Lady Jackson

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imbibe@mindspring.com (David Polewka) - 02 Jul 2006 09:28 GMT

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Ward

Barbara Ward

>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Barbara Mary Ward (1914 - 1981) was a British economist
and writer interested in the problems of developing countries.
She urged Western governments to share their prosperity with
the rest of the world and in the 1960s turned her attention to
environmental questions as well. She was an early advocate
of sustainable development before this term became familiar
and was well-known as a journalist, lecturer and broadcaster.
Ward was adviser to policy-makers in the UK, US and elsewhere.
In the last few years of her life she had the title Baroness Jackson
of Lodsworth.

Education and early career

Barbara Ward was born in Heworth, Yorkshire on 23 May 1914,
but her family soon moved to Felixstowe. Her father was a
solicitor with Quaker tendencies, while her mother was a devout
Catholic. Their daughter went to a convent school before study-
ing in Paris: first at a lycée, then for some months at the Sor-
bonne before going on to Germany. Though she had once
planned to study modern languages, her interest in public
affairs led to a degree course in politics, philosophy, and
economics at Somerville College, Oxford University, from
which she graduated in 1935.

She did post-graduate work on Austrian politics and economics.
After witnessing antisemitism there and in Nazi Germany she
began to help Jewish refugees, and mobilise Catholic support
for any forthcoming UK war effort, although she had initially
been "sympathetic to Hitler".[1] With Christopher Dawson, the
historian, as leader and Ward as secretary, the Sword of the
Spirit organisation was established to bring together Catholics
and Anglicans opposing Nazism. It became a Roman Catholic
group whose policies were promoted by the Dublin Review
which Dawson edited, and for which Ward wrote regularly.

During the war she worked for the Ministry of Information and
travelled in Europe and the US. Partly on the strength of her
1938 book, The International Share-out, Geoffrey Crowther,
editor of The Economist, offered her a job. She left the
magazine in 1950 having risen to foreign editor, but continued
to contribute articles throughout her life. As well as writings on
economic and foreign policy, her broadcasts on Christian
values in wartime were published as The Defence of the West
by Sword of the Spirit. During this time she was also president
of the Catholic Women's League and a popular panel member
of the BBC programme The Brains Trust which answered
listeners' questions. She became a BBC governor in 1946.

After the war Ward was a supporter of the Marshall Plan, of a
strong Europe, and of a European free trade area.

International influence, and marriage

In 1950 Barbara Ward married Australian Commander Robert
Jackson, an administrator for the UN. Their son Robert was
born in 1956, the same year that his father was knighted. Ward
continued to use her own name professionally and was not
widely known as Lady Jackson. Over the next few years they
lived in West Africa and made various visits to India, and these
experiences helped form Ward's views on the need for Western
nations to contribute to the economic development of poorer
countries. For the next two decades both husband and wife
travelled a great deal, and eventually their marriage suffered
from this.[2] A legal separation was arranged in the early 1970s
though Ward, as a Catholic, did not want divorce. In 1976 when
she was given a life peerage she used her husband's surname
in the title Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth.

Ward had been a frequent public speaker since leaving uni-
versity, and by the 1960s her lectures attracted international
respect; several lecture series, including some presented in
Canada, Ghana and India, were published in book form. Ward
spent increasing amounts of time in the US, much of her work
there funded by the Carnegie Foundation. In 1957 Harvard gave
her an honorary LittD and until 1968 she was a Carnegie fellow
there, living for part of each year in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
She got to know Adlai Stevenson and John F Kennedy and
acted as adviser to various influential policy makers, including
Robert McNamara at the World Bank and Lyndon B Johnson,
who welcomed her thoughts on his Great Society projects
despite her opposition to the Vietnam war. She also influenced
James Wolfensohn's thinking on development questions. She
had influence in the Vatican, helped set up a pontifical com-
mission for justice and peace, and in 1971 was the first woman
ever to address a synod of Roman Catholic bishops.

One of her proposals was that richer countries should commit
a certain proportion of their GNP in aid to the developing world,
and she also spoke of the need for institutions to enable and
manage both 'aid and trade'. This was a practical as well as an
ethical concern: Ward believed such policies would encourage
stability and peace. She is sometimes called a distributist. [3]

Environmental concerns

Ward started to see a close connection between wealth
distribution and conservation of planetary resources. "... the
careful husbandry of the Earth is sine qua non for the survival
of the human species, and for the creation of decent ways of
life for all the people of the world."[4] She used the phrases
"inner limits and "outer limits" to refer to the inner limits of the
human right to an adequate standard of living and the outer
limits of what the Earth can sustain. [5]

In 1966 she published Spaceship Earth and is sometimes
said to have coined the phrase, though it had in fact been
used before. Not only had her friend Adlai Stevenson made
a speech to the UN in 1965 in which he said We travel to-
gether, passengers on a little space ship, dependent on its
vulnerable reserves of air and soil....[6] but two years before
that Buckminster Fuller had published his Operating Manual
for Spaceship Earth.

With hindsight, Ward is seen as a pioneeer of sustainable
development. She and René Dubos, co-authors of Only One
Earth, have been described as "parents" of a concept which
"did not know its own name at first".[7] Only One Earth: The
Care and Maintenance of a Small Planet was written for the
1972 UN Stockholm conference on the Human Environment.

Ward's work was rooted in her sense of morality and
Christian values. She saw care of the environment and
concern for the well-being of all humankind as a "dual
responsibility", especially for anyone sharing her religious
outlook. [8] At the same time, she believed wealth distribution
combined with conservation was essentially a rational policy:
We are a ship's company on a small ship. Rational behaviour
is the condition of survival. [9]

In 1971 she founded the International Institute for Environment
and Development (IIED), acting as president from 1973 and
chairman from 1980.

Later life

Ward had recovered from cancer in the late 1940s thanks,
she believed, to the spiritual support of Padre Pio. The illness
recurred twenty years later but surgery did not cure her. In
1973 she retired from Columbia University where she had
been Schweitzer Professor of Economic Development for
the previous five years and went to live in Lodsworth, Sussex.
The next year she was made a DBE, and in 1976 a life peer,
Baroness Jackson of Lodsworth. She wrote her last book,
Progress for a Small Planet, despite her deteriorating health,
discussing the "planetary community", dwindling resources
used up too fast by wealthy countries, and the needs of poorer
parts of the world. It was published in 1979, two years before
her death on 31 May 1981. Pope John Paul II sent a Cardinal
to represent him at Ward's requiem service. At her own request,
she was buried in the graveyard of the local Anglican parish
church.
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