Earth Day: Scientists Reflect On 20 Years Of Activism

As this week's rallies approach, four tell how their concern for the environment has changed their lives and careers Chemical physicist Michael Oppenheimer remembers staring for hours at the poster in his bedroom. The vertical cliffs of granite that had once been Colorado's Glen Canyon shimmered down pink and orange from the wall of his Cambridge, Mass., apartment. Several years earlier, in 1967, a dam had been built and the canyon flooded, its beauty lost forever. "It blew me away," says the 44-year-old scientist. "That someone could come along and decide that this incredible part of nature should be submerged for eternity - that people could even think about putting up a dam - still shocks me." That poster - representing the human potential for permanent environmental change - radicalized the young postdoc. It transformed forever the way he thought about the environment and sowed the seeds for what he would later come to see as the duty of the scientist to have an opinion. That message will be in the minds of thousands of scientists this Sunday as they participate in the 20th anniversary of Earth Day. The first celebration was the idea of Gaylord Nelson, then a Wisconsin senator, who two decades ago foresaw a nationwide "environmental teach-in." Dubbed Earth Day by Harvard activist Denis Hayes, it drew more than 20 million people to demonstrations across the country on April 22, 1970. As with the first celebration, there will be rallies, concerts, tree plantings, and lectures - at least 25,000 events in 135 different countries, according to Earth Day 1990, a group monitoring the celebrations. The list of scientific meetings is endless as well, covering everything from the population crisis to the survival of loons in Alaska. The environmental problems that scientists will be addressing have changed in the last 20 years. In 1970 the crisis was next door: Refuse was piling up in local landfills, waste was polluting the neighborhood streams, and pesticides were poisoning our food. Though some of the problems have since been alleviated, new ones have arisen as the environmental crisis has expanded like a mushroom cloud to cover the globe. "The problems haven't gotten worse," says Robert Harrill, a chemist at the Woods Hole (Mass.) Research Center. "Only our awareness has changed. Twenty years ago we not only didn't care about the ozone hole, we didn't even know about it." Improved technology, especially the increase in satellite data, has heightened our awareness, he says, and moved our focus from local problems to global ones. "Acid rain isn't localized," he says. "The ozone hole raises issues about how U.S. actions affect distant areas." Twenty years ago factories dumped waste in rivers, and fish died. But today, cause and effect are not quite so clear. The role of scientists has changed, too: Increasingly, they are being called upon to tell the voting public what all the complicated and frightening data mean. "Most scientists want to know all the answers before they speak out," says Harrill. "So I think a lot of them are very uncomfortable speaking on policy issues and suggesting possible solutions to a crisis. I have a lot of respect for the scientist who is willing to stick his neck out and go beyond what he was trained to do." Following are brief profiles of four scientists who for two decades or more have stuck out their necks to save the planet. Like most of the socially aware graduate students then at the University of Chicago, Michael Oppenheimer volunteered to help when the first Earth Day rolled around. His assignment was to teach third graders about air pollution. Then, duty done and new Ph.D. in hand, he headed east to Harvard to work on interstellar clouds and star formation. A few years later he was looking at the way solar particles hit the ionosphere when his attention turned to the more earthly problems of the environment. With the poster of the dead Glen Canyon on his wall, he began to write letters to Congress opposing new dams in the Grand Canyon. "About that time some friends and I went hiking in the no-man's land of what is now the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge," he says. "We were dropped off by plane to backpack for a month. It's about the farthest point north in the U.S., and the only sign of human habitation was maybe a piece of tinfoil and a plane that flew over us during the second week. "It was an incredible wilderness experience. Physically it's a few thousand feet up in the mountains, so it's all tundra and no trees. There were caribou and a complex array of tundra plants that, of course, are incredibly fragile. As soon as we got back I went to testify at a congressional hearing on a bill to protect the area," he says. "The congressman wanted to keep the land open for oil and gas development. He said he wished all the do-gooders and scientists who'd never been to his state would leave him alone. And of course, I'd just come back from there, which I think impressed him." His interest in acid rain and the greenhouse effect deepened as he continued his research on the chemistry of the upper atmosphere at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. "In 1977 I started talking to the Environmental Defense Fund," he says, "and by 1980 I'd tossed away a good research career. It was a tough decision to throw away a cushy - and permanent - research job for one in the public interest." Ten years later, from his New York City office at the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF), where he is a senior scientist, he has few regrets. "I truly believe scientists are public entities - society has given them the tools and paid for their education," he says. At EDF he directs the largest nongovernmental effort in the country to focus on solutions to the global warming problem. "They must not act just as finders-out of information," he says about his colleagues. "They must also help people decide what the information means." Tom Cochran doesn't remember what he was doing on the first Earth Day. Fresh from a two-year stint in the Navy, the high-energy physicist, then 29, was investigating conventional Army weapons for Litton Industries. Soon he was hired by Resources for the Future, a Ford Foundation-funded think tank, to write an environmental and economic critique of nuclear power plants. "I'd always wanted the quiet life of the scholar and professor, and this was a place where they paid you to do that, and you didn't even have to teach," says the 49-year-old Tennessee native, who spent summers as a teenager working at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. But his dreams of a career in pure science were soon shattered by political events. "I was researching the light water breeder reactor industry when I uncovered some things that convinced me the managers of the program at the Atomic Energy Commission were hiding a lot of information," he says. "I looked at what the capital costs of a plant would be, what the energy demands were likely to be, what the price of uranium was likely to be. The AEC was fudging every single number. If they were wrong on any one of these things it would wipe them and the program out. "It made me really mad. That dishonesty is what sort of kept me charged up. That was my first real experience with how the government bureaucracy works." He left the think tank to work for the National Resources Defense Council, an environmental lobbying group based in New York with a large presence in Washington, D.C. His first assignment turned into an 11-year fight against the AEC's proposed Clinch River demonstration plant in Oak Ridge. "The [government's] economic dishonesty came first. I objected to spending $8 billion to $10 billion on something that was never going to work. Now I see the real problems of nuclear proliferation, whether for energy or weapons, are environmental. Nuclear war is the ultimate environmental disaster," says Cochran, who was recently part of a joint program with the Soviets to study various verification technologies. In 1983, after years of letter writing and testifying before Congress, Cochran finally saw the Clinch River plant shut down. To the physicist, success was sweet. He is now a senior staff scientist at the NRDC, where he runs its nuclear weapons data center and its verification project. "As a scholar at Resources for the Future, I learned you could do great research but people wouldn't read it. At NRDC I discovered that by teaming up with an attorney you can be a lot more effective, because the lawyer makes sure someone reads the science." In the early 1960s, as a teenager with a bent for physics, John Holdren read a book that would change his life. Harrison Brown's The Challenge of Man's Future, published in 1954, discussed the failings of technology in the face of explosive population growth. Holdren decided that his best response to the book would be to use his technical education to confront environmental issues. In 1968, John Holdren was a doctoral student in theoretical plasma physics at Stanford. He knew that Paul Ehrlich, a professor at the university, was a leading figure in the study of population and the environment. Ignoring the apparent incongruity of a student of theoretical physics writing to a professor of population ecology, Holdren outlined his ideas for solving the planet's population problems and mailed them off to Ehrlich. As it happened, Ehrlich believed that an overreliance on technology was a major cause of the environmental crisis, and Holdren became Ehrlich's technical adviser. The result, for Holdren, has been the merging of two disciplines - the exact world of physics and the unpredictable nature of the biological and social sciences. Like two Cassandras during the politically heady period of the early 1970s, he and Ehrlich warned of the dire consequences of unlimited population growth in publications for both a scientific and general audience. At the same time Holdren earned his keep as a physicist at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "I wanted to figure out how to design fusion reactors to minimize safety and environmental hazards," says Holdren, now a professor of energy and resources at the University of California, Berkeley. Holdren's early, multifaceted, and global approach to the environment is now widely accepted. At Berkeley he runs an interdisciplinary doctoral degree program he helped establish in 1983. His students study the interaction of technology, the environment, economics, and politics. He says they have no trouble finding jobs as environmental lawyers, scientists, and policymakers. "At the time, the university was going out on a limb," he says about the founding of the program. "But in 1990, environmental concerns have become respectable. I'm no longer considered antilabor or antipoor. Now we talk about occupational hazards." "I'm not a great testifier," says John Gofman, explaining why he avoids congressional hearings. Nor was he comfortable sharing a podium with former Senator Walter Mondale and Paul Ehrlich at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor during the first Earth Day. Yet the 71-year-old professor emeritus of medical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, is clearly an angry man. As he sees it, he has spent nearly a half century battling a government that approaches the environmental crisis with its head in the sand. That campaign has involved lots of hand-to-hand combat in the political trenches. He got his doctoral degree in nuclear and physical chemistry from Berkeley in 1943 and a medical degree from the University of California, San Francisco, medical school three years later. The Atomic Energy Commission hired him to establish a Biomedical Research Division at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where a study was being made of peacetime uses of nuclear power in a project called Plowshare. It was not long before Gofman was raising a ruckus about the biological dangers of nuclear radiation. "They called me the `enemy within,'" he says with some pride. "If there's one thing they've shown they don't want, it's the truth." Gofman returned to teaching fulltime at Berkeley, focusing increasingly on the health effects of low dose radiation. "You find radiation in the dentist's chair, from cosmic sources, and increasingly from industry. It can be an extreme environmental hazard, and yet here the government is saying there is such a thing as a safe dose. "I believe radiation will turn out to be the dominant carcinogen in our environment," he says. "Fifteen to 25 percent of all cancers come from some sort of ionizing radiation." Gofman has estimated that there are likely to be 450,000 extra deaths due to cancer from the accident at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. But the Department of Energy, he says, "is saying it could be zero. Warning the press there might be a barrage of propagandistic pseudoscience, they did their utmost to make Chernobyl look like it was nothing. Do you think I should trust such people with the environment?" Gofman believes scientists have a special responsibility to share their knowledge. "There has always been such enormous pressure to deceive the public," he says. "I felt I had to keep on going. Someone asked me to do a job, and I want to do it honestly."

Earth Day: Scientists Reflect On 20 Years Of Activism

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