By Cristine Russell
December 14, 2020
GROWING UP in Connecticut and New Jersey, Harvey Brooks Professor of International Science Bill Clark was the classic outdoorsy kid, wading in streams, looking under rocks, and catching critters, preferably snakes. As a Yale college student in the late 1960s—pulled between ecology and political science—he worked on environmental policy in New York City under Mayor John Lindsay and in Washington, D.C., for the federal government of Richard Nixon. In grad school in the 1970s, Clark studied resource management, shinnying up balsam fir trees and using computer modeling to understand how rare but catastrophic insect outbreaks periodically destroyed boreal forests and forest-based jobs in eastern Canada and the United States.