When I arrived at the University campus in the fall of 1990 to do graduate work in the Environmental Studies Program, it was immediately evident that Professor John Baldwin was the environmental “big man” on campus. That was the year he founded the Institute for a Sustainable Environment and began serving as its director. He had just stepped down as head of the Environmental Studies Program, a program he was instrumental in establishing.
The next year, he became president of the North American Association for Environmental Education and went to Rio de Janeiro for the UN Conference on Environment and Development (still one of the great landmark environmental events).
His Introduction to Environmental Studies class was popular among students seeking enlightenment on the state of our natural world. Most students got much more than they bargained for. John’s lectures were often stunning, jaw-dropping and eye-popping, as young minds began to grasp the scope and magnitude of our global environmental crisis.
John was an extraordinary speaker who could bring together vast amounts of information to make a compelling and dynamic performance. He was always accessible and available to meet with students and often followed his students’ progress after graduation, helping them in any way he could. Thankfully, the Oregon Student Public Interest Research Group recognized him with an award for excellence in teaching in 1991.
He studied zoology and wildlife ecology, and as part of his doctoral work he helped to run a reserve for sandhill cranes. One day a station wagon came down the dirt road toward the visitors’ center driven by a man with his two kids. The man rolled down his window and asked John what the purpose of this reserve was. John explained the mission to protect the cranes’ dwindling marsh and wetland habitat. The man asked, “Well what are these cranes good for anyway?” John gave a lengthy explanation about the magnificent sandhill cranes, their limited habitat, their long migrations, the vulnerability of their species and so forth. The man was still perplexed. “But are they good to eat?” he finally asked. John leaned over to him and said, “Are your children good to eat?”
He was a big-picture thinker. No field of study was outside his reach, be it science, philosophy, business or politics. He knew the past and the present and used them to shape the future. He never got lost in the details, but never lost sight of them either. John keynoted many international environmental conferences around the world and accepted virtually every invitation to speak on environmental topics.
John wrote the best early book on environmental planning in 1984, “Environmental Planning and Management,” and co-authored “Corporate Environmental Policy and Government Regulation” in 1994. As an associate professor in Planning, Public Policy and Management, he taught courses on environmental planning and impact analysis, world energy policy and planning, sustainable development, and Oregon’s land use program. He served twice as PPPM department chair.
John’s outspoken intellectual honesty was one of the qualities I appreciated most. Environmental figureheads often get caught up in a “feel-good” version of environmentalism. This version is intended to appeal to a wide audience by telling people what they want to hear: We can solve the world’s environmental problems if we simply switch to recycled stationery or drive smaller cars. But this is fundamentally misleading. At best, these strategies will gain us a few moments to actually address the real problems. As long as human population and consumption keeps expanding, we will continue to push other species off the planet until our ecological support system is completely overwhelmed. John made it clear that the time for action is now.
“Look at your hand!” he would implore of his students. “Your hand is made from dirt. Your body is just a step or two on the food chain from the soil we walk on. You’re a product of the earth.” John was more the pragmatic realist than the sentimentalist or romantic, so I don’t think he was preoccupied with matters of his own death. “Dust to dust” and cycles-of-life were more his philosophy.
John shocked us all by passing away March 7 of an undiagnosed illness. John made a real difference in this world and will always be an inspiration to those who knew him. We will dearly miss his clear voice, brilliant mind and hearty laugh.
Eben Fodor lives in Eugene