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George M. Woodwell, founder of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and a renowned ecologist whose incisive research and exceptional understanding of policy influenced U.S. toxic substances management and global efforts to combat climate change, died Tuesday at his home in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. He was 95.
The research centre, which Woodwell founded in 1985 to study global climate change and later renamed in his honor, announced his death in a statement.
Throughout his long career, Dr. Woodwell has consistently shown how the by-products of new technologies designed to increase the efficiency of agriculture, forestry, and energy industries are seriously endangering natural systems. His rigorous research provided early evidence of what he called “biological impoverishment” – the steady weakening of plants, animals, and ecosystems that are chronically exposed to synthetic pollutants.
Dr. Woodwell has published over 300 scientific papers, many of which have appeared in Science, Scientific American and other top journals, and has held teaching and research positions at the University of Maine, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Yale University and the Marine Biological Laboratory.
But he was also a die-hard activist, unafraid to use credible scientific findings to influence public attitudes and policies: he was a central figure in the national campaign to stop atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the 1960s and in the efforts to ban DDT and other dangerous pesticides in the 1970s.
Dr. Woodwell was also one of the first scientists to recognize the threat that rising levels of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere posed to nature and human life. In 1972, he organized a conference called “Carbon and the Biosphere” at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, attended by 50 internationally recognized climatologists, oceanographers and biologists. This was the first international conference on what is now called “climate change.”
In 1979, Dr. Woodwell was one of four scientists commissioned by the Carter Administration to prepare a report on the ecological effects of rising atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. The group delivered a prescient assessment to James Gustav Speth, then chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “Its findings were alarming,” Speth wrote in his 2004 book, Red Sky at Morning. “It predicted ‘significant warming within the next 20 years’ and called for early action.”
In June 1988, when the Great Plains and Midwest were suffering from a severe drought, Dr. Woodwell appeared before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee with three other scientists, including James E. Hansen, then director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and warned that it was 99 percent certain that the buildup of carbon dioxide and other man-made gases in the atmosphere was already causing global warming, with potentially catastrophic consequences.
“What I said then is the same thing I say now,” Dr. Woodwell told The New York Times in a 2007 interview. “Climate change has the potential to change the Earth just as much as nuclear war. We’re lucky that nuclear war is a possibility. Climate change is real.”
At the time, Dr. Woodwell had established a reputation for drawing some very impressive conclusions from his research.
In 1964, as a young ecologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory, he published a paper in the journal Science describing how DDT remained in the soil of heavily sprayed forests for years, and in 1967 he published papers in Science and Scientific American showing how DDT accumulated in the food chain of an estuary at the eastern end of Long Island’s South Bay.
These three papers are considered landmarks in the nationwide campaign that led to the federal ban of DDT in 1972. The findings were also essential to the legal and public interest campaign that Dr. Woodwell and a young Long Island lawyer, Victor Yannacone Jr., waged in Suffolk County Superior Court in New York, challenging the county’s program of spraying DDT to control mosquitoes.
In response to the scientific data, a state court issued a preliminary injunction banning the spraying in 1966, the first time such a ban had been issued by a court in the United States. Dr. Woodwell, Mr. Yannakone, and two other leaders of the campaign complied with the court order and made the equally momentous decision in 1967 to found the Environmental Defense Fund, an entirely new type of nonprofit advocacy organization staffed by lawyers and led by a committee of scientists.
“We signed the founding papers in my office at Brookhaven,” Dr. Woodwell said in an interview in 2007. “We knew what we were doing. We knew this was going to put power in the hands of scientists that they had never had before.”
Dr. Woodwell founded his organization in 1985. It was originally called the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, but was renamed the Woodwell Climate Research Center in 2020. He retired as chairman and director in 2005, but remains connected to the organization as director emeritus.
George Masters Woodwell was born on October 23, 1928, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the oldest of two children and the only son to Philip and Virginia (Sellers) Woodwell, educators who taught in the Boston Public Schools. The family owned a 140-acre farm in York, Maine, where George spent most of his childhood summers. He said his time on the farm instilled in him a love of the land, forests and nature.
He continued in a family tradition of Dartmouth graduates that began with his two grandfathers and continued through his father, receiving his degree in botany from Dartmouth College in 1950. He served three years in the U.S. Navy and then enrolled at Duke University, where he completed his graduate studies in 1958.
Dr. Woodwell became a trusted mentor to the activists, researchers and lawyers who built modern environmentalism. He was extremely generous with his time and actively participated on the boards of directors of local, state and national organizations that contributed to all sectors of the American environmental movement.
Mr. Speth was part of a group of young lawyers from Yale who recruited Dr. Woodwell to serve as a founding director of the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970. Dr. Woodwell also helped Mr. Speth in 1982 found the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based global environmental research organization.
Dr. Woodwell was chairman of the board of directors for the World Wildlife Fund, president of the Ruth Mott Foundation, a Midwestern foundation active in supporting grassroots environmental organizations, and a trustee of Living on Earth, a weekly National Public Radio program exploring environmental issues.
He was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences in 1990. He has received numerous awards, including the Heinz Environmental Prize in 1996, the John H. Chafee Award for Excellence in Environmental Affairs in 2000, and the Volvo Environmental Prize in 2001.
Dr. Woodwell is survived by his wife, Catherine, his four children, Caroline, Marjorie, Jane and John Woodwell, and four grandchildren.
Alex Traub Contributed report.
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