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The duty to hope:
A tribute to Barbara Ward

Brian Johnson

The quiet musical voice was speaking of Carlos Romulo. ‘He saw’, she said, ‘that what makes our time unique in modem history is that the immediate questions and ultimate questions are again bound up together.’ She was walking in her garden at Lodsworth on a dappled summer's day. Although I was there often, and in all seasons, I suppose that it was the gentleness of her wit, her archness in irony and the recurrent bubbling of her laughter that makes me remember this renowned thinker and moralist in a summer frock and in her garden. ‘When I am old and retired’, she would say gaily (she was never either, despite the awful depredations of her long illness), ‘I shall play the Edwardian lady in my shawl and bonnet, snip-snipping away dead-heading my roses, pruning my vines.’ Barbara Ward knew about gardening and loved her flowers.

It was typical of her to qualify the insight of Romulo, to put it into historical context. Barbara had read Modern Greats at Oxford, but she had emerged with a depth of historical perspective that enabled her to see the changes and chances of our kaleidoscopic times in a context. She looked beyond the more extravagant claims and wilder alarums of many environmental writers. The immediate questions and the ultimate questions. Their juxtaposition absorbed most of her waking hours and it was the synthesis of their increasing convergence which made up her life's work.

Barbara Ward is celebrated here as a champion of the environment. Her contribution to environmental care and conservation was the more effective because she came to the environment, as it were, from economics. Indeed, she was generally described as Barbara Ward, the economist, and, as in the Times obituary, ‘an outstanding contributor to economic thought’.

Her contribution to economics evolved in the tough school of journalism. Working with Geoffrey Crowther on The Economist, this young political and economic commentator soon found herself writing the weekly leader of the paper, as its foreign editor. Her speed as an assimilator who could write rapidly and almost without correction from the briefest of notes never left her, even in her long battle with pain and illness when she continued to focus ideas for the international community with The Home of Man (written for the United Nations Habitat Conference of 1976) and her final testament, Progress for a Small Planet, published in 1979.

Supreme skill with the written and the spoken word are rarely mastered by a single brain. But starting with an evangelical message of Fabian socialism – she first impressed the economist, Hans Singer, when he heard this ethereal girl speaking from a Catholic pulpit in Manchester in 1939 – Barbara's verbal powers were soon to be enlisted by the Ministry of Information to carry the message of British resolution on hazardous journeys across the North Sea and German-occupied Norway, and across the Atlantic to the USA.

These were the first of many speaking engagements in the USA. She talked then of England at war and of the British people ‘with a pulse like a cannon’. Already she was amassing that following of US admirers, who stayed with her for the rest of her life, and who stirred her always in her unrelenting struggle with illness. In recent years, with the British economy almost prostrate, beset with troubles, this time of its own making, she recalled those phrases and searched for a returning glimmer of this island's solidarity and spirit.

Barbara blossomed early. By the end of World War II she was a nationally known figure, a favourite member of the BBC's Brains’ Trust, on which she could match the wide knowledge and wit of the redoubtable Professor Joad. By her early thirties, she was already a Governor of the Sadler's Wells Ballet, of the Old Vic and of the BBC.

A SECOND MARSHALL PLAN?

In the hungry, coal-short winter of 1947, that dark time when the USA had withdrawn again across the seas and renewed world war or Communist take-over were daily fears, she wrote The West at Bay. Barbara's theme of that time remained the theme of her life: cooperation across seas, across frontiers and across cultures – cooperation for human renewal and development. Her writing and speaking inspired that small missionary group, led by Paul Hoffman and Oliver Franks, who administered, in Churchill's phrase, ‘the most unsordid act in human history’. The Marshall Plan offered a $13 billion carrot in return for a restoration of multilateralism in European trade and payments. The carrot was skilfully used: in less than four years, prosperity was returning, thanks to the economic cooperation which had replaced bankrupt Europe's resort to siege economics and barter.

As Europe returned to prosperity again, Barbara Ward's voice was among the first proclaiming the responsibilities of the reconstructed West towards the emerging post-colonial world. William Clark, Barbara Ward's successor as President of the International Institute for Environment and Development, remembers talking to her in 1950, when he was about to set out to cover the first Commonwealth Finance Ministers’ meeting to be held in Asia, at Colombo: ‘We must always remember’, she said, ‘that we in Europe and the old Commonwealth are the fortunate minority. We dare not forget the really poor, who are the great majority because prosperity, like peace, is indivisible.’

For the rest of her life, Barbara Ward wanted to repeat the Marshall Plan, the working example of how rich and poor could cooperate for the betterment of both. Only last October, she called again for a second Marshall Plan to help the poorest developing nations.

This belief that the success of the Marshall Plan–the impact of massive funds producing relatively rapid results–could be repeated in poor countries was perhaps Barbara's most widely criticized tenet. Indeed, in many circles of development thinking, it is seen as discredited today. Propositions can, of course, become discredited without ever being tried. But for Barbara, the Marshall aid parallel was never meant to be close. It was not a three-to-five- or even ten-year push that she had in mind. It was a sustained massive financial, social and intellectual drive to remove the abject poverty which, she said, ‘we know we can banish from the world if we have a mind to do so’.

Throughout her life of thinking, writing and speaking, Barbara never lost the sense of outrage at people moaning amid their affluence; of Western nations shrinking from the challenge of healing other lives in the course of widening international prosperity. This moral passion which suffused her life has been seen by some to have blinded her to the myriad pitfalls and sidetracks which face the campaign against poverty: the law's delay, the insolence and corruption of office, the oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely being only a few. We hear as much today of the problems inherent in the transfer of culture and technology – apparently inseparable from one another. Could a massive transfer of resources also be a sophisticated transfer? Could it avoid the pitfalls of only benefiting elites or lining official pockets or encouraging short-cuts which waste and deplete vital resources? More fundamentally, there is the political problem of dependency: Could independent, sustaining development occur under the thrust of a Marshall-aid scale of Western involvement?

THE 1960S: DEVELOPMENT AND POPULATION

Book by book, Barbara Ward addressed all these problems. She had gained first-hand experience of developing countries with her Australian husband, Robert Jackson. Together they worked for six years in Ghana, where he advised Nkrumah on the Volta River project, in India and in Pakistan. When, from 1957, she began to teach at Harvard, she produced a succession of books which refined her thinking and her prescriptions. India and the West in 1961 had marked Barbara Ward as a leading promoter of the concept of the 1960s as ‘a decade of development’. Nationalism and Ideology and Rich Nations and Poor Nations–probably her most influential book – explained the problems of underdevelopment and charted the pitfalls and possibilities of economic assistance programmes. In each case she set her analysis in an historical context and drew on her great range and depth of knowledge for contrast and comparison.

Barbara’s influence at this time, as later, was felt in many quarters and at many levels. It was particularly strong in the USA where she was teaching and lecturing. As a regular participant at Robert Kennedy's Hickory Hill seminars, she met and made a disciple of Robert McNamara who, as President of the World Bank, turned frequently to her for encouragement, inspiration and a deepening friendship.

The evolution of Barbara's ideas in these years was inseparable too from her deeply held religious beliefs. As a Catholic, she was often accused of soft-pedalling on the issue of population control. Indeed, the director of one major US foundation told me once that she was irresponsible in her neglect of this crucial question. But population was another example of how Barbara worked at many levels and always insisted on the wider context. She loathed the prejudice against the poor and despised racial fears which, she believed, motivated many of those that pressed for population control as the unique priority. Her message on population was simple and tirelessly expressed: better living standards and hope in life are the only possible replacement for the welfare state of the large family. Short of compulsion, population control would only be acceptable alongside a rise in family standards of nutrition and health and a consequent fall in infant mortality. ‘This is the vital prerequisite to persuade them to use the contraceptive’, she said. ‘We must help them to lengthen each baby's life.’ Thus Barbara made her counsel clear as a mainstay of the Vatican Pontifical Commission on Justice and Peace while encouraging Robert McNamara to commit the World Bank further to programmes of contraception as a part of mother-and-child welfare.

Barbara was painfully aware of the strain that a world population now double what it was 35 years ago was placing on the world's natural systems. She spoke and wrote of the ecological pressures to come with six, seven, and eight billion people – as she put it, ‘another world on this’. It seems, indeed, that it was partly at least her comprehension of the time that demographic transition must take, even with comprehensive family-planning programmes installed, which moved Barbara to concentrate more and more in the late 1960s on the problems of conserving resources and the ecosystems that support all life. By 1971, a decade after the publication of India and the West, she was at work on her grandest theme: development cooperation that would involve changes in lifestyle and expectation for all people and all nations – the vital changes necessary for ‘the care and maintenance of a small planet’.

THE 1970S: FOCUS ON ENVIRONMENT

The theme and the message of Only one Earth were very much Barbara Ward's own, a logical projection of earlier work. The presentation of the work as ‘the book of the Stockholm Environment Conference’ and its co-authorship with the eminent biologist, René Dubos, combining the insights and prestige of luminaries in the social and the natural sciences, was the idea of a new friend, Maurice Strong, the Canadian Secretary General of ‘The First World Conference on Everything’.

The Stockholm Human Environment Conference provided the intellectual framework and the stage which launched Barbara Ward into the final phase of her career. The idea of a popular book which could set forth in vivid language the intricacies of Stockholm's all-embracing theme was a new one to the United Nations’ system. It was one of Strong's most effective devices for raising the level of participation and popular interest above what could be induced by the documentary word-mills that traditionally supplied United Nations conferences with their facts.

Ward and Dubos embarked upon Only One Earth with Barbara recovering from a major operation for her already familiar enemy, cancer. Then Dubos himself fell ill and Barbara faced the whole burden of producing the manuscript by an ineluctable deadline with translators in three countries poised for their breakneck dash for multiple language editions by the time of the Conference. The strain was extreme, even for someone of Barbara's fortitude. It was here that her training as a journalist proved invaluable. At the Stockholm Conference itself, Barbara added her extraordinary gift as a speaker to a series of lectures by ‘distinguished persons’ and at several of the other less formal and, at times, impromptu events which made up that intellectual carnival in a Swedish midsummer.

THE BIRTH OF THE INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR ENVIRONMENT AND DEVELOPMENT

Barbara's writing of Only One Earth had been supported by members of a small secretariat which formed the staff of a newly founded and US-based institute: the International Institute for Environmental Affairs. They, together with her tiny group at Columbia, which she nicknamed ‘the frog pond's, saw the manuscript through to its completion. This was no mean task. Maurice Strong had arranged that this ‘unofficial report’ to the Conference should be read and vetted by a l52-member ‘committee of correspondents’ (the phrase was Barbara's, mindful of Diderot) who wrote from 58 countries with 400 pages of criticisms and suggestions. Then, when the Conference was over, Robert O Anderson, President of the Atlantic Richfield oil company, and the Founder of IIEA, asked Barbara Ward if she would take on the Institute's Presidency. She demurred. Would she have adequate financial backing over a reasonable time so that she could launch her own purpose-built vehicle, as it were, to convey her ideas at the level at which she could operate? Anderson told her she would. Could she change the style and title of the Institute? She could not head an institute that did not include development in its purpose. For environment alone would have little meaning to two-thirds of humanity if they could not acquire the means to improve their lives and so be able to look beyond today in managing their surroundings. She could. Her final condition, after two decades of sojourn in other lands, was that she could bring the re-founded institute home to Europe, though spanning the Atlantic with a base in both Washington DC and London.

So the International Institute for Environment and Development was born in 1973. It became, in the words of her former colleague, Roland Bird, ‘perhaps her first secular interest’. In the seven years from 1973 to her retirement from the Institute's Presidency in 1980, Barbara built upon the Stockholm formula. Surrounded by a small and increasingly international staff, she was able to convene leaders of widely different – and, indeed, opposed – interests and ideas. As their rapporteur, she steered and presented their conclusions, several steps, as usual, ahead of what governments would countenance at the World Food Conference in Rome (1974) and at the Habitat Conference in Vancouver in 1976.

In the meantime, she launched her staff, chairing groups, gathering facts and statistics, drawing up statements, spurring, enthusing, phrase-making, provoking and counselling at other world conferences and on other topics: the Law of the Sea, the First World Water Conference, the World Conference on Desertification and one on the hazards and potentials of science and technology. The formula was simple: to follow and to build upon the international conference agenda, writing and speaking always with down-to-earth humour and simplicity.

At the same time, Barbara worked to shape the Institute so that it might survive her to continue her work as a technically solid centre for policy analysis and influence. In all of this, she retained the support of Anderson and gathered that of others, not least the institutional child of Stockholm: the UN Environment Programme that sponsored her books and other aspects of the Institute's work as well.

This support enabled her to use the transatlantic reach of the Institute to link and cross-fertilize not only ideas – this was happening anyway through the media and travel – but also the confidence and friendships that precipitate action. To mention even a few such linkages would turn this celebration into a catalogue. A long one too, for pretty soon the links were becoming a network – Barbara was adept at institutional crochet – that spread to many parts of the world. In all these activities of the 1970s there was constant expansion and growth, and at a time when Keynesian assumptions were under challenge and the liberal credo that Barbara had espoused was under attack in the centres from which she and her Bloomsbury and Fabian foundations had drawn their support.

What then of her own political development in a time of conservative challenge and reappraisal? Politics inevitably tend to pigeon-hole people; even people like Barbara who avoid direct party involvement and in whom analysis and idealism form heady compounds. All her urgings inevitably held clear political implications and any celebration of her contribution cannot avoid some account of her political progress, especially in today's divisive climate.

In 1945 Barbara was asked to stand in Britain for Labour. She would not do so. But in those days she spoke for Labour. Her espousal of bold government intervention, as with the Marshall Plan, and her link not only with British Fabian socialism, but with US liberalism – what Donald Tyerman called ‘a freer, Chester Bowles, Adlai Stevenson sort of world’ – was never diverted but steadily modified by experience. It was modified a long way from the hopes and claims of the Atlee era. In 1972 she ended a speech in London to the Conservation Society with a quotation from William James:

I am done with great things and big things, great institutions and big success and I am for those tiny invisible molecular moral forces that work from individual to individual, creeping through the crannies of the world like so many rootlets, or like the capillary oozing with water, yet which, if you give them time, will rend the hardest monuments of men's pride.

In her last book, Progress for a Small Planet, she wrote of ‘private socialism’; of the use made by both the Japanese and French governments of indicative planning and of the Yugoslav experiment. She talked of ‘the dispersion of wealth through the community and the involving of all in their factories and offices – an involvement which, more than anything else, can dissolve, perhaps, the worst aspects of traditional industrialism, the alienation of the mass of workers from their community of work’.

Politically and intellectually, Barbara offered a brilliant counterpart to the propositions of EF Schumacher, to most of which she lent her warm support. She complemented his new analysis of the problem of production, bringing the worldly shrewdness of mainstream politics to the ‘alternative’ and the insights of the alternative to the mainstream. Never afraid to be counted in the political fray, in the last months of her life she threw her support to the nascent Social Democrats in Britain, but her prescription would never necessarily follow the format of a party platform.

In the end, Barbara returned to her message of ‘only one earth’. The beloved planet was the only political unit she could happily espouse. ‘In short’, as she wrote in concluding her last book:

no problem is insoluble in the creation of a balanced and conserving planet save humanity itself. Can it reach in time the vision of joint survival? Can its inescapable physical interdependence – the chief new insight of our century–induce that vision? We do not know. We have the duty to hope.

This chapter was first published in the Environmentalist 1 (1981, pp95–99).