WILLIAM T. GOLDEN
2001 HONOREE
William T. Golden is an architect and designer of the first order, but unlike others, who might sketch skyscrapers or shape clay, he has helped build the sturdy edifice that is American scientific research and helped preserve the natural world that science strives to understand.
Whether in his efforts to make the American Museum of Natural History a peerless center for research and education, or his work to ensure that American presidents have the best scientific advice, a critical need now more than ever, he has always championed the pursuit and free flow of knowledge.
And just over the Hudson, draping the hills of Cornwall, the thriving 3,600 acres of the Black Rock Forest form a living tribute to his seemingly magical ability to act as a catalyst for good acts, to elicit generosity from those who might otherwise have sought only profit.
His curiosity and creativity have never ebbed, only flowed. In a poem on quasars, quoted recently by my colleague Dennis Overbye in a profile in the Times, Bill Golden wrote: "Nothing's sure but Lady Luck's encrypted program…"
It's a nice line, but in fact most of what he has accomplished in life owes little to luck, and much to his own zest for a life devoted not to doing well, but to doing good.
Sometimes, he has seemed a bit like the Woody Allen character Zelig, who appears mysteriously in photographs taken at just about every momentous turn of history. But unlike Zelig, who was a quirky apparition, Bill Golden has shaped momentous events while craftily staying just out of the photographer's viewfinder.
For all these reasons and more, he is a fitting recipient of the Russel Wright Award for 2001.
Andrew C. Revkin
Environment Reporter The New York Times