GORDON J.F. MACDONALD

Henry R. Luce Third CenturyProfessor ofEnvironmental Studies andPolicy

The three-year-old Environmental Studies Program at Dartmouth has been cited as one of the "best structured and most comprehensive interdisciplinary programs" being offered by universities and colleges in this important area. That recognition is a tribute both to the careful planning and early direction of the program and to the current director. He is Gordon J. F. MacDonald, nationallyrenowned geophysicist who a year ago came to Hanover from Washington, D.C., to be Dartmouth's first Henry R. Luce Professor of Environmental Studies and Policy and simultaneously director of the Environmental Studies Program.

If an incredible compaction of achievement in a relatively short time can be a measure, it is perhaps not surprising that the Dartmouth Environmental Studies Program should receive high marks under MacDonald's leadership. In a short 23 years since he was graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, he has earned recognition as one of the nation's foremost authorities in the broad and varied environmental fields ranging from outer space to Balch Hill.

Prior to joining the Dartmouth faculty, he had served for two and a half years as a member of President Nixon's first Council on Environmental Quality, established by Congress in 1969. Earlier, from 1965 to 1969, he had been a member of the President's Science Advisory Committee, and during this period was also an active advisor or consultant to the Department of State, Defense Department, Department of Commerce and the National Aeronautics and Space Agency. He still is a member of President Nixon's Advisory Commission on Energy.

A fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, MacDonald recently was named for the second time chairman of the Environmental Studies Board operating under the joint auspices of the Academy of Science and the National Academy of Engineering. In that capacity he is helping to oversee the work of 12 working comand panels concentrating on a range of concerns from oceans and atmosphere to the earth's renewable and non-renewable resources. For the Academy of Sciences he has also served during most of the decade of the sixties on the Committee on Atmospheric Sciences and the Space Science Board.

Among the subjects to which he has made important research contributions are the earth's interior, upper atmosphere, weather modification on earth, and the origin of the moon and other planets. In 1959, he was awarded the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Monograph Prize for his book, Rotationof the Earth, written with Walter Munk of Scripps Institution.

Paralleling his civic and government activities, Mac Donald has had an equally full academic career: M.A. and Ph.D. (1954) at Harvard; instructor in geology and geophysics at MIT: head of the department of planetary and space science at UCLA; vice chancellor for research and graduate affairs and professor of physics and geophysics at the University of California at Santa Barbara. From 1966 to 1968, after moving to the Executive Office of the White House, MacDonald served as first vice president of research and then executive vice president of the Institute for Defense Analysis. He is still a member of the corporation of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.

By his shift north to Dartmouth, MacDonald feels he has only added to the reach of his concerns. While retaining an active role in several organizations at the federal and international level that take him to Washington an average of three days a month, he also has become deeply engaged here in environmental problems at the state level in both New Hampshire and Vermont, and at the local level, in the Hanover Conservation Council.

And immensely stimulating and rewarding, he says, have been his new concerns in helping to create at the undergraduate level a dynamic environmental studies program aimed at generating a broad base of knowledge about ecological issues among future leaders across the spectrum of American enterprise and professions.

The program now offers nine courses of its own, compared to four the first year, and last year approximately 400 students took one or more of them. Another 50 departmental courses are listed as important to students interested in the environment. MacDonald also has drawn up a program for a major in policy design for presentation for faculty consideration.

Forty students last year combined environmental courses with offerings from other departments for modified majors, and MacDonald glows when he talks about the effective ways in which undergraduates have attacked his problem-oriented courses. One group of students has produced a guidebook to assist locally-authorized conservation commissions to move effectively into this new area, and that book is scheduled to appear next month.

Another group of students made an intensive study of a controversial proposal for straightening and widening a stretch of Route 7 between Bennington and Manchester, Vt. Their findings, he says, became a substantive part of a presentation that led to a court injunction delaying the proposed project until receipt of a federal Environmental Impact Study on the entire highway and the impact that widening will have on the environment of Western Vermont.

One student, working alone, utilized a senior fellowship last year to study pollution in Long Island Sound. He came to the conclusion that a major culprit in at least the oil pollution problem is the recent multiplication of two-stroke outboards, and he has presented to the New York and Connecticut environmental agencies and to Congressmen from those states his recommendations for controls. This student, who is going on to become a lawyer, was described by MacDonald'as a "prime example" of the kind of student the Dartmouth Environmental Studies Program is trying to reach a man who will carry an abiding concern into other professions.

Another student utilized the Dartmouth Plan for year-round operation to work last winter in U.S. Senator James Buckley's office where, with guidance from the environmental studies faculty, he helped the Senator's staff prepare a position paper on strip mining. Still another senior, who also was an officer in the Dartmouth Outing Club which works closely with the Environmental Studies Program, was engaged by the Environmental Protection Agency to develop a program for disseminating to interested citizens useful findings from EPA laboratories.