildcat Hills northwest of Calgary. A skilled carpenter, Mr. Beck built a rustic yet sturdy wood-stove-heated log cabin and barn with timbers he cut himself. Years later, while battling prostate cancer, he constructed a smaller guest cabin to help keep his mind off his illness.

The family enjoyed countless hours there in the company of deer, elk, moose, bears, cougars and wolves. The late Ian McTaggart Cowan, considered the father of Canadian ecology, and his wife were close friends and regular visitors at the cabin. After Mr. McTaggart Cowan died, Mr. Beck helped raise money to publish a book about him titled The Real Thing, by author Briony Penn.

The book contains a letter Mr. McTaggart Cowan wrote in 1999, describing the Becks’ peaceful refuge as, “A soul restoring place, complete with birds we see only there, the song of the coyote each evening, flights of swans heading south against an evening sky and an abundance of large wildlife … but especially the time shared with close friends and a year’s adventures to catch up on.”

Three days before Mr. Beck died, his adult children took him, their mother and a group of grandchildren and great-grandchildren, to that “soul restoring place” where they shared memories of many adventures while lunching on venison sausage made from a deer shot last fall on the land.

Mr. Beck leaves his wife, five children, six grandchildren and six great-grandchildren.

You can find more obituaries from The Globe and Mail here.

To submit a memory about someone we have recently profiled on the Obituaries page, e-mail us at [email protected].