Lynton K. Caldwell

American political scientist

Lynton Keith Caldwell (November 21, 1913 – August 15, 2006) was an American political scientist and a principal architect of the 1969 National Environmental Policy Act, the first act of its kind in the world. He was educated at the University of Chicago and spent most of his career at Indiana University Bloomington, where he received tenure in 1956 and retired as Arthur F. Bentley Professor Emeritus of Political Science in 1984. Caldwell was the internationally acclaimed author or coauthor of fifteen books and more than 250 scholarly articles, which may be found in at least 19 different languages. He served on many boards and advisory committees, as a consultant on environmental policy issues worldwide, and received numerous honors and awards.

Caldwell was born in Montezuma, Iowa to Lee Lynton and Alberta (Mace) Caldwell, and died in Bloomington, Indiana, at age 92. He earned his undergraduate degree in English at the University of Chicago in 1934, his Master's degree at Harvard in History and Government in 1938, and his doctoral degree in political science at the University of Chicago in 1943. He married Helen A. Walcher on December 21, 1940 and they raised two children. In the course of his career he secured 21 National Science Foundation grants to support his research. During his career, Caldwell served on the faculties of the University of Chicago, Northwestern University, the University of Oklahoma, Syracuse University, and the University of California at Berkeley, and had shorter appointments at some 80 other collegiate institutions both within the U. S. and overseas. At various times, Caldwell served as advisor or consultant to the U. S. Senate, UNESCO, the United Nations, the Departments of Commerce, Energy, Defense, and Interior, and the National Institutes of Health. Although not a natural scientist, as part of his work towards establishing interdisciplinary study in universities and achieving a greater merging of the two worlds of science and public policy, he became deeply involved in national and international environmental affairs and worked closely with several important scientific bodies serving, among many appointments, on the Sea Grant Program of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the first Environmental Advisory Board of the United States Army Corps of Engineers, the Pacific Science Congress, the President’s National Commission on Materials Policy, the Science Advisory Board for the Great Lakes of the International Joint Commission, as chair of the first Commission on Environmental Policy, Law and Administration for the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), and as advisor to the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Program (MAB), and the UNESCO working program for the environmental education and training of engineers. In 1962 his groundbreaking article “Environment: A New Focus for Public Policy?” appeared in Public Administration Review, launching development of a new subfield of environmental policy studies. After 1962, he changed the main focus of his career towards examining policies for protecting the quality of the human environment. In 1972 he was the catalyst for founding the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) at Indiana University, Bloomington. His 1976 article "Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Heritage of American Public Administration" in Public Administration Review was a defining paper in the modern history of public administration. Caldwell is perhaps best known as one of the principal architects of the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA), the first act of its kind in the world, signed into law on January 1, 1970. Much of the impulse for Caldwell's broad approach came from his experience watching flawed international development work while overseas in the 1950s and 1960s. In drafting A National Policy on the Environment in 1968 as consultant to Senator Henry Jackson, the head of the powerful Senate Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, Caldwell realized that more was needed than a mere a policy statement: an “action forcing mechanism” would be necessary to secure federal agency compliance with the Act’s requirements. The origin of the requirement for preparation of an environmental impact statement (EIS) has been attributed to Caldwell, whose testimony at the Senate hearing in April 1969 laid the groundwork for inclusion of provisions requiring an evaluation of the effects of all major federal projects significantly affecting the quality of the human environment. In these “detailed statements,” as they were termed in the Act, all reasonably foreseeable social, economic, and environmental effects of a proposed action and any possible alternatives to it must be identified and assessed before any federal action takes place. NEPA has been emulated, in one form or another, by more than one hundred other countries, and many states have also established “mini NEPAs.”

The many awards Caldwell received included the William E. Mosher Award (1964) and the Marshall E. Dimock Award of the American Society for Public Administration (1981); the John M. Gaus Award from the American Political Science Association; and the National Environmental Quality Award from the Natural Resources Council of America (1997). In 1991, he was named one of the United Nations Environmental Program's (UNEP) Global 500 for distinguished environmental services, and in 1997, he was awarded an honorary LLD from Western Michigan University. In 2001 he was the recipient of Indiana University's Distinguished Service Award. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and an honorary member of the International Association for Impact Assessment. Shortly after his death in 2006, the Caldwell Center for Culture and Ecology was established in Bloomington, IN to provide environmental education for youth and adults.

The administrative theories of Hamilton & Jefferson: Their contribution to thought on public administration. New York: Russell & Russell, 1944. The government and administration of New York. New York: Crowell, 1954. Environment: A challenge for modern society. Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1970. Published for the American Museum of Natural History. In defense of earth: International protection of the biosphere. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1972. Man and his environment: Policy and administration. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Citizens and the environment: Case studies in popular action. With Lynton R. Hayes and Isabel M. MacWhirter. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976. Science and the National Environmental Policy Act: Redirecting policy through procedural reform. University, AL: University of Alabama Press, 1982. US interests and the global environment. Muscatine, IA: Stanley Foundation, 1985. Biocracy: Public policy and the life sciences. Boulder: Westview Press, 1987. Perspectives on ecosystem management for the Great Lakes: A reader. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. Between two worlds: Science, the environmental movement, and policy choice. New York : Cambridge University Press, 1990. International environmental policy: Emergence and dimensions, 2d ed. Durham: Duke University Press, 1990. "Globalizing environmentalism: Threshold of a new phase in international relations. In: American Environmentalism: The U. S. environmental movement, 1970 1990, Riley E. Dunlap and Angela G. Mertig, eds. New York: Taylor & Francis, 1992. Policy for land: Law and ethics. With Karen S. Shrader Frechette. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1993. Environment as a focus for public policy. With Robert V. Bartlett and James N. Gladden. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1995.
International environmental policy: From the twentieth to the twenty first century, 3d ed. With Paul S. Weiland. Durham: Duke University Press, 1996. Environmental policy: Transnational issues and national trends. With Robert V. Bartlett. Westport, CT: Quorum Books, 1997. The National Environmental Policy Act: An agenda for the future. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998.