Charles Wurster, 92; ‘real giant in modern environmentalism’ battled to ban DDT
Charles Wurster, a scientist whose battle to ban pesticides helped save the bald eagle, the brown pelican, ospreys, and other endangered bird species and led to the founding of the Environmental Defense Fund, one of America’s premier environmental groups, died July 6 at his daughter’s home in Arlington, Va. He was 92.
The cause was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, said his son, Erik, of Brookline.
Trained in organic chemistry and working as a researcher at Dartmouth College, Dr. Wurster began his second career in environmental advocacy in December 1962 with a pen stroke.
At a party, he signed a petition calling on leaders in Hanover, N.H., to stop spraying the pesticide dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane, better known as DDT, because a local conservationist alleged it was killing the town’s birds. Town officials believed DDT was necessary to eliminate beetles that were plaguing the area’s elm trees.
Widely adopted in the 1940s, DDT was generally seen as a miracle product — an insecticide that could wipe out malaria-carrying mosquitoes and other pests, with no obvious harms to humans and animals. It was sprayed around the world and won its inventor, Swiss chemist Paul Müller, a Nobel Prize in 1948.
When town officials shrugged off the petition, Dr. Wurster, his then-wife, and two other Dartmouth colleagues decided to study the spray’s effects.
They counted birds found at sites slated to be sprayed in Hanover in April 1963, then did the same for a control population more than a mile away, across the Connecticut River in Norwich, Vt. — and watched what happened as the town's planned three-day DDT spray went forward.
The study captivated Dartmouth colleagues and students.
“I was in my lab at Dartmouth College when a student brought in a robin that was twitching and convulsing,” he said in a 2015 interview published by the Environmental Defense Fund.
Within several weeks, Dr. Wurster’s laboratory freezer was jammed with 151 dead birds from Hanover and only 10 dead birds from the control group across the river. Through their analysis, the researchers concluded that after days of feeding on contaminated insects, the birds accumulated lethal concentrations of DDT in their brains. They published their findings in Science magazine two years later.
Meanwhile, Hanover’s elm trees continued to suffer from a beetle-born disease. Presented with Dr. Wurster’s findings, Hanover officials in 1964 agreed to replace DDT with a less dangerous insecticide, methoxychlor — a muted achievement, Dr. Wurster thought.
“We had spent two years stopping DDT in one town, while hundreds of other towns continued to use it, a not especially spectacular performance,” he wrote in his 2015 memoir, “DDT Wars: Rescuing Our National Bird, Preventing Cancer, and Creating the Environmental Defense Fund.”
“The whole thing struck me as absurd and tragic. It became a life-changing event for me.”
Ecologist George Woodwell asked Dr. Wurster to join him on New York’s Long Island to fight against the spraying of DDT on the extensive marshes there. Local authorities were using the chemicals to control mosquitoes.
“It was a magnificent paper that he and colleagues wrote showing the difference in bird populations between Dartmouth and the Hanover campus and Norwich,” said Woodwell, who went on to found the Woods Hole Research Center in 1985.
Dr. Wurster moved to Long Island and the State University at Stony Brook in 1965. Woodwell credited him with bringing better techniques with him — chromatography, which was new, instead of wet chemical techniques. Chromatography could detect DDT down to the parts per billion, Woodwell said.
The DDT concentrations they found in salt marsh organisms were “astonishingly high,” said Woodwell.
Yet, DDT also had ample defenders who argued that Dr. Wurster and his colleagues were alarmist. The commissioner of a mosquito control board on Long Island ate the pesticide in public in an attempt to demonstrate its safety.
In the end, Dr. Wurster and his colleagues found that osprey populations were collapsing by 80 percent to 90 percent. After he wrote a letter to the editor of a local paper about the problem, a lawyer contacted him, and he and a small group of scientists prepared to file a lawsuit to protect the environment, considered a radical approach at the time.
The lawsuit worked, and the local commission stopped spraying DDT.
“We began to think that marrying science and law to defend the environment in court was a good strategy,” Dr. Wurster said in the 2015 EDF interview, adding that the courts had not been used for environmental protection before.
That led to 10 scientists and lawyers gathering at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York to form the Environmental Defense Fund in 1967, the same year the United States declared the bald eagle, America’s national bird, an endangered species.
The group opened an office in Stony Brook, N.Y., with a staff of three. Dr. Wurster would serve on the fund’s board for 55 years.
Dr. Wurster was a “real giant in modern environmentalism,” said Elena Conis, a historian at the University of California Berkeley who profiled his efforts in “How to Sell a Poison,” her 2022 history of DDT. Conis said Dr. Wurster laid the groundwork for the modern environmental movement by “putting health at the core” of environmentalists’ work.
As EDF steadily gained attention and acclaim, its leaders broadened their fight to include warnings about the risk of human cancers, citing evidence that DDT caused cancer in test animals. Dr. Wurster — the group’s chief scientist — served as a key spokesperson, dueling with skeptical researchers and taking his case to some of the nation’s highest-profile forums.
“A quarter-century ago, man launched a biological experiment of truly colossal proportions, inadvertently using most of the world’s animals as the experimental organisms,” Dr. Wurster wrote in a 1969 op-ed in The Washington Post. “It is time to end the great experiment with DDT.”
He and his allies ultimately won the argument: The Environmental Protection Agency in 1972 banned most uses of DDT in the United States. Bird species threatened by the pesticide made a comeback; the peregrine falcon was removed from the endangered list in 1999, and the bald eagle was removed from the list in 2007.
And EDF's influence grew, with more than 3 million members and $300 million in annual donations today.
Charles Frederick Wurster Jr., the son of a stockbroker and homemaker, was born in Philadelphia on Aug. 1, 1930, and graduated from nearby Haverford College in 1952. He received a master's degree from the University of Delaware in 1954 and a doctorate from Stanford University in 1957, both in organic chemistry.
He was a Fulbright fellow in Austria in 1957 before taking a job with Monsanto Research Corp. near Boston, where he researched jet fuels and laminating resins before joining Dartmouth in 1962.
Gene Likens was a young professor in the newly formed biological sciences department at Dartmouth at the time. He and Dr. Wurster later served for many years together as board members of the Environmental Defense Fund.
“I was always very impressed by Charlie,” Likens told the Globe. “He was very intelligent, always informed, extremely enthusiastic, and dedicated.”
Likens recalled in the early days the effort to establish scientific credibility around the harms of DDT, which caused birds to lay eggs with thinner shells that would get crushed in their nests. “There were lots of deniers,” he remembered. But Dr. Wurster remained “aggressive about how serious he thought the problem was to all kinds of birds, not just robins,” Likens said.
As Dr. Wurster continued his career as a scientist and environmentalist, he was also raising a family. Erik Wurster said in an email that he won “the father lottery.”
“He worked really hard with his career, but he was also really present with the family,” Erik Wurster told the Globe, adding that his father was an avid gardener and would make dinner for the family.
“He was always talking about birds, to the point where the kids are like ‘oh, my god,’” his son said.
Erik Wurster said his father’s scientific contributions were matched by his ability to explain complicated concepts in simple terms, he said.
“That made him a great teacher,” he said.
Dr. Wurster’s marriages to geneticist Doris Sanford and Norwegian diplomat Eva Tank-Nielsen ended in divorce. In addition to his son, he leaves his partner, Marie Gladwish of Seattle; another son, Steven of McCall, Idaho; a daughter, Nina of Arlington, Va.; and four grandchildren.
“He felt really strongly that he wanted to improve the world,” Eric Wurster said. “And environmental advocacy was the most effective way to do that.”