NANCY WILSON PERKINS, CLIMATE ALERT FOUNDER AND EDITOR FOR 12 YEARS, DIES

Nancy Crenshaw Wilson Perkins, who edited Climate Alert from its founding in early 1987 until late 1999, died of complications following hip replacement surgery, March 28, 2004, at George Washington University Hospital in the District of Columbia. She was 83 years old. An economist who had worked at the Brookings Institution, the National Science Foundation, and as a professional staff member for the Congressional Budget Committee, Nancy played a key role in the Climate Institute, from its inception until her retirement.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on March 24, 1921, Nancy attended Germantown Friends School and Vassar College where she majored in economics and French.  Nancy chose economics, she said, because of its potential to provide an effective means of helping the poor.

Upon graduating from Vassar in 1943, she left for Europe, where she worked for the United States Office of War Information in Italy, and saw a great deal of the final years of World War II. Soon after returning to the US, she married Armine Taylor Wilson, a medical doctor and researcher from Ohio. They moved to a farmhouse in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where they shoveled coal for heat and bought milk from the three neighboring dairy farms. Armine worked at the Alfred I. DuPont Institute in pediatric research nearby in Wilmington, Delaware. They raised three daughters, Joyce, Sylvia, and Marcia. "If you have a Vassar education, you never let yourself sit still for a minute," Nancy remarked about those busy years. While raising her daughters, Nancy published occasional articles, among them one on domestic life that appeared in Everywoman’s magazine. She also wrote and distributed a town newsletter, served on the PTA, and helped to launch the celebratory Chadds Ford Day. Though the focus of these projects was close to home, their scope was large, and she encouraged her daughters to develop an awareness of the greater purposes of the world. Nancy (as her daughter Sylvia often noted) was already interested in environmentalism, back when the conventional word for it was "conservation." Motivated by the sense that they were living in a unique place and time, she and Armine spent many hours exploring the woods and fields near their home, identifying birds and wild flowers. They set their goal to take photographic images of all the wild flowers in a five-mile radius. These collections were shown to classes at the public schools and other local audiences. After Armine died suddenly in 1964, Nancy began to work part time as a research assistant at Swarthmore College. Later, she moved on to jobs with the Brookings Institution, the National Science Foundation, and the Congressional Budget Committee, acquiring along the way a Masters in Economics from the University of Delaware. She served briefly as a managing editor of The Climate Impact Assessment Journal, a monthly magazine launched by NOAA (the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration) in 1982. And for a "vacation" one year in the late 1970s, she went to Nepal to study rhesus monkeys with Earthwatch. In 1981 she married Courtland Davis Perkins, a distinguished aeronautical engineer, President of the National Academy of Engineering, and an old friend of Nancy's from Germantown Friends School.

Nancy began working for the Climate Institute shortly after its foundation, and served as liaison to the news media for the First North American Conference on Preparing for Climate Change held in Washington, DC in October 1987. This conference, the first broad-based meeting on climate in the United States, generated wide focus on climate change and helped inspire cover articles in several major US publications. Following the Conference’s success the Climate Institute decided to launch a newsletter on climate change directed alike at scientists and policymakers. Nancy Wilson became Editor and the driving force behind this publication, Climate Alert. More than simply an editor, Nancy actually wrote most of the articles in Climate Alert, and continued to participate in many of the Institute's other activities, including the 1989 Cairo World Climate Conference, which she also made the occasion for another of her strenuous working/educational vacations, inviting her daughter Joyce and granddaughter Kaelen to join her, along with about 40 of the conference participants, for a week-long tour of the Nile. With Nancy’s skillful mastery of scientific and technical details and her remarkable ability to relate such matters to a lay audience, Climate Alert played a pivotal role in the early years of the climate protection effort, familiarizing policy makers and the news media with the potential implications of climate change. Climate Alert helped inspire many other groups to launch newsletters on climate change and to build an interest in climate protection both in the US and abroad. Much of its focus centered on implications of climate change in developing countries.  Among Nancy’s strongest contributions to Climate Alert were issues or special reports on Climate Change Implications for Asia, Energy Trends in China, Potential Impacts of Climate Change in Developing Countries, Implications of Climate Change for Coastal Regions of the World, Implications of Climate Change for Small Island States, the Potential for Collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, and the Potential for a Change in Extreme Weather Events in the US and Canada as the Climate Warms, as well as articles on the vulnerability of US regions to climate change and actions by states and localities to address these challenges.

Several of Nancy's articles were reprinted in other publications, where they helped to broaden the discussion of climate change and its impact on both the natural and the human environments. Perhaps the most notable of these was her Special Report (in Climate Alert, July/August 1993) on the growing interest of the insurance industry in the economic consequences of climate change. Reprinted in The Journal of Meteorology, U.K. (January 1994), this pioneering article highlighted Nancy's special array of talents and strengths, showing how she could put her professional training in economics, and her lifelong interest in scientific research, into the service of her broadest vision and her most humane values.

Nancy retired in 1999 at age 78. She loved gardening, and did it in her own particular expressive style, which one of her neighbors called "controlled exuberance" - a phrase which aptly describes her whole approach to life. Loved for her warmth and enthusiasm, Nancy inspired all those around her to pursue their interests and dreams. She accompanied her encouragement with a generosity that was prompted by her curiosity and genuine interest in other people. There was authentic greatness, as well as grace, in her.

Climate Institute President John Topping stated:

“Nancy played a pivotal role in moving climate change onto the international policy agenda. She brought an uncanny ability to master the most complex scientific concepts and translate them in terms that could be understood by policymakers, few of whom have much scientific grounding. Under Nancy’s pioneering leadership Climate Alert helped lay the groundwork for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the negotiations that led to the Framework Convention on Climate Change. Nancy’s reporting of the events leading to the December 1989 Cairo Conference and the resulting Cairo Compact were a real catalyst in the success of the conference and in bridging a North-South divide before the 1992 Rio Conference. For much of the next decade Nancy made readers in the US and Western countries aware of the potential gravity of climate change for developing countries.

Although future generations are indebted to Nancy for her timely role in catalyzing interest in climate change, we at the Climate Institute will remember Nancy most for her quick wit, remarkable knowledge of so many interesting things, warm humanity and indefatigable energy. Although in her seventies during most of her time as Editor of Climate Alert, Nancy would run circles around the rest of us and had an energy level that those a third her age would have been delighted to have. We all miss Nancy greatly and extend our deepest condolences to her beloved husband, Court Perkins, and the three daughters she loved so much – Joyce, Sylvia, and Marcia- and to their families.

"Mark Goldberg, Vice Chairman of the Institute’s Board, added: “Many readers around the world know Nancy Wilson from her fine, pioneering work as the founding editor of Climate Alert. Those of us at the Climate Institute who were privileged to know her as a colleague and friend will always remember her as an exceptional person -- kind, wry, idealistic, committed to the Institute's mission of helping to build a better international dialogue about climate policy, curious, empathetic, and sensible.  She was a mentor to many of the Institute's staff members and in her capacity as an officer of the Institute -- she served as corporate secretary -- a force for clear thinking, accountability, and, especially, attention to first principles."