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| Barry Commoner |
Described in 1970 by Time magazine as the "Paul Revere of ecology," Commoner followed Rachel Carson as America's most prominent modern environmentalist. But unlike Carson, Commoner viewed the environmental crisis as a symptom of a fundamentally flawed economic and social system. A biologist and research scientist, he argued that corporate greed, misguided government priorities, and the misuse of technology accounted for the undermining of "the finely sculptured
Commoner insisted that scientists had an obligation to
make scientific information accessible to the general public, so that citizens
could participate in public debates that involved scientific questions.
Citizens, he said, have a right to know the health hazards of the consumer
products and technologies used in everyday life. Those were radical ideas in
the 1950s and 1960s, when most Americans were still mesmerized by the cult of
scientific expertise and such new technologies as cars, plastics, chemical
sprays, and atomic energy.
Commoner linked environmental issues to a broader vision
of social and economic justice. He called attention to the parallels among the
environmental, civil rights, labor, and peace movements. He connected the
environmental crisis to the problems of poverty, injustice, racism, public
health, national security, and war.
Commoner first came to public attention in the late
1950s when he warned about the hazards of fallout caused by the atmospheric
testing of nuclear weapons. He later used his scientific platform to raise
awareness about the dangers posed by the petrochemical industry, nuclear power,
and toxic substances such as dioxins. He was one of the first scientists to
point out that although environmental hazards hurt everyone, they
disproportionately hurt the poor and racial minorities because of the location
of dangerous chemicals and because of the hazardous conditions in blue-collar
workplaces. Commoner thus laid the groundwork for what later become known as
the environmental justice movement.
Born in 1917, Commoner grew up in Brooklyn, New York,
the child of Russian Jewish immigrants. He studied zoology at Columbia
University and received a doctorate in biology from Harvard University in 1941.
After serving in the Navy during World War II, Commoner was an associate editor
for Science Illustrated and then became a professor at Washington University in
St. Louis, Missouri, a position he held for thirty-four years. There he
founded, in 1966, the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems to promote
research on ecological systems. He later moved the center to Queens College in
New York.
While serving in the Navy, Commoner discovered a
disturbing unintended consequences of technology. He was put in charge of a
project to devise an apparatus to allow bombers to spray DDT on beachheads to
kill insects that caused disease among soldiers. The military wanted to remove
the insects before troops landed. Commoner's crew discovered that the DDT
sprayed from bombers effectively eliminated hordes of flies on the beach, but
also that more flies soon came to feast on the tons of fish that the DDT had
also killed. This lesson became a central theme for Commoner throughout his
career: humans cannot take action on one part of the ecosystem without
triggering a reaction elsewhere.
After the war, many scientists, including Albert
Einstein, alarmed by America's use of the atomic bomb on Japan in 1945, began
to rethink their role in society. They questioned whether dropping the bomb had
been necessary for the United States to win the war. They were shocked by the
scale of the damage in terms of both immediate deaths and long-term human
suffering. And they worried about the potential for a prolonged arms race
between the United States and the Soviet Union, which, they feared, could end
in a nuclear war in which all humanity would be the losers.
As Commoner told Scientific American in a 1997
interview:
“The Atomic Energy Commission had at its command an army
of highly skilled scientists. Although they knew how to design and build
nuclear bombs, it somehow escaped their notice that rainfall washes suspended
material out of the air, or that children drink milk and concentrate iodine in
their growing thyroids. I believe that the main reason for the AEC's failure is
less complex than a cover-up but equally devastating. The AEC scientists were
so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they
failed to perceive facts--even widely known ones--that were outside their
limited field of vision."
Commoner and other scientists -- including chemist Linus
Pauling (a professor at the California Institute of Technology and a Nobel
Prize winner) -- believed they had a responsibility to sound the alarm about
the potentially devastating effects of nuclear fallout. In 1956, when Adlai
Stevenson ran for president as the Democratic Party nominee, he sought
Commoner's advice and then called for the United States to take the lead in
ending nuclear testing.
In 1958 Commoner and other scientists and activists
formed the Committee for Nuclear Information with the goal of educating the
public to understand how, in Commoner's words, "splitting a few pounds of
atoms could turn something as mild as milk into a devastating global
poison." Their new publication, Nuclear Information (later renamed Scientist
and Citizen), was founded to discuss the responsibility of scientists to the
larger society. They drafted a petition, signed by 11,021 scientists worldwide,
urging that "an international agreement to stop the testing of nuclear
bombs be made now." These activities created a groundswell of public
opinion that eventually helped persuade President John F. Kennedy to propose
the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.
Commoner's early experience with DDT led him to espouse
what scientists call the "precautionary principle" -- that new
chemicals and technologies should not be introduced into society if there is
reason to believe that they pose a significant public health risk. They should
be approved only after it can be demonstrated that they are safe. Commoner
warned about the risks to human health posed by detergents, pesticides,
herbicides, radioisotopes, and smog. He argued that polluting products (such as
detergents and synthetic textiles) should be replaced with natural products
(such as soap, cotton, and wool). He alerted the public to the negative effects
of nuclear power plants, toxic chemicals, and pollution on the economy, birth
defects, and diseases like asthma.
In the 1970s Commoner spoke out against the view that
overpopulation, particularly in the Third World, was responsible for the
increasing depletion of the word's natural resources and the deepening
ecological problems. The thesis was popularized by Paul Ehrlich (in his book The
Population Bomb) and other scientists, but Commoner challenged those who echoed
the ideas of the 19th-century British thinker Thomas Robert Malthus.
As Commoner argued, it is rich nations that consume a
disproportionate share of the world's resources. And it was their systems of
colonialism and imperialism that led to the exploitation of the Third World's
natural resources for consumption in the wealthy nations, making the poor even
poorer. Without the financial resources to improve their living conditions,
people in developing countries relied more heavily upon increased birthrates as
a form of social security than did people in wealthier nations.
As Commoner wrote, "The poor countries have high
birthrates because they are extremely poor, and they are extremely poor because
other countries are extremely rich." His solution to the population problem
was to increase the standard of living of the world's poor, which would result
in a voluntary reduction of fertility, as has occurred in the rich countries.
In The Closing Circle (1971), Commoner argued that our
economy--including corporations, government, and consumers--needs to be in sync
with what he called the "four laws of ecology":
· Everything is connected to everything else.
·
Everything must go somewhere.
· Nature knows best.
· There is no such thing as
a free lunch.
The Closing Circle helped introduce the idea of
sustainability, a notion that is now widely accepted but was controversial at
the time. As Commoner pointed out, there is only one ecosphere for all living
things. What affects one, affects all. He also noted that in nature there is no
waste. We can't throw things away. Therefore, we need to design and manufacture
products that do not upset the delicate balance between humans and nature. We
need to utilize alternative forms of energy, such as wind, solar, and
geothermal power. And we need to change our consumption habits accordingly--to
use fewer products with plastics (which are based on oil), aerosol cans (which harm
the atmosphere), and industrial-grown food (which is produced with harmful
chemicals).
In his best-selling book The Poverty of Power (1976),
Commoner introduced what he called the "Three Es"--the threat to
environmental survival, the shortage of energy, and the problems (such as
inequality and unemployment) of the economy--and explained their
interconnectedness: Industries that use the most energy have the most negative
impact on the environment. Our dependence on nonrenewable sources of energy
inevitably leads to those resources becoming scarcer, raising the cost of
energy and hurting the economy.
Commoner was neither a back-to-the-land utopian or a
Luddite opposed to modern industrial civilization. He did not place the burden
of blame on the consumers who buy these products or the workers who produce
them. He believed that big business and their political allies dominate
society's decision making, often leading to misguided priorities, a theme that
paralleled the ideas of economist John Kenneth Galbraith and, later, Ralph
Nader.
Commoner believed that the corporate imperative for
wasteful growth is the root cause of the environmental crisis and must be
corralled by responsible public policies demand by a well-educated public. As
he told Scientific American: “The environmental crisis arises from a
fundamental fault: our systems of production--in industry, agriculture, energy
and transportation--essential as they are, make people sick and die."
Commoner's proposals for addressing these problems
reflect his lifetime of promoting a progressive agenda. He told Scientific
American:
“What is needed now is a transformation of the major
systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II
changes in production technology. Restoring environmental quality means
substituting solar sources of energy for fossil and nuclear fuels; substituting
electric motors for the internal-combustion engine; substituting organic
farming for chemical agriculture; expanding the use of durable, renewable and
recyclable materials--metals, glass, wood, paper--in place of the petrochemical
products that have massively displaced them."
Commoner acknowledged some of the environmental
movement's victories, including bans on DTT and on lead in gasoline. Commoner
saw this as an evidence that society can prevent environmental hazards by
changing the way we produce and consume. But in a 2007 interview with the New
York Times, he warned that these measures did not go far enough.
"Environmental pollution is an incurable disease,” he
said. “It can only be prevented. And prevention can only take place at the
point of production. If you insist on using DDT, the only thing you can do is
stop. The rest has really been sort of forgotten about."
Many Americans embraced Commoner's ideas about workplace
hazards, nuclear power plants, and recycling. But he grew frustrated by the
influence of corporate America over both political parties and by the failure
of the mainstream environmental movement to join forces with other progressive
movements to heed his warnings and challenge the basic tenets of the
free-market system.
In 1979 Commoner helped form the Citizens Party, hoping
it would gain influence similar to that of the Green Party in Europe. The next
year Commoner ran as the party's presidential candidate. He got on the ballot
in twenty-nine states but received less than one-third of 1 percent of the
national vote. Like most third parties in the American system, the Citizens
Party wound up being a minor fringe force. Commoner did not run again for
office, but he advised Jesse Jackson's Democratic Party presidential campaigns
in the 1980s.
In the 2007 interview with the New York Times, the
90-year-old Commoner remained the relentless radical:
"I think that most of the 'greening' that we see so
much of now has failed to look back on arguments such as my own -- that action
has to be taken on what's produced and how it's produced. That's unfortunate,
but I'm an eternal optimist, and I think eventually people will come
around."
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