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George M. Woodwell, the founder of the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts and a renowned ecologist whose keen research and masterful understanding of policy shaped how the United States controlled toxic substances, and how the world confronted climate change, died on Tuesday at his home in Woods Hole, Mass. He was 95.
The research center, which Dr. Woodwell started in 1985 to study global climate change, and which was later renamed for him, announced his death in a statement.
During his long career, Dr. Woodwell consistently shined a light on how the byproducts of new technologies devised to increase efficiency in the agriculture, forestry and energy industries seriously endangered natural systems. His careful research provided early evidence of what he called “biotic impoverishment” — the steady weakening of plants, animals and ecosystems chronically exposed to synthetic pollutants.
Dr. Woodwell published more than 300 scientific papers, many of them in Science, Scientific American and other leading journals, and his career included teaching and research positions at the University of Maine, Brookhaven National Laboratory, Yale University and the Marine Biological Laboratory.
But he was an activist at heart who was not afraid to leverage credible scientific findings to influence public attitudes and policy. He was at the center of the national campaign to end atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons in the 1960s and the effort to ban DDT and other dangerous farm chemicals in the 1970s.
Dr. Woodwell also was among the first scientists to recognize the threats to nature and human life associated with rising levels of carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. In 1972, he convened a conference, Carbon and the Biosphere, at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island that was attended by 50 internationally recognized climatologists, oceanographers and biologists. It was the first international gathering ever held on what is now called climate change.
In 1979, Dr. Woodwell was one of four scientists asked by the Carter administration to prepare a report on the ecological effects of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. The group delivered its prescient assessment to James Gustave Speth, at the time the chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality. “Its contents were alarming,” Mr. Speth wrote in his 2004 book, “Red Sky at Morning.” “The report predicted ‘a warming that will probably be conspicuous within the next 20 years,’ and it called for early action.”
In June 1988, as a severe drought gripped the Great Plains and the Midwest, Dr. Woodwell appeared before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee with three other scientists, including James E. Hansen, then the director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, to warn that it was 99 percent certain that the buildup of carbon dioxide and other artificial gases in the atmosphere was already responsible for warming the earth — and could be catastrophic.
“I said the same things then that I say today,” Dr. Woodwell said in a 2007 interview with The New York Times. “The climatic disruption has the potential of changing the earth as much as a nuclear war will. We’re fortunate that nuclear war is a possibility. Climatic disruption is real.”
By then, Dr. Woodwell’s reputation for drawing such formidable conclusions from his research was well-established.
As a young ecologist at Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1964, he published an article in the journal Science that described how DDT persisted for years in the soils of heavily sprayed forests. In 1967, he published separate articles in Science and in Scientific American that reported on how DDT accumulated in the food web of an estuary at the east end of Long Island’s South Bay.
The three articles are regarded as milestones in the national campaign that led to the federal ban on DDT in 1972. The findings also were essential to the legal and public interest campaign that Dr. Woodwell and Victor Yannacone Jr., a young Long Island lawyer, were waging in Suffolk County Superior Court in New York to challenge the county’s program of spraying DDT to control mosquitoes.
The scientific data prompted a state judge in 1966 to issue an injunction that barred the spraying, the first court-ordered ban of its kind in the United States. Dr. Woodwell, Mr. Yannacone and two other leaders of the campaign followed the court order with an equally momentous decision in 1967 to start the Environmental Defense Fund, an entirely new kind of nonprofit advocacy organization that was staffed by lawyers and led by a board of scientists.
“We signed the incorporation papers in my office in Brookhaven,” Dr. Woodwell said in the 2007 interview. “We knew what we were doing. We knew this put power in the hands of scientists that scientists never had before.”
In 1985, Dr. Woodwell founded his own organization, initially called the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts before being renamed the Woodwell Climate Research Center in 2020. He stepped down as president and director in 2005, maintaining his ties to the organization as its director emeritus.
George Masters Woodwell was born on Oct. 23, 1928, in Cambridge, Mass., the only son and oldest of two children of Philip and Virginia (Sellers) Woodwell, educators who taught in the Boston public school system. The family owned a 140-acre farm in York, Maine, where George spent much of his childhood summers. He credited his time at the farm with instilling in him a love for the land, forests and nature.
He earned a degree in botany from Dartmouth College in 1950, following a family tradition of Dartmouth graduates that started with both of his grandfathers and continued with his own father. He served for three years in the U.S. Navy and then attended Duke University, where he completed his graduate studies in 1958.
Dr. Woodwell became a sought-after mentor to the activists, researchers and lawyers who built modern environmentalism. Exceptionally generous with his time, he actively participated on the boards of regional, state and national organizations that served every wing of the American environmental movement.
In 1970, Mr. Speth was among a group of young Yale-educated lawyers who recruited Dr. Woodwell to serve as a founding board member of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Dr. Woodwell also helped Mr. Speth in 1982 found the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based global environmental research institution.
Dr. Woodwell was chairman of the World Wildlife Fund’s board of directors and chairman of the Ruth Mott Fund, a Midwest foundation active in supporting grass-roots environmental groups, and he was a board member of Living on Earth, a weekly National Public Radio program that explored environmental issues.
He became a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1990. He was the recipient of numerous honors, including the 1996 Heinz Environmental Award, the John H. Chafee Excellence in Environmental Affairs Award of 2000 and the Volvo Environment Prize of 2001.
Dr. Woodwell is survived by his wife, Katharine; four children, Caroline, Marjorie, Jane, and John Woodwell; and four grandchildren.
Alex Traub contributed reporting.
