[Reader-list] Barry Commoner NYT

Nagraj Adve nagraj.adve at gmail.com
Tue Oct 2 23:15:43 IST 2012


The first part of a 3-part obit in the New York Times. Not a good time for
old people on the left.

Nagraj


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.
Related in Opinion

   - Dot Earth Blog: Barry Commoner's Uncommon
Life<http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/barry-commoners-uncommon-life/?ref=us>(October
   1, 2012)

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Jack Fahland/St. Louis Globe Democrat

Barry Commoner in 1971 at Washington University in St. Louis. He believed
pollution, war and inequality were related issues.
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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 <http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19700202,00.html> 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.


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