Lynton Keith Caldwell: An Environmental Visionary and the National Environmental Policy Act
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Lynton Keith Caldwell: An Environmental Visionary and the National Environmental Policy Act
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Overview
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
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253010377 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 12/22/2021 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 534 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Wendy Read Wertz has a degree in History and Environmental Studies from Indiana University where she met Caldwell and was captivated by his work and writings. Additionally, she has published several articles on Caldwell.
Read an Excerpt
Lynton Keith Caldwell
An Environmental Visionary and the National Environmental Policy Act
By Wendy Read Wertz
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2014 Wendy Read WertzAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-01037-7
CHAPTER 1
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." 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. 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." 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.
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." 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."
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. 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 twentytwo, 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." 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." 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." 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."
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." 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." 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."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Lynton Keith Caldwell by Wendy Read Wertz. Copyright © 2014 Wendy Read Wertz. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Author's Note,Acknowledgments,
PROLOGUE Choosing an Environmental Path,
1 A Century of History and Heritage: The Roots of an Environmental Focus,
2 Marriage, War, Children, and Career,
3 Choosing a Different Path,
4 A New Focus on Education: Ecology and the Environment Become Political Issues, 1965–1968,
5 "Those Were Exciting Years": Toward a National Policy for the Environment,
6 The National Environmental Policy Act and the Start of the "Environmental Decade",
7 Early Challenges to NEPA: Trying for National Land-Use Policy,
8 NEPA, a New School, and New Directions,
9 Increasing International Focus: The "Visiting Professor",
10 Conservation versus Consumption: A Division in Social Philosophy,
11 The Years of Going Backward,
12 Retirement: A New Focus on Global Environmental Issues,
13 Strengthening NEPA through a Constitutional Amendment,
14 The Grand Old Man of Environmental Policy,
15 The Final Years,
EPILOGUE Leaving a Legacy,
Notes,
Index,
What People are Saying About This
Keith Caldwell's writings . . . have been vital contributions both to the academic literature and to public discourse . . . inspiring an entire generation with their articulate vision of what a sustainable society in harmony with nature's forces and constraints would require.