Barry Commoner, Pioneering Environmental Scientist and Activist, Dies at 95
Dr. Barry Commoner acknowledges cheers of delegates after accepting the Citizens’ Party’s nomination for president. About 300 delegates from 32 states attended the new party’s first national convention. —Corbis ImagesThe obituary from Common Dreams is posted here, and excerpted below:
Barry Commoner, who died on Sunday at the age of 95, spent his life linking environmental issues to a broader vision of social and economic justice. He called attention to the parallels among the environmental, civil rights, labor, and peace movements. Described in 1970 by Time magazine as the “Paul Revere of ecology,” Commoner followed Rachel Carson as America’s most prominent modern environmentalist. He viewed the environmental crisis as a symptom of a fundamentally flawed economic and social system. A biologist and research scientist, he argued that corporate greed, misguided government priorities, and the misuse of technology undermined “the finely sculptured fit between life and its surroundings.”
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Commoner linked environmental issues to a broader vision of social and economic justice. He called attention to the parallels among the environmental, civil rights, labor, and peace movements. He connected the environmental crisis to the problems of poverty, injustice, racism, public health, national security, and war.
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In 1979 Commoner helped form the Citizens Party, hoping it would gain influence similar to that of the Green Party in Europe. The next year Commoner ran as the party’s presidential candidate. He got on the ballot in twenty-nine states but received less than one-third of 1 percent of the national vote. Like most third parties in the American system, the Citizens Party wound up being a minor fringe force. Commoner did not run again for office, but he advised Jesse Jackson’s Democratic Party presidential campaigns in the 1980s.
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Barry Commoner was a brilliant big thinker. I have a photo somewhere of him speaking in a living room in Portland OR, with myself in the background. I was involved in the Citizens Party. Many members felt strongly about Jesse Jackson’s campaign for president in 1984, and like Mr. Commoner, worked for him instead of the Party’s own nominee, Sonia Johnson. The Party didn’t last long after that.
There’s another very good obituary at the New York Times.
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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 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 make environmentalism a people’s political cause.
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His platform did not get him very far in the 1980 presidential race, which he entered as the head of his own Citizens’ Party. He won only 234,000 votes as Ronald Reagan swept to victory. Dr. Commoner himself conceded that he would not have made a very good president. Still, he was angry that the questions he had raised had generated so little interest.
His own favorite moment of the campaign, he recalled many years later, was when a reporter in Albuquerque asked, ‘Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate, or are you just running on the issues?’
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Stephen Jay Gould, the Harvard paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, reviewing Dr. Commoner’s 1990 book ‘Making Peace With the Planet’ for The Times in 1990, said that it ‘suffers the commonest of unkind fates: to be so self-evidently true and just that we pass it by as a twice-told tale.’
‘Although he has been branded by many as a maverick,’ Dr. Gould added, ‘I regard him as right and compassionate on nearly every major issue.’
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Barry Commoner on the cover of Time Magazine, Feb. 2, 1970Read both obituaries, especially if you aren’t familiar with him. He lived a fascinating life. I only wish he had been more influential.
