Their annual gatherings are the most visible part of an effort to
raise $250,000to support a permanent series of Carroll Wilson Awards.
Constantine Simonides, '57, says the awards are expected to provide
$3,000 to $10,000 annually to several individuals who present imaginative
plans for international travel, study, and research. Howard Johnson,
a friend as well as colleague of Wilson, would like to see the awards
go to young people whose proposals reflect a willingness to launch
themselves "from a standing start" into a totally new intellectual
frame of reference - a mode of action absolutely typical of Wilson.
Linchpin for The
Limits to Growth.
Wilson, whose varied
career included being the first general manager of the Atomic Energy
Commission (AEC), joined the faculty of the Sloan School in1959.
For more than 20 years he used M.I.T. as a base while demonstrating
his skills as an initiator of meetings (both national and international),
a link among policy-makers, an assembler of information, and a molder
of world opinion on major issues such as energy supply, global climate
change, and alternatives to nuclear arms.
Never a traditional
classroom teacher, Wilson involved his students and colleagues in
his world, and many of them say he permanently changed their lives.
Take, for example, the
book The Limits to Growth, published in 1972. It was based
on a very early computer simulation of what would happen if world
population, food production, industry, resource development, and
environmental degradation continue to grow exponentially. The book
put forth the then unthinkable idea that growth itself causes problems
and that it must be deliberately limited.
The chain of events
which led to the book began when Carroll Wilson introduced Jay Forrester,
S.M. '45, head of the System Dynamics Group at M.I.T., to the Club
of Rome - an independent, international forum for the "great issues."
Forrester saw that the problems of growing complexity considered
by the Club of Rome lent themselves to computer modeling. He produced
two models and one of his collaborators produced a third on which
some of Forrester's colleagues based The Limits to Growth.
The book triggered a
storm of controversy by challenging the universal assumption that
economic growth was the optimum scenario for all countries in all
times.
Back at M.I.T., Wilson
organized workshops, conferences, and seminars to explore the issues
raised in this controversial work. One of the people who was inspired
by the book to join Wilson's seminar at Sloan on "Critical Choices
for the Future" was David Gray, a minister who had been studying
finance at the Harvard Business School. Asked four weeks into the
course to write a paper on "How would a sustainable social and economic
system work when my grandchild is as old as I am now," Gray, produced
a "grandchild paper" on a sustainable financial system 40 years
down the road. This was at a time, he says, when "long-range" planning
in the financial community meant looking 18 months into the future.
Wilson's lesson was
that unless we have some concept of a truly good future, we are
at risk of being overwhelmed by what are essentially transition
problems. While "a grandchild paper" seemed like an almost bizarre
exercise in the very early 1970s, Gray remembers, this is now a
recognized technique in policy design, referred to as "normative
scenario planning."
As a teacher, Wilson
never forgot the audience outside the ivyed walls. In 1973, when
asked by a Congressional committee to testify on the range of issues
raised in The Limits to Growth, Wilson wrote back to say
he would be in Europe and unavailable, but help might be forthcoming
from his seminar group in Cambridge. After some negotiation, members
of the seminar agreed to provide 10 briefing papers for 10 days
of testimony. "In 21 days, we wrote a book," Gray recalls.
"Working with Carroll
Wilson was a life-shaping experience," Gray says. He and his wife,
Elizabeth Dodson Gray, run the Bolton Institute for a Sustainable
Future - publishing books, doing environmental projects for government
and industry, and fulfilling a public education role. One of Gray's
colleagues on the briefings to Congress, William Martin, '74, is
now the third-ranking officer of the National Security Council in
Washington. Other colleagues include John Strongman, S.M. '77, now
with the World Bank, and David Korten, now with the Ford Foundation
and the Agency for International Development (AID) in Indonesia.
Working for the Ugandans
or the U.S.?
Following his departure
from the AEC, Wilson had a continuing leadership role with the Washington-based
Council on Foreign Relations, a high-level, private institution
which seeks to understand issues and influence policy. Thus he was
invited on a tour of the newly-emerging countries of Africa in 1959.
The tour coincided with his acceptance of a bid from Mr. Johnson,
who was then dean, to join the faculty of the Sloan School and the
timing proved to be momentous for many of his students at M.I.T.
Wilson had seen in wartime
the remarkable things accomplished by very young people thrust into
positions of great responsibility. He saw in Africa a "talent vacuum"
developing in the operational, middle management ranks of countries
making the transition from colonialism to independence. And then
at M.I.T., he was pressed by his students for some means for independent
involvement in an international setting. Wilson synthesized all
that into the African Fellows Program.
In typical Wilson fashion,
he had the idea, located the funding, and did the leg work - travelling
around Africa lining up jobs for the Fellows. The Fellows were apprenticed
to African leaders on the condition that they be given real responsibility.
As a result, they drafted law codes, negotiated national agreements
with the World Bank, set up national airlines, and generally advised
heads of state, often on issues with which they had no previous
experience. Wilson is said to have considered it the highest compliment
to the program when the U.S. ambassador to Uganda complained that
the African Fellow in Kampala was acting as if he were working for
the Ugandans. "He is," Wilson agreed.
Among former African
fellows, Richard Pigossi, S.M.'65, is vice-president of the Private
Investment Co. for Asia, Jakarta; Michael Roemer, Ph.D. '68, is
head of the Harvard Institute for International Development (now
on a two-year assignment in Kenya); and Carroll Brewster (centerpiece
of an eloquently detailed tribute to the program by John McPhee
in The New Yorker) is president of Hobart and William Smith College.
Constantine Simonides, enlisted by Wilson to help manage the program,
is now vice-president of M.I.T.
The fellows program
was discontinued in the mid-1960s, when the political climate in
Africa became less hospitable to American advisors. But the 80 fellows
(and their wives, whose talents also made them invaluable to African
countries in need of every kind of skill) were welded by shared
experience and elaborately orchestrated annual gatherings with Wilson
into an enduring network which is the back-bone of the Wilson memorial
activities.
Assessments of Global
Problems.
Wilson then turned to
larger issues, pioneering a new format for studying and publicizing
major scientific problems in world development. In 1970, for the
first study, he assembled a multi-disciplinary group that produced,
in one month, Man's Impact on the Global Environment. The study
was an important catalyst of debate within the U.S. on the greenhouse
effect and other major environmental consequences of technology,
including the SST. The following year Wilson brought together 35
atmospheric scientists from 15 countries in Stockholm to produce
Inadvertent Climate Modification: Report of the Study of Man's Impact
on Climate.
Wilson next conceived
of a process for engaging industrial and government leaders (in
contrast to scientists) from many countries in making global assessments.
He demonstrated the process in action during three years of leading
a Workshop on Alternative Energy Strategies (WAES). His format involved
enlisting the very top people in the countries with the most at
stake in energy development (the president of Atlantic Richfield,
for example), getting their commitment to meeting seven or eight
times over the course of the study, requiring them to take on young
"leadership apprentices," and getting the conference report, in
book form, into bookstores in 15 countries within three months of
the study's end. Issued in 1977, the WAES study outlined strategies
to counter what it foresaw as an inevitable oil shortage.
Organization of the
World Coal Study began in 1978, and that Wilson-led effort produced
a report in 1980 entitled "Coal: Bridge to the Future." The essence
of that study's conclusion was that precious oil could be saved
by using coal in ways that were environmentally sound. When Wilson
died of leukemia in 1982, he was ostensibly retired, but in fact
he was fully engaged in another of his classic studies, this time
on conventional weapons as an alternative to the nuclear threat
in NATO countries.
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