Before “climate change,” “global warming,” and “environmental justice” became household words, an eminent scientist described a set of memorable rules and an analytic scheme that correctly foreshadowed our current environmental crisis and its solution. I refer to Barry Commoner (1917–2012), a biologist by training, a teacher and writer by profession, and a world citizen by necessity.
I worked with Barry from 1998 until his death in 2012 as his colleague at the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at the City University of New York. Barry spent his time thinking and writing (up to 10 drafts!), so that the clarity of his ideas and books reflected both his native brilliance and decades of close observation but also a relentless desire to describe the world correctly.
Barry Commoner was, both figuratively and literally, the face of the first Earth Day in the United States in 1970, when he landed on the cover of Time magazine, which called him “a scientist with a classroom of millions.” And it was true: he traveled and lectured to large groups at dozens of college campuses each year in the 1960s and 1970s and then set out his ideas in the widely read landmark book The Closing Circle (Knopf, 1971).
Consider three of Barry’s laws of ecology: “Everything is connected to everything else,” “Everything must go somewhere,” and “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” Is there a simpler or more apt description of the production, fate, and impact of carbon emissions and their relation to global warming? These laws are true, universally applicable, and readily understandable. They give a name to our felt experiences of the world. People know that their actions have consequences, even if environmental and public health scientists are charged to explain the detailed nature of those consequences. The challenge for these scientists, which is easily overlooked, is not just to do rigorous science but to explicate their findings in a manner that demonstrates those laws so that they tap into these commonly shared felt experiences. Barry’s work was to articulate a scheme that connected scientists and citizens, thereby facilitating engagement, by citizens and scientists alike, in efforts to find solutions to the environmental crisis. That this approach is now commonplace is a testament to Barry’s success.
Throughout his long career (into his 90s), Barry was consistently concerned with illuminating the necessary relationship between resolving the environmental crisis and creating a just society. The historic changes that were required to alleviate the environmental crisis—the democratization of decision making—were also needed to remove people from poverty and to lessen social conflict. Technological advances, if properly shared, could raise material welfare sufficiently to end poverty but could only do so if their benefits were disseminated and their environmental consequences were blunted. Barry thus helped initiate the environmental justice movement.
Barry closed his 1971 book, with this:
None of us—singly or sitting in committee—can possibly blueprint a specific “plan” for resolving the environmental crisis. To pretend otherwise is only to evade the real meaning of the environmental crisis: that the world is being carried to the brink of ecological disaster not by a singular fault, which some clever scheme can correct, but by the phalanx of powerful economic, political, and social forces that constitute the march of history. Anyone who proposes to cure the environmental crisis undertakes thereby to change the course of history. But this is a competence reserved to history itself, for sweeping social change can be designed only in the workshop of rational, informed, collective social action. That we must act is now clear. The question which we face is how. (The Closing Circle, p. 300)
37 Years Ago
Assessing Environmental Risks of Energy
[I]ndirect public health and safety effects of energy systems are the most poorly quantified to date, the most difficult to quantify in principle, and potentially the most serious. . . . Effects on climate from the atmospheric increase in carbon dioxide caused by the combustion of fossil fuels; . . . on environmental and economic goods and services caused by acid precipitation from fuel combustion; the risk of nuclear terrorism arising from national or subnational groups gaining access to nuclear materials from commercial nuclear power facilities; and the risk of war over access to oil . . . all fall into the category of indirect effects that are resistant to convincing analysis but possibly enormously destructive.
From AJPH, September 1981, p. 1049
10 Years Ago
Climate Change: The Public Health Response
As climate change has become a certainty, so has the need for public health action to anticipate, manage, and ameliorate the health burdens it will impose. The standard framework for public health action is the 10 Essential Services of Public Health, developed in 1994 by the American Public Health Association and a group of federal, state, and local agencies and partners. In developing and implementing services to address climate change, public health professionals will need to confront several practical realities. First, the effects of climate change will vary considerably by region. Second, they will vary by population group; not all people are equally susceptible. Third, these effects are highly complex, and planning and action will need to be multidimensional.
From AJPH, March 2008, p. 438
Biography
Image. Barry Commoner, 1971, Washington University Photographic Services Collection, Washington University Libraries, Department of Special Collection. Printed with Permission.
