Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,822

This is the grave of Barry Commoner.

Born in 1917 in Brooklyn, Commoner grew up in the Jewish immigrant world of that place and time. He was a science-oriented kid and a very good student. He got into Columbia University and graduated with a degree in zoology in 1937, so he was still quite young. He then went on to Harvard and got his PhD in 1941. 24 years old, not bad. He joined the Navy in World War II and was a lieutenant. He went to St. Louis after mustering out of service and took over the editorship of Science Illustrated for a year and then got a job at Washington University in the same city. He would remain an active teacher at Washington for a very long time.

Commoner was a prodigy but he was also a politically dedicated one. He was one of the early people to protest above ground nuclear testing in the 1950s and this led to him to spend the rest of his life connecting politics and science to try and get humans to live in a more ecologically sustainable way. He first really became famous for being central to the baby tooth survey. This was part of a larger project based around a number of St. Louis scientists that asked parents to send them their baby teeth to test for strontium-90. Parents were becoming quite scared of the impact of nuclear testing on their children and the teeth came flooding in. In fact, a friend of mine is doing historical work on this issue, and the teeth kept coming in after the study ended. Today, some dude just has boxes of baby teeth in his house–literally, my friend has been in the house. In any case, the study showed that strontium-90 had increased in children’s bodies over the 50s and it caused a big stir when it was published in 1961.

But it was a bit later when Commoner really became a national figure. This brilliant iconoclast was somewhat uniquely situated to speak to wide swaths of the American public by the end of the 1960s. He was a hero to many of the hippies, who unlike stereotypes about them, were in fact very interested in work of a certain kind and whom he could address due to his interest in actual life in an ecological age. He could speak to unions too for the same reason. And of course the broader zeitgeist of the era was perfect for Commoner, who really summed up the new ecological age in a way that should have made him a lot more famous today than his ridiculous clown of a fellow professor of the age, Timothy Leary. But then the divide between people who followed Commoner and people who followed Leary was real enough–the former were serious about remaking the world and the latter were mostly dumbfucks who just wanted to get wasted all the time.

What made Commoner the perfect fit for the age was his 1971 book The Closing Circle. In it, he argued for what we might call today a proto-Green New Deal. He was laser focused on the economy and how to restructure it for an ecological age. Commoner very much believed in the environmental crisis, but he was also quite optimistic about the potential of Americans to get ahead of this. You can’t change ecology, but you can change your economy and make a good bit of money on it too if you are smart about it. Basically, he was arguing for sustainable development. This put him in conversation with people such as Stewart Brand and others who were articulating new ways of developing ways to create a real life for world in actual nature. This was not a romanticized world. It was pretty realistic. And like some GND folks today, he could speak to unions because there were plenty of union-based potential projects in his vision. When I was researching Empire of Timber, I ran across the International Woodworkers of America inviting Commoner to be the keynote at their annual convention at some point in the 70s. He couldn’t do it, but the point is that they asked and it made sense to them. That he would have addressed the workers who a decade later were furious about demands to protect the spotted owl suggests a lot of history between the mid 70s and mid 80s and a lot of missed opportunities.

In 1976, Commoner wrote The Poverty of Power, which dealt with the interconnected problems of the 70s that he defined as environment, energy, and economy. By this time, Commoner was beginning to reject capitalism as an economic system that could solve the environmental problem, but he was certainly no communist. Rather, he was working toward some sort of utopian socialism, which is fine, especially given all the utopian capitalism that has driven American history and continues to drive Americans across the political spectrum today. Either way, this book holds up because of its correct observation about the problem of non-renewable energy driving the economy. This was the Peak Oil era still and of course, technology has uncovered a lot more fossil fuels, so the predictions that the energy crisis would continue around the economy weren’t proven out, but the predictions that the energy crisis would feed the environmental crisis, well….let’s say Commoner would not be too surprised that we as a nation have done nothing to fight climate change.

Another reason why Commoner remains such an upstanding figure today is that he entered the debates of the time around environment and population growth and rejected the racist ideas that it is the population growth of the global poor responsible for our environmental crisis. This argument has long been a shunt by the globally wealthy to move attention away from consumption by the elite. Rather, he noted correctly that the real driver of too many children was poverty and as nations became less poor, they would produce fewer children. That’s exactly what has happened in much of the world. He also blamed colonialism for the problem, saying that the northern nations had stripped these poorer nations of resources that had allowed them to balance their populations but had left Asia, Africa, and Latin American in a state of long-term poverty.

Commoner’s influence really did peak in the Carter years. By the 80s, the nation as a whole was less interested in hearing from prophets of environmental sustainability. We could buy SUVs now, thanks Reagan! But he remained involved in these issues for the rest of life. He kept writing and he had an audience. He also was involved in a dioxin study of Inuit women that was published in 2000 and which showed that American factories were polluting the Arctic.

In the mid 70s, Commoner left Washington University for Queens College. He ran for president in 1980 on a third party ticket called the Citizens Party, with LaDonna Harris, wife of the former senator from Oklahoma Fred Harris as his VP. He died in 2012, at the age of 95.

Barry Commoner is buried in Green-Wood Cemetery, Brooklyn, New York.

If you would like this series to visit other American environmental writers, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Lynn White is in Los Angeles and Jane Jacobs is in Almedia, Pennsylvania. Previous post in this series are archived here and here.