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Climate Institute and MacDonald Friends Establish Gordon MacDonald Environmental Leadership Program
Gordon MacDonald received his A.B. (summa cum laude), A.M. and Ph.D. in geophysics from Harvard University. After receiving his doctoral degree, he served on the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), University of California Los Angeles, and University of California Santa Barbara prior to his appointment to CEQ. Program FocusIn recognition of this pioneering work in environmental science and policy the Climate Institute established the Gordon MacDonald Environmental Leadership Program in the summer of 2002. This program has sought to advance two causes dear to Gordon's heart: promoting leadership and innovation in global environmental protection and catalyzing young people's interest in careers in environmental science and policy. It is currently anticipated that this program may support the following activities: 1) Continue to conduct a seminar program in which leaders in the environmental and energy fields and other areas of current note meet informally over dinner or lunch with Washington area interns and recent graduates from Dartmouth College and other cooperating institutions to help them gain an understanding of the real world of policy making. Among those who have spoken in this program:
The seminar director is Climate Institute President John Topping. 2) Seek to match students and recent graduates with environmental research and leadership development opportunities abroad and in the Washington area. The Climate Institute facilitated the identification of a senior thesis project by a former intern, Meryl Raymar, who wrote a thesis on electricity transformation and renewable energy in St. Lucia. This thesis helped earn Meryl the Chairman's Award from the Princeton University Geology Department. The Climate Institute helped place Kristian Lau, a Dartmouth undergraduate, in a summer internship with the Caribbean Environmental Health Institute in St. Lucia. Kristian obtained funding from Dartmouth's Dickey Center to support his work. The Institute also helped match Oliver Bernstein, Chair of Dartmouth's Environmental Conservation Organization during his junior and senior years, with a service opportunity with the Mexico City- based SIMA. With a Reynolds grant from Dartmouth, Oliver, who is fluent in Spanish and Portuguese, has worked since September 2003 to expand SIMA's on line air quality work from Mexico City to other cities of Latin America. 3) Provide the salary or a portion of the salary to enable a scientist or policy innovator from a developing country to work with the Climate Institute on approaches for responding to climate change. That individual would be designated as a Gordon MacDonald Environmental Leadership Fellow. In 2004, funds permitting, the first such fellow will be Luis Roberto Acosta, Director of the Mexico City- based Group, SIMA, which is seeking to place the air quality data of urban areas of Mexico and of Latin American mega-cities on line (www.sima.com.mx). Acosta won the Aleman Prize, Mexico's most prestigious environmental award, in 2000 and was featured in Oct. 2001 by Time Latin America as one of 27 young leaders of Mexico in the New Millennium. (More on Acosta here) 4) Fund travel and subsistence to allow former interns or recent graduates of participating institutions to work on projects with likelihood of high public impact. This, like the fellowship described above, is contingent on funds being raised. Collaborating EffortsThe Gordon MacDonald Environmental Leadership program will build on several of the Climate Institute's ongoing initiatives that have mutually reinforcing objectives. These include: 1) A strong internship program, now in its 16th year, in which over 100 undergraduates, graduate students and recent graduates from ten nations and about three dozen colleges and universities have served at the Climate Institute. Three interns in the spring and summer of 2003 were pivotal in the Institute's establishing the most comprehensive on line information on climate change impacts and air quality levels around the world 2) A collaborative effort with Dartmouth College's William Jewett Tucker Foundation, Rockefeller Center for Public Policy and Dickey Center for International Understanding to identify opportunities for Dartmouth undergraduates and alumni and alumnae to serve with the Climate Institute, its international partner groups and other organizations in the environmental or energy field. Washington College and Princeton University have both also agreed to participate in the MacDonald Program. 3) The Class of 1964 at Dartmouth College, to which the Institute's President, John Topping belongs, has raised money from class members to create a public service intern fund to support service in the Washington area. At the inception of the MacDonald seminar series this intern would likely serve as the liaison with other participating Washington area interns. Among the class members who are involved in the Class of 1964 effort are class president Steve Blecher, Bob Bartles, Bill Craig, David Plavin, Prof. Dale Eickelman, David Shipler, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his book Arab and Jew, and Louis Goodman, who is Dean of American University's School of International Service. Another classmate, Harold Rabner, has generously provided funding to purchase food for the dinner seminars. Funding ArrangementsThe Climate Institute is recognized as a tax exempt organization under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code and gifts to it are generally tax deductible to US taxpayers. The Institute will allocate funds raised for this program to support work in the program areas set forth above and other areas recommended by a Gordon MacDonald Environmental Leadership Program Steering Committee. Steering CommitteeAmong the initial members of this steering committee are Margaret MacDonald, MITRE Corp. senior editor and widow of Gordon; Gordon MacDonald III, a Manchester, NH, attorney and son of the honoree; Dr. Rosina Bierbaum, Dean of the School of Natural Resources and Environment of the University of Michigan; Prof. Andrew Friedland, Chair of the Environmental Studies Program at Dartmouth College; Dr. Dale Eickelman, Prof. of Anthropology at Dartmouth; Dr. Steven Wofsy, Prof. of Atmospheric and Environmental Chemistry at Harvard University; Dr. Walter Munk, who leads the Acoustic Thermometry of Ocean Climate Program; Dr. Norbert Untersteiner, Prof. Emeritus at the University of Washington and Prof. at the University of Alaska; Michele Pena, Business Development Specialist at the EcoEnterprises Fund of The Nature Conservancy; Hilary French, Director of the Global Governance Program of Worldwatch Institute; Harold Rabner, senior partner in a Montclair, NJ, law firm; Norman Brown, owner of a Philadelphia environmental remediation firm; Paul Hoff, partner in a Washington, DC, law firm; Robert Raymar, partner in a Newark, NJ, law firm; David Hobbie, a Boston attorney who in 1994 was co-editor of Climate Change in Asia; Mark Spalding, Editor of the Journal on Environment and Development; Ramzi Nemo, a doctoral candidate at American University's School of International Service; and two former Institute interns- Michael Ring, now a doctoral candidate at MIT, and Meryl Raymar, who now works with the Wilderness Society.
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One of the foremost atmospheric scientists of the last half century, Gordon MacDonald, who died May 14, 2002, was a pioneer in many aspects of global environmental protection. He served at Dartmouth College from 1972 to 1979 as first Professor of Environmental Studies and as Chair of its nascent Environmental Studies Program. Before that, from 1970 to 1972, he was one of the first members of the President's Council on Environmental Quality. His public service spanned administrations of Presidents of both parties and in the early 1990s, as the Cold War ended, included a leading role in declassifying satellite data to enable environmental researchers to track global changes of the past few decades. Gordon MacDonald was widely regarded as an authority on the potential of methane clathrates to amplify global warming. His book The Rotation of the Earth, is still the standard work in its field. From 1996-2000 he served as director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA) in Austria and made that institution a leader in studies of global energy transformation. As one of the first scientists to alert US and international policy makers to the challenge posed by climate change, he was a regular speaker at Climate Institute conferences and led a Climate Institute team that conducted ministerial level briefings in Honduras in 1991. He served on the Institute's Board of Directors from 1992 until his death. In 1996 the Journal of Environment and Development, which he founded and edited, published an article by Climate Institute analysts on the need for an international public-private partnership to speed global clean energy transformation. This idea was ultimately endorsed in the report of the G-8 Renewable Energy Task Force issued in July 2001.
