Gilbert White

Internationally known geographer Gilbert White has been ahead of his time for more than 50 years in his view of people and their relation to the land.

When he studied the Mississippi River Basin for the federal government as a graduate student in the late 1930s, White proposed what was then considered a radical idea: that the best way to avoid the human and economic havoc wreaked by floods is to keep people and buildings out of their paths.

At the time, "People were very attracted by the notion that man could control nature to best serve his needs," he says.  While other planners followed a flood-control policy based on the construction of dams, White questioned the impact of such projects and suggested alternatives.

His doctoral dissertation has since been called the most influential ever written by an American geographer.  "Floods are 'acts of God,' but flood losses are largely acts of man," he wrote in 1942.

"Those of us who work in the profession feel that his study was the birth of what we call flood-plain management today," says Jim Wright, flood-plain manager of the Tennessee Valley Authority in Knoxville.

Today planners tend to look at the landscape the way White does, considering a broad range of alternatives to cope with floods including land-use planning, upstream watershed treatment, flood-proofing buildings, insurance, emergency evacuation, and dams and other structures.

But the professional and personal accomplishments of Gilbert White extend far beyond his study of floods and other natural hazards.  Examining White's career is like retracing the history of modern environmental awareness because he influenced so many of its crucial developments.

Besides being known as the "father of flood-plain management," White has made major contributions to the study of water systems in developing countries, global environmental change, international cooperation, nuclear winter, geography education, and mitigation of natural hazards including earthquakes, hurricanes, and drought.  He was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 1973.

His accomplishments filled two books by the University of Chicago in 1986: one of selected writings by White and the other of essays by distinguished academics on the importance of his work. 

Since his dissertation, White has become a key player in many of the world's biggest environmental developments of the last five decades -- often involving the United Nations and global issues.  He won the Tyler Prize, the world's most prestigious environmental award, the UN's Sasakawa International Environmental Prize, the National Wildlife Federation Conservation Award, and the Vautrin Lud International Prize in Geography for 1992.

But the list continues:

• In the early 1960s and in 1970 he campaigned for a development plan covering the lower Mekong Basin.  Today his efforts are credited with keeping North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia talking about integrated development even after fighting began.
  
• From 1964 to 1970 White chaired the steering committee of the High School Geography Project, a major attempt to improve geography education in the United States that attracted significant attention.
• In 1979 he issued a declaration with Mostafa Tolba, head of the United Nations Environment Programme, suggesting that human activity might cause a change in global climate.  White was then president of the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment (SCOPE), a research group of the International Council of Scientific Unions, which published the first serious book on the subject and sponsored a 1985 conference mobilizing concern about greenhouse gases.
• In 1985 a landmark report on the environmental effects of nuclear war was published, representing the consensus of 300 scientists in 30 countries.  White initiated the study as president of SCOPE and helped draft the report.
• Since 1986 White has chaired a committee of prominent scientists convened by the state of Nevada to review the quality of scientific evaluations of the proposed Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository.  The site is the only location under consideration for the permanent storage of high-level radioactive waste in the United States.

As a member of the Arid Zone Program of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1953, White was part of the first interdisciplinary study aimed at protecting the environment on a global basis.  On that and other committees, he sometimes was the only social scientist involved.

"Gilbert is more apt to know something in a discipline other than one of his own than anyone we know -- except for Kenneth," says sociologist Elise Boulding, making an exception for her famous economist husband.  "This means he brings a perspective to problems that other people don't."

The UN arid lands research was a forerunner to a 1972 conference in Stockholm that was the first to take an integrated look at the world's environmental problems.  Twenty years later that event blossomed into the massive UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio de Janeiro last spring.

White was involved in the Rio conference through the Quakers, illustrating the link throughout his career between his religious beliefs and a commitment to social responsibility.

White's "subject and style are infused with a spirit of strong values and an activist philosophy," write two of his former students, Ian Burton and Robert Kates.  "Underlying his pragmatic social involvement are deeply held views on the sanctity of human life, the stewardship of nature, and the liberating qualities of education and science."

White's great-grandparents were Quakers and he became interested in their beliefs while attending the University of Chicago.  "Their belief in non-violence as a way of life was what attracted me," he says.

His father recommended that his son try ROTC for two years to understand the other point of view while learning more about the Quakers.  White did so, but was not dissuaded.

He was a conscientious objector to military service under the American Friends Service Committee from 1942 to 1946 during World War II.  He helped assist children and refugees in France, was detained by the Nazis for a year in Germany, and later chaired the AFSC from 1963 to 1969.

At the age of 34, White became president of Haverford College, the first college founded by the Quakers.  He served there until 1955 when he returned to the University of Chicago.

As part of a Quaker group in the 1950s, White helped set up informal meetings to help ease Cold War tensions.  The Quakers invited diplomats from east and west to get together at an isolated boarding school in Switzerland for several days in a relaxed, off-the-record forum just to get acquainted.

His skill in bringing together diverse groups of people is often remarked upon.  "I think Gilbert's very quiet demeanor -- the way he conducts himself -- personally has had the greatest impact on me," says Wright of the TVA.  "He just has a dignified, serene presence about him that demands and holds attention."

"The diplomats would come to a Quaker conference because they knew that we didn't have a particular political program to sell to them," White says.  "We had extraordinary results in terms of communications among people."

The conferences turned out to be so successful they have been repeated for years  -- often chaired by White -- and were held prior to preparatory meetings for the Rio conference.  The emphasis in Rio was on getting representatives from the world's leading developed nations together with those from the 77 least developed.

White employed a similar idea at the Natural Hazards Research Applications and Information Center, which he founded at CU-Boulder in 1976.  The center is a national clearinghouse for research on the economic and social costs of natural disasters.

One of its key activities is to host a summer workshop in Boulder where natural hazards researchers and administrators -- the producers and users of scientific information -- can talk.  More than 300 pay their own way to attend the off-the-record event.

The number of people affected by natural hazards is increasing and, consequently, costs are going up.  But, he notes, governments are much better prepared to respond to emergencies caused by natural disasters today than they were 25 years ago.

Serving once again as director of the center while a new director is found, White is contemplating a book about floods and the city of Boulder.  His tentative title is Building the Boulder Disaster, examining the decision in the 1950s to build the Municipal Building in the Boulder Creek flood plain and subsequent decisions.

His current views of the most important environmental issues continue to be noteworthy.

"I think the main issues are recognizing the inherent characteristics of each local landscape and of each community and starting from the landscape up," he says.  "I think the discussion of climate change, even though I was basically involved in getting it started, detracts from consideration of what's happening on the ground, which is the important thing."

That view is clearly in evidence in the work that White considers his most important.  The research was done with his late wife and frequent collaborator, Anne, and David Bradley of the London School of Tropical Hygiene and Medicine.

Until Drawers of Water was published in 1972, no one had closely examined the decisions involved in providing domestic water supplies in developing countries.  It seems an enormous oversight in retrospect: 60 percent of the world's people get their water by going someplace to draw and carry it.

The Whites studied 30 sites in East Africa from downtown Nairobi to remote rural areas of Uganda where women carry all the water consumed for domestic use -- sometimes up to 60 pounds at a time and requiring 20 percent of their time to gather.

The water gathering practices and the amounts used varied widely, and the authors came up with basic information about the costs in time, energy, money, and health that changed government attitudes toward the quantity and quality of water provisions for thousands of people.

"That work has been continued in many, many ways," White says.  "It certainly was the most influential research work I've done in terms of affecting the lives of people."

Gilbert and Anne White formed a "remarkable husband-wife team," says Elise Boulding.  In the late 1980s, when Anne became seriously ill, Gilbert administered a type of chemotherapy so they could travel throughout the world during the last years of her life.

Anne once wrote of her husband:

"What makes him keep at this? I think it is all tied together by his Quaker faith in the ability of humans to marshal their inner resources to deal competently and lovingly with the outer world and with their fellow human beings.

"Then there is the real fun he gets out of the exchange of ideas with others, and the challenge of making real friends, not just coworkers, out of those others.  And not least, there is his innate and humble desire to leave the world a bit better place than he found it."