Harvard Professor James McCarthy, environmentalist, dead at 75
James J. McCarthy, Alexander Agassiz Professor of Biological Oceanography and director emeritus of the Museum of Comparative Zoology, died on Dec. 11 after a long battle with pulmonary fibrosis. He was 75. A champion of the environment, McCarthy, known as Jim, was committed to both education and advocacy about climate change. “A profound lesson from the past few decades of scientific discovery across the Earth and life sciences is that the weight of the human footprint on essential life-supporting services of the Earth system has grown dramatically since the time of Darwin,” he wrote in 2009 in an article for the journal Science, “Reflections On: Our Planet and Its Life, Origins, and Futures.” “Could Darwin have imagined that so soon in Earth history a single species would be altering the prospects for the survival of other species across all continents and to the greatest depths of the sea?” he wrote. Committed to the application...