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Margaret Mead

uber 1 thin:  https://webbrain.com/brainpage/brain/6950F840-FB80-FCB0-D505-8AB1FA685F08#-117

MM pal of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Houston

she freaked out Sununu and Larouche

[global cooling, Sagan...] Sununu had suspected that the greenhouse effect belonged to this nefarious cabal since 1975, when the anthropologist Margaret Mead convened a symposium on the subject at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “Unless the peoples of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices,” Mead wrote, “the whole planet may become endangered.”

Her conclusions were stark, immediate and absent the caveats that hobbled the scientific literature. Or as Sununu saw it, she showed her hand: “Never before have the governing bodies of the world been faced with decisions so far-reaching,” Mead wrote. “It is inevitable that there will be a clash between those concerned with immediate problems and those who concern themselves with long-term consequences.”When Mead talked about “far-reaching” decisions and “long-term consequences,” Sununu heard the marching of jackboots.

https:/:{/larouche:(style="background-color:#ffcc66;"):}:pub.com/other/2007/sci_techs/3423init_warming_hoax.html

:{June 8,:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}::{ 2007 :(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}::{issue:(style="background-color:#ffffff;"):}: of Executive Intelligence Review.

1975 `Endangered Atmosphere'

Conference: Where the

Global Warming Hoax Was Born

by Marjorie Mazel Hecht

[PDF version of this article]

"Global Warming" is, and always was, a policy for genocidal reduction of the world's population. The preposterous claim that human-produced carbon dioxide will broil the Earth, melt the ice caps, and destroy human life, came out of a 1975 conference in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina, organized by the influential anthropologist Margaret Mead, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), in 1974.

Mead—whose 1928 book on the sex life of South Pacific Islanders was later found to be afraud—recruited like-minded anti-population hoaxsters to the cause: Sow enough fear of man-caused climate change to force global cutbacks in industrial activity and halt Third World development.Mead's leading recruits at the 1975 conference were climate-scare artistStephen Schneider, population-freak biologist George Woodwell, and the current AAAS president John Holdren—all three of them disciples of malthusian fanaticPaul Ehrlich, author ofThe Population Bomb.[1] Guided by luminaries like these, conference discussion focussed on the absurd choice of either feeding people or "saving the environment."

Mead began organizing for her conference, "The Atmosphere: Endangered and Endangering," shortly after she had attended the United Nations Population Conferencein Bucharest, Romania, in August 1974. She had already bullied American scientists with her malthusian view that people were imperiling the environment. She wrote in a 1974 Science magazine editorial that the Population Conference had settled this question:

:{At Bucharest it was affirmed that continuing, unrestricted worldwide population growth can negate any socioeconomic gains and fatally imperil the environment.... The earlier extreme views that social and economic justice alone can somehow offset population increase and that the mere provision of contraception can sufficiently reduce population—were defeated.[2]

}:

The North Carolina conference, which took place Oct. 26-29, 1975, was co-sponsored by two agencies of the U.S. National Institutes of Health: the John E. Fogarty International Center for Advanced Study in the Health Sciences and the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. (Mead had been a Scholar in Residence at the Fogarty Center in 1973.)

It was at this government-sponsoredconference, 32 years ago, that virtually every scare scenario in today's climate hoax took root. Scientists were charged with coming up with the "science" to back up the scares, so that definitive action could be taken by policy-makers.

Global cooling—the coming of an ice age—had been in the headlines in the 1970s, but it could not easily be used to sell genocide by getting the citizens of industrial nations to cut back on consumption. Something more drastic and more personal was needed.

Eugenics and the Paradigm Shift

Mead's population-control policy was firmly based in the post-Hitler eugenics movement, which took on the more palatable names of "conservation" and "environmentalism" in the post-World War II period. As Julian Huxley, the vice president of Britain's Eugenics Society (1937-44), had announced in 1946, "even though it is quite true that radical eugenic policy will be for many years politically and psychologically impossible, it will be important for UNESCO to see that the eugenic problem is examined with the greatest care and that the public mind is informed of the issues at stake so that much that now is unthinkable may at least become thinkable." Huxley was then director-general of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).

By the 1970s, the paradigm shift that obliterated the optimistic development policies of Franklin Roosevelt and of Dwight Eisenhower's "Atoms for Peace" program, was in full swing. The Club of Rome's Limits to Growth, which removed the role of scientific advances, was drummed into the public consciousness. Nuclear energy, in particular, was under attack, because of its promise of virtually unlimited cheap energy to support a growing population. In the guise of protecting the world from potential terrorism, theNuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty prohibited developing countries from acquiring civilian nuclear technologies.

In the United States, where nuclear plant construction was poised for takeoff, the dream of a nuclear-powered economy was under ferocious attack from the top down. The real "Dr. Strangelove," RAND nuclear strategist Albert Wohlstetter, counseled U.S. Presidents on his strategy for winning a nuclear war, at the same time that he advocated an end to civilian nuclear energy. In one report after another, "experts" paid by the Ford Foundation, among others, argued that nuclear power was not economical, not safe, and just plain no good. Thus was scientific optimism ushered out.

The rock-sex-drugs counterculture of the '68ers lapped it up. Man was seen as just another animal, but an exceedingly greedy one, using up Mother Nature's resources and making a mess in the process. Theunique cognitive ability of the human being, with its power to create new resources, to develop more advanced science and technology, and thus to provide better living standards was trashed.[3] Scientific pessimism invaded the scientific organizations.

Mead played a central role in this degeneration, from her obsession with spreading the"free love"message, to her participation in mind-control projects (the Cybernetics group at MIT) with her third husband, Gregory Bateson, intellectual author of the infamous MK-Ultra drug-brainwashing program.

The Endangered Atmosphere?

Mead's keynote to the 1975 climate conference set the agenda: Mankind had advanced over the years to have international laws governing the sea and the land; now was the time for a "Law of the Atmosphere." It was a naked solicitation of lying formulations to justify an end to human scientific and industrial progress.

Mead stated:

Unless the peoples of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices—to drill a well, open a road, build a large airplane, make a nuclear test, install a liquid fast breeder reactor, release chemicals which diffuse throughout the atmosphere, or discharge waste in concentrated amounts into the sea—the whole planet may become endangered....

At this conference we are proposing that, before there is a corresponding attempt to develop a "law of the air," the scientific community advise the United Nations (and individual, powerful nation states or aggregations of weaker states) and attempt to arrive at some overview of what is presently known about hazards to the atmosphere from manmade interventions, and how scientific knowledge coupled with intelligent social action can protect the peoples of the world from dangerous and preventable interference with the atmosphere upon which all life depends....

What we need from scientists are estimates, presented with sufficient conservatism and plausibility but at the same time as free as possible from internal disagreements that can be exploited by political interests, that will allow us to start building a system of artificial but effective warnings, warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee before the hurricane, pile up a larger store of nuts before a severe winter, or of caterpillars who respond to impending climatic changes by growing thicker coats [sic].

Mead deplored the fact that some scientists might be so cautious to "protect their reputations" that they would not act. She described this as the "modern equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns." As for the thinking population, she deplored "those who react against prophets of doom, believing that there is not adequate scientific basis for their melanchology prophecies, [for they] tend to become in turn prophets of paradisiacal impossiblities, guaranteed utopias of technological bliss, or benign interventions on behalf of mankind that are none the less irrational just because they are couched as 'rational.' They express a kind of faith in the built-in human instinct for survival, or a faith in some magical technological panacea."

What Scientists Need To 'Invent'

Here's what Mead wanted the atmospheric scientists to do:

What we need to invent—as responsible scientists—are ways in which farsightedness can become a habit of the citizenry of the diverse peoples of this planet. This, of course, poses a set of technical problems for social scientists, but they are helpless without a highly articulate and responsible expression of position on the part of natural scientists. Only if natural scientists can develop ways of making their statements on the present state of danger credible to each other can we hope to make them credible (and understandable) to social scientists, politicians, and the citizenry.

:{...I have asked a group of atmospheric specialists to meet here to consider how the very real threats to humankind and life on this planet can be stated with crediblity and persuasiveness before the present society of nations begins to enact laws of the air, or plan for 'international environmental impact statements.' "

}:

Throughout her presentation, Mead stressed the need for consensus, an end-product free from any troubling "internal scientific controversies" that might "blur the need for action."

Mead and her co-organizer William W. Kellogg (a climate scientist from RAND and later NCAR, the National Center for Atmospheric Research), edited a report on the proceedings of the conference into a little book published a year later.[4] (The Mead-Kellogg team also came up, in 1976, with the idea that carbon dioxide emissions should be controlled "by assigning polluting rights to each nation"[5]—an early version of the cap-and-trade program of Al Gore.)

The conference proceedings identify the presenters and the rapporteurs for the sessions, but there is no list of all the participants. Some discord is reported in the audience (more than is "allowed" today in climate change circles!), and Margaret Mead steps in to push for "consensus." The editors note in their initial comment on the proceedings, "... we believe that we have captured something very close to consensus."

Mead's Propagandist Scientists

A few of the 1975 conference presenters stand out today as leading spokesmen for global warming:

  • Climate scientist Stephen Schneider, who was promoting the global cooling scare scenario in the 1970s, made himself notorious by telling Discover magazine in 1989: "To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios,make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest."[6]

Schneider has been one of the most visible and voluble scientist-lobbyists for global warming, testifying to Congress, playing a prominent role in the Interngovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and setting the standards by which it presents its opinions to the public without any hint of uncertainty. At Stanford University he has trained new generations of climate scare clones. He is also a close friend of The Population Bomb's Paul Ehrlich and wife, Anne Ehrlich, both at Stanford, whose anti-population philosophy he fully shares. He and Paul Ehrlich co-authored articles on the "limited carrying capacity" of the Earth, and challenged population advocate Julian Simon with a bet on how fast man would exhaust certain resources.

  • John Holdren, another Ehrlich collaborator at Stanford, is now a Harvard-based energy specialist, and the president of the AAAS. Holdren has co-authored several articles and books with Paul Ehrlich, elaborating on their formula (I = PAT) that the impact of an increase in population and consumption (affluence), although modified by technology, is degrading the environment. Therefore, population growth should stop. Their underlying assumption, like Mead's, was that technology cannot solve the problems created by "limitless" population growth. (Ehrlich's view, in fact, is that the United States can sustain only 150 million people; there are now 302 million of us.)

In December 2006, Holdren shepherded a radical global warming resolution through the AAAS board of directors, which was announced at the organization's annual meeting in February 2007, the first ever of such resolutions.[7] Its conclusions, the AAAS stated, "reflect the scientific consensus represented by, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change...."

Holdren is one of a small group of anti-nuclear "nuclear experts" who push technological apartheid—the doctrine that poorer nations cannot be allowed to gain knowledge of nuclear science.

  • Dr. George Woodwell, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and a Fellow of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, is a global warming fanatic whose stated beliefs indicate that he abhors human beings in general, and whose zealousness in this cause leads him to bend the truth. Woodwell works closely with John Holdren at the Woods Hole Research Center, which Woodwell founded and of which Holden is a director.

To get the flavor of Woodwell's views: In a 1996 interview, he proclaimed: "We had an empty world that substantially ran itself as a biophysical system, and now that we have filled it up with people, and the sum of human endeavors which is large enough to affect global systems, it no longer works properly."[8] He attributes climatic changes and warming to "the crowding of people into virtually every corner of the Earth." "How will his plan for a 50 percent cut in [carbon dioxide] emissions happen?" the interviewer asks. Woodwell says it will require "a concerted effort on the part of the scientific and scholarly community; the public will have to be sufficiently enraged...." He stresses that the scientific community is going to have to exert pressure on the government to act.

Woodwell's 1989 article on global warming in Scientific American was illustrated with a drawing that showed seawater lapping at the steps of the White House.

Another example of his "bending" the truth: During the environmentalist campaign against DDT, Woodwell wrote a technical article for Science magazine in 1967 purporting to show that there were 13 pounds of DDT per acre of soil. He neglected to mention, however, that he measured the soil at the spot where the DDT spray trucks washed down! This detail came out in the official EPA hearings on DDT in 1972, but neither Woodwell nor Science magazine issued a retraction.[9]

  • Dr. James Lovelock is best known as the inventor (in the 1970s) of the Gaia thesis, which views the Earth as a whole as a living biological being. Lovelock's worry about global warming has led him to make dire predictions about what will happen: "Before this century is over, billions of us will die, and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable," according to one of his scenarios.[10]

But unlike the three other scientists above, who attended the 1975 Mead conference, Lovelock has called for nuclear power to slow the disaster that he warns is coming. Again, unlike the three others, Lovelock sees mankind as a "resource" for the planet, its "heart and mind."

During the 1975 Mead conference, Lovelock occasionally pooh-poohed some of the more hysterical suggested disasters of man-made warming. In a discussion on ozone depletion, for example, Lovelock strongly criticized the National Academy of Sciences report of the coming danger of skin cancers from increased ultraviolet radiation. "To speak of ultraviolet radiation as analogous to nuclear radiation is most misleading," he said.

(During this discussion, the report of the proceedings says, Mead called for a " 'ceasefire' in an attempt to avoid a premature polarization of the participants." Referring to the uncertainty of potential effects, she stated, "The time interval required before we begin to see clear evidence of a particular manmade effect on the enviromment may be long compared to the time in which society has to act.... A decision by policy-makers not to act in the absence of scientific information or expertise is itself a policy decision, and for scientists there is no possibility for inaction, except to stop being scientists.")

'Anticipating' Global Warming

Mead's co-editor of the proceedings, climatologist William Kellogg, notes that "the main purpose of this conference is to anticipate the call that will be made on scientists and leaders of government regarding the need to protect the atmospheric environment before these calls are made."

Kellogg outlines the difficulties of computer modelling of climate change and man's role because of the nonlinearities involved in climate, but he concludes that climate models "are really the only tools we have to determine such things." He then states,

The important point to bear in mind is that mankind surely has already affected the climate of vast regions, and quite possibly of the entire earth, and that its ever escalating population and demand for energy and food will produce larger changes in the years ahead.

Kellogg reviews the potential global warming disaster scenarios, which are actually what then became the scientific research agenda for the next 30 years. He himself had put forward arguments that therelease of the energy necessary to support a "large, affluent world population could possibly warm up the earth excessively."

The issues Kellogg laid out are all too familiar today: warming that will melt "the Arctic Ocean ice pack and the ice sheets of Greenland and the Antarctic." "What will happen to the mean sea level and the coastal cities around the world?" Kellogg asks.

Increased carbon dioxide was high on the list of man-related climate change disasters. It was admitted that there might be other factors involved, but,

It is concluded that, in cases where the societal risk is great, one should therefore act as if the unaccounted-for effects had been included, since we have no way of dismissing the very possibility that the calculated effect will prevail.

In the Conference summary of recommendations, Kellogg's thrust is repeated: Scientists and policy-makers must act now on man-caused climate change. "To ignore the possibility of such changes is, in effect, a decision not to act."

John Holdren repeated this idea: "How close are we to the danger point?" of ecological collapse, he asked. But then he went on to say that it doesn't matter, because we need to act now. He stated:

We already have reached the scale of human intervention that rivals the scale of natural processes.... Furthermore, many of these forms of intervention will lead to observable adverse effects only after time lags, measured in years, decades, or even centuries. By the time the character of the damage is obvious, remedial action will be difficult or impossible. Some kinds of adverse effects may be practically irreversible....

Should We Feed People?

One of the most telling discussions concerned the view of man as just another species competing for resources. The report of the summary session of the first day of the conference stated "that we as a species are trying to maintain ourselves at the expense of other species; there seems to be a conflict between preserving nature and feeding the rapidly increasing population. Is our major objective really to feed the population, or do we realize we cannot continue to feed the world at any price? Where do we strike a balance between preserving nature and feeding the world?"

Stephen Schneider's presentation, "Climatic Variability and Its Impact on Food Production," sounds the alarm:

There is a further fear that mankind's industrial and energy production activities may affect the climate and lead to enhanced probabilities of extreme vaiability. Thus the food-climate crisis could be very near-term and of major significance.... The smallest impact, and one we have already seen, is the triggering of higher prices for food by crop failures in one nation, such as the USSR in 1972, which had to be made up by North America.... Simultaneous crop failures in North America and the USSR could lead to even higher prices and widespread starvation throughout the world. Some estimates predict that upwards of 100 million people in developing countries could starve, while the more affluent countries would be just inconvenienced by a significant crop failure in North America.

As a gauge of the immorality of the conference participants, Schneider felt compelled to assert that "national energy and food policies must start with the assumption that population control by mass starvation or nuclear war is untenable"!

grn blk death BS:

Like the other presenters at the conference, and the global warming faction today, Schneider fails to see how curbs on science and industry will kill people by preventing the economic development that permits a higher relative potential population density. Advances in science and technology are mentioned, but usually in the context of better energy savers and conservation, not in allowing more people to be supported at a better standard of living on a given amount of land.

Woodwell's presentation, "The Impact of Enviromental Change on Human Ecology," is even more alarmist. He writes:

:{A careful analysis of the extent to which the earth's net primary production is being used directly in support of man leads to the conclusion that, at present, as much as 50 percent of the net production is being used in support of human food supplies.... The fact that the toxic effects of human activities are spreading worldwide and reducing the structure of the biota is an indication that human activities at present exceed the capacity of the biosphere for repairing itself.

}:

The Noösphere to the Rescue

Thirty-two years after this 1975 conference, the world's population, its science and technology, and its industry are dangerously in the grasp of Margaret Mead's minions, including those on the IPCC. A good part of the population is scared, as planned, by the potential effects of human-caused global warming. They are ready to react, as Mead demanded, to "warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee before the hurricane," and in the process tear down the very institutions and technologies that can obviate the perceived "limits to growth."

In the intervening 32 years, most of our scientific institutions have been taken over by an anti-science ideology, typified by the views of a Stephen Schneider or a John Holdren.How can there be a science when the mind and its capacity for creativity is denied, when man is put equal to beast, and when man's advancements are perceived as ruining the pristine confines of alimitedworld? Such pessimism is a formula for a "no future" world.

The question remains, will the reservoir of sanity, in particular in today's youth, who did not live through thegreenwashing [?!]of the 1970s and 1980s, be able to force reality—climate reality and financial reality—on the rest of the population? Will the Noösphere, man's creative ability to change the Biosphere, prevail?

  • * *

[1] The Population Bomb, published in 1968, was a campus bestseller among the 1968er generation. Ehrlich employs the repeatedly discredited argument of the British East India Company's Parson Thomas Malthus (1766-1834) that population increases geometrically while food supply increases only arithmetically. Malthus was proved wrong in his own lifetime by the development of fertilizers and scientific farming, and repeatedly thereafter by the application of successive advances in mechanization, chemistry, and biochemistry to agriculture.

Describing the spirit of "gloom and misanthropy" into which the English population had fallen following the dashing of their hopes for progress in the French Revolution, Malthus's opponent Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote: "Inquiries into moral and political science, have become little else than vain attempts to revive exploded superstitions, or sophisms like those of Mr. Malthus." (Author's introduction to "The Revolt of Islam," 1818.)

[2] Margaret Mead, "World Population: World Responsibility," Science, Sept. 27, 1974 (editorial), Vol. 185, No. 4157. The only opposition to the Rockefeller/Club of Rome policy presented at the Bucharest conference came from Helga Zepp-LaRouche.

[3] See, for example, "The New Environmentalist Eugenics," by Rob Ainsworth, EIR, March 30, 2007.

[4] The Atmosphere: Endangered and Endangering, Margaret Mead, Ph.D. and William W. Kellogg, Ph.D., eds. Fogarty International Center Proceedings No. 39, 1976 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, DHEW Publication No. [NIH] 77-1065).

[5] Cited in P.C. Sinha, Atmospheric Pollution and Climate Change (Anmol Publications PVT, 1998).

[6] Schneider made this statement in an interview with Discover magagzine, October 1989.

[7] The text of the shamefully unscientific AAAS resolution, which closely follows Mead's 1975 prescription, reads in part: "The scientific evidence is clear: global climate change caused by human activities is occurring now, and it is a growing threat to society. Accumulating data from across the globe reveal a wide array of effects: rapidly melting glaciers, destabilization of major ice sheets, increases in extreme weather, rising sea level, shifts in species ranges, and more. The pace of change and the evidence of harm have increased markedly over the last five years. The time to control greenhouse gas emissions is now.

"The atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, a critical greenhouse gas, is higher than it has been for at least 650,000 years. The average temperature of the Earth is heading for levels not experienced for millions of years.... As expected, intensification of droughts, heat waves, floods, wildfires, and severe storms is occurring, with a mounting toll on vulnerable ecosystems and societies. These events are early warning signs of even more devastating damage to come, some of which will be irreversible.

"Delaying action to address climate change will increase the environmental and societal consequences as well as the costs.... Developing clean energy technologies will provide economic opportunities and ensure future energy supplies.

"The growing torrent of information presents a clear message: we are already experiencing global climate change. It is time to muster the political will for concerted action. Stronger leadership at all levels is needed. The time is now. We must rise to the challenge. We owe this to future generations."

[8] http://www.annonline.com/interviews/961217/

[9] Woodwell's original article is "DDT Residues in an East Coast Estuary: A Case of Biological Concentration of a Persistent Insecticide," Science, May 12, 1967, pp. 821-824. His admission that there was only 1 pound of DDT found per acre appears in the transcript of the EPA's 1972 hearings on DDT, p. 7,232. He also managed to measure DDT in the forests at a site near an airstrip where crop-dusting airplanes tested and calibrated their DDT spraying equipment.

[10] Woodwell's commentary in the *Independent*, Jan. 16, 2006, summarizes his views.

During the late 1940s at the beginning of the Cold War, Mead was employed by the right-wing think tank RAND corporation to research and report on various aspects of Russian culture, particularly Russians' attitudes toward authority.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margaret_Mead

Margaret Mead (December 16, 1901 – November 15, 1978) was an American cultural anthropologist who featured frequently as an author and speaker in the mass media during the 1960s and 1970s.[1] She earned her bachelor's degree at Barnard College in New York City and her MA and PhD degrees from Columbia University. Mead served as President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1975.[2]

Mead was a communicator of anthropology in modern American and Western culture and was often controversial as an academic.[3] Her reports detailing the attitudes towards sex in South Pacific and Southeast Asian traditional cultures influenced the 1960s sexual revolution.[4] She was a proponent of broadening sexual conventions within the context of Western cultural traditions.

Birth, early family life, and education

Margaret Mead, the first of five children, was born in Philadelphia, but raised in nearby Doylestown, Pennsylvania. Herfather, Edward Sherwood Mead, was a professor of finance at the**Wharton School**of the University of Pennsylvania, and her mother, Emily (née Fogg) Mead,[5] was a sociologist who studied Italian immigrants.[6] Her sister Katharine (1906–1907) died at the age of nine months. This was a traumatic event for Mead, who had named the girl, and thoughts of her lost sister permeated her daydreams for many years.[7]

Her family moved frequently, so her early education was directed by her grandmother until, at age 11, she was enrolled by her family at Buckingham Friends School in Lahaska, Pennsylvania.[8] Her family owned the Longland farm from 1912 to 1926.[9] Born into a family of various religious outlooks, she searched for a form of religion that gave an expression of the faith that she had been formally acquainted with, Christianity.[10] In doing so, she found the rituals of the Episcopal Church to fit the expression of religion she was seeking.[10] Mead studied one year, 1919, at DePauw University, then transferred to Barnard College where she found anthropology mired in "the stupid underbrush of nineteenth century arguments."[11]

Mead earned her bachelor's degree from Barnard in 1923, then began studying with professor Franz Boas and Ruth Benedict at Columbia University, earning her master's degree in 1924.[12] Mead set out in 1925 to do fieldwork in Samoa.[13] In 1926, she joined the American Museum of Natural History, New York City, as assistant curator.[14] She received her PhD from Columbia University in 1929.[15]

Personal life

Before departing for Samoa, Mead had a short affair with the linguist Edward Sapir, a close friend of her instructor Ruth Benedict. But Sapir's conservative ideas about marriage and the woman's role were unacceptable to Mead, and as Mead left to do field work in Samoa the two separated permanently. Mead received news of Sapir's remarriage while living in Samoa, where, on a beach, she later burned their correspondence.[16]

Mead was married three times. After a six-year engagement,[17] she married her first husband (1923–1928) American Luther Cressman, a theology student at the time who eventually became an anthropologist. Between 1925 and 1926 she was in Samoa returning wherefrom on the boat she met Reo Fortune, a New Zealander headed to Cambridge, England, to study psychology.[18] They were married in 1928, after Mead's divorce from Cressman. Mead dismissively characterized her union with her first husband as "my student marriage" in her 1972 autobiography Blackberry Winter, a sobriquet with which Cressman took vigorous issue. Mead's third and longest-lasting marriage (1936–1950) was to the British anthropologist Gregory Bateson,with whom she had a daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, who would also become an anthropologist.

Mead's pediatrician was Benjamin Spock,[1] whose subsequent writings on child rearing incorporated some of Mead's own practices and beliefs acquired from her ethnological field observations which she shared with him; in particular, breastfeeding on the baby's demand rather than a schedule.[19] She readily acknowledged that Gregory Bateson was the husband she loved the most. She was devastated when he left her, and she remained his loving friend ever after, keeping his photograph by her bedside wherever she traveled, including beside her hospital deathbed.[7] :428

She spent her last years in a close personal and professional collaboration with anthropologist Rhoda Metraux, with whom she lived from 1955 until her death in 1978. Letters between the two published in 2006 with the permission of Mead's daughter[21] clearly express a romantic relationship.[22]Mead also had an exceptionally close relationship with Ruth Benedict, one of her instructors. In her memoir about her parents, With a Daughter's Eye, Mary Catherine Bateson implies that the relationship between Benedict and Mead was partly sexual.[20]:117–118 Mead never openly identified herself as lesbian or bisexual. In her writings, she proposed that it is to be expected that an individual's sexual orientation may evolve throughout life.[20]

Mead had two sisters and a brother, Elizabeth, Priscilla, and Richard. Elizabeth Mead (1909–1983), an artist and teacher, married cartoonist William Steig, and Priscilla Mead (1911–1959) married author Leo Rosten.[23] Mead's brother, Richard, was a professor. Mead was also the aunt of Jeremy Steig.[24]

Career and later life

Following Ruth Benedict's example, Mead focused her research on problems of child rearing, personality, and culture.[27] She served as president of the Society for Applied Anthropology in 1950[28] and of the American Anthropological Association in 1960. In the mid-1960s, Mead joined forces with communications theorist Rudolf Modley, jointly establishing an organization called Glyphs Inc., whose goal was to create a universal graphic symbol language to be understood by any members of culture, no matter how primitive.[29] In the 1960s, Mead served as the Vice President of the New York Academy of Sciences.[30] She held various positions in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, notably president in 1975 and chair of the executive committee of the board of directors in 1976.[31] She was a recognizable figure in academia, usually wearing a distinctive cape and carrying a walking-stick.[1]During World War II, Mead served as executive secretary of the National Research Council's Committee on Food Habits. She served as curator of ethnology at the American Museum of Natural History from 1946 to 1969. She was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1948.[25] She taught at The New School and Columbia University, where she was an adjunct professor from 1954 to 1978 and was a professor of anthropology and chair of the Division of Social Sciences at Fordham University's Lincoln Center campus from 1968 to 1970, founding their anthropology department. In 1970, she joined the faculty of the University of Rhode Island as a Distinguished Professor of Sociology and Anthropology.[26]

Mead was featured on two record albums published by Folkways Records. The first, released in 1959, An Interview With Margaret Mead, explored the topics of morals and anthropology. In 1971, she was included in a compilation of talks by prominent women, But the Women Rose, Vol.2: Voices of Women in American History.[32]

She is credited with the term "semiotics", making it a noun.[33]

In later life, Mead was a mentor to many young anthropologists and sociologists, including Jean Houston.[7]:370–371

In 1976, Mead was a key participant at UN Habitat I, the first UN forum on human settlements.

Mead died of pancreatic cancer on November 15, 1978, and is buried at Trinity Episcopal Church Cemetery, Buckingham, Pennsylvania.[34]

Work

Coming of Age in Samoa (1928)

Main article: Coming of Age in Samoa

Courtesy, modesty, good manners, conformity to definite ethical standards are universal, but what constitutes courtesy, modesty, very good manners, and definite ethical standards is not universal. It is instructive to know that standards differ in the most unexpected ways.[35]In the foreword to Coming of Age in Samoa, Mead's advisor, Franz Boas, wrote of its significance:

...

Despite its feminist roots, Mead's work on women and men was also criticized by Betty Friedan on the basis that it contributes to infantilizing women.[53]

Other research areas

In 1926, there was much debate about race and intelligence. Mead felt the methodologies involved in the experimental psychology research supporting arguments of racial superiority in intelligence were substantially flawed. In "The Methodology of Racial Testing: Its Significance for Sociology" Mead proposes that there are three problems with testing for racial differences in intelligence. First, there are concerns with the ability to validly equate one's test score with what Mead refers to as racial admixture or how much Negro or Indian blood an individual possesses. She also considers whether this information is relevant when interpreting IQ scores. Mead remarks that a genealogical method could be considered valid if it could be "subjected to extensive verification". In addition, the experiment would need a steady control group to establish whether racial admixture was actually affecting intelligence scores. Next, Mead argues that it is difficult to measure the effect that social status has on the results of a person's intelligence test. By this she meant that environment (i.e., family structure, socioeconomic status, exposure to language) has too much influence on an individual to attribute inferior scores solely to a physical characteristic such as race. Lastly, Mead adds that language barriers sometimes create the biggest problem of all. Similarly, Stephen J. Gould finds three main problems with intelligence testing, in his 1981 book The Mismeasure of Man, that relate to Mead's view of the problem of determining whether there are indeed racial differences in intelligence.[54][55]

In 1929 Mead and Fortune visited Manus, now the northern-most province of Papua New Guinea, travelling there by boat from Rabaul. She amply describes her stay there in her autobiography and it is mentioned in her 1984 biography by Jane Howard. On Manus she studied the Manus people of the south coast village of Peri. "Over the next five decades Mead would come back oftener to Peri than to any other field site of her career.[56]

Mead has been credited with persuading the American Jewish Committee to sponsor a project to study European Jewish villages, shtetls, in which a team of researchers would conduct mass interviews with Jewish immigrants living in New York City. The resulting book, widely cited for decades, allegedly created the Jewish mother stereotype, a mother intensely loving but controlling to the point of smothering, and engendering guilt in her children through the suffering she professed to undertake for their sakes.[57]

Mead worked for the RAND Corporation,a U.S. Air Force military funded private research organization, from 1948 to 1950 to study Russian culture and attitudes toward authority.[58]

Controversy

As an Anglican Christian, Mead played a considerable part in the drafting of the 1979 American Episcopal Book of Common Prayer.[7]:347–348

After her death, Mead's Samoan research was criticized by anthropologist Derek Freeman, who published a book that argued against many of Mead's conclusions.[59] Freeman argued that Mead had misunderstood Samoan culture when she argued that Samoan culture did not place many restrictions on youths' sexual explorations. Freeman argued instead that Samoan culture prized female chastity and virginity and that Mead had been misled by her female Samoan informants. Freeman's critique was met with a considerable backlash and harsh criticism from the anthropology community, whereas it was received enthusiastically by communities of scientists who believed that sexual mores were more or less universal across cultures.[60][61] Some anthropologists who studied Samoan culture argued in favor of Freeman's findings and contradicted those of Mead, whereas others argued that Freeman's work did not invalidate Mead's work because Samoan culture had been changed by the integration of Christianity in the decades between Mead's and Freeman's fieldwork periods.[62] While Mead was careful to shield the identity of all her subjects for confidentiality Freeman was able to find and interview one of her original participants, and Freeman reported that she admitted to having wilfully misled Mead. She said that she and her friends were having fun with Mead and telling her stories.[63]

On the whole, anthropologists have rejected the notion that Mead's conclusions rested on the validity of a single interview with a single person, finding instead that Mead based her conclusions on the sum of her observations and interviews during her time in Samoa, and that the status of the single interview did not falsify her work.[64] Some anthropologists have however maintained that even though Freeman's critique was invalid, Mead's study was not sufficiently scientifically rigorous to support the conclusions she drew.[65]

In her 2015 book Galileo's Middle Finger, Alice Dreger argues that Freeman's accusations were unfounded and misleading. A detailed review of the controversy by Paul Shankman, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 2009, supports the contention that Mead's research was essentially correct, and concludes that Freeman cherry-picked his data and misrepresented both Mead and Samoan culture.[66][67][68]

Legacy

In 1976, Mead was inducted into the National Women's Hall of Fame.[69]

On January 19, 1979, President Jimmy Carter announced that he was awarding the Presidential Medal of Freedom posthumously to Mead. UN Ambassador Andrew Young presented the award to Mead's daughter at a special program honoring Mead's contributions, sponsored by the American Museum of Natural History, where she spent many years of her career. The citation read:[70]

Margaret Mead was both a student of civilization and an exemplar of it. To a public of millions, she brought the central insight of cultural anthropology: that varying cultural patterns express an underlying human unity. She mastered her discipline, but she also transcended it. Intrepid, independent, plain spoken, fearless, she remains a model for the young and a teacher from whom all may learn.

In 1979, the Supersisters trading card set was produced and distributed; one of the cards featured Mead's name and picture.[71]

The 2014 novel Euphoria[72] by Lily King is a fictionalized account of Mead's love/marital relationships with fellow anthropologists Reo Fortune and Gregory Bateson in pre-WWII New Guinea.[73]

In addition, there are several schools named after Mead in the United States: a junior high school in Elk Grove Village, Illinois,[74] an elementary school in Sammamish, Washington[75] and another in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York.[76]

The USPS issued a stamp of face value 32¢ on May 28, 1998, as part of the Celebrate the Century stamp sheet series.[77]

In the 1967 musical Hair, her name is given to a tranvestite 'tourist' disturbing the show with the song 'My Conviction'.[78]

Publications by Mead

https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.132143/2015.132143.The-Atmosphere-Endangered-And-Endangering_djvu.txt

THE ATMOSPHERE: 
Endangered and Endangering 

William W. Kellogg, Ph.D. 

and 

Margaret Mead, Ph.D. 

Scientific Editors 


CASTLE HOUSE PUBLICATIONS LTD. 

First published in the UK, 1980 
stephen schneider? ncar


Foreword 

When Dr. Margaret Mead was a Visiting Scholar at the Fogarty 
International Center, one of her interests focused on the interactions 
between the world society and its planetary environment. She saw a 
conflict developing, and yet there was surprisingly little public awareness 
of the growing problems and few efforts to develop long-term national 
and international solutions to these problems. She therefore persuaded 
the Fogarty International Center to sponsor a conference on the 
atmospheric environment which would explore the ways to maintain it 
as a healthy place in which to live. 

An organizing committee planned the Conference, and its members 
are listed in these Proceedings. We were fortunate in being able to 
enlist the help of Dr. William W. Kellogg, of the National Center for 
Atmospheric Research, to work with Dr. Mead as co-organizer and 
co-editor of the Proceedings; he is known internationally for his work on 
climate change and mankind’s influence on climate. Four able and 
dedicated rapporteurs were also enlisted, and this report owes its exist\- 
ence largely to their efforts. They are Mr. Anthony Broderick, Doctors 
Richard S. Greeley and J. Dana Thompson, and Ms. Barbara West. ...

Preface 

SOCIETY AND THE ATMOSPHERIC ENVIRONMENT 

We are facing a period when society must make decisions on a plane\- 
tary scale. Tremendous tankers traverse the seas, supersonic transport 
aircraft traverse the skies, and nuclear explosions reverberate around the 
world (both physically and in our consciousness). Whereas in the recent 
past a whole continent could have been submerged, decimated by 
plague, or ravaged by earthquakes and the rest of the world remain 
untouched and unnoticing, today’s natural catastrophes and environ\- 
mental interventions affect the whole of human society — interconnected 
as it is in reality though not yet politically capable of acting in concert. 

As such, manmade interventions depend upon the application of 
science to technology; scientists become doubly responsible, both for 
the immediate uses made of their discoveries and for the well-being of 
their fellow citizens. Whether they be citizens of a free enterprise state, 
a socialist state, a dictatorship, or a hereditary monarchy, they need 
information to make decisions, either for an intelligent choice among 
alternatives or for guidance in carrying out decrees by their ruling 
group. Even in the most arbitrary and authoritarian forms of govern\- 
ment, a comprehension on the part of the leadership and an under\- 
standing on the part of the people are both essential. 
Unless the peoples 
of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term conse\- 
quences of what appear to be small immediate choices — to drill a well, 
open a road, build a large airplane, make a nuclear test, install a liquid 
fast breeder reactor, release chemicals which diffuse throughout the 
atmosphere, or discharge waste in concentrated amounts into the sea — 
the whole planet may become endangered. [WICKED PROBLEM]

The decisionmakers of the world are beginning to\- understand many 
of these issues, but they are trapped in immediacy — how to relieve 
immediate hunger, how to gain a quick agricultural yield, how to 
acquire oil at the cheapest rate, how to dispose of waste in some manner 
that does not entail rebuilding a city or an expense that the existing 
tax structure will not bear, how to prohibit some form of manufacture 
that is proving hazardous without creating more depression in already 
depressed industries. Never before have the governing bodies of the 
world been faced with decisions so far reaching in their immediate 

[1 Prefaces are conventionally written last, as an introduction to the written word. 
In this case, however, the Preface was written before the Conference and, together 
with the material by William W. Kellogg in Part 6, served as a position paper to 
keynote the theme and purpose of the Conference. ]

P. xvu 

consequences and so potentially disastrous and momentous in their 
long-term consequences. It is inevitable that there will be a clash 
between those concerned with immediate problems and those who 
concern themselves with long-term consequences, such as the next 15 
years (perhaps) for the victims of certain kinds of chemical industrial 
processes, the next 25 years for genetic damage to show up in the off\- 
spring of today’s school children, the next 25 years for the widespread 
loss of agricultural lands in the tropics, the next 25 to 50 years for 
possible climatic change, and the next 100 years for the strangulation 
of our human settlements which have been permitted to aggregate with\- 
out reference to the condition of the soil, the water, and the air. 

For many thousands of years there have been those who have thought 
in terms of preserving arable and resource land, shorelines, and streams; 
and ever since human beings began to live in settled communities and 
to cultivate the land the question of frontiers and the ownership of 
streams and offshore waters has been a matter for political decisions — 
and of the willingness of men to defend their land for the safety and 
future of their families, and of aggressors to attempt to add to what they 
possessed by inroads on the possessions of others. 

The question of the freedom of the seas came much later, and society 
now faces new relationships between attempts to dominate the sea lanes 
and attempts to preserve the open oceans as a heritage of all mankind. 
The Law of the Sea has been essentially the law of the strongest, with 
a detente established only when there were many nations who benefited 
by international regulations concerning ports and the prevention of 
interference with ships at sea. [commons, tragedy?] SUPRA-NAT'L GLOBAL

One has, however, only to follow the discussions of the last few 
years in the United Nations conferences on the Law of the Sea to see 
how long-term and short-term political aims conflict, how an interest 
in the right of navies to sail through straits conflicts with a nation's 
attempts to protect and exploit its offshore resources of irreplaceable 
physical resources — oil and minerals — anil its replaceable but danger\- 
ously depletable biological resources — fish. Rapid about-faces in na\- 
tional policies, conflicts between different economic interests, and the 
lack of scientific knowledge about the resources of the oceans or the 
way in which toxic substances are distributed have all played their part 
in the relative impotence of the Caracas, Vienna, and New York con\- 
ferences on the Law of the Sea. 

At this Conference we are proposing that, before there is a corre\- 
sponding attempt to develop a “law of the air," the scientific commu\- 
nity advise the United Nations (and individual, powerful nation states or 
aggregations weaker states) and attempt to arrive at some overview of 
what is presently known about hazards to the atmosphere from manmade 
interventions, and how scientific knowledge coupled with intelligent 
xviii 

social action can protect the peoples of the world from dangerous and 
preventable interference with the atmosphere upon which all life de\- 
pends. We also need warnings about what is not known, and about the 
probability of bad harvests which will alert the nations to build food 
banks, and about the probability of earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, 
typhoons, and floods which will be sufficient to persuade them to stop 
building whole cities on sites where earthquakes and other natural dis\- 
asters are predictable — even if there is a long and uncertain timespan 
between such events. 

Human beings are endowed individually with an extraordinary 
ability to forget pain, and this capacity has made human continuance 
tolerable. When this individual capacity was extended to the community 
level, so that whole village populations returned to their former sites 
after a devastation, it may also have been beneficial if they had no other 
choice than to survive by extreme attachment to a locale and continua\- 
tion of their traditional way of life. Today, however, this refusal to 
face the reality of natural disasters and the insistence on denying the 
probability of their reoccurrence have become definite hindrances to 
survival. 

What we need from scientists are estimates, presented with sufficient 
conservatism and plausibility but at the same time as free as possible 
from internal disagreements that can be exploited by political interests, 
that will allow us to start building a system of artificial but effective 
warnings, warnings which will parallel the instincts of animals who flee 
before the hurricane, pile up a larger store of nuts before a severe 
winter, or of caterpillars who respond to impending climatic changes 
by growing thicker coats. 

Human beings need protection as much as other animals, but they 
have no built-in ways of protecting themselves against the nexus between 
their great artificial human settlements, their worldwide system of in\- 
tercommunication, and the enormous size of their interventions. As they 
harness atomic fission and invent electronic controls, miniaturization, 
computers, satellites, etc., which have woven the previously dispersed 
and unconnected populations of the planet into a single, interconnected, 
mutually dependent and totally-at-hazard single group, there is an ur\- 
gent need for new manmade inventions by which the scientific knowl\- 
edge which has made the new kind of society possible can interact with 
forms of political decisionmaking to make that single planetary com\- 
munity less vulnerable and more viable. 

At the center of this problem lie the relationships between scientists, 
technologists, human scientists, and political decisionmakers. Inevitably, 
different political interests will seize upon disagreements among scientists 
to buttress their own interests and to discredit scientific advice. Scien\- 
tists themselves may value making a fine point against a rival more than 

xix 

the possible consequences of the intra-scientific battle; or be extremely 
cautious so as to protect their reputations — among scientists— which is 
a modern equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns or dancing on the 
eve of the Battle of Waterloo; or they may simply despair of ever con\- 
necting effectively the nature of science, with its built-in requirement 
for validation by other scientists, into the political decisionmaking 
bureaucracies of the world. Very often scientists are content to blame 
either the politicians or the technologists who "exploit’' the findings of 
"pure science,” rather than making an effort to warn against the dan\- 
gers of such shortsightedness and immediate exploitation. 

There is as yet hardly any "law of the air" to parallel the age-old 
agreements about war and peace, ownership and trespass on land, access 
to streams and shores, and the more recent conventions governing the 
lugh seas. Most of the legal efforts to prevent pollution of the lower at\- 
mosphere have been localized in cities, or limited to state or provincial 
legislative efforts. Attempts to protect the atmosphere as a whole, with 
the recognition of the inevitable and unpreventable interconnectedness 
of all the peoples and all life itself upon the same earth-encircling at\- 
mosphere, are in their infancy. 

It was not, however, accidental that Sweden, itself not only highly 
industrialized hut also exposed to pollution from the Soviet Union, the 
United Kingdom, and West Germany, should have taken the initiative 
in convening an international conference on the protection of the en\- 
vironment. (An account of this is in Part 5.) This example demonstrates 
that we need a sober, cautious, credible statement of the extent to which 
pollutants, originating in one place on the planet, may affect neighbor\- 
ing peoples or all the peoples of a given region, or possibly even affect 
the life-carrying capacity of the total environment. 

Only by making clear how physically interdependent are the people 
of all nations can we relate measures taken by one nation to measures 
taken by another in a way that will draw on the necessary capacities for 
sacrifice, dedication, and farsightedness of which human beings — as a 
group — have proved capable. We have witnessed their willingness to die 
if necessary and to suffer every sort of hardship to protect their chil\- 
dren's future in their home countries. It is therefore the statement of 
major possibilities of danger which may overtake humankind — or all 
life on the planet — within the life span of those who are already born 
on which it is important to concentrate attention. The old impulse to 
deny danger (past or future), to continue to build our villages "on the 
side of the volcano,” persists in the attitudes of the peoples of the world 
and in their leaders who seek support, compliance, and reelection. If 
irresponsible scientific controversies provide encouragement for these 
impulses, there is little hope of providing the future protection that is 
needed. 

XX 

Another human impulse which we must attempt to overcome is the 
willingness to ignore danger when unidentified populations are at risk [EJ?]. 
There are a multitude of examples of this, such as our calm acceptance 
of tens of thousands of anonymous auto deaths each year contrasted with 
our unwillingness to contemplate the loss of a single astronaut. The 
question is how far we can continue calmly to accept the present degra\- 
dation of parts of our environment and the resultant suffering and loss 
of human life, wherever it may be. 
There are, however, signs of a new 
awareness of populations in danger and an unwillingness to accept 
threats to the health of workers in chemical plants, for example, or to 
abandon people in hurricane-ravaged communities or starving nomads 
of the Sahel. Our ethic and our sense of responsibility are steadily 
widening from a concern with our own children and those of our neigh\- 
bors to the children of other nations and to the peoples of the planet, 
but we have a long way to go before w r e can demonstrate that we are 
willing to act vigorously when nameless throngs are endangered. 

It is important to realize that there is a human tendency to exaggerate 
a point in the heat of a debate and to overstate one’s case in order to 
win an argument. Thus, those who react against prophets of doom, be\- 
lieving that there is not adequate scientific basis for their melancholy 
prophecies, tend to become in turn prophets of paradisiacal impossibili\- 
ties, guaranteed utopias of technological bliss, or benign interventions 
on behalf of mankind that are none the less irrational just because they 
are couched as “rational.” They express a kind of faith in the built-in 
human instinct for survival, or a faith in some magical technological 
panacea. 

What we need to invent — as responsible scientists — are ways in which 
farsightedness can become a habit of the citizenry' of the diverse peoples 
of this planet. This, of course, poses a set of technical problems for so\- 
cial scientists, but they are helpless without a highly articulate and re\- 
sponsible expression of position on the part of natural scientists. Only 
if natural scientists can develop ways of making their statements on the 
present state of danger credible to each other can w r e hope to make them 
credible (and understandable) to social scientists, politicians, and the 
citizenry. 

This Conference is one step in that direction. As a human scientist 
concerned with institution-building for a newly interdependent plane\- 
tary community, I have asked a group of atmospheric specialists to meet 
here to consider how' the very real threats to humankind and life on this 
planet can be stated with credibility and persuasiveness before the pres\- 
ent society of nations begins to enact law's of the air, or plan for “inter\- 
national environmental impact statements,” or develop nationalistic 
barriers against intrusion on their “air space,” or declare themselves in\- 

xxi 

dependent of the consequences which their activities — with possible re\- 
gional or global impact — may have on members of other nation states. 

We have the experience of thousands of years of "international law” 
and its predecessors dealing with the land and several hundred years of 
the Law of the Sea behind us as precedents. However, we now have a 
totally new situation. Instead of dealing with a limited domain— for 
example, land on which two men cannot build their houses simultane\- 
ously or plant their crops, or areas of the seas in which fishing fleets 
compete — we now confront a domain that must either be shared and 
responsibly protected by all people or all people will suffer. The atmos\- 
phere is, in a sense, the ultimate international commons. To the extent 
that planetary hazards can be spelled out, we also have an unprecedented 
opportunity to provide a basis for wider responsibility than the world 
has ever known, evolved from a chaotic history that witnessed empires 
that crumbled and aggregations of mutually incompatible ethnic groups 
that united only to split apart again. 

Those members of the Conference who are concerned with manmade 
mechanisms such as international law and city planning, or the develop\- 
ment of new instruments such as environmental impact statements, civil 
aviation agreements, Earth Watch (ERTS), World Weather Watch, 
meteorological satellites, food banks, space exploration, and so forth, will 
be primarily asking questions, familiar as they are with the kind of ar\- 
guments which are at present being pressed by the many sides of every 
controversy involving the impact of new technologies. 
The specialists in 
the atmospheric sciences and the technologies dealing with the impact 
of mankind’s activities on the global atmosphere, on the air over cities, 
on the waters of the deep seas, and on the upper atmosphere will be 
seeking agreement on estimates of effects, couched in probabilistic terms, 
which can be presented so that internal scientific controversies cannot 
be used to blur the need for action — action either toward more adven\- 
turous interventions such as with earth satellites, or more watchfulness 
such as with ERTS, or more caution in the use of manmade chemical 
compounds or the harnessing of nuclear power. 

We hope to arrive at a concise and persuasive statement directed spe\- 
cifically to problems of the atmosphere, anticipating and providing for 
scientific cooperation in the decisionmaking of the immediate future 
but having an effect on the far future. 


New York, 1975 


Margaret Mead

losing earth , sununu eg see wm reilly

Sununu had suspected that the greenhouse effect belonged to this nefarious cabal since 1975, when the anthropologistMargaret Meadconvened a symposium on the subject at the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences. “Unless the peoples of the world can begin to understand the immense and long-term consequences of what appear to be small immediate choices,” Mead wrote, “the whole planet may become endangered.” Her conclusions were stark, immediate and absent the caveats that hobbled the scientific literature. Or as Sununu saw it, she showed her hand: “Never before have the governing bodies of the world been faced with decisions so far-reaching,” Mead wrote. “It is inevitable that there will be a clash between those concerned with immediate problems and those who concern themselves with long-term consequences.” When Mead talked about “far-reaching” decisions and “long-term consequences,” Sununu heard the marching of jackboots.

In April, the director of theO.M.B., Richard Darman, a close ally of Sununu’s, mentioned that the NASA scientist James Hansen, who had forced the issue of global warming onto the national agenda the previous summer, was going to testify again — this time at a hearing called by Al Gore. Darman had the testimony and described it. Sununu was appalled: Hansen’s language seemed extreme, based on scientific arguments that he considered, as he later put it, like “technical garbage.”

While Sununu and Darman reviewed Hansen’s statements, the E.P.A. administrator, William K. Reilly, took a new proposal to the White House. The next meeting of the I.P.C.C.’s working group was scheduled for Geneva the following month, in May; it was the perfect occasion, Reilly argued, to take a stronger stand on climate change. Bush should demand a global treaty to reduce carbon emissions.

Sununu disagreed.It would be foolish, he said, to let the nation stumble into a binding agreement on questionable scientific merits, especially as it would compel some unknown quantity of economic pain.They went back and forth. Reilly didn’t want to cede leadership on the issue to the European powers; after all, the first high-level diplomatic meeting on climate change, to which Reilly was invited, would take place just a few months later in the Netherlands. Statements of caution would make the “environmental president” look like a hypocrite and hurt the United States’ leverage in a negotiation. But Sununu wouldn’t budge. He ordered the American delegates not to make any commitment in Geneva. Very soon after that, someone leaked the exchange to the press.

Sununu, blaming Reilly, was furious. When accounts of his argument with Reilly appeared in The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post ahead of the Geneva I.P.C.C. meeting, they made the White House look as if it didn’t know what it was doing.

A deputy of Jim Baker pulled Reilly aside. He said he had a message from Baker, who had observed Reilly’s infighting with Sununu. “In the long run,” the deputy warned Reilly, “you never beat the White House.”...