"Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art." -- Barry Commoner
Barry Commoner (born May 28, 1917) is an American biologist, college professor, and eco-socialist. He ran for president of the United States in the 1980 U.S. presidential election on the Citizens Party ticket.
"After all, despite the economic advantage to firms that employed child labor, it was in the social interest, as a national policy, to abolish it - removing that advantage for all firms.""As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world - most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world's poor.""By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.""Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.""Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline - which prevented it from entering the environment.""If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.""In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.""It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.""It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.""My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically - and destructively - demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.""No action is without its side effects.""Nothing ever goes away.""Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.""The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.""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.""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.""The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.""The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.""The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.""The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.""The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.""The wave of new productive enterprises would provide opportunities to remedy the unjust distribution of environmental hazards among economic classes and racial and ethnic communities.""The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists; they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment.""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.""What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point - the exclusive right to govern the systems of production.""When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think."
Commoner was born in Brooklyn. He received his bachelor's degree in zoology from Columbia University (1937) and his master's and doctoral degrees from Harvard University (1938, 1941)."After serving as a lieutenant in the United States Navy during World War II, Commoner moved to St. Louis and became a professor of plant physiology at Washington University, where he taught for 34 years. In 1966 he founded the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems to study the science of the total environment.
During the late 1950s, Commoner became a well-known protester against nuclear testing. He went on to write several books about the negative ecological effects of above-ground nuclear testing. In 1970 he received the International Humanist Award from the International Humanist and Ethical Union. His 1971 book, The Closing Circle, suggested a left-wing, eco-socialist response to the limits to growth thesis, postulating that capitalist technologies were chiefly responsible for environmental degradation, as opposed to population pressures. In 1980, he founded the Citizens Party to serve as a vehicle for his ecological message, and his candidacy for President on the Citizens Party ticket won 233,052 votes (0.27% of the total) [1]. His official running mate was La Donna Harris, Native-American wife of Fred Harris, the former Democrat Senator from Oklahoma, although she was replaced on the ballot in Ohio by Wretha Hanson.[2][3](PDF)
After his unsuccessful bid for President, Commoner returned to New York City, and moved the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems to Queens College. He stepped down from that post in 2000, and is now a senior scientist at Queens. He is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and has a star on the St. Louis Walk of Fame.
Commoner criticized Ronald Reagan and George Bush for regulating pollution and not preventing it.
One of Commoner's lasting legacies is his four laws of ecology, as written in The Closing Circle in 1971. The four laws are:
1. Everything is Connected to Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.
2. Everything Must Go Somewhere. There is no "waste" in nature and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown.
3. Nature Knows Best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, “likely to be detrimental to that system.”
4. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. Exploitation of nature will inevitably involve the conversion of resources from useful to useless forms.
