Eville Gorham, Hero

To keep your mind off of all the people doing bad things in Washington, here's the story of a person who did good things.

Eville Gorham, who died recently at the age of 94, made two major discoveries about the impact of modernity on the natural world that changed the way "we" did things in the 1960s and ’70s. In doing so, he bought us some time that we are now frittering away while carbon builds up in the atmosphere to dangerous levels (but I digress).

First, he figured out that nuclear testing was infecting the world with radioactivity. While living and working in Britain's Lake District in the early 1960s,

[he was friends] with the local medical officer, who fretted about the effects of a fire at a nearby plutonium plant. Gorham agreed to look into it. He found radiation — lots of it — in sphagnum moss near the plant, but also far from it, suggesting a global source: fallout from nuclear bombs. Nature, arguably the world’s most prestigious scientific journal, published his findings as its lead article.

This led directly to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty in 1963.

Not long after, Gorham "showed that air pollution was drifting to rural areas, loading bogs with sulfuric acid. During the 1970s and ’80s, [he] helped shape public debates around acid rain, testifying before Congress." This finally led to cleaner power plants and the Clean Air Act Amendments of 1990. He is, essentially, the father of acid rain as a global problem.

He came to the University of Minnesota in 1962, where he developed courses on the ecological effects of pollution upon ecosystems.

Gorham retired 22 years ago and spent his time as a naturalist who watched birds and collected  native seeds to spread. He mentored students and wrote poetry. In a paper he co-wrote very late in his life, he said he still had hope that we can do the unimaginable and "learn to manage consciously the entire planetary ecosystem."


I wish I had known about him before now.

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There's lots more info on his Wikipedia page, including how a bloodhound led him indirectly to the nuclear fallout discovery.