Barry Commoner (1917 – ) American Biologist, Environmental Scientist, Author, and Social Activist
Born to Russian immigrant parents, Commoner earned a doctorate in biology from Harvard in 1941. As a biologist, he is known for his work with free radicals—chemicals like chlorofluorocarbons, which are suspected culprits in ozone layer depletion. Commoner led a fairly academic life at first, with research posts at various universities, but rose to some prominence in the late 1950s, when he and others protested atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons. He earned a national reputation in the 1960s with books, articles, and speeches on a wide range of environmental concerns, including pollution, alternative energy sources, and population. His latest book, Making Peace with the Planet, was published in 1990. Commoner's other works include Science and Survival (1967), The Closing Circle
Barry Commoner speaking to a group of protesters gathered outside a New Jersey hotel where Exxon stockholders met in 1989. (Corbis-Bettmann. Reproduced by permission.)
(1971),
Energy and Human Welfare (1975),
The Poverty of Power (1976), and
The Politics of Energy (1979).
Commoner believes that post-World War II industrial methods, with their reliance on nonrenewable fossil fuels are the root cause of modern environmental pollution. When combined with a myopic view of the bottom line, he states, the devastation is complete: "At present, economic considerations—in particular, the private desire for maximizing short-term profits—govern the choice of productive technology, which in turn determines its environmental impact, generally for the worse." The petrochemicals industry receives the largest share of Commoner's criticism. He refers to "the petrochemical industry's toxic invasion of the biosphere" and states flatly that "the petrochemical industry is inherently inimical to environmental quality."
Almost as distressing as environmental pollution is our inability to clean it up. Commoner rejects attempts at environmental regulation as pointless. Far better, he says, to not produce the toxin in the first place. "When a pollutant is attacked at the point of origin—in the production process that generates it—the pollutant can be eliminated; once it is produced, it is too late. This is the simple but powerful lesson of the two decades of intense but largely futile effort to improve the quality of the environment."
Commoner offers radical, sweeping solutions for social and ecological ills. The most urgent of these is a renewable energy source, primarily photovoltaic cells powered by solar energy. These would not only decentralize electric utilities (another target of Commoner's), but would use sunlight to fuel almost any energy need, including smaller, lighter, battery-powered cars. To ease the transition from fossil fuels to solar power, he proposes methane, cogeneration (which produces electricity from waste heat), and an organic agriculture system that would "produce enough ethanol to replace about 20 percent of the national demand for gasoline without reducing the overall supply of food or significantly affecting its price."
Commoner makes few compromises, and his environmental zeal has made him a crusader for social causes as well. Eliminating Third World debt, he argues, would improve life in impoverished countries and end the spiral of economic desperation that drives countries to overpopulation. "This [debt forgiveness] should be regarded not as a magnanimous gesture but as partial reparations for the damage inflicted...by the former colonial empires...[T]he cause of poverty is the grossly unequal distribution of the world's wealth...we must redistribute that wealth, among nations and within them."
In 1980, Commoner made a bid for the presidency on the Citizen's Party ticket, a short-lived political attempt to combine environmental and Socialist agendas. Since 1981 he has been the director of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Queens College in New York City.
Resources
Books
Commoner, B. The Closing Circle. New York: Knopf, 1971.
——. Making Peace With the Planet. New York: New Press, 1992.
Periodicals
Commoner, B. "Ending the War Against Earth." The Nation 250 (30 April 1990): 589–90.
——. "The Failure of the Environmental Effort." Current History 91 (April 1992): 176–81.
Stone, P. "The Ploughboy Interview." Mother Earth News (March–April 1990): 116–26.
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