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Field Notes
An extraordinary ecologist
Eville Gorham honored for lifetime achievement
Through a half-century
career, Eville Gorham’s
probing curiosity has led to
inferences with momentous implications.
What might the connection
between the atmosphere and
lichens imply for Arctic people who
eat reindeer? What does the source
of nutrients in mosses reveal about
the transport of pollutants?
Eville Gorham tracked radioactive fallout to the ends of the earth, where it
had crept into the diet of Arctic peoples. On the basis of such questions and
subsequent investigations,
Gorham, emeritus professor in the
Department of Ecology, Evolution,
and Behavior, won the Society of
Wetland Scientists 2005 Lifetime
Achievement Award—the latest in
a string of honors, including membership
in the National Academy of
Sciences.
G. David Tilman, University
Regents Professor and McKnight
Presidential Endowed Chair in
Ecology, calls Gorham “a true academic,”
who is “very curious, very
questioning, unfettered
by current
dogma.” Says
Gorham, “what
really motivates
me is solving
interesting puzzles
in the natural
world.”
Gorham grew up in
Nova Scotia, “shy
and introspective,”
he once wrote, “a compulsive reader
of anything I could lay my hands
on.” He attended Dalhousie
University in Halifax and earned a
doctorate at University College in
London, where he studied acidification
of woodlands and wetlands
in England’s Lake District. He
arrived at the University of
Minnesota in 1962.
In England, he realized the acidity
in bogs was due to acid rain,
“which I viewed not as an environmental
problem but simply as a
fascinating subject for research.”
Acid rain was known, but Gorham
demonstrated that the atmosphere
transported the pollutants much
farther than anyone imagined.
Gorham also discovered lichens
and mosses were concentrating
atmospheric radioactive fallout.
After reading that reindeer were
more radioactive than sheep,
Gorham predicted that the people
of the Arctic, the Inuit and Sami,
would also have high levels of
radioactivity because they consumed
the reindeer and caribou
that ate contaminated lichens.
Subsequent research proved him
right. That research, says Gorham,
was “perhaps the
most fascinating work
I’ve done.”
Such deductions
spring from a wideranging
mind, says
Paul Glaser, senior
research associate at
the University’s
Limnological
Research Center, who
nominated Gorham
for his recent award. “He has
always been a Renaissance-type
scholar with very keen interests in
poetry, literature, history, and the
arts as well as the physical and
natural sciences.”
Gorham retired in 1998, but he
continues to study the atmosphere-
wetland relationship. He and
Clarence Lehman are estimating
the rate and extent that northern
peatlands have trapped carbon—
an estimated 400 billion tons—
since the last ice age. The work
has important implications for
understanding climate change.
Warming might trigger the release
of carbon as carbon dioxide, further
accelerating the greenhouse
effect.
Global warming is the most vexing
problem he’s studied, Gorham
says. “I don’t think we’re going to
control it. I foresee some difficult
times for our grandchildren.”
- Greg Breining
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