Barry Commoner, The greatest environmentalist of the 20th century’

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Posted on October 5, 2012

Barry Commoner: scientist, activist, radical ecologist

Earth Day 1970, Time magazine recognizes Barry Commoner’s key role in launching the new environmental movement.

by Simon Butler
Green Left Weekly

Barry Commoner, “a leader among a generation of scientist-activists” (New York Times) and possibly “the greatest environmentalist of the 20th century” (Ralph Nader), died in New York on September 30, aged 95.

Credited as a founder of the modern environmental movement, Commoner was among the world’s best known ecologists in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. He was famous for his public campaigns against nuclear testing, chemical pollution and environmental decay.

In 1970, Time featured Commoner on its cover, calling him “The Paul Revere of Ecology,” after the American revolutionary hero Paul Revere, who famously warned the rebel militia about approaching British forces before a decisive battle. Time said he had “probably done more than any other US scientist to speak out and awaken a sense of urgency about the declining quality of life.”

But Commoner was far more than a Paul Revere — the person sounding the early environmental alarm. A biology professor and founder of Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University, St Louis, his biographer Michael Egan says Commoner practically invented the science information movement, “a method of communicating technical information so that the public could better participate in complex social, political, and environmental debate.”

Over several decades, he also took part in many grassroots environmental campaigns. His research into the health impacts of atmospheric nuclear testing is credited with leading to the 1963 international treaty that banned it. He repeatedly spoke out for the most common victims of industrial pollution: poor, Black and working class communities.

But he combined this activity with a radical argument about the root cause of ecological crisis, which he said was a system of production based on private profit instead of ecological and human need. Commoner said in his 1971 book The Closing Circle:

“We are in an environmental crisis because the means by which we use the ecosphere to produce wealth are destructive of the ecosphere itself. The present system of production is self-destructive; the present course of human civilisation is suicidal.”

Commoner’s argument that production for profit was the key cause of environmental destruction set him apart from the liberal wing of the US environment movement, which had emerged as a new political force by the early 1970s. “At a time when most writers were blaming individual behaviour or overpopulation for pollution,” writes Canadian ecosocialist Ian Angus, “Commoner exposed the role of capitalism and profit.”

This led Commoner to challenge the notion that environmental problems can be overcome through purely environmental campaigns. In a tribute to Commoner, The Nation’s Peter Dreier said:

“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.”

At a lecture in Berkeley, California, in 1973, Commoner said no permanent environmental solutions are possible without deep social changes:

“When any environmental issue is pursued to its origins, it reveals an inescapable truth – that the root cause of the crisis is not to be found in how men interact with nature, but in how they interact with each other – that, to solve the environmental crisis we must solve the problems of poverty, racial injustice and war.”

Commoner is best known for his four “laws of ecology”, which he outlined in the first chapter of The Closing Circle. These are: 1) Everything is connected to everything else; 2) Everything must go somewhere; 3) Nature knows best; and 4) There is no such thing as a free lunch.

The first law states what Commoner called “a simple fact about ecosystems” — all healthy ecosystems are interconnected and self-stabilising: if any part of a natural ecosystem is damaged or overstressed it can trigger far wider problems. For example, the burning of fossil fuels is overloading the global carbon cycle, which in turn is triggering dramatic changes to climate, global ice cover, weather patterns, ocean acidification, farming yields, sea levels, government budgets and worldwide refugee figures. Any society that ignores Commoner’s first law – that everything is connected to everything else – invites ecological and social turmoil.

Of the second law — everything must go somewhere — Commoner said:

“One of the chief reasons for the present environment crisis is that great amounts of materials have been extracted from the Earth, converted into new forms, and discharged into the environment without taking into account that ‘everything must go somewhere’. The result, too often, is the accumulation of harmful amounts of material in places where, in nature, they do not belong.”

Commoner’s third law of ecology – nature knows best – is not an example of naive, green romanticism, but a rejection of what he called “one of the most pervasive features of modern technology … the notion that it is intended to ‘improve on nature.’” Rather, he said: “Stated baldly, the third law of ecology holds that any major man-made change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system”.

Commoner said he borrowed his fourth law — there is no such thing as a free lunch — from economic science:

“In ecology, as in economics, the law is intended to warn that every gain is won at some cost. In a way, this ecological law embodies the previous three laws. Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to overall improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed. The present environmental crisis is a warning that we have delayed nearly too long.”

Commoner was also a key figure in the environmental movement’s debates about the relationship between population size and environmental decay. He took issue with Paul Erhlich’s 1968 book The Population Bomb, which said human population growth was the most important environmental issue and argued for drastic population control measures to avoid a planetary overload.

At the 1970 US Earth Day, Commoner said:

“In my opinion, population trends in the US cannot be blamed for the deteriorated condition of the environment … Of course, if there were no people in the country there would be no pollution problem, but the fact of the matter is that there simply has not been a sufficient rise in the US population to account for the enormous increase in pollution levels … It is a serious mistake to becloud the pollution issue with the population, for the facts will not support it.”

He later told a meeting at Brown University that “pollution begins not in the family bedroom, but in the corporate boardroom”.

In our 2011 book Too Many People?, Ian Angus and I wrote:

“Commoner’s key argument [with Ehrlich] was that the [20th century] pollution explosion was driven not by increased population, but by changed industrial and agricultural production – by radical changes in the way things were made and grown, in the raw materials used, and in the products themselves. Those changes were adopted by industry during and after World War II because the new technologies were more profitable than the old ones …

“In short, poverty was the cause of rapid population growth in the twentieth century, not an effect-and poverty itself was the result of centuries of colonialist plunder. Pressuring poor countries into reducing their birth rates without the improved living standards that enable lower death rates and infant mortality, Commoner wrote, is a ‘gigantic and questionable experiment’.”

The difference between the two ecologists was stark. Erhlich favoured governments and institutions placing more controls on people. Commoner said the real ecological solutions will be possible when ordinary people win control over governments and institutions.

Commoner was a sharp critic of the Soviet-style bureaucratic socialist states, which left a horrendous environmental legacy. But he held a vision of democratic socialism, where people and planet trumped corporate power. He said in his 1976 book The Poverty of Power:

“The energy crisis and the web of inter-related problems confront us with the need to explore the possibility of creating a production system that is consciously intended to serve social needs and that judges the value of its products by their use, and an economic system that is committed to these purposes. At least in principle, such a system is socialism.”

Despite his wide audience and influence, Commoner’s ecological critique of capitalism fell out of favour in mainstream environmental circles and his warnings about the profit motive where not heeded. By 2000, Australian writer Sharon Beder could say: “The fact is that many environmentalists have been persuaded by the rhetoric of free market environmentalism. They have accepted the conservative definition of the problem, that environmental degradation results from a failure of the market to attach a price to environmental goods and services.”

But the past few decades of free market environmentalism have failed to deal with our environmental problems, which are now worse than ever. The dismal record of such market-based responses suggest it’s time to return to Commoner’s conclusion:

“If the environment is polluted and the economy is sick, the virus that causes both will be found in the system of production. And that is where their cure can be found as well.”

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Related reading:

• Barry Commoner: ‘Pollution begins in the boardroom, not the bedroom’
• ‘The greatest environmentalist of the 20th century’
• Ecology and social action

http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/10/05/barry-commoner-scientist-activist-radical-ecologist/

Posted on October 3, 2012

‘The greatest environmentalist of the 20th century’

Thanks to Simon Butler for these links to articles honoring and remembering Barry Commoner.

Climate & Capitalism’s tribute to Commoner was published yesterday.

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Scientist, Candidate and Planet Earth’s Lifeguard
New York Times

“Dr. Commoner was a leader among a generation of scientist-activists who recognized the toxic consequences of America’s post-World War II technology boom, and one of the first to stir the national debate over the public’s right to comprehend the risks and make decisions about them.”

Remembering Barry Commoner
The Nation

“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 fit between life and its surroundings.”

Barry Commoner, scientist and influential environmentalist, dies at 95
Washington Post

“Time magazine put Dr. Commoner on its cover in 1970, saying he ‘has probably done more than any other U.S. scientist to speak out and awaken a sense of urgency about the declining quality of life’.”

The greatest environmentalist of the 20th century
Greenpeace USA

“Ralph Nader calls Barry Commoner ‘the greatest environmentalist of the 20th century.’ It’s hard to argue with that.”

RIP, Barry Commoner: A scientist who wasn’t afraid to make some noise 
Grist

“In 1993, Commoner explained to the Chicago Tribune that “the Atomic Energy Commission turned me into an environmentalist.” He had raised alarms about the levels of radioactive material in the atmosphere after atomic bomb tests, but officials brushed him off. From that point on, he would become a vocal advocate for people’s right to know about toxins in the environment and in the products they bought.”

Barry Commoner’s Legacy
The American Prospect

“Commoner believed in addressing multiple issues, such as racism, sexism, war, and—most importantly—the failings of capitalism at the same time as environmentalism because they were, and still are, all related issues of a larger central problem.”

Commoner in Context
Michael Egan in History for a Sustainable Future

“My instinct is that we will hear the same references over and over again in the coming days and weeks: Commoner introduced the Four Laws of Ecology, he ran for President in 1980, and he was called (by TIME magazine in 1970) ‘the Paul Revere of Ecology.’ All true, but I should like to stress a much more fundamental point: Commoner invented the science information movement”

Barry Commoner’s Uncommon Life
Andrew Revkin, NYT/Dot Earth.

Quoting Michael Egan: “He should be in any top five list of American environmental leaders, up there with Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, and Alice Hamilton. It may be heretical to say it, but I think he’s a more important figure in American environmentalism than Rachel Carson.”

Barry Commoner and Our Interconnected World
Legal Planet

“You might say that, even when Commoner first wrote, it was clear that the world had a complex set of links. Today, however, we are beginning to have glimpses of the wiring diagram.”

Find more Barry Commoner links in Simon Butler’s blog Climate Change Social Change.

Related articles… (auto-generated)

• The four laws of ecology
  and the four anti-ecological laws of capitalism (posted on April 2, 2012)
• Background reading for World at a Crossroads conference (posted on July 22, 2011)
• If Socialism Fails: The Spectre of 21st Century Barbarism (posted on March 7, 2011)
• Fidel: The Insanities of Our Time (posted on April 26, 2010)
• Ecosocialism for the 21st Century (posted on September 25, 2007)
//

Category: Ecosocialism | Tagged: Barry Commoner, Simon Butler

http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/10/03/the-greatest-environmentalist-of-the-20th-century/

Barry Commoner | 1917-2012

Scientist, Candidate and Planet Earth’s Lifeguard

By Sean Patrick Farrell

Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times

Last Word: Barry Commoner: Dr. Commoner, an early environmentalist, warned of the dangers of nuclear weapons testing. He was an early champion of recycling, organic food and reducing fossil fuel use.

By DANIEL LEWIS

Published: October 1, 2012 144 Comments

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Barry Commoner, a founder of modern ecology and one of its most provocative thinkers and mobilizers in making environmentalism a people’s political cause, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 95 and lived in Brooklyn Heights.

His wife, Lisa Feiner, confirmed his death.

Dr. Commoner was a leader among a generation of scientist-activists who recognized the toxic consequences of America’s post-World War II technology boom, and one of the first to stir the national debate over the public’s right to comprehend the risks and make decisions about them.

Raised in Brooklyn during the Depression and trained as a biologist at Columbia and Harvard, he came armed with a combination of scientific expertise and leftist zeal. His work on the global effects of radioactive fallout, which included documenting concentrations of strontium 90 in the baby teeth of thousands of children, contributed materially to the adoption of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963.

From there it was a natural progression to a range of environmental and social issues that kept him happily in the limelight as a speaker and an author through the 1960s and ’70s, and led to a wobbly run for president in 1980.

In 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, Time magazine put Dr. Commoner on its cover and called him the Paul Revere of Ecology. He was by no means the only one sounding alarms; the movement was well under way by then, building on the impact of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” in 1962 and the work of many others. But he was arguably the most peripatetic in his efforts to draw public attention to environmental dangers.

(The same issue of Time noted that President Richard M. Nixon had already signed on. In his State of the Union address that January, he said, “The great question of the ’70s is, shall we surrender to our surroundings, or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?” And he followed through: Among other steps, the Environmental Protection Agency was established in December 1970.)

Dr. Commoner was an imposing professorial figure, with a strong face, heavy eyeglasses, black eyebrows and a thick head of hair that gradually turned pure white. He was much in demand as a speaker and a debater, especially on college campuses, where he helped supply a generation of activists with a framework that made the science of ecology accessible.

His four informal rules of ecology were catchy enough to print on a T-shirt and take to the street: Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Although the rules were plain enough, the thinking behind them required leaps of faith. Dr. Commoner’s overarching concern was not ecology as such but rather a radical ideal of social justice in which everything was indeed connected to everything else. Like some other left-leaning dissenters of his time, he believed that environmental pollution, war, and racial and sexual inequality needed to be addressed as related issues of a central problem.

A Critic of Capitalism

Having been grounded, as an undergraduate, in Marxist theory, he saw his main target as capitalist “systems of production” in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation that emphasized profits and technological progress with little regard for consequences: greenhouse gases, nonbiodegradable materials, and synthetic fertilizers and toxic wastes that leached into the water supply.

He insisted that the planet’s future depended on industry’s learning not to make messes in the first place, rather than on trying to clean them up. It followed, by his logic, that scientists in the service of industry could not merely invent some new process or product and then wash their hands of moral responsibility for the side effects. He was a lasting opponent of nuclear power because of its radioactive waste; he scorned the idea of pollution credit swaps because, after all, he said, an industry would have to be fouling the environment in the first place to be rewarded by such a program.

In a “Last Word” interview with The New York Times in 2006, videotaped to accompany this obituary online, Dr. Commoner elaborated on his holistic views and lamented the inability of society to connect the dots among its multitude of challenges, calling it “an unfortunate feature of political development in this country.”

Noting the success of movements that had promoted civil rights, sexual equality, organized labor, environmentalism and an end to the war in Vietnam, he said one might think that “if they would only get together, they could remake the country.” But, he added, that has not happened.

Then he said: “I don’t believe in environmentalism as the solution to anything. What I believe is that environmentalism illuminates the things that need to be done to solve all of the problems together. For example, if you’re going to revise the productive system to make cars or anything else in such a way as to suit the environmental necessities, at the same time why not see to it that women earn as much as men for the same work?”

Dr. Commoner’s diagnoses and prescriptions sometimes put him at odds with other environmental leaders. He is rightly remembered as an important figure in the first Earth Day, April 22, 1970, a nationwide teach-in conceived by Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin, and he himself regarded the observance as historically important. But Earth Day also illustrated the growing factionalization of a movement in which “environmentalism” comprised a number of agendas, all competing for attention and money, and could mean anything from ending the Vietnam War to growing one’s own cabbages.

That was the context for the rift between Dr. Commoner and advocates of population control, who saw environmental degradation as a byproduct of overpopulation. They had become a force on the strength of Paul R. Ehrlich’s huge best seller “The Population Bomb.” Conservationist groups like the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation were strong supporters of Dr. Ehrlich’s views.

Dr. Commoner took aim at the “neo-Malthusians,” as he called those who, like the English scholar Thomas Malthus, foresaw perils in population growth. In a panel discussion with Dr. Ehrlich in 1970, he said it was “a cop-out of the worst kind” to say that “none of our pollution problems can be solved without getting at population first.”

He elaborated in his best-known book, “The Closing Circle,” published the next year. Reducing population, Dr. Commoner wrote, was “equivalent to attempting to save a leaking ship by lightening the load and forcing passengers overboard.”

“One is constrained to ask if there isn’t something radically wrong with the ship.”

In the science establishment, Dr. Commoner’s standing was ambiguous. Along with eminent figures of the postwar years like the chemist Linus Pauling and the anthropologist Margaret Mead, he was concerned that the integrity of American science had been compromised — first by the government’s emphasis on supporting physics at the expense of other fields during the development of nuclear weapons, and second by the growing privatization of research, in which pure science took a back seat to projects that held short-range promise of marketable technologies.

It was a concern remarkably similar to that of the distinctly unradical Dwight D. Eisenhower, who warned of the dangerous power of “the military-industrial complex” as he was leaving the presidency. But although Dr. Commoner had a record of achievement as a cellular biologist and founding director of the government-financed Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, he was seen primarily as the advocate for a politics that relatively few considered practicable or even desirable. Among other positions, he advocated forgiveness of all third world debt, which he said would decrease poverty and despair and thus act as a natural curb on population growth.

His platform did not get him very far in the 1980 presidential race, which he entered as the head of his own Citizens’ Party. He won only about 234,000 votes as Ronald Reagan swept to victory. Dr. Commoner himself conceded that he would not have made a very good president. Still, he was angry that the questions he had raised had generated so little interest.

His own favorite moment of the campaign, he recalled many years later, was when a reporter in Albuquerque asked, “Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate, or are you just running on the issues?”

Barry Commoner was born on May 28, 1917, in the East New York neighborhood of Brooklyn. His parents, the former Goldie Yarmolinsky and Isidore Commoner, were Jewish immigrants from Russia, his father a tailor until he went blind. (The original family name, Comenar, was Anglicized at the suggestion of an uncle of Barry’s, Avrahm Yarmolinsky, chief of the Slavonic department at the New York Public Library.)

Young Barry grew up at a time when it was possible to be both a tough street kid and a studious sort. He spent hours in Prospect Park collecting bits of nature, which he took home to inspect under a microscope that Uncle Avrahm had given him.

He was so shy at James Madison High School that he was referred to a speech correction class, and after graduation he set out on the track of a quiet academic career. With money earned from odd jobs, he put himself through Columbia, earning honors in his major, zoology; election to Phi Beta Kappa and Sigma Xi; and a B.A. degree in 1937, at 20. He went on to do graduate work at Harvard, where he got a Ph.D. in cellular biology. He taught for two years at Queens College and served in the Naval Air Corps in World War II, rising to lieutenant. In 1947 he joined the faculty of Washington University in St. Louis.

Role in Nuclear Test Ban

Parallel to his life as a public figure, Dr. Commoner had a reputation as a brilliant teacher and a painstaking researcher into viruses, cell metabolism and the effects of radiation on living tissue. A research team he led was the first to show that abnormal free radicals — groups of molecules with unpaired electrons — might be the earliest indicator of cancer in laboratory rats.

He found his political voice when he encountered the indifference of government authorities to the high levels of strontium 90 in the atmosphere from atomic tests. Quite simply, he said in an interview with The Chicago Tribune in 1993, “The Atomic Energy Commission turned me into an environmentalist.”

He helped organize the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information in 1958, and was eventually its president. Dr. Commoner told Scientific American years later that the committee’s task “was to explain to the public — first in St. Louis and then nationally — how splitting a few pounds of atoms could turn something as mild as milk into a devastating global poison.”

“At about that time,” he continued, “several of us met with Linus Pauling in St. Louis and together drafted the petition, eventually signed by thousands of scientists worldwide.” The petition was part of the scientific underpinning for President John F. Kennedy’s proposal of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 — “the first of continuing international actions to fully cage the nuclear beast,” Dr. Commoner said.

As the founding director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems in St. Louis, he led a staff drawn from many disciplines in investigating, among other things, lead poisoning in slums, the ecology of ghetto rats, the economics of conventional versus organic farming, and the pollution of rivers by fertilizer leaching.

Dr. Commoner moved the center from St. Louis to Queens College in 1981. He remained in the thick of things, helping to set up New York City’s trash recycling program and defending it against critics like Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who had declared the recycling law irresponsible.

In 2000, at 82, Dr. Commoner gave up the center’s directorship to concentrate on new research projects, including work on the effects of genetically altering organisms.

Waning Influence

By then he was no longer getting anything like the attention he had enjoyed in earlier times. Some experts had begun to think that his view of the planet, as a place harmoniously balanced by the trial and error of long evolution, left out too much complexity and too much potential for the unexpected.

Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, reviewing Dr. Commoner’s book “Making Peace With the Planet” for The Times in 1990, said that it “suffers the commonest of unkind fates: to be so self-evidently true and just that we pass it by as a twice-told tale.”

“Although he has been branded by many as a maverick,” Dr. Gould added, “I regard him as right and compassionate on nearly every major issue.”

Dr. Commoner married Ms. Feiner in 1980. He is also survived by two children, Lucy Commoner and Frederic, by his first wife, the former Gloria Gordon; and one granddaughter.

Dr. Commoner practiced what he preached. In his personal habits he was as frugal as a Yankee farmer, and as common-sensical. He drove or took taxis if the route by public transit took him far out of his way. On the other hand, he saw no need to waste electricity by ironing his shirts.

And when a Times writer once asked his Queens College office to mail some material, it arrived in an old brown envelope with the crossed-out return address of the botany department at Washington University — where he had last worked 19 years earlier.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 2, 2012, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Saw an Earth at Risk and Let the World Know.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/us/barry-commoner-dies-at-95.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0