Remembering Barry Commoner 

Peter Dreier | October 1, 2012

The Nation 

http://www.thenation.com/article/170251/remembering-barry-commoner

[photo] Courtesy: Washington University. Via Oregon State
University [1].  

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 fit between
life and its surroundings."

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 a 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." 

Links: [1]
http://osulibrary.oregonstate.edu/specialcollections/
coll/pauling/peace/index.html

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