Water Resources People and Issues
pollution field. He was a chemist and had been more involved in environmental
policy, which had led to his appointment as executive secretary to the
Environmental Studies
He had just been made executive director of the
new Commission on Natural Resources, which at that time encompassed the
Environmental Studies Board, Agriculture Board, Oceans Board, Radioactive
Waste Board, and Minerals and Energy Board covering the whole, broad,
natural resources area. So he was swamped with work.
When he called me up to ask for my help in finding people to work on this
study for the Rockefeller Commission, I gave him some names of people who
I thought would be competent to serve on the committee. At the end of the
conversation Dick said, "How's everything with you?" And I told him that my
work with the National Water Commission was finished, that I had applied for
federal retirement, and that I was going to do consulting work. Actually, I
already had a few academic things lined up, such as giving a short course out
at Berkeley and some lectures at the University of North Carolina and a few
speeches. But I hadn't given my future much thought because I needed to rest
for a while after the intensive work to close out the commission. I also had a
mountain climbing trip to the Mount
area in British Columbia
scheduled for the latter part of July. And there was still one more hearing, the
hearing with the government agencies on the National Water Commission
report scheduled for July 17th. A few days after that I was planning to leave
for Mount
So when Dick asked me if I would come to the National Academy of Sciences
to handle the water quality study, I responded negatively. I told him I was too
weary to take on that kind of a job. Dick persisted and said he would talk to me
again when I got back from the climbing trip.
It was a great outing with a group from the mountaineering club at the State
University of Iowa. But after a lapse of several years during which I hadn't
done much climbing, the mountains seemed to have gotten a lot higher than
when I was in my 30s and 40s and doing a lot of climbing. We were camped
at about 6,000 feet at the northeast side of Mount
We had to walk in
about 16 miles to get there, the peak went up to over 12,500 and was full of
glaciers on that side. To climb
the easiest way you had to kind of
circle around the mountain to ascend the peak from the south and it was a
day trip. All of the other peaks in the vicinity were about 10,500 feet or more,
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