Harold Ward, a professor emeritus of chemistry and environmental studies who is known as the father of the environmental studies program at Brown, passed away on Dec. 4, 2024 at the age of 89. He is survived by his two children and Selma Moss-Ward P’02 P’06, his wife who taught English at Brown.

Born in Mount Vernon, Illinois, Ward’s humble childhood informed his environmentally conscious mindset, which he brought to his research as a tenured chemistry professor. After observing the amount of waste his chemistry labs produced, he was inspired to switch his research and academic focus to environmental science and studies.

Before his transition to environmental science, Ward earned a PhD in organic chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1961. He was a frequently cited chemistry scholar, with dozens of publications on topics including photochemistry and nuclear magnetic resonance. Ward began teaching chemistry at Brown in 1963, just as the modern environmental movement began taking root. 

After transitioning his interest to environmental studies, Ward decided he needed a more holistic perspective of environmentalism. He attended Harvard Law School to bolster his knowledge of environmental law, obtaining a juris doctorate in 1975. 

The 60s and 70s saw an increase in students creating independent concentrations about the environment, and in 1978, Ward and his students coalesced into the Center for Environmental Studies. In 1979, a concentration program in environmental studies was approved by the University.

Shortly after the Center for Environmental Studies was established, Ward turned his attention to finding the community a more suitable physical home that would embody the applied environmentalism that he championed. He hoped to fashion it with solar panels, insulated windows and a community garden. With funding from the Mellon Foundation and a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy, Ward and more than 45 of his students began construction on the Urban Environmental Lab in 1981 — a teaching building that has been home to environmental studies at Brown since it opened at 135 Angell Street in 1983. 

According to Moss-Ward, Ward would most want his legacy to manifest as “having his students continue to do good work, in terms of public service and creative environmentalism, and passing that on to other people.” The Center for Environmental Studies now exists as the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, which graduates around 60 students per year and celebrated its 10th anniversary last year. The Harold Ward Prize, announced last year, recognizes a senior in the department for work that benefits Rhode Island and broader society.

In addition to his impact on Brown, Ward has an extensive legacy in the New England region for his environmental work.

Using his law background, Ward engaged in legal action by founding and serving as president of the Rhode Island chapter of the Conservation Law Foundation and working with the Environmental Law Committee of the Rhode Island Bar Association. In addition, he was a board member of the Audubon Society of Rhode Island and the Rhode Island Water Resources Board, president of the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association and a member of the governor’s Environmental Advisory Council.

Ward’s achievements also include the development of a state commercial recycling program and the state’s first greenhouse gas inventory. Ward has received awards from the Environmental Protection Agency and Save The Bay, an organization that works to protect the Narragansett Bay. 

In the months following his passing, The Herald spoke with several of Ward’s former students, friends, family and colleagues, who remember his quiet persistence, his commitment to applying environmental research to the real world and his skill for grafting tomato plants.

‘The state of Rhode Island was a classroom’

Peter Heywood, professor emeritus of molecular biology, cell biology and biochemistry, said the most impactful part of Ward’s work was “his abiding belief that what you did in environmental studies had to be applied to a real-world situation.” Heywood recalled how Ward worked with his students to test for lead in the environment, as many of the old buildings in Providence were painted with lead-containing paint that flaked off into soil.

At the forefront of Ward’s teaching was “service learning,” according to Katrina Korfmacher ’90 P’21, who had Ward as her first-year advisor and is now an environmental medicine professor at the University of Rochester. 

“Over time, this practice led to tremendous contributions to addressing environmental problems in Rhode Island and wherever his graduates landed,” Korfmacher wrote in an email to The Herald. 

For Ward, “the state of Rhode Island was a classroom,” according to James Corless ’88, another one of Ward’s former students.

“If we were writing papers or doing research, he always wanted it to be about an actual issue that was happening,” Corless said.

One thing that made Ward’s courses so uniquely engaging was “this combination of teaching and pedagogy and research,” said Senior Lecturer in Environment and Society Kurt Teichert, who met Ward in 1992. Another was his humor. 

When a colleague took over his introductory environmental studies class, Ward gave the colleague all of his notes and slides, “and in his notes and preparation for his lecture, he would write out the jokes,” Teichert said. 

“The whole program was arranged and structured in a way that really entrusted us students,” said Chip Giller ’93, another of Ward’s former students.

Packaged with the immense confidence Ward placed in his students, though, were high standards that he empowered them to meet. 

“Sometimes he pushed us really hard or challenged us — he was not afraid of conflict — but all of that was really made so much easier to take (because) you just knew, fundamentally, (that) he was in your corner,” Corless said. “I had never had an experience where I had an adult and a mentor … who just so fundamentally believed I could kind of do anything.”

The admiration was mutual — Ward was “very close” and “very, very proud” of his students, Moss-Ward said. She remembered a special gift from students when he retired.

“He always had a supply of scotch in his office,” Moss-Ward said, adding that his favorite brand was Dewar’s. “When he retired, his graduate students gave him an honorary bottle of scotch, (for which) they had made a label that looked like the Dewar’s label, but it had Harold’s picture on it.”

This bottle still sits in their home. 

“He regarded his students as his chosen family,” she said.

‘I wanted to do for undergraduates what he had done for us’

Many of Ward’s students credit him with inspiring and encouraging their careers in environmental studies. 

“He made me realize that I wanted to teach environmental studies,” Korfmacher wrote. “I wanted to do for undergraduates what he had done for us — create an engaged, multidisciplinary, service- and action-oriented learning community.”

After Corless graduated, Ward recommended him to be the first director of the Brown is Green initiative, an older University sustainability initiative. Corless recalls Ward’s “unwavering belief” in him, despite Corless’s “horrible” first speech to Brown’s provost and other University leaders at the time. Now the executive director of the Sacramento Area Council of Governments, Corless is reminded of Ward’s mentorship when he watches young staff members make their own first presentations to boards of directors.

“I was so nervous, and I just basically blew (the speech) — I mean, it was horrible, like I fumbled my words,” Corless recalled. 

“He could easily have said, ‘Jesus, you gotta get better,’” Corless added. “But he just said, ‘The first time is the hardest, and you’re just gonna get better.’”

Ward also had a large influence on Giller’s professional career, instilling in him the value of engaging community groups in his work. But this is not where his influence ends: Ward even shaped Giller as a parent to his two teenagers — “in ways that I don’t even realize,” Giller said.

‘The kindest person I ever knew’

Heywood and Ward met in the 1970s and together formed a “men’s group” of six friends who met every couple of weeks for over 40 years. According to Heywood, Ward was “one of the most active members” of the group, which had their final meeting last July. 

“We talked about our lives and our concerns, what we thought about what was going on in the world and in the University, and it was just a great opportunity in a confidential setting to talk about our innermost feelings,” Heywood said. 

Ward, Heywood said, could have been the one who hosted the most dinner parties, but definitely was “the one who gave away the most plants” — tomatoes and squashes and zucchinis that he grew in his garden.

“He was, as you’d always hope for in a friend, a warm and thoughtful person,” Heywood said.

After Ward retired around the turn of the century, he remained an active friend and community member, volunteering to help seniors with their tax returns and heading the Wood-Pawcatuck Watershed Association. Whenever Teichert, a carpenter, visited Ward at his home by the river, Ward would have numerous craftsman questions saved up for Teichert.

“He’d have questions for me about his truck or, you know, ‘Why, when I’m cutting my wood, why is the chainsaw, you know, not cutting in a straight line?’ and things like that,” Teichert said. 

Moss-Ward was assistant to the dean of the College at Brown when she met Ward in October 1995, she told The Herald. She was working on a research project on what motivated professors to check the “Writing Check” box, which they can click if they feel the student lacks writing competency, when submitting grades to the registrar. Ward was a frequent user of the checkbox, so Moss-Ward set up a meeting to “figure out why he was so adamant about it.” Two months later, he asked her to lunch, “and the rest is history.” 

Upon first impression, she found him to be “very quiet” but also very generous and friendly. 

“He was extremely kind,” Moss-Ward said. “He’s probably the kindest person I ever knew.”

Ward’s mantra with his work was “quiet persistence,” Moss-Ward said. 

“He would drive me crazy sometimes because it felt like nagging,” Moss-Ward said. 

“He would preface things with, ‘Can I make a suggestion?’ and I’d say ‘No,’” she added with a laugh.

Constructing ‘a living laboratory’

Working hands-on with students to physically construct the UEL in the 1980s, Ward was the “driving force,” of the project, according to Fred Unger, one of the architects on the project and a specialist in environmentally responsible buildings.

Under Ward’s guidance, an old historical building became “a living laboratory using state-of-the-art approaches,” Heywood said, where students could learn how to apply their class knowledge.

Ward also put a community garden in what used to be a parking lot in front of 135 Angell Street. 

Every former student that The Herald spoke to about Ward described the UEL as, simply, “home.” A large part of this was thanks to Ward’s commitment to the community. 

Giller remembered organizing weekly “Pizza-Conversation-Beverages” Friday nights at the UEL called “PCBs” — a play on PCBs, or polychlorinated biphenyls, a toxic chemical and a concern for environmentalists. Despite these PCB meetings consisting of mostly students bantering over environmental topics, Ward attended “like, every Friday, which was amazing,” Giller said.

‘He’s out in the garden!’

According to Corless, if you were to come into the UEL on a Friday and say, “I’m looking for Harold,” someone would call back, “He’s out in the garden!” But Ward’s gardening wasn’t limited to the front lot of the UEL.

At his home with Moss-Ward, where he lived with “between two and six cats at any given time and a dog,” he enjoyed introducing innovative technologies like drip irrigation to his garden. 

“I’m more of a cook, so I’d tell him what vegetables I was thinking about, or what kinds of tomatoes, and he would plant them, and I would can, freeze and cook them,” Moss-Ward said.

Ward was especially skilled at cultivating tomatoes, a pastime he further complicated by being particularly meticulous with his grafting techniques to produce the best and most abundant fruit. He even had a master gardener certificate from the University of Rhode Island.

“And his plants were all the more vigorous in their fruiting because of that,” Heywood said.

But really, what mattered to him was simply “to exchange ideas and exchange plants,” Heywood added.

Heywood said that for Ward, “living the simple life to protect the environment,” is what it was all about. 

“He used to say that he was a simple person,” Moss-Ward said. “‘I’m just a simple guy.’”