Russell W. Peterson, who helped develop Dacron as a DuPont research scientist before becoming a champion of environmentalism as governor of Delaware, a White House adviser and president of the National Audubon Society, died Monday at his home in Wilmington, Del. He was 94.
As a one-term Republican governor from 1969 to 1973, he ignored the opposition of DuPont and other companies and pushed through a law to protect the state’s coastline from industrial development.
The immediate victim of Governor Peterson’s Coastal Zone Act was the Shell Oil Company, which was stopped from building a $200 million refinery. He rallied environmentalists by wearing a lapel button saying “To hell with Shell.”
He took a more nuanced approach when Maurice H. Stans, secretary of commerce in the Nixon administration, summoned him to Washington to complain that the coastal protection law threatened the nation’s prosperity and security. Mr. Peterson answered with a dozen ways the heavy industries in question might achieve their purposes without destroying Delaware’s 28 miles of relatively clean coast.
His answers were apparently persuasive enough that President Richard M. Nixon appointed him chairman of the Council on Environmental Quality, a post he continued to hold under President Gerald R. Ford after Nixon resigned.
Things began to change when a certain Hollywood actor moved into the White House:
As president of the National Audubon Society from 1979 t0 1985, Mr. Peterson vigorously fought President Ronald Reagan's efforts to weaken enforcement of environmental regulations to help business. When Reagan said conservationists would not be happy until the White House was a “bird’s nest,” Mr. Peterson snapped back that it was already “a cuckoo’s nest.”
And can you imagine one of today's tea party Republican governors doing this?
Under Russell Peterson’s insistent leadership, Delaware in 1972 became the last state to outlaw the punishment of flogging.
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