Lynton Keith Caldwell: An Environmental Visionary and the National Environmental Policy Act

By Wendy Read Wertz

“A solid overview of both Caldwell’s contributions and the development of the environmental movement in the US . . . . Recommended.” —Choice

This is the story of a visionary leader, Lynton Keith Caldwell, who in the early 1960s introduced the study of the environment and environmental policy at a time when such areas of expertise did not exist. Caldwell was a principal architect of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 and is recognized as the “inventor” of the Act’s important environmental impact statement provisions, now emulated around the world. For the next three decades, Caldwell played a leading role in establishing ethics-based environmental policy and administration as major areas of inquiry in the United States and around the world. Through his tireless global travels, writing, and lectures, and his work with the US Senate, the IUCN, UN, and UNESCO, Caldwell became recognized for his contributions to environmental ethics and the development of strong environmental planning and policy. This engrossing biography is based on interviews the author conducted with Caldwell and on unrestricted access to his memorabilia, photos, and records.

“Deeply insightful . . . The field of environmental policy is richer for this addition. —H-Net Reviews

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 8, 2014
• ISBN: 9780253010377

Book preview

PROLOGUE

Choosing an Environmental Path

IN THE INTRODUCTION TO HER BIOGRAPHY OF ALDO LEOPOLD, A Fierce Green Fire, Marybeth Lorbiecki wrote, How many Americans have ever heard of Leopold? Relatively few. Perhaps he was involved in too many aspects of the conservation movement to be pigeonholed into an easily remembered historical slot. . . . Whatever the reason, the majority of Americans have not yet been introduced to this person who has been so influential in their lives. . . . This is a shame; it is a life well worth knowing.¹ These words could just as well be applied to Lynton Keith Caldwell, whose contributions, like Leopold’s, are difficult to categorize neatly. This is because they, too, were wide-ranging and because they covered a period of some forty years, during which significant evolution occurred in attitudes toward conservation and sustainability, in the growth and structure of environmental organizations, and in environmental policy, management, and legislation.

The young Caldwell held Leopold in high esteem and once, in 1946, spent a memorable evening in his company. In Leopold’s midlife, as his daughter Nina Leopold Bradley explains, through his . . . intellectual evolution, [he] advanced the development of ecological science.² In his own midlife, Caldwell’s particular intellectual evolution led him to change the course of his career in public administration to become a visionary developer of environmental policy, in which science and the ecological concepts and values so important to Leopold’s thinking played a large part. Leopold’s writings on the need for a more ethics-based approach to interactions between humans and their environment influenced Caldwell’s groundbreaking 1963 article, Environment: A New Focus for Public Policy?, which played a pivotal role in spurring the emergence of the entirely new field of environmental policy, politics, and administration.³ Ethical considerations also inspired Caldwell’s later pioneering work in biopolitics, his tireless advocacy on behalf of interdisciplinary environmental studies, and the leading role he took not only in drafting the Magna Carta of environmental law, the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (NEPA), but in initiating its environmental impact assessment provisions, which over time became globally emulated. All these ideas and endeavors were grounded in the belief that humans, as the dominant species and principal resource consumers, had the responsibility for ensuring that future generations would continue to inherit a diverse and healthy planet. Caldwell later attained international recognition for his efforts to promote a globally shared environmental initiative, and in old age he fought hard for what, after three decades of writing, teaching, and research around the world, he had come to see as an imperative essential to the future economic and ecological sustainability of the United States: an environmental amendment to the Constitution.

Despite disparities in age, background, and career path, Caldwell and Leopold held much in common. Both men were born in Iowa, developed a love of the natural world at an early age, and had been similarly endowed with boundless energy, insatiable curiosity, and keen powers of observation. As they matured, both developed a values-oriented approach to their teaching and writing on environment-related issues. Both came to believe strongly that the complexity of ecological interactions meant that environmental problems could only be addressed by viewing them in an integrative, multidimensional way. For this reason both argued against the growing tendency toward specialization in the arts and sciences.⁴ And both men, albeit in very different ways, devoted the larger part of their lives, through teaching, lecturing, and writing, to creating public awareness of the increasingly urgent need to take better care of the Earth.

In his later life, as he pursued the idea of a constitutional environmental amendment, Caldwell argued that another self evident truth should be added to the list. He explained this to me later in his life:

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are all very well but cannot be achieved without the foundation of a healthy environment. In their day, the Founding Fathers did not have to concern themselves with such massive ecological problems as widespread pollution of air, soils, and waters, the build up of toxic wastes, disappearing species, desertification, overpopulation, the threat of nuclear war, or global warming. Education, greater public awareness of and involvement in environmental interactions, stronger government regulation regarding the use and protection of the environment, and the wisdom and understanding to enforce those controls for the greater good are the only ways to ensure a sustainable Earth in the future. These are the things I have done my best to teach.⁵

Aldo Leopold died in 1948. In the 1950s Caldwell’s work in government and public administration provided him with increased opportunities for foreign travel. Like George Perkins Marsh a century earlier, Caldwell became increasingly concerned about the rapid spread of pollution and environmental degradation.⁶ As a result of many discussions with government representatives, he came to realize that political and economic instability, mixed with widespread corruption, poverty, rapid population growth, and a general lack of education and health care, lay at the root of many of these problems. But how was it possible, he began to ask himself, that in the mid-twentieth century people in his own rich and highly developed nation were still able to pollute their air, soils, and waters largely at will, with no overarching federal legislation and only uncoordinated state regulations in place to control their bad practices?

Because of his scholarly background in history and government, Caldwell was well aware that since the founding of the nation people had remained largely averse to any form of government interference in the ways they used the land to enrich themselves. For more than two hundred years the vast size of the continent and its abundance of natural resources had appeared to negate the need for any form of conservation effort. By the turn of the twentieth century, because of unbridled agricultural, industrial, and urban growth (made easier by the almost complete lack of environmental controls), the United States had surpassed Great Britain to become the world’s leading economic power. But as early as the 1840s on the eastern side of the continent and increasingly after the 1860s in the West, socially aware members of the more privileged classes began to regard the reckless desecration of nature in a different light. Two centuries of exploiting the land and giving little back had brought fabulous riches to a few and prosperity to many. At the same time, the material wealth these elites enjoyed had come at an often terrible cost to the natural environment and to the health of millions of the less fortunate who lived in squalid conditions in the booming cities and labored in the shadows of industry and its polluting effluents.

The more holistic or inclusive approach to the study of human-environment interactions that Caldwell came to champion did not really evolve until the 1960s. Instead, in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, two groups with very different ideas about environmental protection and resource use began to emerge on the scene. As Paul Weiland, Caldwell, and Rosemary O’Leary wrote in 1997,

The limits-to-growth ideology stems from conservationist and preservationist beliefs, which have a rich and deeply rooted history that [in the United States] may be traced back to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. . . .

The conservation movement was based upon the controlled use of resources . . . while the preservation movement was concerned primarily with the preservation of natural resources, as the name implies. Underlying conservationist notions was the economistic assumption that resources exist for the benefit of society. However, conservationists recognized resource limits and therefore believed that resources should be used wisely, not wastefully. . . .

Preservationists, on the other hand, believed that nature has intrinsic worth. . . . Many of the beliefs of preservationists stemmed from the works of transcendentalists such as Emerson and Thoreau. Whereas conservationists generally were represented by corporations and national and state agencies, preservationists derived their support primarily from voluntary organizations. . . .

Under the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt the conservation movement dominated, popularizing the ideas of multiple-use and sustained yield. The movement was led by Gifford Pinchot, chief of the U.S. Forest Service under Roosevelt. John Muir, the founder of the Sierra Club in 1892, led the preservationists in their battles against the conservation movement.⁷

Thanks to advances in science and medicine, by the time the first environmental movement began to gain ground, many of the health problems suffered by urban dwellers could be directly attributed to human activity. As early as the 1880s, pollution belching from thousands of factory chimneys contaminated urban skies, and a mélange of untreated sewage and medical waste, decomposing animal carcasses, and industrial sludge and waste products poured into streams and rivers. In the course of the major movement westward that took place between the 1850s and 1890 (the year the census declared the frontier officially closed), vast areas of forests were clear-cut, intensifying soil erosion and the silting up of streams. Western streams and rivers, teeming with countless millions of fish at the beginning of this period, became increasingly contaminated with toxic chemical effluents from mining and pulp mill operations. Over time, many rivers also were diverted from their natural courses as engineers channeled their waters and constructed thousands of dams to supply the needs of fast-growing but water-poor western cities like San Francisco and Los Angeles and to provide hydroelectric power and irrigation water to the farmers who settled on the arid prairies and converted them to croplands. Yet, despite the immense disruptions to productive ecosystems, little or no comprehensive environmental impact assessment took place until the 1970s, following the passage of NEPA. Until then, state governments usually paid scant attention to the risk of chronic environmental problems resulting from sewage and effluent discharges, the buildup of toxic sediments, disruptions to established patterns of fish migration, or damage to downstream ecological communities.

For decades the federal government also virtually ignored environmental concerns. The first major intercession by Congress can be traced to the 1906 publication of The Jungle, Upton Sinclair’s exposé of animal cruelty and the filthy working conditions then common in Chicago slaughterhouses. Although Sinclair’s book raised the ire of the powerful meatpacking business, he found a champion in President Theodore Roosevelt, whose support helped to assure the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act that same year (the act was strengthened in 1938). But until the end of World War II, few members of Congress concerned themselves about the increasingly negative impacts on the natural environment of a fast-expanding population, the corresponding growth of cities and industry, the rapid spread of suburbia made possible by highway construction and the automobile, and the introduction over the years of many invasive and exotic species. In 1947 the emergence of many new synthetic chemicals and the growing fear of their possible toxic effects on humans and wildlife resulted in the first Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA). The next year saw the passage of the first Federal Water Pollution Control Act. In 1955 Congress passed the first Clean Air Act. Most of the environmental regulations effected during the 1950s, however, were enacted by individual states whose governments rarely cooperated with each other to define and alleviate cross-border pollution problems. Throughout the boom years of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, Congress – largely because of opposition from powerful agricultural, industrial, chemical, and manufacturing interests – took little further action. Only Lady Bird Johnson’s efforts toward beautifying America encouraged her husband to give some needed attention to spreading environmental problems.

At the same time, following the development of the atomic bomb in the 1940s and the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the start of the arms race, and the growing threat of nuclear confrontation with the Soviet Union, public fear of the deadly effects of radiation fallout increased. Moreover, the 1950s witnessed explosive growth in the development of synthetic organic chemicals, such as dioxin, used in the production of pesticides (including DDT), herbicides, and insecticides. Only in the 1960s did significant environmental policy initiatives begin to emerge with the passage of such legislation as the 1964 Wilderness Act; the 1965 Water Resources Planning Act and the Land and Water Conservation Act; the Air Quality Acts of 1963, 1965, and 1967; and the Solid Waste Disposal Act of 1965. In 1962 Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, in which she exposed the dangers that unconstrained use of toxic chemicals posed to human and animal health. Although her work spurred some prominent members of Congress to listen to the warnings of experts in the emerging fields of ecology, wildlife management, and marine biology, these experts still often found themselves pitted against pro-growth government representatives and industry scientists who insisted that Carson’s claims were baseless. Despite opposition, it was at this time, as understanding at last began to spread about the real interconnectedness of the natural world and the potential for human actions to cause chronic, even irreparable harm, that Caldwell launched his groundbreaking arguments that the government should instigate comprehensive environmental policy and administration procedures, arguments that a few years later gave rise to the wording of the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969.

As far back as the Progressive Era in the early twentieth century, the efforts of President Theodore Roosevelt and his chief forester, Gifford Pinchot, to implement new conservation-minded policy had often met with fierce opposition from a largely development-oriented Congress. In May 1908, with the assistance of his principal conservation advisors, Pinchot and W. J. McGee, Roosevelt arranged what turned out to be – apart from a more modest White House Conference on Conservation convened in 1962 by Interior Secretary Stewart Udall at the request of President John F. Kennedy – the only environmental conference of its kind ever held in the United States. Edmund Morris has described the applause Roosevelt received for his opening address, Conservation as a National Duty. Nevertheless, despite the president’s appeals for foresight and his keynote and pedal point: that the natural endowment was a gift of God, and that utilitarianism must be subject to human and spiritual constraints, no positive action followed.⁸ Conservation, according to the industrialists and conservative politicians of the time (whose successors, more than a century later, continue to repeat the same arguments), would be bad for business, since it would involve their acceptance of new government practices imposing restrictions on their previously uninhibited money-making activities. According to Carl Moneyhon,

at the National Conference of Governors in 1908, Edmund J. James . . . attacked the conference’s organizers for putting too much emphasis upon the destruction of resources and exaggerating that facet of the problem. . . . His primary concern was that the conference’s focus was being used to persuade the American people to adopt unnecessarily restrictive governmental policies. . . . The power of those opposed to the intervention of the national government was finally felt when [President] William Howard Taft . . . proved reluctant to push forward the power of the nation at the expense of individuals or states. In the end the schism made a general national policy untenable.⁹

As a result, for the next several decades these strong differences in viewpoint prevented the development of a coordinated political approach to solving growing environmental problems even as the longterm and widespread repercussions of uncontrolled environmental damage remained poorly understood. It was not until the 1930s that scientists began to realize that, far from being localized phenomena, many forms of pollution could be spread easily by air and water across state lines and even carried to distant continents and oceans. The sciences and humanities also widened the gulf in understanding by gradually breaking down human-environment relations into separate, narrowly focused areas of expertise that often bore little or no relationship to one another. Preservationists desired to protect the natural world from the more damaging effects of human intrusion, while utilitarian-minded conservationists wished to see natural resources wisely used, and the two groups rarely managed to find common ground. During a lecture given in 1910, however, McGee attempted to bridge the growing gap by touching on ethical themes that he hoped would appeal to both sides. He advocated

a higher honesty of purpose between man and man . . . a stronger family sense, tending toward a realization of the rights of the unborn . . . a deeper probity, maturing in the realizing sense that each holder of the sources of life is but a trustee for his nominal possessions, and is responsible to all men, and for all time for making the best use of them for the common interest; and . . . a livelier humanity, in which each will feel that he lives not for himself alone but as a part of a common life for a common world and for the common good.¹⁰

At the time, like the ardent advocacy of John Muir, McGee’s appeal for the use of values and morals in environmental interactions went largely ignored. Instead, throughout the twentieth century the great strides made in science and technology, the vast movement of people from farms to cities, and the onset of mass production in industry and agriculture all contributed to the belief that people were apart from, not a part of, their natural environments. By midcentury, developed industrial nations in particular had become dangerously hubristic about humans’ ability to endlessly control and manipulate nature to meet their ever-growing needs. Only in recent years, as environmental degradation and species loss have continued apace, exacerbated by planetary warming engendered to a growing degree by our still spiraling use of fossil fuels, are a majority of world scientists voicing their concerns about the abyss into which this careless hubris may be leading us.

A voracious reader both within and outside his own specialty, including in natural science, ecology, history, and philosophy, Caldwell came to share the opinion, expressed by Leopold and others, that the Earth is not a pie to be sliced up by the academic and scientific communities into many individual, disconnected areas of specialization. In this approach, they suggested, lay chaos. Instead, the planet should be regarded as what it really is: an interlocking whole in which each part is complexly involved with all the rest and in which no part can be understood without considering all the other parts. As Harvard geologist Nathaniel Shaler wrote in his 1904 book Man and the Earth,

Something may be done to hasten the growth of a better state of mind as to man’s relation to nature by a much-needed change in our methods of teaching science. We now present the realm to beginners as a group of fragments labeled astronomy, geology, chemistry, physics, and biology, each, as set forth, appearing to him as a little world in itself, with its own separate life, having little to do with its neighbors. It is rare, indeed, in a very considerable experience with youths to find one who has gained any inkling as to the complete unity of nature. Seldom it is . . . that we find a true sense as to the absolute oneness of the realm.¹¹

In his 1998 book Consilience, the eminent sociobiologist E. O. Wilson noted, The greatest enterprise of the mind has always been, and always will be, the attempted linkage of the sciences and humanities. The ongoing fragmentation of knowledge and resulting chaos in philosophy are not reflections of the real world but artifacts of scholarship.¹² The distinguished English novelist and scientist C. P. Snow shared this view. In his influential and widely discussed 1959 Rede lecture The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, Snow argued that the widening gulf in communication between the humanities and the sciences was acting to reduce the quality and breadth of education and intellectual thought.¹³ In turn, this reduction was becoming a major barrier to solving the world’s problems, including its spiraling environmental ones. As a trained scientist who later became a successful writer, Snow moved between the two worlds of what he described as literary intellectuals at the one pole – at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension. He considered this incomprehension and polarization a sheer loss to us all. To us as people and to our society. It is at the same time practical and intellectual and creative loss.¹⁴

During the 1950s, as Caldwell traveled and observed the accelerating environmental deterioration created by the industrial, agricultural, and housing development booms of the postwar years, he began to think more deeply about the widening gap between the arts and sciences and how this gap contributed to the increasing dissociation between people and their natural environments. As a scholar, a respected professor of political science (though often labeled a social scientist), an expert in government and public administration, a largely self-taught ecologist, and a committed lover of nature and the natural world, he began to consider how he might be able to use his particular set of skills to help develop a far more integrated approach to the use and management of the human environment. By the early 1960s it had become clear to him that, for such broad and complex issues to be resolved, university curricula needed to become more interdisciplinary in content and focus.

Caldwell agreed with Leopold that solving human-created environmental problems required a far more integrated way of looking at the Earth. To his mind, however, any hope of bringing about such a change in worldview depended on ensuring that all parties involved in any major action affecting the natural environment – public officials, civil engineers, and scientists; local business leaders, farmers, and residents, for instance – have access to the relevant research findings and be provided with the means to interact with each other to determine, as far as possible, the long-term effects the proposed action might have both on them and on surrounding ecosystems. Armed with this knowledge, they would then be able to make a far more informed decision about the measures required to ensure the best possible outcome for both the human and ecological communities to be affected. Each participant, regardless of his or her particular area of expertise, thus needed to consider all parts of a proposed project and understand their interactions before deciding on a best course of action. Such an integrative or holistic approach, he believed, would better enable humans to make choices that would have the least negative impacts on their supportive biosphere. But how could such an integrative approach be achieved?

Beginning in 1960, Caldwell attempted to discuss his ideas with his academic colleagues and was almost invariably rebuffed. What did he mean by environmental policy? He was well aware, of course, that the concept of the environment is difficult to define and thus also difficult to compartmentalize into the neat, specialized sections favored for academic scrutiny. Even a standard reference dictionary struggles to explain the word’s meaning: Something that surrounds. . . . All the conditions, circumstances, and influences surrounding and affecting the development of an organism or group of organisms; all of the conditions, circumstances, etc., that surround and influence life on earth.¹⁵ The environment, Caldwell’s colleagues told him, was too fluffy a concept, too broad, too generalized, too much like a big ball of cotton candy. He later remembered suffering through not a few snide remarks questioning whether a brilliant scholar could be going off the deep end.¹⁶

Nonetheless, despite the difficulty of defining the term, environment – as Caldwell first recognized during his undergraduate years – is in some way a part of every field of study and is central to the broad scope of environmental studies that attempt to encapsulate the scientific, historical, ethical, and sociological aspects of the environment and to investigate people’s place in it. This makes clear the need for the interdisciplinary approach to education that Caldwell first began to emphasize during the 1960s.

In 1962 he came to the conclusion that perhaps the best way to encourage a widespread social commitment to environmental sustainability would be to develop interest in an entirely new subfield of expertise: public policy for the environment. The following year, in his first article on the topic, Environment: A New Focus for Public Policy?, he introduced the concepts of environmental policy and administration for perhaps the first time. After describing why, in an increasingly populated and resource-depleted world, he believed it had become necessary to adopt an integrative, holistic approach to the development of environmental policy, he established the base on which his later ideas for a national policy for the environment would be built:

It matters little how environment is defined, provided it is defined comprehensively. A standard dictionary describes environment as the aggregate of surrounding things, conditions, or influences. This is environment in the generic sense, as distinguished from specific environments. The concept of environment assumes not only surrounding things but something that is surrounded – in our preview, man. . . . Environment is not only the complex interrelating reality surrounding us; it includes us. . . .

The public decision maker – legislative, administrative, or judicial – must deal with environmental questions without the help of a general body of environmental policy to which he may turn for authoritative guidance. . . . American policies affecting the environment have been essentially segmental – largely because most of us, in government and out, taking the environment for granted have dealt with its various elements without regard to their interrelated totality. . . . Fragmented action and policies affecting natural resources and human environment have brought waste and confusion in their train and are the result of the lack of recognition of environment as a generic subject for public action. To change this behavior, to obtain integrated planning and action and to get coordination among the agencies and policies affecting environment a new policy focus will be required. What is this new policy focus? Does it imply environmental administration?¹⁷

Early on, Caldwell faced significant difficulties in winning his colleagues’ support for his ideas. Late in the decade, however, his unwavering belief, like Leopold’s, in the importance of taking a holistic approach to environmental affairs at last bore fruit. In the mid-1960s growing public concern about the scale of pollution and the clearly negative impacts of unchecked environmental degradation on human health, wildlife, and ecosystems finally prompted Congress to take action. As a result, the 1970s witnessed the introduction and passage of a number of important bills related to specific areas of environmental concern, such as improving air and water quality. All these statutes, however, were preceded by the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 (initially drafted by Caldwell), which in its values-oriented and holistic or inclusive approach set it apart from all other related legislation. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would later describe this act as the basic national charter for protection of the environment.¹⁸ Today, most leading environmental organizations look on NEPA as the cornerstone of American environmental policy.

In 1968 Caldwell’s association with the Conservation Foundation in New York, and his unusual expertise in both government and environmental affairs brought him to the attention of Senator Henry Scoop Jackson, the powerful chair of the Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Jackson, who had been considering the need for an environmental statute for some time, now asked Caldwell to draft a national policy and then act as a witness in Senate hearings should his unusual bill gain traction in Congress. Against all odds, it did. On January 1, 1970, President Richard Nixon signed NEPA into law, the first act of the decade and the first of its kind established by any nation. Today, as a principal author of that act, Caldwell is often credited by environmental scholars as the father of NEPA and the originator of the environmental impact statement (EIS). Since its inception, NEPA has been used by many states and more than one hundred nations in developing their own environmental laws and policy.¹⁹ Because of its global influence, NEPA has been called, with justification, the most widely emulated legislation in the world.

Throughout the 1960s Caldwell also worked tirelessly to attract interest, both at Indiana University and at colleges and universities around the country, in cross-disciplinary environmental studies programs. In 1972, two years after the passage of NEPA and a decade after he had first proposed the establishment of an interdisciplinary environmental center at Indiana University, the university’s now highly regarded School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) opened its doors for the first time.

For the next thirty years, Caldwell tirelessly continued his crusade to make people aware of the need to care for their environments and of the potentially catastrophic consequences of not doing so. Today, as scientists prove that pollution is now driving the collapse of essential ecosystems and exacerbating potentially fatal global warming, and as the natural resources that support our lives continue to be recklessly plundered as a result of unabated population growth and consumer-driven economic development in many parts of the world, the time has surely come for the wise advice offered by Caldwell – one of the most prominent environmental voices of the late twentieth century – to be not just revisited but acted upon. As he urged so often and as leading scientists now continuously reiterate, little time now remains to alter the disastrous course on which we are presently headed.

The paths of the pioneers have widened into broad highways, The forest clearing has expanded into affluent commonwealths.

FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER,

Contributions of the West to American Democracy

ONE

A Century of History and Heritage: The Roots of an Environmental Focus

THE CALDWELLS: A PIONEERING FAMILY

On November 21, 1913, Lynton Keith Caldwell, the first child of Lee Lynton Caldwell, the local school superintendent, and his wife, Alberta, was born in the local hospital of the farming town of Montezuma, Iowa. If his father had not departed from two hundred years of family tradition by taking up a profession other than agriculture, Caldwell might well have grown up to be a farmer himself. Genealogical records trace his paternal farming heritage back in an unbroken line to the 1760s, when his branch of the Caldwell family, believed to have emigrated from Ireland, resided in Westmoreland County, Pennsylvania. In 1808, during the period in which President Thomas Jefferson hoped to establish a largely self-governing agricultural society in America, John T. Caldwell, born in 1776, traveled with his wife and thirteen children to Ohio, thus becoming among the earliest to settle in that state. One of his sons, also named John, married when he was eighteen. Of this John’s eleven children, the third-born, Nicholas, became Lynton Keith Caldwell’s great-grandfather.

In May 1855, accompanied by his wife, Abigail, and their three children, Nicholas moved from Michigan, where he had relocated in 1848, to the small settlement of Lewisburg, near Corydon in Iowa. Here he was soon joined by two of his brothers and their families. On June 2 Nicholas bought eight hundred acres of unimproved land in three lots, for which he paid one thousand dollars. He then signed over two of the lots to his younger brother James but kept for himself the core farm area of 440 acres. At the same time, his older brother Levi, who had married Abigail’s sister Louisa, purchased adjacent acreage.

The brothers all lived at first in rough board shanties, which, as they began to prosper, they replaced with substantial farm dwellings.¹ Despite their early difficulties, it turned out that the brothers had chosen an opportune time to resettle their families. From probably not more than fifty white people living within the limits of the future state in 1832, Iowa’s population had swelled to more than 324,000 by 1854.² That year, the Chicago and Rock Island Railroad finally reached the banks of the Mississippi River, across from the town of Davenport. Indeed, the rapid spread of the railroads during and after the 1850s acted as a major catalyst for this phenomenal rate of growth. Although steamboats had come into use around 1819, their use in trade and commerce became hampered by the fact that for several months of each year the northern sections of the Mississippi froze over and became impassable, while in the summer water levels in the southern sections tended to drop too low for safe navigation. The railroads changed everything, quickly improving both transportation and communication. In the decades that followed, ever larger quantities of Iowan farmers’ produce – corn, wheat, hogs, and cattle among them – were shipped to Chicago, which was then rapidly expanding into the major transportation, distribution, and industrial hub of the Midwest.

NICHOLAS AND ABIGAIL CALDWELL

By 1866 Nicholas had turned his original purchase into an excellent farm of 385 acres. Perhaps nostalgic for the woods he had left behind in Michigan, he was apparently responsible for setting out the First Tree in Lewisburg.³ Abigail also bore him four more children, of whom Lewis Napoleon, born in 1860, became Lynton Keith Caldwell’s grandfather. It is not known why the child of a rural farming family was given such a grand name, but at the time of his birth Lewis’s namesake, Louis Napoléon III, ruled as emperor of France.

The Civil War broke out when Lewis was two years old. Nicholas’s older children ran the farm while their father served on the Union side in an Iowa state militia unit called the Southern Border Brigade. The period that followed the end of the war was quiet, although – according to family lore – the Caldwells did have one brush with fame – or infamy. After years of committing murder and mayhem in Kentucky and Missouri, the notorious James Gang, led by brothers Jesse and Frank, began crossing the northern Missouri border to attack trains and rob banks in Iowa. After one such raid, as the gang fled back to comparative safety in Missouri, they stopped off at Nicholas and Abigail’s farm to water their thirsty horses.⁴

LEWIS AND LUCY

Historian John Mack Farragher notes that in 1830 about one in five heads of household shared his surname with the heads of at least two other households; thirty years later that proportion had doubled. . . . A significant minority of marriages among the descendants of original families took place among sibling sets, the brothers and sisters of one family marrying the brothers and sisters of another. Such marriage patterns seem strange today but were commonplace in the nineteenth-century countryside.⁵ Farragher could well have been describing Caldwell’s family. Nicholas and Levi Caldwell had married sisters Abigail and Louisa Curtis. In their turn, Nicholas’s daughters, Harriet and Sylvia, married two brothers from a local Lewisburg family. Then, when Nicholas’s sons, Charles and Lewis Napoleon, grew up, they married sisters Jeanette and Lucy Ellen Surbaugh, their next-door neighbors.

Lewis married Lucy in 1880, when he was twenty and she just seventeen. For some years after their marriage the young couple made their home with his parents. On July 1, 1883, Lucy gave birth to her first child, a son they named Lee Lynton, who would become Lynton Keith Caldwell’s father. After the births of two more children, Harry and Harriet, Lewis moved his growing family into a newly constructed home across the road north of the farm. Here Lucy would bear four more children, of whom one died in infancy. Soon after they moved, Nicholas deeded Lewis eighty acres of surrounding farmland to help him start out on his own. Over the course of the following years, Lewis did well enough to buy the rest of the farm from his father. (By this time land values had increased a great deal. In 1855 Nicholas had paid $1.25 an acre. In the 1890s Lewis gave his father $25.00 an acre for the cropland and $18.50 an acre for the timbered land. Even these prices may have been below market rate, since Nicholas probably asked less from his son than he would have demanded from an outsider.)

LEE LYNTON CALDWELL: BREAKING THE MOLD

In 1900, the year that Lee Lynton turned seventeen and graduated with distinction from high school in Allerton, America was a very different place from the utopian agrarian society Jefferson had envisaged almost a century earlier. Instead, the United States had developed during the nineteenth century into an economic powerhouse, thanks to the mix of manufacturing, commerce, and agriculture that Jefferson’s rival, Alexander Hamilton, had advocated and advanced as the nation’s first secretary of the treasury. By this time, the Wild West had been civilized: in 1890 the superintendent of the census issued a bulletin stating, Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.⁶

As the new century began, however, Lee Caldwell was not a happy young man. The census taken that year lists his occupation as farm laborer, but Lee had ambitions, and the country’s rapid urbanization and technical and industrial growth offered opportunities to young men of ambition that were far less physically demanding and certainly less unpredictable than farming. All over the country young men were leaving rural areas to try their luck in the booming cities, and a college education, especially for men, had become increasingly commonplace. Lee believed that the key to his own future success lay in earning a degree, but no one in his family had ever taken their education that far. He had also recently started seeing Alberta Mace, a young woman with nine siblings whom he had first met in high school. Her father ran a buggy shop in Allerton, where the family had lived since the 1870s. This occupation, however, presented a problem. As business people, the Maces considered themselves a cut above the Caldwells. To win their approval, Lee knew he had to prove he was worthy of Alberta.

When Lee finally found the courage, soon after he had turned eighteen, to tell his father he wanted to go to college, Lewis erupted in fury. Taking twenty-five dollars from his billfold, he threw the money at Lee, shouting that if he wanted to go, so be it, but if he left, he could neither return nor expect further financial assistance. Like the great preservationist John Muir, who, forty years earlier, had faced down his own father in an almost identical situation, Lee took the money and left.⁷ He would return to the farm only once, in 1914, when his own son, Lynton Keith Caldwell, was a year old.

Lewis Caldwell must have been certain that, with three strapping young sons, he had assured the future of his farm. But in the end none of them accepted their inheritance. Both Harry and Nicholas, who for a long time resented their older brother for leaving them with extra farm work, also eventually went into business for themselves. In the end it was Ruth, the youngest daughter, who took over the family inheritance after she married.

LEE AND ALBERTA: MAKING A NEW LIFE DURING THE PROGRESSIVE AGE

On March 30, 1904, Lee married Alberta at her home. In early 1906, at the age of twenty-two, he left Simpson College, in Indianola, without completing his degree in order to accept a position in Manson, Iowa, as principal of Manson Schools. At the end of his first year he had already made such a good impression that the school board offered him the higher position of superintendent of schools.

In early 1909 Lee became superintendent of public schools in Parkersburg, Iowa, where the couple spent the next three years. Alberta, still childless, began to attend classes with her husband at Iowa State Teachers College. In February 1913, after nine years of marriage, she finally became pregnant. In June she graduated with a B.A. in education that she would never use professionally. In July, Lee, having graduated with the same degree, successfully applied for the position of superintendent of schools in the larger farming community of Montezuma, Iowa, where, on Friday morning, November 21st 1913 at four O’clock AM , nine months of happy anticipation were ended and we were made happier still by the arrival of our dear little son. We have named him Lynton Keith, Alberta wrote a few days later, Lynton for his papa. The Senior Class ’14 [who, at the invitation of Superintendent Caldwell, had held a contest to choose his son’s name] named him Keith and presented him a silver cup for Christmas.⁸ Despite the family’s choice of Lynton, from the very beginning Caldwell was always called Keith by his family and friends.

EARLY YEARS: THE GREAT WAR AND INDUSTRIAL GROWTH

Apart from a worrying bout of scarlet fever in April 1915, from which he quickly recovered, Lynton Keith Caldwell seems to have been a healthy child who, from a very early age, dearly love[d] books and [was] read to every day.⁹ In December 1915 Alberta gave him a sister, Margaret. In August 1916 the family moved once again, this time to Monmouth, Illinois, where Lee Caldwell had just been elected superintendent of schools. A second daughter, Dorothy, joined the family in 1919. As Caldwell grew into boyhood, he began to demonstrate an interest in nature, especially in birds. And in Monmouth, where the family lived for six years, nature could be found in abundance all around him. The town was then the center of a prosperous farming area containing about two thousand farms, many of them settled by immigrant German families. The Caldwells had lived in Monmouth less than a year when in April 1917, nearly three years after the Great War had first broken out in Europe, the United States declared war on Germany.

In September 1918 Caldwell started his studies in Monmouth at the local Garfield Elementary School, founded in 1902. He later recalled that on a Saturday morning soon afterward my father took me off to his barber. When we left, my long curls remained behind on the floor. My ‘Buster Brown’ haircut, very popular among mothers of that period, had been demolished. My mother was very upset but my father had decided it was time I looked like a boy.¹⁰ Two months later, on November 11, the war ended. That evening, Lee took his young son down to Monmouth’s public square to watch celebrations that were held in similar fashion in many towns across the nation. Although still two weeks shy of his fifth birthday, Caldwell later recollected that evening well: There was an enormous bonfire and a great deal of noise. Men drove around in their Model T cars dragging behind them stuffed and burning effigies of the Kaiser. The local newspaper reported the next day that the assembled crowd grew so enthusiastic that someone’s carriage ended up being thrown into the bonfire to fuel the flames, but, the article explained, a hat was passed among the crowd and there was enough money to buy a new buggy for the owner.¹¹

THE GREAT CHANGE: FROM COUNTRY TO CITY

In November 1921 Keith Caldwell celebrated his eighth birthday. His early report cards already pointed out the areas that would later become his academic strengths. In only one subject did he not improve: arithmetic, where his marks remained a steady, unwavering fair.

By this time, Lee Caldwell, who had worked hard to provide an equal education to all his students, had grown increasingly frustrated by his inability to obtain better funding for the growing school system. Much of Monmouth’s wealth and local influence came from retired farmers, but the town was also home to a large number of poor, unskilled families. Richer community members, however, already openly hostile to school taxes, fiercely opposed having these taxes increased to meet the educational needs of the less fortunate. Lee Caldwell thus began an active search for another position. Then, on April 24, 1922, an unsolicited and entirely unexpected telegram arrived from the president of the board of education in Hammond, a fast-growing town situated in the heavily industrialized northwest region of Indiana. The board had heard about his successful career and asked him to come for an interview. He must have made an excellent impression, for in June the family moved again.

HAMMOND, INDIANA, I922

In the early twentieth century, as James H. Madison writes, Indiana industries became ever more successful in producing durable manufactured goods, particularly steel, auto parts, household appliances, and machinery. These products were produced in high volume in large plants . . . concentrated in growing cities of central and northern Indiana. . . and the Calumet cities of Gary, Hammond, and East Chicago.¹² John Bartlow Martin adds that Standard Oil had earlier selected Whiting, then a tiny hamlet near the southern shore of Lake Michigan, as the site on which to build the world’s largest refinery, the first step in transforming desolate dunes and swamps into Indiana’s greatest industrial region, and one of the nation’s greatest.¹³ Steel plants were located along the Calumet River, and the United States Steel Corporation’s massive South Works complex had been built during the 1880s along the Lake Michigan shoreline: its Gary Works had grown into the largest steel mill complex in Indiana and second largest producer in the nation.¹⁴

On our train journey to Hammond, we first stopped in Chicago, Caldwell recalled, and when we surfaced to ground level and I heard all the traffic noise and saw the tall buildings and busy city streets for the first time, I was completely overwhelmed. Years later, in the early 1960s, Arthur Franklin Mapes wrote a poem extolling the natural beauty of Indiana, adopted in 1963 as the state poem. Indiana is a garden, Mapes wrote, Where the dreamy Wabash River / Wanders on through Paradise. Indeed, in the 1960s, large parts of the state still retained much of their original charm. But in other regions by the early 1920s the bucolic images Mapes later conjured up would exist largely only in his imagination. By this time some Indiana rivers had not done much wandering through paradise for several decades, especially those flowing through the state’s more urbanized and industrialized areas. By the time the Caldwell family arrived in Hammond, the Grand Calumet River (the city’s major waterway) and its surrounding marshlands, once famous for their beauty and for dense numbers of migratory ducks, geese, and other wildfowl, had already become highly polluted from uncontained industrial, agricultural, and urban runoffs. Nonetheless, away from the industrialized parts of town a good deal of open countryside still remained. In this pleasant area, where Hammond’s more upscale residential neighborhoods had been built in a setting of attractive city parks and wooded tracts, Lee and Alberta moved into a rented house on a street that divided Indiana from Illinois. Carroll Street, Caldwell recalled,

was right on the state line. Just across the street was Calumet City, Illinois. My father had always enjoyed nature. Once we had settled down in Hammond, he would sometimes take us out to the Calumet marshes area or drive to the Indiana Dunes, which in those days still stretched out for miles.

Even then, arguments had begun to intensify between local residents who had started to unite in an effort to gain protection for this rare ecosystem, and politicians and their business friends from nearby Chicago who wanted to develop the entire dunes area into a new deep-water port and industrial metropolis. No national park had been established in the Midwest, and even before the end of the Great War, concerned people, including Stephen Mather (the first director of the National Park Service, established in 1916 to administer the growing national park system), were promoting the idea of establishing a Sand Dunes National Park. I also remember my father bemoaning the increasing pollution of the Calumet River and remaining marshlands from uncontrolled industrial runoffs and the dumping of wastes. I believe he wrote letters of complaint to various government departments, but to little avail. Relatively few people at that time made the connection between the pollution of water and soils and human health problems, and companies certainly weren’t about to spend any money on expensive remedial controls when there were no laws in place that forced them to do so. Anyway, I think it was rare in those days, due largely to the lack of publicity or understanding of these matters, for the general public to give any thought to the harm they could inflict on themselves by polluting their environments. It was those connections – the ecological connections as they were called once the word ecology came into wider usage – that I began to think about much more deeply in later years.¹⁵

Fortunately, as Caldwell would later become well aware, not everyone in that era remained indifferent to the deteriorating state of their surroundings. By the 1920s the first environmental movement had already been active for some four decades, although – because of conflicting ideas about the best management of natural resources – it had already split into the two groups usually described as preservationists and conservationists. The first antipollution movement emerged as an outgrowth of the mid-nineteenth-century sanitation movement pioneered in England by the 1842 Chadwick Report. During the early years of the twentieth century, the movement began to gather momentum as the links between environmental pollution and human diseases became better understood.¹⁶ The uproar following the 1906 publication of The Jungle , Upton Sinclair’s famous exposé of the meatpacking industry, resulted in the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act, the nation’s first health-related legislation. That same year, two economists from Yale University, J. Pease Norton and Irving Fisher, began to press for a national department of health. In 1908, in his Report on National Vitality, Its Wastes and Conservation, Fisher urged that steps be taken to prevent the spread of environmental pollution, noting: More legislation should be advocated, passed, and enforced to the end that streets may be kept clean, garbage properly removed, sewage properly disposed of, [and] air pollution of all kinds prevented, whether by smoke, street dust, noxious gases, or any other source.¹⁷

In 1912, four years after Fisher’s report, a bill to establish a national health department was defeated. Soon afterward, however, Congress did establish the Public Health Service. The PHS would have a long way to go before becoming an established national agency, but as a first step it was at least empowered to investigate the diseases of human beings, including the conditions leading to their spread, among them the pollution and sanitation of navigable streams and lakes.¹⁸ Even so, and despite the fact that a growing number of enlightened people – including Caldwell’s father – had already recognized that good human health depended to a significant extent on a healthy surrounding environment, the issue of environmental pollution would continue to simmer on a back burner for the next half century. Certainly, Lee Caldwell agreed with another recommendation Fisher had made in 1909: the development of school health programs.¹⁹ Caldwell had worked hard during his years at Monmouth to establish a school health department that was lauded locally as unexcelled.²⁰ Once in Hammond he readily turned his attention anew to the often severe pollution-related health problems afflicting children living in heavily industrialized areas. As a result, over the course of the next ten years his son would absorb many of the concerns his father raised about the links between poor health and the increasing despoliation of the natural environment.

GROWING UP IN HAMMOND

In 1922 Caldwell had already started to extend his knowledge of nature, focusing particularly on birds and botany. The woods by his home proved perfect for these pursuits, and he enjoyed trips with his family to explore the rare dunes ecosystem along Lake Michigan, where he developed a keen interest in shore birds and rare migrating species. I was well aware of my father’s fondness for the area, Caldwell later recalled, and so, as I grew older, because I knew he feared it might be lost to industrial development, my own passion to keep it safe began to grow.²¹

Although Caldwell never shared his father’s love of fishing, he had already begun to develop what would become a lifelong appreciation of some of Lee Caldwell’s other interests, especially history and literature. His father’s encouragement in these directions and his efforts to pass on to his son his own self-taught discipline and the ability to extract the essence from whatever he read helped Caldwell develop skills that proved of inestimable use to him in later life. For her part, Alberta did all she could to provide her beloved son with her own deep appreciation of the arts. Aided by the proximity of Chicago, she soon began to stir in him a love of classical music, ballet, film, and opera. Opera especially became such a passion that Caldwell would eventually attend hundreds of performances in the United States, in Europe, and all over the world.

THE DUST BOWL AND THE DEPRESSION ERA

As strict Methodists, every Sunday morning Caldwell’s family went to church. Caldwell also attended Sunday school, where his father helped out on a regular basis. Yet, even at eleven years old, he had already begun to have doubts about the religion he was being taught. In the same way as the young John Muir, he realized he was happiest when out in nature. By this time, his childhood curiosity about birds and plants had already begun to grow into a wider fascination with the functioning of the living world. Because of his increasing empathy with nature, he began to question what he heard in Sunday sermons. Had God really given people dominion over the incredible natural world he had created, just so that they could abuse it at will to serve their own needs? How could this be, Caldwell began to ask himself, especially when God had started out his human experiment on Earth by placing the first man, Adam, in the Garden of Eden with the specific instruction that he should dress it and keep it. Caldwell later observed that his parents must have been shocked when, in what he called my first act of defiance, he informed them that he no longer wanted to attend Sunday school.²² Perhaps wisely, they did not force him. Years later, after much study of different religions, Caldwell eventually concluded that his beliefs aligned most closely with those of John Toland, the seventeenth-century founder of Pantheism:

Even when still a boy, the only way I could conceive of God was as an emanation, an invisible creative force flowing continuously throughout the universe. It occurred to me that if a Creator really had granted us superior intelligence, surely it had been with the intention that we would ensure the long-term wellbeing of this apparently singular and miraculous creation that is our Earth, not just so that we could despoil it for own short-term gain. This I felt had to be the case, because if we failed to take due care we would basically be writing the recipe for our own eventual self-destruction.²³

Caldwell had thus already started to understand the natural world as complexly interrelated. This