In Memoriam - William Lord, Former WRRC Director
On the evening of Friday, March 27, 2020, former WRRC Director William Lord passed away. He had retired from UA and was living in Boulder, Colorado. At UA, he was a professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics and Hydrology and Water Resources (now Hydrology and Atmospheric Sciences). His research focused on water resources planning and management, municipal water supply, and water shortages. During his five-year tenure at the WRRC (1985-1990), he was responsible for creation of an important Issue Paper series, the first Arroyo publications, and formation of the Deans’ Water Council, an effort to coordinate water-related activities across campus. He was an early advocate for interdisciplinary studies when the university was only beginning to see their value. In 1990, he oversaw the WRRC’s move from the Engineering College to the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. The current WRRC Assistant Director remembers him as a mentor, who asked her to write an Issue Paper when she was still a graduate student and offered her a position at the WRRC upon graduation. “He brought me into the fascinating world of water research and was always interested in offering me new challenges.”
UA Professor Emeritus Marvin Waterstone, who was the WRRC Associate Director under Lord, shared this remembrance. “I met Bill in 1976 in Boulder at the University of Colorado. As a new masters’ student, I was recruited onto a project at the Institute of Behavioral Science. Bill was a co-pi on this national project and coordinated the efforts at Colorado. Over the years that followed, we became both close colleagues and personal friends. I consider Bill to be one of my paramount intellectual influences. Bill’s curiosity and ingenuity allowed him to stake out new conceptual and theoretical territory and to develop novel ways of thinking about very thorny economic and political issues. His views were always both iconoclastic and yet stubbornly pragmatic and productive. In getting these ideas into practice, Bill’s style was usually modest but unrelenting. He was a very good listener, was open-minded, but was also a ruthless critic, and I mean that in the best way possible. One pertinent example of these characteristics showed itself tangibly in the very substantial improvement in quality in the AWRA’s Water Resources Bulletin under Bill’s editorship. Both the range of articles, particularly a much-needed expansion of attention to matters of social science, and their level of sophistication, increased under Bill’s careful curation.
“On a more personal note, but one which reveals something important about how he operated in the world, Bill literally put me on my present trajectory. I had taken a tenure-track job at Kent State University just a year before and was woefully unhappy there. Without telling me, he placed a soul-saving ad for a job as WRRC Associate Director at Arizona in a place I would see it, but only if I was on the market. This approach was very careful, tactful, thoughtful, and completely in Bill’s style. If I was happy where I was, I wouldn’t be looking, but if I was unhappy, …. Of course, he then backed out of the search process and let it proceed without his influence. That was 34 years ago; I’ve been at the UA ever since and I'm still thankful.”
The WRRC joins William Lord’s friends, family, and colleagues in mourning the loss of an influential force in water resources research here at UA and far beyond. The history of the WRRC’s first 50 years, available on our website, features past directors and important milestones.
WRRC History https://wrrc.arizona.edu/about#history