If a link exists between business, science, and religion, William A. Nitze, AB '64, JD '69, just may have found it.
Nitze, who served as the Environmental Protection Agency's assistant administrator for international activities under the Clinton administration, is immediate past chairman of the Climate Institute—the first U.S. nonprofit organization to focus on the impact of climate change—and also heads the Galapagos Conservancy and the Oceana Energy Company.
A former Mobil Oil Corporation divisional counsel, and later assistant general counsel, he developed a progressive environmental consciousness during a decades-long journey filled with people and events that caused him to rethink his own Western beliefs.
"In Japan," Nitze recalls of his time with Mobil, "I met someone who I still admire, but who is no longer with us: Soichiro Honda, founder of Honda Motors. Mr. Honda never completed high school, but in his way, he knew that God resided in every motorcycle that left his factory."
The son of iconic cold war defense policy architect and Harvard alumnus Paul Nitze, the younger Nitze received his bachelor of arts and law degrees from Harvard, also attending Wadham College at Oxford. An innate desire for public service—readily attributed to his father—gave him incentive to leave Mobil after nearly 14 years to pursue a more tentative future.
"For people working on environmental issues, there isn't an obvious career path," he says in retrospect. But Nitze knew even then that this future would offer him the opportunity to act upon what was truly in his soul: "To do better by doing good."
While still in Japan, Nitze became involved with the Republican party during its search for someone to steer Republicans Abroad Japan. He accepted that role, and soon thereafter assumed the number two spot in the larger Republicans Abroad Asia, which led circuitously to his acceptance of the State Department's offer to become deputy assistant secretary for environment, health and natural resources under the Reagan administration.
Nitze recalls that John Negroponte, assistant secretary for oceans, environment and science, "was a good boss throughout a period that got me passionately committed to environmental issues." In time, and in an effort to tackle the nascent climate change issue internationally, Nitze helped create the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and negotiated other multilateral environmental changes involving trade and endangered species.
While Nitze was a visiting scholar at the Environ mental Law Institute (ELI), elements he described in his ELI monograph, The Greenhouse Effect: Formulating a Convention, were incorporated into the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, ratified in 1992. He went on to teach a course on establishing an international contingency to address climate change at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.
Nitze suggests that, despite the huge strides we've made in modern physics, chemistry, biology and neuroscience, we still don't really comprehend underlying rules and complexities. "Why do we have these complex adaptive systems? There is this reason and order to life," he affirms, adding that if there is a God, "He resides in the laws of physics —but physics in the sense of this wonderful inner order to things."
Nitze recalls the anticipation he felt as a Harvard freshman, standing in line at 6:30 AM after negotiating rows of sleeping bags belonging to students who'd arrived the night before to register for Natural Sciences V, the general education biology course taught by taught by Nobel Prize-winning professor George Wald.
About halfway through the course, Professor Wald, an avowed atheist, declared, "Does anybody in this class believe this could happen without the hand of God!" According to Nitze, "You could have heard a pin drop. It was one of those moments where my view of the universe began to grow."
The incentive to explore the confl uence of science and religion led Nitze and his wife, Ann, to establish the William A. and Ann K. Nitze Fund at Harvard. The fund, supported by the Nitzes' charitable remainder unitrust, provides a lifetime stream of income for the family. By the time the entirety of the fund passes to the Divinity School, Nitze explains, it will be a more signifi cant sum that can be used in an even more fundamental way.
Science has always posed difficult ethical issues, Nitze says, noting that science challenges human myths about "the centrality of ourselves in our world." He believes the invention of artificial intelligence and the subsequent displacement of the human species will catapult us into arenas we've not yet imagined, suggesting the concept of a Kantian dignity being accorded machines which are no longer just machines, but moral entities in themselves.
In his current role as leader of several environmental energy organizations, Nitze helps to develop and execute ideas for a more sustainable energy future, such as harnessing tidal energy—the water equivalent of wind farms—for electricity, and more cost-effective and efficient implementation of the use of solar energy.
He concedes that the "green revolution" in energy isn't easy and requires a good deal of hard work, considering the myriad laws, permits, and precedents that must be negotiated and established. Undeterred, he is strongly committed to facilitating change and, through the William A. and Ann K. Nitze Fund, to making it possible for future generations at Harvard to engage in efforts "to create a unified understanding of the world as a spiritual entity."
—Beth A. Herman