Carl Borgmann Archives - All Our Yesterdays

Interview with Martha Crago, daughter of Carl Borgmann

Last week, a post about Carl Borgman’s 1965 commencement address, which informed students at the University of Tennessee about the threat of carbon dioxide build-up leading to climate change, went viral (by AOY standards).

“Climatic Change appears to be underway, in fact.” – the 1965 commencement speech that should have rocked the world.

A couple of days later I had a lovely email from someone who had read it and then set up a very comprehensive Wikipedia page for Carl Borgmann. This person suggested I contact his daughter to see if she would be happy to do an interview. I did, and she was! Here it is.

A little bit about who you are.

I did my bachelor’s degree at McGill University (1964-68). My Master’s degree was an applied degree in Speech-Language Pathologist. After I completed it in 1970, I worked on a variety of special projects and was a lecturer in Communication Sciences and Disorders at McGill University. Later with three children under the age of six, I did a PHD degree in that same department. It concerned language socialization practices with young Inuit children in the homes and schools of Northern Quebec. This was followed by how children learn Inuktitut as well as other language-based studies in other Indigenous communities of Quebec. By the late 1990s I became the Dean of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies at McGill, followed by becoming a Vice President International at the French language Universite de Montreal and then Vice President Research at Dalhousie University and subsequently the same position at McGill University. I am presently on a reduced load pre-retirement Professor at McGill University working on Indigenous community engagement of a large biomedical grant and teaching a course I taught for 20 years and last taught 20 years ago. I have served on numerous scientific project and government Boards in Canada. I have three children and six grand children that give me much pleasure.

2. Any further light you can shed on the commencement address your dad gave – its motivation, its reception, whether it was the first commencement address he gave.

The wonderful thing about your email was that I had never heard of that commencement address nor any of the other speeches he gave at that time that concerned the environment. I also never knew he had honorary degrees. I was by then not living at home since I was an undergraduate student in Montreal at McGill by 1964. I had only known about the commencement addresses he gave at the University of Vermont when I was a young girl in elementary school. I recently found the script for his inaugural address at UVM in some old papers and read it with interest. It did not have a strong environmental flavor to it.

3. Was carbon dioxide buildup something that was mentioned in your house when you were growing up? If not, when and how did you hear about it, as best you remember.

I never remember overhearing any discussion of carbon dioxide and its effect on the atmosphere in my family’s house. There was discussion of many things but not that or else I was not sufficiently interested to pick up on it at the time. In general, my father expressed concern about the environment and on wasteful ways of living. But he was a quiet person at home and rarely spoke of his accomplishments or his work. Most of what I know about his work life, I read in pieces written about him by his workplaces.

4. Did your father ever point back to his commencement address when “the greenhouse effect” was in the news in the 1980s? What was his “take” on the issue in later years?

Again, I do not remember this being a subject of conversation. I remember speaking to him about university administration and its evolution over time when I was a Dean and he was quite elderly. We also discussed some of what he did at the Ford Foundation. When he moved back to Colorado and lived in the foothills outside of Boulder, he spent time trying to protect trees from a spruce beetle infestation in a kind of solo effort to deal with environmental devastation of a stand of trees near his home.

5. Any thoughts or feelings you had on reading the All Our Yesterdays article and/or the Wikipedia page that has been created.

I loved reading about his prescience about environmental issues. This showed me a whole different side of his interests. Once not long ago, I looked to see if he was on Wikipedia and did not find him. Now I can and so can his grandchildren and great grand children who can now read about him. That is a delight for us all and hopefully an inspiration to others.

One last thing about him – he came from a very poor and uneducated family who moved from place to place. At one point he had a high school schoolteacher who realized he had a very spotty knowledge of math. He willingly accepted to stay after school hours so she could give him extra teaching. She discovered he was a very bright boy and taught him, according to the story that he told us, “Everything she knew and more” since she borrowed a book from a library on more advanced math just to be able to teach it to him. She also told him that he should attend a university. He had never heard of such a place. When he told me this story he always said, “I owe my career to that woman.”

6. Anything else you’d like to say

I would just like to thank you a great deal for contacting me and providing me with this wonderful information about a man I emulated and loved.

“Climatic Change appears to be underway, in fact.” – the 1965 commencement speech that should have rocked the world.

Sixty years ago today, on Thursday August 26th 1965, Carl W. Borgmann stood in front of hundreds of young Americans in Knoxville. Borgmann, who was the director of the Ford Foundation’s Science and Engineering programme, was there to deliver the commencement address for the University of Tennessee. He probably gave it little thought, but he was doing something unprecedented – he was using a commencement address to warn young people about the threat of carbon dioxide build-up in the atmosphere.

[Update 31/8/2025 – a comprehensive Wikipedia page has been created about Borgmann, in response to this article. It’s really good]

[Update 1/9/2025 – here’s an interview with Martha Crago, Borgmann’s daughter.]

His speech was given the unwieldy title “A Conversation Ethic. Man’s Use of Science: Some Deferred Costs “ when it appeared the following year in the Massachusetts Audubon Society magazine. He began by explaining what he would not talk about.

“I would rather not deal today with new discoveries in science – not because they are not exciting, for they are, nor because I don’t feel quite comfortable with some of them, which is certainly true, but because another topic seems more urgent to me. Even as I contemplate what man may know through science, I am impelled to ask what he will do with this knowledge – not only with his new scientific discoveries, but with his older ones too, and his ingenious technologies.”

Borgmann laid out many of the challenges – physical, social and moral – facing the United States and the world. Then, two thirds of the way through the speech he said the following startlingly prescient phrases.

“Now consider the burning of fossil fuels. If everyone does it at the average we now have achieved, there will be whole new sets of problems; in fact, many American communities face them presently. What shall we do with the inevitable wastes of our energy-producing processes, with our ash heaps, with the smog of Los Angeles, with the unnatural warming of our rivers?”

Borgmann asks the students to imagine that technology will burn fuels more cleanly, before presenting them with the central dilemma.

“But even if we could afford devices which allowed for our fuels to be completely burned to water and carbon dioxide, another change in our environment is likely. Carbon dioxide, as it becomes a greater proportion of the atmosphere, behaves somewhat like the glass of a greenhouse. It traps heat from the sun, and climatic change results – not overnight, but slowly and surely. This process appears to be already under way, in fact.”

Borgman followed this with a critique of nuclear power – “The preparation of the fuel and the handling and storage of the radioactive waste ash are not without dangers to man and his future.”

Borgmann was sixty at this point. Born in Missouri he had graduated from the University of Colorado in 1927 before working on the technical staff of the Bell Telephones Laboratories and gaining a master’s degree in chemical engineering and a PhD from Cambridge University. He had worked at the universities of North Carolina, Colorado and Nebraska before becoming President of University of Vermont in 1952.

In 1958, Borgmann had started working for the Ford Foundation. His job basically involved handing out money in the form of grants in the resource and environment field.

Borgmann was therefore extremely well equipped to understand the carbon dioxide problem.

Where did he get his information? While carbon dioxide build-up had been covered in both the scientific press, and even by President Lyndon Johnson a few months earlier, by far the most likely source of inspiration for Borgmann’s comments lie with a group that the Ford Foundation helped to fund – the Conservation Foundation.

Established in 1948 the Conservation Foundation had organised some of the pivotal meetings of US academics and policymakers in the 1950s and early sixties around environmental problems.

As Rebecca John reported a year ago, the Conservation Foundation’s March 1963 workshop was pivotal in raising awareness within governmental circles.

“The present liberation of such large amounts of fossil carbon in such a short time is unique in the history of the earth,” the report stated, “and there is no guarantee that past buffering mechanisms are really adequate.”

This rise in atmospheric CO2 was “worldwide,” the summary reported, and, while it did not present an immediate threat, would be significant “to the generations to follow.” The document went on to say, “The consumption of fossil fuels has increased to such a pitch within the last half century, that the total atmospheric consequences are matters of concern for the planet as a whole.” Relief was likely “only through the development of some new source of power.”

Given the Ford Foundation’s ties with the networks of corporate philanthropy and policy-shaping institutions such as the Conservation Foundation, it seems highly likely that a copy of the report landed on his desk.

In all probability, however, this was not the only source Borgmann had. Through the 1950s, and especially around the time of the 1957-8 “International Geophysical Year,” the possibility of modifying the weather and the climate had been much discussed. Carbon dioxide build-up had appeared in cartoons, public education films and on television programmes. The previous year, in August 1964, Popular Mechanics had run a story about the changing air.

Screengrab Popular Mechanics August 1964

A large portion of Borgmann’s speech appeared the following spring, in the magazine of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. From there, it was approvingly cited in an article entitled “The Future Role of the Biologist in Protecting our Natural Resources“ by the biologist Richard Goodwin in the journal Biological Conservation.

In a February 1968 luncheon speech at the New York Waldorf Astoria called “A Challenging Future”, delivered to extractive metallurgists, Borgmann covered similar ground, trying to explain that there were limits to both resources and the planet’s capacity to cope with the consequences of human ingenuity.

Meanwhile, other, more senior figures were beginning to use commencement addresses to warn students of threats in their future. On June 10, 1966 Glenn Seaborg, head of the Atomic Energy Commission warned students at UC San Diego that “at the rate we are currently adding carbon dioxide to our atmosphere (six billion tonnes a year) within the next few decades the heat balance of that atmosphere could be altered enough to produce marked changes in the climate – changes we might have no means of controlling.” Seaborg continued, saying “I, for one, would prefer to continue to travel toward the equator for my warmer weather than run the risk of melting the polar ice and having some of our coastal areas disappear beneath a rising ocean.”

By 1969 students at commencement addresses were proclaiming that “the future is a cruel hoax”

June 1, 1969 – “The Future is a Cruel Hoax” Commencement address

Borgmann was not, of course, responsible for this upsurge in awareness. What is remarkable though, is that the young people to whom he spoke in 1965 would have very little inkling of global atmospheric threats besides the possibility of nuclear war. Four years later, such threats were far more commonplace.

Borgmann closed his 1965 commencement address by invoking the words of Adlai Stevenson, twice Democratic presidential candidate and ambassador to the United Nations, who had died the previous month.

“We travel together, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its vulnerable reserves of air and soil; all committed for our safety to its security and peace; preserved from annihilation only by the care, the work and, I will say, the love we give our fragile craft.”

Borgmann lived a long life. He died in 1998. Three years earlier 1995 the IPCC’s Secod Assessment Report had declared that human impact on the atmosphere was already “discernible.” The year before he died, the Kyoto Protocol was agreed (though the US Senate had already signalled its unwillingness to be part of any global deal).

The warnings of carbon dioxide build-up he had given in 1965, when the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was at only 320 parts per million (it is now 430ppm) had come to pass.

Also on this day

August 26, 1970 The Alkali Inspector’s report…

August 26, 1973 – Sir Kingsley Dunham points out the C02 problem

August 26, 1991 – Norwegian PM says “we cannot delay.”

August 26, 2003 – Australian “plan” to save biodiversity

August 26, 2006 – First “Climate Camp” begins