Tom's Turn: Notes from our Senior Editor

Marc Lappé

May 15, 2005

I had planned to write about the Roadless Rule, but there's plenty of time for that later. Instead I want -- need -- to write about Marc Lappé, a dear friend who succumbed to a brain tumor April 14 at the age of 62.

Marc had a PhD in experimental pathology, and he knew all there was to know about pesticides, herbicides, genetically modified organisms, antibiotics, and a myriad of other scientific subjects -- but that's only a small part of the story. He was hands-down the best storyteller I've ever seen and heard, full of wisdom and compassion and a positively wicked sense of humor.

I met him when he was doing a post-doc at Berkeley in the early 'seventies and teaching a free-university course on ecology and Chinese medicine. His lectures (too dry a term) were packed to overflowing.

I was at Friends of the Earth then and introduced Marc to Dave Brower, FOE's founder and president. The result was a book called Of All Things Most Yielding, with photographs by John Chang McCurdy and Chinese poetry selected and arranged by Marc. During this time, we introduced his then-wife, Frances Moore Lappé, to Dave, who introduced her to Ian and Betty Ballantine of Ballantine Books. The outcome was Diet for a Small Planet.

Marc's first job after the post-doc was at the new Hastings Center for Society, Ethics, and the Life Sciences, a think tank on the Hudson River in New York. Among other things, this threw Marc into the debate over genetic screening and the myriad ethical questions that raises, and then another book, Genetic Politics. After Hastings, Marc was hired to create and run a small Office of Health Law and Values in the California State Department of Health, where he tried to remind everyone that public health is about more than splints and aspirin. He taught at several universities and, in 1992, founded CETOS, the Center for Ethics and Toxics in the tiny coastal town of Gualala on the northern California coast.

Along the way he served once or twice as an expert in Earthjustice lawsuits aimed at stopping the state of California from using herbicides on weeds that grow where children wait for the school bus each morning. He testified countless times before Congress and was an expert witness in dozens more cases.

Marc wrote or edited 14 books and scores of scientific articles, and that will be his tangible legacy, I suppose. But if you never heard him talk, you missed the essence of an extraordinary human being. One more warrior down, and the world is a lesser place.

Tom Turner, Senior Editor
yourturn@earthjustice.org