The University-Environmental Movement Marriage

Abstract

Professors and students helped shape environmental movement, and now environmentalism is reshaping university. The history of higher education may offer no more telling example of interplay of life and learning in America. But will universityenvironmental marriage last? No clear date marks beginning of what has come to be called the environmental movement in United States. There was no shot heard 'round world from a rude bridge. Nor has any single individual come to personify environmentalism way Teddy Roosevelt took on mantle of first wave of conservation four score years ago. What we can say with assurance is that from mid-1950s on some rather apocalyptic voices were heard in land, predicting a badly malfunctioning people-environment-energy system and calling for varieties of remedial private and public actions. Invariably early-warning-radar voices of environmentalism were those of university professors. As Aldo Leopold [17] once wrote, ecologists live in a world of wounds, and they began to cry out in force, not just card-carrying ecologists either: Leopold himself, a University of Wisconsin wildlife manager; Arnold Bolle, Montana forester; Kenneth Boulding, Michigan economist; Paul Brandwein, Pinchot Institute educator; Lynton Caldwell, Indiana political scientist; Lamont Cole, Cornell biologist; Barry Commoner, Washington University biologist; Ray Dasmann, California ecologist; Rene Dubos, Rockefeller micro-