BARRY COMMONER AND THE SCIENCE OF SURVIVAL

By

MICHAEL EGAN

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN HISTORY

WASHINGTON STATE UNIVERSITY

Department of History

December 2004

© Copyright by MICHAEL EGAN, 2004

All Rights Reserved
© Copyright by MICHAEL EGAN, 2004
All Rights Reserved
 ii

To the Faculty of Washington State University:

The members of the Committee appointed to examine the dissertation of Michael Egan
find it satisfactory and recommend that it be accepted.

____________________________________
Chair

____________________________________

____________________________________

____________________________________
 iii

Acknowledgments

History is an exercise in collaboration. We organize our thoughts and research in tandem with the
intellectual generosity of others. In this way, I am indebted to more people than I could ever hope
to list and thank here. I must begin, however, with the protagonist of this story. In my first meeting
with Barry Commoner, I asked a series of general and awkward questions that he very patiently
answered. At the end of that meeting, he gave me a tour of the Center for the Biology of Natural
Systems, then stopped me and said: “You’re Michael; I’m Barry.” I took it as a sign of acceptance.
He also duly informed me—without a shred of self-consciousness—that I was tackling an excellent
and important dissertation topic. He was right. I hope that the following pages do justice to his
career, the trust he placed in me, and the amount of time he made available for me. Barry also
makes a mean sandwich, and his office is a better bet for lunch than any deli in New York. At risk
of undermining the study that follows, maybe there is such a thing as a free lunch after all.
For their contributions, I also thank the members of my dissertation committee. Ron Doel
gave freely of time and energy, and worked diligently to help make up for my shortcomings in the
history of science. Laurie Mercier offered friendly encouragement and thoughtful counsel on the
historian’s role as social critic. LeRoy Ashby was an excellent teacher and willing participant in
historical free association. His passion for history—in the classroom and on the written page—is a
source of inspiration that I can only hope to match. Paul Hirt would, no doubt, attest to my never
being short of words on the page (second only to the number he could fit in the margin), but I can’t
even begin to thank him. He is my mentor and my friend.
This study has also benefited from the attention and care that Ben Cohen, Jeff Crane, Amy
Crumpton, Andrew Duffin, John Hausdoerffer, Maril Hazlett, Linda Lear, Neil Maher, and Kevin
Marsh offered in insightful readings of various sections and chapters. In addition, for friendly
encouragement and direction, I am grateful to Kevin Armitage, Sue Armitage, Mary Braun, Laurie
Carlson, Hilary Elmendorf, Sara Ewert, Danny Faber, Michael Fellman, Hugh Gorman, Denis
Hayes, Sam Hays, Katie Johnson, Steve Kale, Peter Kuznick, Bill Lang, Tim Luke, Gregg Mitman,
Tammy Nemeth, Vera Norwood, Sheldon Novick, Val Plumwood, Bill Robbins, Philip Scranton,
Thomas Seiler, Steve Shay, Adam Sowards, Jeffrey Stine, Heather Streets, Noël Sturgeon, Paul
Sutter, Patricia Thorsten, Oscar Vogel, Jessica Wang, Sylvia Washington, Charlie Weiner, Laurie
Whitcomb, Donald Worster, and Tony Zaragoza. I would not presume to be so bold as to suggest
 iv

that I stand, like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, but what light this work
does offer is emboldened by the generosity of these colleagues and friends. I am also grateful to
conference, symposium, and colloquium audiences and panel members for their criticisms and
encouragement, notably at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, the History of Science
Colloquium at Oregon State University, the 2003 History of Science Society meeting, the
“Monitoring the Environment” symposium sponsored by the Hagley Museum and Library and the
Society for the History of Technology, and numerous American Society for Environmental History
meetings.
Travel for research and conferences was supported by a variety of sources, and I wish to
express my thanks for funds from the History Department’s Pettyjohn Travel Fund, a History of
Science Society/National Science Foundation Travel Grant, the Society for the History of
Technology, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. At
Washington State University, I was also the recipient of the College of Liberal Arts’ Boeing
Graduate Fellowship in Environmental Studies and the Department of History’s Claudius O. and
Mary W. Johnson Fellowship. Indeed, both the College and the Department have been especially
energetic in encouraging my studies and research. I am also grateful to archivists across the
country for their help in locating documents: Kenn Thomas at the Western Historical Manuscript
Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis; Patricia E. White at the Special Collections and
University Archives at Stanford University; Lucia Munch at the AAAS Archives; and especially the
genial staff of the Manuscript Reading Room at the Library of Congress.
Finally, I have enjoyed the unfailing love of family, near and extended. My parents have
been a constant source of support, financial, moral, and intellectual; my grandmother, a source of
inspiration; and my brother and sister, companions in so many ways. My children, Joshua and
Jordan, served as wonderful distractions from work as well as poignant reminders of its larger
significance. This work begins and ends with Janice: friend, partner, beloved. This is for her.

me
Philadelphia, PA
October 2004
 v

BARRY COMMONER AND THE SCIENCE OF SURVIVAL

Abstract

by Michael Egan, Ph.D.

Washington State University
December 2004

Chair: Paul W. Hirt

Since World War II, biologist Barry Commoner has remained one of the most prominent

and ardent defenders of the American environment. This study examines his social and scientific

activism in order to shed light on his specific influences on and contributions to American

environmentalism. Commoner’s influences and contributions can be best examined by separating

his struggles against particular environmental pollutants and his larger social vision. On the one

hand, Commoner worked tirelessly to uncover environmental hazards inherent in postwar methods

of production and to share that information with the public. He was a leading activist against

nuclear fallout, air pollution, and the synthetic creations of the petrochemical industry—plastics,

pesticides, detergents, PCBs, CFCs, and countless other toxins—and also a staunch critic of

American free market capitalism, raising concerns about the inequitable distribution of

environmental risks and benefits and the production and consumption of energy. On the other

hand, he sought to demonstrate the intimate relationship between environmentalism and other

social movements—for peace, civil rights, women, and labor—as part of a larger movement for

social justice and empowerment. In so doing, he showed how environmental decline was the

result of social decisions made beyond the purview of the American public, and became a leader

for public participation in decision-making, particularly as it related to determining the risk factors

presented by environmental pollutants.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii

ABSTRACT v

CHAPTER

Introduction: Risk & Dissent 1

1. In the Thunderclap’s Wake 20

2. Guarding the Public 65

3. The New Jeremiad 111

4. When Scientists Disagree 157

5. Biological Capital 199

6. The “Other” Environmentalism 241

Conclusion: If We Would Know Life 277

BIBLIOGRAPHY 287
 vii

for ti jan
my tempest and my harbour
 viii

Power never yields without a struggle

—Frederick Douglass
 Introduction
Risk & Dissent

You have to describe the country in terms of what you passionately hope it will
become, as well as in terms of what you know it to be now. You have to be
loyal to a dream country rather than to the one to which you wake up every
morning. Unless such loyalty exists, the ideal has no chance of becoming
actual.
—Richard Rorty

This study examines the relationship between democracy and environmental health in the United

States in the half century that followed the conclusion of the Second World War. Insofar as a

coherent thesis directs, justifies, and coordinates the chapters that follow, it is that the

environmental crisis that emerged during the postwar era fostered a public conversation about

acceptable levels of environmental risk, which sought to realize a broadening of social

empowerment in decision-making processes. That empowerment was derived from the

recognition that an empowered and participatory public required the kind of specialized information

that was usually guarded from them. This is a story about a movement that sought to reform the

way American society accepts or rejects risk by increasing democratic participation, questioning

established authority, and energizing experts to address the important human health and

environmental issues that confronted Americans and the world after World War II.

On 2 February 1970 Time incorporated a new “Environment” section into its magazine.

The editorial staff chose for the issue’s cover a haunting acrylic painting by Mati Klarwein of Barry

Commoner, its appointed leader of the emerging “science of survival.” Commoner was set in front

of a landscape half of which appeared idyllic and the other half apocalyptic, presumably suggestive

of the environmental choices facing humankind. The urgency of those choices was implicit. The

decision to put the biologist from Washington University in St. Louis on the cover stemmed less

from Commoner’s celebrity than his relative ubiquity. As Time journalists hunted for their first cover

story relating to the environment, they discovered that Commoner had lectured widely on a variety
 2

of environmental topics and had gained notoriety in sounding the alarm on environmental problems

from nuclear fallout and air pollution to water contamination and toxic chemicals in the city, on the

farm, and in the home. In choosing Commoner, Time acknowledged both the extent and the

complexity of that crisis as well as affirming Commoner’s role as a key voice of dissent in the larger

environmental discourse.1

After World War II, the American popular imagination recognized the existence of an

environmental crisis in the United States. Amidst a period of high Cold War tension, Americans

welcomed the “Age of Ecology,” the rapid expansion of legislation relating to environmental

protection, and the proliferation of popular publications lamenting the condition of the earth’s

ecosystems, all of which pointed toward a specific and growing ecological fear.2 That Time should

devote a cover story and a new section to the environment a couple of months before Earth Day

1970 was another indication that a collective anxiety over the state of the environment was, in

Commoner’s words, “a sign that the finely sculptured fit between life and its surroundings [had]

begun to corrode.”3 For many, the popular genesis of the new ecology movement was the

publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which described—rather ominously—the

potential of a “silent spring,” one without birds singing. Silent Spring concentrated on the fact that

chemicals designed to kill bugs—notably DDT—incurred unforeseen environmental hazards and

were often toxic to birds, fish, children, and other small animals. But it also paved the way for a

1 Time (2 February 1970).

2 For the “Age of Ecology,” see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas 2nd edition

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

3 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 11.

The first Earth Day was 22 April 1970.

 3

decade of effective criticism of American industrialism and helped shape the context of postwar

American environmentalism.4

Indeed, the Second World War might really be seen as a pivotal turning point in American

environmental history, wherein Americans effectively sought to replace nature with human

technologies.5 This endeavor was fraught with unanticipated consequences, many of which were

deleterious to the physical environment and human health. As a result of this transition, the scope

and scale of environmental decline grew markedly. As Commoner wrote in The Closing Circle

(1971): “The period of World War II is … a great divide between the scientific revolution that

preceded it and the technological revolution that followed it.”6 That technological revolution led to

an outpouring of polluting technologies, which contributed to what might be regarded as a tragic

tableau of the Progressive-era fallacy that humans could infinitely shape and dominate the

environment. Whereas Progressive-era conservationists and their heirs sought to control

environmental problems with new technologies, the post-World War II environmentalists rejected

that technological optimism and warned that many new technologies were more dangerous than

the problems they sought to control. In addition to pesticides like DDT, many other miracle

chemicals became prominent parts of the American landscape. Synthetic detergents quickly

replaced natural soap until it was discovered that their suds did not break down and polluted

surface waters. The manufacture of plastics emitted dangerous chemicals into the environment.

The disposal of these new synthetic products also resulted in problems, because they were not

4 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962).

5 This suggestion is put forward by Theodore Porter. See Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit
of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 16. See also Edmund
Russell, War and Nature: Fighting Humans and Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2001). Russell posits the theory that “war and nature coevolved: the control of nature
expanded the scale of war, and war expanded the scale on which people controlled nature.” See page 2.

6 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 129.

 4

biodegradable and their incineration released dioxin and other poisons into the air. Mercury and

other toxics escaped from coal-fired power plants and worked their way into the food chain.

Nuclear technology was perceived as a viable energy alternative to coal, but its hazardous waste

defied safe disposal. Increased demands on agriculture led to greater dependence on synthetic

fertilizers and pesticides, the runoff of which contaminated local waters. The dispersal of

ammonium perchlorate, an additive used for rocket fuel and munitions since the 1950s, threatened

the widespread contamination of groundwater. Flame retardants, known as polybrominated

diphenyl ethers, were detected in alarming quantities in the milk of nursing mothers in the United

States and Canada. The growing demand for high performance automobiles led to greater fuel

consumption—which contained lead—and higher levels of carbon dioxide, and contributed to urban

smog. Further, new methods of food production, continued urban expansion and suburban sprawl,

and the nonchalant disposal of harmful waste materials all contributed to a variety of health and

environmental problems, locally, nationally, and globally. As Commoner warned in Science and

Survival (1966): “The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.”7 Individually

and sometimes cumulatively, these new hazards galvanized the American public into action,

frequently in agreement with Commoner’s assertion. By 2000, a Gallup poll found that 83% of

Americans were sympathetic to the goals of the environmental movement.8

But the year after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published, historian Arthur Ekirch Jr.

mused at the “paradoxical ability” of Americans “to devastate the natural world and at the same

time to mourn its passing.”9 While Americans seemed to agree with the broadest goals of

7 Commoner, Science and Survival (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 3.

8 Lydia Saad & Riley Dunlap, “Americans Are Environmentally Friendly, but Issue Not Seen as Urgent

Problem,” Gallup Poll Monthly 415 (April 2000), 12-18.

9 Arthur Ekirch Jr., Man and Nature in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 189.
 5

environmental protection, the Gallup poll also noted that only 16% were “active participants,” while

more than half of those polled were sympathetic but uninvolved. It was a recurring phenomenon.

Within a couple of decades of the energy crisis that rapt the American consciousness during the

mid-1970s, for example, American drivership had pushed gas and oil consumption to per capita

levels higher than those prior to the oil crisis of the 1970s.10 Hal Rothman has suggested that

Americans are “half-hearted” environmentalists, reluctant to make the difficult choices that might

alter their current lifestyles.11 Americans are buying and consuming more plastics, emitting more

toxins into the air, and encouraging wasteful industries that promote cost-efficiency over

environmental responsibility. And the consequences of these decisions have hardly been benign.

The nation’s wild places are under siege by developers; sprawl has turned many American cities

into wastelands; cancer rates have steadily increased, especially among children; more children

are developing asthma and other respiratory diseases; carbon dioxide levels continue to increase;

and Americans are still consuming a disproportionate and—many would argue—unsustainable

share of the earth’s resources.12 The environmental crisis, then, is a two-pronged crisis: the first

10 While the average fuel rate (miles per gallon) for vehicles on American roads has increased substantially

since 1973 (from 11.9 miles per gallon in 1973 to 16.9 miles per gallon in 2000), recently there has been a distressing
move to larger vehicles. The ratio of cars to total vehicles declined from 80% in 1977 to 64% in 1995. See George
Martin, “Grounding Social Ecology: Landscape, Settlement, and Right of Way,” Capitalism Nature Socialism, 13 (March
2002), 3-30. Bigger vehicles invariably mean greater fuel consumption, so while cars have continued to become more
fuel-efficient the average fuel rate for all vehicles has only fluctuated mildly since 1991. See the Department of Energy
website statistics: http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/aer/txt/ptb0209.html. Further, while per vehicle fuel consumption is
lower than the pre-oil crisis rate, it has climbed back up to the 1980 rate, a disturbing rise associated with the
increasing popularity of sport utility vehicles. See John Cloud & Amanda Bower, “Why SUV is all the Rage,” Time 161
(24 February 2003). See also Keith Bradsher, High and Mighty: The Dangerous Rise of the SUV (New York: Public
Affairs, 2003).

11 Hal K. Rothman, The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States since 1945 (Orlando,

FL: Harcourt Brace College, 1998), 210.

12 For cancer rates among children, statistics are available from the National Cancer Institute. See

http://seer.cancer.gov/csr/1975_2001/sections.html (5 June 2004). For the growing level of asthma rates among
children, see the American Lung Association website, http://www.lungusa.org/.
 6

denotes the objective hazards wrought upon nature and human health, and the second points to

the relative apathy of the American public to address it.

This study charts the course of American values toward the environment since World War II, using

Barry Commoner as a lens. It is a story mixed with hope and failure, and one that strikes at the

very root of American values more broadly conceived. Central to that story is a growing skepticism

toward the unquestioned benevolence of technology, which became an integral feature of the

postwar environmental movement during the early postwar years. Donald Worster has commented

that “what is especially surprising … is that the campaign against technological growth has been

led not by poets or artists, as in the past, but by individuals from within the scientific community.

So accustomed are we to assume that scientists are generically partisans of the entire ideology of

progress … that the ecology movement has created a vast shock wave of reassessment of the

scientist’s place in society.”13 For more than fifty years, Barry Commoner was at the vanguard of

that scientists’ movement.

It is important to note, however, that the science under debate throughout this study

was—at the outset of the various struggles—rarely conclusive. As Commoner grappled with

government and industrial scientists over the relative safety of fallout from aboveground nuclear

testing or the potential hazards of mercury, existing knowledge and scientific data could not

conclusively support either argument. To the extent that Commoner constituted a voice of caution

in a world addicted to technological optimism and progress, he also presented a powerful critique

of post-World War II risk analysis. That new technologies were introduced to the public and

integrated in the marketplace before their safety had been fully established was, to Commoner, a

13Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas 2nd edition (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 22.
 7

palpably dangerous feature of the postwar technological revolution. Industrial scientists were

exposing society to unanticipated risks and dangers.

The history of quantification and qualification of risk assessment, therefore, plays a critical

role in this study. I submit that the modern environmental movement is engaged in a struggle to

alter the manner in which risk is identified and assessed. In his seminal study of risk analysis,

sociologist Ulrich Beck argued that the production of wealth was inevitably connected to the

production of societal risks. Because the postwar technological revolution had introduced a variety

of hazards that defied easy solution, Beck argued that society had turned its attention from the

production of goods to the management of those hazards and the social controversies that ensued.

But by shifting its focus away from production, a perpetual vicious circle emerged as new hazards

continually presented themselves, thereby founding what Beck termed “risk society.”14 “We are

now living in the hazardous age of creeping catastrophe,” Beck wrote in another essay. “What

generations before us discovered despite resistance, and had to shout out loud at the world, we

have come to take for granted: the impending ‘suicide of the species.’”15 With respect to

environmental concerns, these risks were manifested in threats to human health, the

mismanagement or over-exploitation of resources—or what economists might call natural

capital—and the unforeseen social and environmental costs of technological progress. Further, as

Frederick Buell summarized: “No longer does society need to deal only with social conflict resulting

from the unequal distribution of environmental goods; it now has to cope also with the tensions and

conflicts that come from the inequitable distribution of environmental bads.”16 To Commoner,

14 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1992).

15 Ulrich Beck, “Risk Society and the Provident State,” in Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New

Ecology edited by Scott Lash et al. (London: Sage Publications, 1996), 27-43. Quotation is from page 40.
 8

questions of what constituted acceptable risk, who made that determination, and what groups of

people were most susceptible to risk required fundamental revision. Commoner insisted that these

kinds of questions demanded public participation; scientific experts or policy makers had no moral

authority to make these kinds of decisions unilaterally. What Commoner was advocating through

environmental protest was a radical overhaul of how democracy and the governance of production

in the United States worked.

One of Commoner’s biggest obstacles involved captivating the American public and

alerting them of the dangers inherent in environmental hazards. Indeed, he quickly discovered that

initiating a public dialog on social problems and risk analysis was particularly difficult in a state of

conformity. In many respects, his challenge to the Cold War social conformity constitutes his most

significant contribution. Commoner outlined the central tenets of his political activism in a

commencement address he gave at the University of California’s San Francisco Medical Center on

10 June 1967. In a paper entitled “The Scholar’s Obligation to Dissent,” Commoner discussed his

social duty as a scholar:

The scholar’s duty is toward the development of socially significant truth, which
requires freedom to test the meaning of all relevant observations and views in
open discussion, and openly to express a concern with the goals of our society.
The scholar has an obligation—which he owes to the society that supports
him—toward such open discourse. And when, under some constraint, scholars
are called upon to support a single view, then the obligation to discourse
necessarily becomes an obligation to dissent. In a situation of conformity, dissent
is the scholar’s duty to society.17

Because the postwar era was marked by a prevailing consensus and conformity—in no small

measure a reaction to a decade of economic depression during the 1930s and then cultural

16 Frederick Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New

York: Routledge, 2003), 193.

17Commoner, “The Scholar’s Obligation to Dissent,” Commencement Address, University of California, San
Francisco Medical Center, 10 June 1967 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 493), 7.
 9

uncertainty during the Second World War—the need for dissenting opinions had rarely been

greater. Cass R. Sunstein agrees with Commoner’s basic position. In Why Societies Need

Dissent, Sunstein notes that: “conformity is often a sensible course of action. … One reason we

conform is that we often lack much information of our own.”18 Providing information, however, was

the scholar’s primary mission. As Commoner asserted in his commencement address, “the

scholar’s duty is … not to truth for its own sake, but to truth for society’s sake.”19 To that end,

Commoner saw the public intellectual’s role as vital to the moral glue that countenanced social

progress. In effect, through this devotion to dissent, intellectuals embodied “a self-appointed moral

conscience of their society.”20

Because the very act of dissent upsets the delicate conformity upon which social stability is

founded, conformists are frequently considered the defenders of social interests and dissenters are

regarded as selfish individualists. But Sunstein argues that the opposite is perhaps more accurate.

“Much of the time,” he claims, “dissenters benefit others, while conformists benefit themselves.”21

Naturally enough, as a biologist, Commoner applied his understanding of his social responsibility to

questions of environmental risk. In the years following World War II, specialists had managed to

reduce risk assessment to a series of statistics that measured hazards in parts per million and

actuarial equations of what constituted acceptable risk. But “leaving it to the experts” constituted a

shift toward conformity and a related suppression of information. Commoner found this

unacceptable. Such an “objective” approach ignored or downplayed public concerns and pressing

18 Cass R. Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 5.

19 Commoner, “The Scholar’s Obligation to Dissent,” 6.

20 Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1992), 17.

21 Sunstein, Why Societies Need Dissent, 6.

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social questions of what criteria and ethical standards should be used to regulate pollution and

protect human health.22 Much of Commoner’s writings and activism pointed to the significance of

risk assessment as ultimately a question of moral and public judgment, not simply a question of

scientific data and statistics.

Numerous environmental historians have recognized the inherent connection between the

control of nature and the concurrent control of people.23 Power relations are frequently played out

over access to natural resources and environmental risk analysis. Those who determine what

constitutes acceptable risk subjugate others to those determinations. In a market-driven society,

economic interests have typically played a central role in environmental decision-making, often at

the expense of the poor or the disenfranchised. In this respect, Commoner’s activism targeted

human passions as a means of persuading non-specialists both of the temerity of conformist

technological decisions in favor of “progress” but, more importantly, of the public’s role in the

decision-making process. For Commoner, the public examination of risk created the context for a

more inclusive kind of democracy. While Commoner presented much of his activism as a form of

environmental dissent, he was also quite conscious of the notion that he was making a

commitment to social dissent and the manner in which power was distributed in the United States.

My investigation of Commoner’s career seeks to make a series of scholarly contributions. First and

foremost, I document Commoner’s influences on and contributions to modern environmentalism.

Commoner played a distinct and important role in the development of American environmentalism

22 For a discussion on the objectivity of risk analysis, see Porter, Trust in Numbers.

23 For the most articulate, recent discussions of the relationship between nature and power relations, see

Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford University Press,
1985), 17-60; Andrew Hurley, Environmental Inequalities: Class, Race, and Industrial Pollution in Gary, Indiana, 1945-
1980 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995); and Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic
Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996).
 11

by bringing several industrial and technological threats into public debate. His historical

significance stems from the breadth of environmental issues he addressed and the manner in

which he sought to make light of their connections to a more comprehensive movement for social

justice. During the latter half of the twentieth century, Commoner represented a durable, stalwart,

and remarkably consistent position that American society needed to revise the manner in which it

accepted or rejected risk. He saw this revision as being integral to any program that might offer

environmental sustainability over the long term, but he also insisted upon greater public

participation in decision-making. This story traces his efforts to persuade citizens to participate in

the discourse over environmental risks while examining the methods he used in order to achieve

his goal. As a prominent and early dissenting voice in the discourse on postwar technological

affluence, Commoner is an important figure who helps shed light on the moral and political

intricacies of American society inside the environmental crisis.

By shedding light on both his social and environmental ethics and the manner in which risk

assessment is a vital aspect of environmental activism, I fill a hole left between two important

works on the history of environmentalism. Samuel P. Hays’s Beauty, Health, and Permanence:

Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 offers a provocative account of American

environmental politics, which attempts to associate environmental issues more broadly with the

swath of social movements that sprang up during the postwar era, but his analysis lacks any

discussion of the intellectual underpinnings for environmental resistance. In contrast, Roderick

Nash’s treatment of the history of environmental ethics in The Rights of Nature: A History of

Environmental Ethics is one of the most insightful considerations of American environmentalism,

but it does not engage sufficiently with the empirical problems that gave rise to the movement’s

postwar prominence. Commoner undermines the separation between the political and the moral,
 12

and allows us to properly appreciate the significance and complexity of American environmentalism

since World War II.24

I also stress the role of modern science in the postwar iteration of American

environmentalism. In so doing, I hope to put the historiographies of recent science and

environmentalism in dialog with one another. For disciplines with such natural links, it is odd that

little literature sits comfortably in both camps. I hope to use the questions posed in my study to

build a bridge between the disparate literatures in the histories of science and the environment.

Scientists were intellectual leaders, but they were also prominent actors in the debate over

environmental policy. As much as the atomic bomb raised palpable concerns over the potential for

social and environmental destruction, it also gave rise to a fierce moral debate within the broad

scientific community that had spawned it. In the wake of the bomb, science had become politically

interesting, and scientists had immersed themselves—often fractiously—in politics. A bitter

disagreement broke out among scientists over how they should use their newfound social and

political prestige. Connections between the social responsibility of post-war scientists and modern

environmentalism exist within the framework of what values are inherently important to American

society and how those values changed after World War II.

Blending science and the environment also creates opportunities for environmental

historians to examine more carefully the landscape of the human body. With respect to the growth

of American environmentalism, Christopher Sellers claims that “the body—at once human and

animal—has emerged as arguably the most critical middle ground where fin-de-siècle relations

between nature and culture are being actively remade as well as rethought.” As Americans

24 Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental
Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989). Further, Nash makes no reference whatsoever to Commoner.
 13

discovered how radioactive fallout, DDT, and other toxic pollutants were affecting not just the

physical environment but also human health, rigid distinctions between nature and culture were

blurred. This ecological awakening—the realization that harming nature also harmed human

health—is the defining feature of what we might call modern environmentalism. “The human

body,” Sellers insists, “still serves as synecdoche for ‘nature’ writ large.”25 The environmental

threats that emerged during the postwar period clearly demonstrated that the human body was

unquestionably and inextricably a part of the larger ecosystem. As pollutants contaminated water,

air, and soils, they found their way into the food chain and entered into human bodies. With Rachel

Carson, Commoner was at the forefront of a scientific movement thought sought to reintegrate the

human body into the environmental consciousness.26

To properly understand Commoner’s role and radicalism and his emergence as a leading

spokesperson in American environmentalism, we must start by recognizing the extent to which the

technological leviathan against which he railed was firmly entrenched within the popular American

imagination. Chapter 1 introduces the culture and context of consumer and technological

enthusiasm after World War II, and examines the early postwar debates among scientists over

their social responsibility, particularly in relation to the public discourse of risk. The detonation of

the atomic bomb made it abundantly clear that scientists had uncovered forces that required

considerable caution, and decision-making now demanded political and moral assessment just as

much as it did scientific. If science had become overtly politicized, Commoner reasoned, then

25 Christopher Sellers, “Thoreau’s Body: Towards an Embodied Environmental History,” Environmental

History 4 (1999), 486-514. Quotations are from page 487.

26 Literature on the human body as a site for environmental history is growing rapidly. See, by way of

introduction, Sellers, “Thoreau’s Body”; Sellers, “Body, Place and the State: The Making of an ‘Environmentalist’
Imaginary in the Post-World War II U.S.,” Radical History Review 74 (1999), 31-64; Conevery Bolton Valencius, The
Health of the Country: How American Settlers Understood Themselves and Their Land (New York: Basic Books,
2002); and Maril Hazlett, “The Story of Silent Spring and the Ecological Turn” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
University of Kansas, 2003.
 14

scientists like him would have to become politically active in order to ensure that their vision of

American science was protected. Within the scientific community, a small group of scientists

sought to emphasize scientists’ responsibilities to the public. Historian Donald Fleming has called

these younger activists “politico-scientists.”27 The undercurrent throughout this first chapter

examines the changing shape of American science in response to American technological

optimism and the popular acceptance of the importance and centrality of technology to the modern

condition.

According to Fleming, one of the pivotal roles of the new politico-scientists was to serve as

a kind of Fifth Estate. In addition to mediating between experts and laypeople, politico-scientists

were dedicated to providing accessible scientific information to the public as a kind of highly

specialized Fourth Estate. This responsibility was central to their belief in how a functioning

democracy required an informed citizenry. The single most important case involving the science

information movement—of which Commoner was the primary founder—was raising public concern

over the hazards of nuclear fallout. Chapter 2 relates Commoner’s participation in the debate over

fallout and explores the importance of information as a necessary tool for democracy and for

environmentalism, as it helps to discern and define acceptable risk through social as well as

scientific means.

Shedding light on the connection between science and activism is critical to our

environmental understanding, because it helps us to appreciate how scientists came to be among

the intellectual leadership of the new environmentalism. Commoner would call the 1963 Nuclear

Test Ban Treaty one of the first major victories for the modern environmental movement. For

Commoner, the transition from opposition to nuclear fallout to environmental concerns like

27 Donald Fleming, “Roots of the New Conservation Movement,” Perspectives in American History 6 (1972),
7-91.
 15

fertilizers and air pollution was perfectly natural. Advocating a more holistic approach to science

and health problems, Commoner became one of the leading ecologists of the 1960s, marking the

rise of modern ecology as a popular field of inquiry critical to identifying the social and

environmental health of the American landscape.28 Chapter 3 recounts Commoner’s move toward

ecology after the Test Ban Treaty, and his focus on the dangers presented by the petrochemical

industry. Moreover, whereas Chapter 2 examined the importance of information, Chapter 3

explores how the politico-scientists presented that information. Environmentalists borrowed one of

their most effective rhetorical methods from the Puritan evangelists of the First Great Awakening.

As nature’s prophets, ecologists would use their scientific status to insist that the world was on the

brink of ecological destruction from a variety of human-induced causes. By 1970, on the eve of

Earth Day, Time magazine would refer to the ecological messages as the new jeremiad. This

rhetorical method was particularly effective in making headlines and generating an audience for the

necessity of greater environmental responsibility, but it also strongly associated the environmental

movement with alarmist diatribes in order to drive people to environmental action. The scare

tactics may have over-emphasized the real dangers—after all, the human species has not

completely destroyed its habitat nearly as quickly as many environmental jeremiads predicted

through overpopulation, over-consumption, and over-exploitation.

28 Peter Bowler observes that “many people now see ecology as a science whose subject matter must

necessarily lead its practitioners to side with environmentalists. The very word ‘ecological’ has come to denote a
concern for the environment.” Peter J. Bowler, The Environmental Sciences (London: Fontana Press, 1992), 504.
Strictly speaking, however, ecology examines the interactions between organisms and their environment and need not
address the moral equation of environmentalism. Moreover, ecology is typically embraced as the holistic science when
much of the ecological sciences are far more reductionist in nature. These two misconceptions derive from the modern
ecological imagination, spurred in no small part by Commoner’s popular activism and the activism of his postwar
contemporaries. The rise of environmental concern with scientists at the vanguard gave rise to a form of popular
ecology that blended scientific interests in organisms and the surroundings with pressing concerns over pollution and
environmental decline. Unless otherwise noted, this study tends to refer to ecology in its popular iteration. For a good
distinction between scientific ecology and ecology in the popular imagination, see Worster’s discussion of the “Age of
Ecology” in Worster, Nature’s Economy.
 16

The “Age of Ecology” and the jeremiads spawned by it that swept the United States in the

1960s—made popular by the Test Ban Treaty and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—helped raise the

general ecological literacy of citizens and laid a path for subsequent environmental action that

would lead to the first “Earth Day” in 1970. After deliberating on the significance of Earth Day,

Chapter 4 follows a particularly well-publicized debate, in which Commoner contributed to a major

rift in the environmental movement by engaging in a vociferous debate with Paul Ehrlich, another

popular and charismatic ecologist, over the origins of the environmental crisis. The rift itself is

historically significant in understanding the divisions within American environmental interests, the

politics of environmental concern, and also the breadth of environmentalism. Perhaps the

jeremiad’s great failing was that it gave rise to a cacophony of voices and interests that diluted

concern for the environment and deflected interest from pressing social issues relating to

environmental degradation. The jeremiad’s tenor lent itself to singular explanations for

environmental decline, and limited Commoner’s success in asserting that environmental problems

could only be addressed in conjunction with poverty, civil rights, and peace.

During the euphoria of Earth Day, Commoner began to change his message from one of

social activism to an increasingly blunt attack on the economic systems that gave rise to the

environmental crisis. Indeed, the 1970s might be understood as the decade of crisis. The decade

began with the environmental crisis, which was followed in swift succession by the energy

crisis—spurred by the OPEC oil embargo—and the economic crisis, which followed on the heels of

the energy crisis. As analysts scrambled to make sense of these crises, Commoner pointed to the

fact that they all derived from the same root cause. Chapter 5 examines the shockwaves of the

1970s oil crisis, and expands on the relationship between risk and economics. As Commoner

boldly outlined in The Closing Circle and The Poverty of Power, there was a clear enemy, and it

was free market capitalism, which governed the means of production in socially irresponsible ways.
 17

It was not a new argument; to Commoner the American economic system was complicit in

diminishing the integrity of science after World War II.

In 1980, Commoner ran for president of the United States. He would later jokingly say that

he was the fourth candidate who finished fifth. The 1980s were a decade of mixed gains for

environmentalism. The Reagan administration was overtly hostile to environmental interests, but in

reaction to that membership in environmental groups swelled and activists found new ways to

enforce important pieces of environmental legislation. For Commoner, the 1980s constituted a

decade of returning to age-old foes: waste disposal, dioxin, and other toxic threats. What had

become abundantly clear to Commoner through his career was that Americans did not share these

threats equally. Chapter 6 discusses the relationship between poverty and environmental risk. As

Commoner and numerous other observers noted, there was a direct association between one’s

socio-economic and socio-political standing and the extent to which one was exposed to

environmental pollutants in the United States. Poor and disempowered communities were much

more likely to suffer exposure to more toxins. Commoner was one of many environmentalists to

point to this disturbing link between poverty and environmental health. Environmental justice—the

combination of social and environmental activism—has recently provoked divisions within

American environmentalism, which stem from a question of priorities. Rather than representing a

direct threat to existing strands of the movement, however, Commoner saw environmental justice

as a welcome expression of environmentalism’s pluralism at the end of the twentieth century.

Commoner’s active role in all of these issues helps us to understand the relationships

between these disparate elements of environmental decline and the movement that seeks to arrest

that decline. Central to this larger discussion is an understanding of how perceptions of risk serve

as a link between science, social ethics, and environmentalism to combat the unbridled progress of

the postwar technological revolution. Commoner was an early and persistent advocate for revising
 18

how Americans interpreted risk and how they subsequently addressed it. Cumulatively, these

chapters explain the relationship between Commoner’s social and environmental dissent and his

efforts to alert the American public to his concerns. But his activism involved a complication of

standard environmental concerns. To Commoner, environmentalism was intimately and

inextricably linked to other social movements that collectively expressed a sense of disillusionment

and disenchantment in postwar America. The consistent thread throughout these disparate

movements was a struggle for social empowerment, particularly as it related to the postwar

technological revolution. “Social guidance of technological decisions is vital not only for

environmental quality but for nearly everything else that determines how people live: employment;

working conditions; the cost of transportation, energy, food, and other necessities of life; and

economic growth,” he wrote in 1987. “And so there is an unbreakable link between the

environmental issue and all the other troublesome political issues. … Environmentalism reaches a

common ground with all the other movements [civil rights, women’s rights, gay and lesbian rights,

anti-war, against nuclear power and for solar energy, world peace, … the much older labor

movement], for each of them also bears a fundamental relation to the choice of production

technologies.”29 In gauging his successes and setbacks, “Barry Commoner and the Science of

Survival” explores the significance of Commoner’s social and scientific activism. As a discipline

built around the significance of empirical and reproducible data, science was supposed to be a self-

correcting enterprise. Its self-correction was designed to enhance scientists’ grasp of scientific

knowledge, but also to guard the larger public citizenry from the dangers of faulty science and its

application. But if the environmental crisis was any indication the watchdog had, in effect,

inadvertently surrendered its bark. And to Commoner and his colleagues, there was a clear

29 Commoner quoted in Andrew Szasz, EcoPopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental
Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 153.
 19

correlation between recent technological mistakes and the erosion of the central tenets of open

scientific endeavor. As Commoner rightly noted in Science and Survival, one of science’s major

duties to society was “prediction and control of human intervention into nature.”30 The story that

follows suggests that after the Second World War, American science failed to keep human well-

being at the heart of that endeavor. But that erosion also carried over into the public arena.

Commoner’s work to galvanize the public into action against numerous environmental problems

tells an engaging story about dissent in America and the significance of a more public conversation

about environmental health and risk.

30 Commoner, Science and Survival, 29.

 Chapter 1
In The Thunderclap’s Wake

When the late war ended in a thunderclap, it left two noteworthy developments
in its wake. Science had become politically interesting, and scientists had
become interested in politics.
—Joseph H. Rush

It would be rather difficult to overstate the cultural significance of the Great Depression and the

Second World War on the postwar American psyche. After almost two decades of Depression and

war, the American public was desperate for a rest—a return to normalcy (whatever that was)—and

the promise of a restored individual and national affluence. This meant affordable homes,

affordable cars, machines to help remove the burdens of household work, chemicals that ensured

greener lawns, more abundant produce, and cleaner clothes. And cheaper, too. World War II re-

stimulated a long-flagging economy and created an outlet for production. After the war, “big ticket”

items were in demand and more affordable than they had ever been before. Americans with

money to spend were lured by new technologies that proliferated in the market. The unchecked

and unprecedented growth of new technologies—and, more importantly, the popular acceptance of

them—suggested the realization of a brave new world. This new wave of chemicals, machines,

and conveniences helped usher in a novel kind of consumer culture that Lizabeth Cohen has called

a “landscape of mass consumption.”1 Combined with the beginning of the Cold War, mass

consumption bred a kind of mass consensus or conformity, against which dissent was not a

welcome feature of socio-political discourse.

1 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003), 6. Cohen argues that “in the aftermath of World War II a fundamental shift in America’s
economy, politics, and culture took place, with major consequences for how Americans made a living, where they
dwelled, how they interacted with others, what and how they consumed, what they expected of government, and much
else.” Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 8. For the cultural impact of the Depression and World War II on 1950s
Americans, see Elaine Tyler May, Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era (New York: Basic Books,
1999), 30-57; Rosalyn Baxandall & Elizabeth Ewen, Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened (New York: Basic
Books, 2000); and Dolores Hayden, Redesigning the American Dream: Gender, Housing, and Family Life (New York:
W. W. Norton & Co., 2002).
 21

Behind this culture of consumerism was a deep-seated technological optimism. In the

1930s, the historian Charles A. Beard, an acute observer of the American condition, hailed

technology as “the supreme instrument of modern progress” and “the fundamental basis of modern

civilization.”2 During the Second World War, innovation and production levels exceeded even the

wildest dreams of American policy makers. The proximity fuse, solid fuel rockets, and radar

enhanced American military objectives; DDT and other pesticides ensured that hostile fire claimed

more casualties than did disease for the first time in modern warfare; and the atomic bomb

provided ominous closure. After the Second World War, American technologies came home, and

human ingenuity promised to recreate the landscape in ways heretofore unimagined and put

nature and its resources to even more effective use. The prosperity of post-war America and the

convenience that these new technologies offered seemed almost idyllic.

In a sense, the postwar consumer culture was a reaffirmation of the long dormant notion

that the American character was a product of unlimited economic abundance.3 Referring to the

popular belief that energy and resources were limitless, historian Robert Righter observed:

“Americans who, during the war had conserved, afterwards consumed.”4 Critics castigated this

internalized mass consumption as neglecting social needs, but after so much social upheaval in

previous decades, Americans seemed unwilling to upset or question the economic growth they

enjoyed.5 The result was a public that was uninformed, uncoordinated, complacent, and generally

2 For quotations, see Beard’s introduction to J. B. Bury, The Idea of Progress (New York: MacMillan Co.,

1932), xxii, xx. See also Beard (ed.), A Century of Progress (New York: Harper & Bros., 1933), 3-19.

3David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1954).

4 Robert Righter, Wind Energy in America: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996), 149.

5 In The Affluent Society, economist John Kenneth Galbraith criticized the American pursuit of private

consumption at the expense of social consumption, the infrastructure necessary for a humane society; social theorist
Herbert Marcuse noted the relationship between mass consumption, mass culture, and mass complacency in One-
 22

unwilling to confront imminent environmental threats. According to Elmo Richardson, Americans

“had nothing more to draw upon to cope with that threat than the economic materialism, the

bureaucratic inertia, and the political gamesmanship practiced by the men of the Truman-

Eisenhower era.”6 Reservations about the growing technological output typically came from voices

outside the mainstream and, as a result, were easily dismissed as irrelevant and even un-

American.

While mass consumption is an indisputably significant feature of the postwar period, it is

important to recognize the mechanism that made consumption after World War II so

environmentally problematic. If consumption was the expression of American environmental

decline, production was its architect. The explosion of technological production that coincided with

World War II brought with it new kinds of environmental hazards—which assaulted human bodies

as well as natural landscapes—and dramatically shifted the perception of environmental protection

from a luxury pastime to a social necessity. Human civilizations have always consumed goods and

resources, but how those products were fabricated after World War II changed markedly. Over the

period of a decade following the conclusion of the Second World War, human-made materials,

many of which did not break down in nature, but rather wrought havoc on natural ecosystems (in

both their production and disposal), replaced organic materials. Synthetic fibers replaced cotton

and wool; detergents replaced soaps; and a variety of chlorine-based chemicals replaced more

benign, natural products.

Dimensional Man; and historian Daniel Bell lamented the decline of the “public household” and social solidarity in favor
personal consumption. John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958); Herbert
Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964);
and Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976). See also Christopher
Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton &
Co., 1978); C. Wright Mills, White Collar: The American Middle Classes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1951);
Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic, 10-11; and Adam Rome, “’Give Earth a Chance: The Environmental Movement and
the Sixties,” Journal of American History 90 (September 2003), 525-554.

6 Elmo Richardson, Dams, Parks, and Politics (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1973), 201.
 23

The acceptance of these new products is relatively easy to understand. In Guns, Germs,

and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, Pulitzer-Prize winning physiologist Jared Diamond

outlined why some inventions succeed and others do not. “The first and most obvious factor,”

Diamond contended, “is relative economic advantage compared with existing technology.”7 These

newer goods were invariably cheaper to produce in mass quantities than their organic

predecessors, resulting in higher profit yields for producers and cheaper market prices for

consumers. The outcome was that American culture and society in the postwar era became

infatuated with what they saw as technological progress. Commoner’s critique of post-World War II

technology focused on his concern for what he called widespread “technological displacements,”

this practice of introducing new technologies with severe environmental impacts to replace older

technologies with less destructive effects. “The chief reason for the environmental crisis,”

Commoner argued, “is the sweeping transformation of productive technology since World War II.

… Productive technologies with intense impacts on the environment have displaced less

destructive ones. The environmental crisis is the inevitable result of this counterecological trend.”8

As more environmental problems found their way into media headlines and the public’s psyche and

concern, Commoner’s critique of science appeared more prescient and foreboding. “If we are to

survive the new age of science,” he wrote in 1964, “scientists and citizens alike need to learn why

this massive contamination has come about.”9

7 Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W. Norton & Co.,

1997), 247-248. In addition to economic advantage, social value and prestige, compatibility with vested interests, and
the ease with which a new technology’s advantages can be discerned comprised Diamonds four factors that influence
the social acceptance of technological innovations.

8 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 177. See also Edward Tenner,

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996).

9Commoner, “Fallout and Water Pollution—Parallel Cases,” Scientist and Citizen 6 (December 1964), 2-7.
Quotation is from page 2.
 24

This first chapter traces the rise of two important developments: the technological leviathan

that would culminate in the post-World War II technological revolution, and the body of scientists

who came to represent the first line of defense against unregulated technological progress. While

research and development resulted in rapid technological progress and significant advances in the

scientific understanding of the natural world, the new realms of knowledge also—unwittingly and

somewhat paradoxically—increased the gulf between what was known and what it was desirable to

know, thereby providing a context for heightened risk.10 To Commoner, new technologies were

introduced under a cloak of Cold War secrecy that prevented any kind of scientific or public

discourse about their social costs or benefits. Further, scientists were uniquely responsible for the

discoveries that gave rise to these potentially dangerous technologies. When public interest in

science grew markedly after the atomic bomb demonstrated the awesome destructive powers

unleashed by nuclear science, politically concerned scientists like Commoner took that opportunity

to force themselves into the public arena to voice their concerns. As Donald Worster wryly noted,

“the bomb cast doubt on the entire project of the domination of nature that had been at the heart of

modern history.”11 In the years directly after the Second World War—in the thunderclap’s

wake—independent and socially conscious scientists like Commoner increasingly found

themselves asking epistemological questions—what is science for? and how should it be

used?—which mirrored similar questions in the public arena as new technologies fundamentally

changed the lives of average Americans across the country.12 The rise of the politico-scientists

Mary Douglas & Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technical and
10

Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 3.

11 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas 2nd edition (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 1994), 343.

12While we might appreciate that science and technology are ubiquitous features of public life in the United
States, many observers have suggested that federal science and technology policy developed as part of a general and
 25

and their role in ultimately helping to develop both the intellectual and political wings of the

American environmental movement begins with increase in postwar scientific dissent and

scientists’ debates over their own social responsibility.13

Because of the rapid increase in major scientific advances during and after the Second

World War, the potential dangers of which required far greater caution and understanding, this new

breed of politico-scientist sought to enter the political arena and influence policy decisions.

Scientists figured on all sides of the policy-making spectrum, but what is especially intriguing here

is the increase in questions among scientists about their responsibility to the larger society. If the

debate between scientists focused on how science ought to be used, politico-scientists turned their

attention to questions of what the new guidelines governing science—secrecy and national

security, closed labs, and more specialized science—meant in the broader social and scientific

context. One of the most fundamental flaws in the postwar science, they contended, was the

coherent postwar consensus inspired by presidential science advisor Vannevar Bush’s seminal publication of Science,
the Endless Frontier (1945). Vannevar Bush, The Endless Frontier (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing
Office, 1945). For a good summary of Bush’s life and work, see G. Pascal Zachary, Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush,
Engineer of the American Century (New York: Free Press, 1997). More recent scholarship has argued that that dialog
was indeed far more complex. See, for example, David M. Hart, Forged Consensus: Science, Technology, and
Economic Policy in the United States, 1921-1953 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); Patrick J.
McGrath, Scientists, Business, and the State, 1890-1960 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002);
Jessica Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety: Scientists, Anticommunism, and the Cold War (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1999); Peter J. Kuznick, Beyond the Laboratory: Scientists as Political Activists in
1930s America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987); A. Hunter Dupree, Science in the Federal Government:
A History of Policies and Activities to 1940 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1957); Daniel J. Kevles, “The
National Science Foundation and the Debate over Postwar Research Policy, 1942-1945,” Isis 68 (March 1977), 5-26;
and Michael A. Dennis, “A Change of State: The Political Cultures of Technical Practice at the MIT Instrumentation
Laboratory and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, 1930-1945,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation,
Johns Hopkins University, 1991. For the cultural impact of postwar science and technology, see Paul Boyer, By the
Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 1994); and Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American
Environmentalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

13 Donald Fleming, “Roots of the New Conservation Movement,” Perspectives in American History 6 (1972),
7-91. See pages 40-43. Rae Goodell calls these politically engaged scientists the “visible scientists;” Ralph E. Lapp
refers to the “new priesthood;” and Joel Primack & Frank von Hippell discuss what they term “public interest science.”
In contrast, Kuznick rejects titles and simply calls them scientists who became involved. Goodell, The Visible
Scientists (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1977); Lapp, The New Priesthood: The Scientific Elite and the Uses of Power
(New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1965); J. R. Primack & Frank von Hippell, Advice and Dissent: Scientists in the
Political Arena (New York: Basic Books, 1974), 3-9; and Kuznick, Beyond the Laboratory.
 26

absence of conduits through which risk might be publicly assessed and disclosed, and they

frequently sought to make this appeal to public citizens. Commoner was one of the first and,

retrospectively, the most durable of a younger generation of politico-scientists. His professional

career, briefly delayed by service in the U.S. Navy during World War II, effectively began in this

new climate of postwar science and political activism.

The central question of this chapter, then, asks: how did American scientists perceive

themselves and their social responsibility after World War II? After the thunderclap, during a period

of high political tension, Americans witnessed an effort to democratize scientific information in

reaction to a conservative push by the federal government, accepted by many physical scientists,

in which many branches of science reached new levels of privacy and secrecy. This phenomenon

was most vehemently played out in the opposition to aboveground nuclear weapons testing in the

late 1950s and early 1960s (the subject of the next chapter) and in subsequent protests against the

industrial production of synthetic chemicals, but the origins of that democratization were fostered in

the years that immediately followed the Second World War, as some members of the American

scientific community struggled to ensure that science become primarily an instrument of peace,

dedicated to human welfare. Science had become more immediately relevant outside the

laboratory and certain scientists—Commoner included—sought to demonstrate science’s political

importance not only to a still largely uninformed public traditionally comfortable in leaving science

and science policy to the experts, but to the experts themselves, who tended not to adequately

consider the social ramifications of their work.

Barry Commoner grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Born 28 May 1917, the son of Russian

immigrants, Commoner experienced the Great Depression, during which his parents lost their

savings. Commoner’s father, a tailor, worked until he was blind. Despite his urban environment,
 27

Commoner was fascinated by nature and became an avid biology student in high school. In 1933

Commoner enrolled at Columbia University with enough money for only one semester, and worked

his way through college. During the 1930s, Columbia was a hub of social activism. “I’m a child of

the Depression,” Commoner later noted, referring to his being influenced by the numerous rallies to

support the Spanish Loyalists, to support Socialist and Communist meetings that promoted and

defended labor union movements, and to protest lynchings in the South.14 Of that period,

Commoner remembered, “I began my career as a scientist and at the same time … learned that I

was intimately concerned with politics.” That perspective helped him to develop a social

conscience, which he applied to all his activities, and before he had completed his undergraduate

studies at Columbia University he was deeply committed to participating in “activities that properly

integrated science into public life.”15 By the time he entered Harvard in 1937, Commoner was

convinced of his public and political duty as a scientist to disseminate his scientific findings as

broadly and as publicly as possible. At Harvard, Commoner participated in a radical “science and

society” movement, which Peter Kuznick has called “a small though vocal and influential portion of

the scientific community [that] became radicalized, believing that the full realization of science’s

potential demanded a socialist transformation.”16 In 1939, Commoner was a member of the

executive committee of the Boston-Cambridge branch of the American Association of Scientific

14 David DeLeon (ed.), Leaders from the 1960s: A Biographical Sourcebook of American Activism (Westport,

CT: Greenwood Press, 1994), 313.

15 Commoner interview with author, 15 November 2001. Chief among studies that examine American

scientists as activists prior to World War II is Kuznick, Beyond the Laboratory. See also Charles William Heywood,
“Scientists and Society in the United States, 1900-1940: Changing Concepts of Social Responsibility,” unpublished
Ph.D. dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1954. For the growing political activism of scientists in America after
World War II, see Dael Wolfle, Renewing a Scientific Society: The American Association for the Advancement of
Science from World War II to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: AAAS, 1989); and Bruce V. Lewenstein, “Shifting Science from
People to Programs: AAAS in the Postwar Years,” in Sally Gregory Kohlstedt et al., The Establishment of Science in
America: 150 Years of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers
University Press, 1999).

16 Kuznick, Beyond the Laboratory, 2.

 28

Workers, a progressive (and often radical) group of scientists who, according to Elizabeth Hodes,

“pioneered awareness and involvement of scientists in social concerns and political activity.”17 As

Chris Lewis correctly points out, “The American Association of Scientific Workers’ guiding

principles—that ‘scientists must advise the public, make scientific advances accessible, and

undertake research with social needs in mind’—informed all of Commoner’s postwar activities in

science and politics.”18 Here, in the 1930s, then, Commoner was acquiring the tools that would

serve him throughout his career.

Commoner’s Jewish background also played a role in shaping his worldview; “it was a big,

big hurdle to overcome.” Commoner noted that he had been “very lucky,” but that his rather un-

Jewish name “helped” in avoiding the harsher effects of American anti-Semitism. When he was

born, Commoner’s last name was spelled “Comenar,” but very conscious of the stigma against

Jews in America, Commoner’s uncle—whom Commoner would frequently refer to as his

“intellectual uncle”—recommended changing the spelling of his last name to the more anglicized

Commoner.19 As a teenager, Commoner was encouraged to go to college by his teachers at

Madison High School—his father had wanted him to be a radio repairman—but being Jewish in

New York made this difficult. Commoner recalled being taken aside by a couple of his teachers,

“and they said since you’re a Jew it’ll be very hard for you … so you’ll have to work twice as hard

as everyone else, but they had confidence in me and they said they were going to apply to city

17 Elizabeth Hodes, “Precedents for Social Responsibility Among Scientists: The American Association of

Scientific Workers and the Federation of American Scientists, 1938-1948,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University
of California at Santa Barbara, 1982, 59. In 1950, Senator Joseph McCarthy attacked the American Association of
Scientific Workers as a Communist movement. Though Commoner escaped censure, the group was weakened.

18 Chris Lewis, “Progress and Acopalypse: Science and the End of the Modern World,” unpublished Ph.D.

dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1991, 304.

“Barry” came from the hero of Louisa May Alcott’s novel, Little Men. Commoner interview with author, 22
19

November 2002.
 29

college for me.” At this point, Commoner’s uncle intervened, insisting that a even with a city

college degree, Commoner would just be “a New York Jew.” Instead, his uncle worked to get

Commoner accepted into Columbia University. The Second World War ultimately helped to

diminish the anti-Semitic feelings in America, but that initial experience, combined with growing up

in a poorer section of Brooklyn, also contributed to Commoner’s more radical perspective.20

During the Second World War, Commoner served in the U.S. Navy, and it was during his

service that he discovered firsthand that scientific innovations often possessed unanticipated and

undesirable side effects. In 1942, Commoner headed a team working to devise an apparatus that

would allow airplanes to spray DDT. The new miracle chemical played a critical role in reducing

the number of casualties from insect-borne diseases during the Second World War, but it also

created numerous unforeseen problems. Testing its new device, Commoner’s team sprayed an

experimental rocket station off the New Jersey coast that was infested with flies. The apparatus

was a success, and the DDT was tremendously effective in killing the flies. Within days, however,

new swarms of flies were congregating on the island again, attracted by the tons of decaying

fish—accidental victims of the DDT spraying—that had washed up on the beach. As the flies

returned to feed on dead fish, Commoner witnessed an eerie foreshadowing of how many new

technologies brought with them environmental problems that their inventors had not anticipated.21

20 Commoner interview with author, 22 November 2002. For readings on the Jewish experience in the

United States, see Hasia R. Diner, A New Promised Land: A History of Jews in America (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2002); Diner, In the Almost Promised Land: American Jews and Blacks, 1915-1935 (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 1977); Jennifer Lee, Civility in the City: Blacks, Jews, and Koreans in Urban America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2002); and Carey McWilliams, A Mask for Privilege: Anti-Semitism in America (Boston: Little-Brown,
1948). For the relationship between religious ethos and environmental persuasion, see Worster, “John Muir and the
Roots of American Environmentalism,” in The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 184-202; and Mark Stoll, “Green versus Green: Religions, Ethics, and the
Bookchin-Foreman Dispute,” Environmental History 6 (July 2001), 412-427.

21See Douglas H. Strong, Dreamers and Defenders: American Conservationists (Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 1988), 223. See also Danny Kohl, “Barry Commoner’s Science: An Anecdotal Overview,” in Barry
 30

But unwavering faith in science and technology’s role in the American marketplace was not

a new phenomenon—rather a product of the Enlightenment and the engine of modernity.

Advances in science and technology promoted a deeply rooted sense of progress in American

culture, which manifested itself in a unique brand of millennialism.22 According to Robert V. Bruce,

“science and technology [were] the prime instruments of irreversible change in the thought and life

of mankind.”23 Central to that faith was the birth of scientific method, the critical and empirical

approach to the collection of knowledge. “The Scientific Spirit,” the columnist Walter Lippmann

asserted in Drift and Mastery in 1914, was “the discipline of democracy.”24 The best environment

for scientific endeavor, he intimated, was a society that valued individualism, free initiative, and

mass education. As it had evolved during the latter stages of the nineteenth century, science

embraced those democratic ideals both in theory and in practice. As the American philosopher

Charles Peirce posited in 1878, scientific method was profoundly social and democratic. It

demanded that scientists arrive at the truth through mutual engagement and public discourse.

Disagreement in science—embodied in the peer review method—was an example of dissent that

ultimately strengthened the overall body of work. Collaboration, criticism, and communication were

the cornerstones of the scientific method.25

Commoner’s Contributions to the Environmental Movement: Science and Social Action, edited by David Kriebel
(Amityville, NY: Baywood Publishing Co., 2002), 45-56.

22 See Merritt Roe Smith, “Technology, Industrialization, and the Idea of Progress in the America,” in

Responsible Science: The Impact of Technology on Society, edited by Kevin B. Byrne (San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1986), 1-20; and Leo Marx, “Does Improved Technology Mean Progress?” Technology Review 90 (January 1987), 32-
41, 71. For recent studies on American exceptionalism, see Arnon Gutfield, American Exceptionalism: The Effects of
Plenty on the American Experience (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2002); and Deborah L. Madsen, American
Exceptionalism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998).

23 Robert V. Bruce, The Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876 (Ithaca: Cornell University

Press, 1987), 3.

24 Walter Lippmann, Drift and Mastery ([1914] Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1961), 151.
 31

Indeed, the intellectual impact of an earlier war strongly influenced the scientific spirit in the

United States. Coming out of the Civil War, American science and philosophy sought to make

sense of the new United States, brutally scarred from violent differences over secession, slavery,

reconstruction, and, in the decades to follow, immigration. Amidst these social tremors, Charles

Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and, later, The Descent of Man (1871) threatened to

overturn the existing and ardent theological order that had structured so much of the societal

framework. War and evolutionary theory had shaken America to its core, and its collective

intellectual culture was in need of nearly as much reconstruction as the American political

structure. After years of political instability revolving around sectionalism and political corruption, a

veritable whirlwind of scientific and technological innovation followed. Rather than contributing to

the malaise of the period, however, science and technology served as the bulwark for the nation’s

metaphysical revitalization and the dawn of a new age that Charles and Mary Beard would call “the

Second American Revolution.”26

In the quarter century following the conflict, Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone (1876),

Thomas Edison’s incandescent light bulb (1879), the first hydroelectric power plant in Appleton,

Wisconsin (1882), and electric light and power to which Nikola Tesla, William Stanley, and Elihu

Thomson contributed during the 1880s all promised to reshape the material foundation of American

society. Overseas, the Russian chemist Dimitri Mendeleev introduced the Periodic Table of

Elements (1869), Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler invented the internal combustion engine (1885),

and Guglielmo Marconi patented wireless telegraphy (1896). In addition, the continuing rapid

expansion of railroads, communication, and machine manufacturing heralded something of a mini-

25 See Philip P. Wiener (ed.), Values in a Universe of Chance: Selected Writings of Charles S. Peirce

(Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1958), 113-136.

26 Charles A. Beard & Mary R. Beard, The Rise of American Civilization (New York: MacMillan, 1930), 52-
121.
 32

technological revolution and a mode of living that we might begin to recognize as being “modern.”

If Commoner referred to the period following the Second World War as a technological revolution,

surely the period following the Civil War constituted a similar kind of paradigm shift in American

culture. The rise of the machine changed the way Americans worked. More factory and industrial

jobs created remarkable demographic changes in America as urbanization represented one of the

most significant migrations in American history. The 1920 census indicated that for the first time

more Americans lived in cities than in rural areas.27 In just over a century, Jefferson’s agrarian

republic had been transformed into an urban-industrial juggernaut. The organic city of the

eighteenth century gave way to the urban metropolis, complete with what the urban planner Lewis

Mumford called the “underground city”—the vast complex of subway and service tunnels, water

and gas mains, and sewers—and the “invisible city”—the electric and communications grids.

American science and technology were bearing fruit.28

27 The 1910 U.S. Census listed the American urban population at 42,166,120, and the rural population at
49,806,146. By 1920, however, the urban population had surpassed the rural population. The 1920 Census listed the
urban population at 54,304,603, and the rural population at 51,406,017. “Urban” referred to communities of more than
2,500 people. U.S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1940 (Washington, D.C., 1941), 8.
See also Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). This transition from an
agrarian society to an urban one was also largely powered, of course, by huge numbers of immigrants who poured into
the United States—mostly from Europe—until just before the First World War.

28 Lewis Mumford, The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects (New York:
Harcourt, Brace & World, 1961), 478-480 & 563-567. For the rise of American science and technology, see Bruce, The
Launching of Modern American Science, 1846-1876. For surveys of the history of American technology during the
Gilded Age, see Ruth Schwartz Cowan, A Social History of American Technology (New York: Oxford University Press,
1997), 67-219. For technological optimism, see Thomas P. Hughes, American Genesis: A Century of Invention and
Technological Enthusiasm, 1870-1970 (New York: Viking Press, 1989); John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine:
Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1976); Daniel T.
Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978); Howard P. Segal,
Technological Utopianism in American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985); and Joseph M. Petulla,
American Environmental History 2nd edition (Toronto: Merrill Publishing Co., 1988), 175-196. See also Brooke Hindle
& Steven Lubar, Engines of Change: The American Industrial Revolution, 1790-1860 (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1986). For the transformation of the American city, see Martin V. Melosi, The Sanitary City: Urban
Infrastructure in America from Colonial Times to the Present (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000); Jane
Jacobs, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (New York: Random House, 1961); Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The
Urban Wilderness: A History of the American City (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Edwin G. Burrows & Mike
Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); William Cronon,
 33

The boom in technological progress and economic growth meant that industrial production,

too, climbed dramatically as the nation organized itself into gargantuan production and

communication systems.29 Historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan noted that in 1869 agricultural

products made up 53% of what was produced in the United States, while only 33% of the Gross

Domestic Product came from manufacturing. Just thirty years later, however, those figures were

reversed, and half the nation’s output was in manufactured goods, even though farm acreage had

increased markedly as a result of westward migration and settlement.30 Industrial productivity only

encouraged further technological innovation, and the Gilded Age welcomed in a new era Thomas

P. Hughes has called an era of popular “technological enthusiasm” in the United States.31

Technological optimism was so great in America, that the intellectual historian Perry Miller

described Americans “[flinging] themselves into the technological torrent,” conscious “that here was

their destiny.”32 Confidence in American technology had increased to such an extent that many

Americans were convinced that they had won the war against nature. The natural world, they

believed, was dominated by and subject to human ingenuity and endeavor.33

By World War I, leading American corporations—General Electric, Du Pont, General

Motors, and Bell Telephone—were establishing and funding their own private research

Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1991); and Ted Steinberg, Down to
Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 157-172.

29 Hughes, American Genesis, 3.

30 Cowan, A Social History of American Technology, 165.

31 Hughes, American Genesis, 1.

Perry Miller, “The Responsibility of Mind in a Civilization of Machines,” The American Scholar 31 (Winter
32

1961-1962), 51-69. Quotation is from page 55.

33 See, for example, Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive

Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959). For a good synthesis of the
Progressive era confidence in human’s capacity to dominate nature, see John Opie, Nature’s Nation: An
Environmental History of the United States (New York: Harcourt Brace Publishers, 1998), 243-264.
 34

laboratories. Industrial scientists dismissed the broadly inquisitive methods of the independent

inventors in favor of more direct, applied research, much more in tune with the mantra of efficiency

and utilitarianism that typified the age. Efficiency and utilitarianism, themes introduced and praised

during the Progressive era, lingered after World War I, and continued to demonstrate their

centrality to Americanism in the auto industry and in the continuing success of efficiency experts

like Henry Ford, Frederick Taylor, and Charles Bedaux. Economic growth and technological

optimism also welcomed individualism and entrepreneurialism back in formidable style. Whereas

the economic depression at the end of the Gilded Age had bloodied the middle-class American

entrepreneur, the Progressive era offered the entrepreneurial spirit another chance. As John Opie

observed, “no one who looked at the American character in the nineteenth century and the first half

of the twentieth century said that Americans were cautious.”34 Scientists also embraced the

American entrepreneurial spirit, and as the growth in industrial laboratories suggested, they

cultivated relationships with their financial supporters to strengthen their research abilities, by

establishing science and technology as the cornerstone of progress during the first half of the

twentieth century. This mutual cooperation contributed to maintaining the American enthusiasm for

technological growth, which resulted in the realization of the technological revolution that occurred

once post-World War II affluence allowed for more consumers to enjoy the fruits of scientists’

labors.35

34 Opie, Nature’s Nation, 435.

35 For the rise of industrial science, see Hughes, American Genesis, 7; Cohen, A Social History of American
Technology, 149-171; David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977); George Wise, Willis R. Whitney, General Electric, and the Origins of U.S. Industrial
Research (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Leonard S. Reich, The Making of American Industrial
Research: Science and Business at GE and Bell, 1876-1926 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985); David
Hounshell & John Kenly Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy: DuPont R&D, 1902-1980 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1988); and John Servos, “The Industrial Relations of Science: Chemical Engineering at MIT, 1900-
1939,” Isis 71 (December 1980), 531-549.
 35

And herein lay the rub. Whereas Lippmann and Peirce lauded American science’s

democratic principles, the economist Thorstein Veblen warned in 1918 that knowledge reflected

the material circumstances of its conception.36 During and after World War II, those circumstances

were increasingly shaped by an omnipresent military influence that dominated scientific research

agendas across the country.37 In 1939, the federal government had allotted $50,000,000 per year

to science research, 18% of all private and public spending on research and development.38 By

the end of the war, the federal investment was $500,000,000, and constituted 83% of private and

public spending on scientific research.39 In 1955, the annual research and development budget

was $3.1 billion. By the early 1960s, the annual budget for research and development had climbed

above $10 billion, and to $17 billion by 1969. Moreover, since 1940, the federal budget had

multiplied by a factor of eleven; the budget for research and development had increased some 200

times.40 Where that money went also changed; in 1939, the bulk of government-funded research

was done in agency laboratories; by 1969, more than three-quarters of it was performed by private

industry, universities, and non-profit institutions.41 While the money was a significant boon to

36 Thorstein Veblen, The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities by

Business Men (New York: Viking Press, 1918), 1-58.

37 Daniel J. Kevles, “Cold War and Hot Physics: Science, Security, and the American State, 1945-56,”
Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 20 (March 1990), 239-264; and Allan Needell, “Preparing for
the Space Age: University-based Research, 1946-1957,” Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18
(March 1987), 89-110. Both Kevles and Needell cite the Korean War as the point when American universities were
integrated into the military-industrial complex.

38 The President’s Scientific Research Board, Science and Public Policy (Washington, D.C.: Government

Printing Office, 1947), I, 10.

Kevles, The Physicists: The History of a Scientific Community in Modern America (Cambridge, MA:
39

Harvard University Press, 1995), 341.

40 Kevles, The Physicists, 395.

41 See J. Stefan Dupré & Sanford A. Lakoff, Science and the Nation: Policy and Politics (Englewood Cliffs,

NJ: Prentice-Hall Inc., 1962), 9; and Martin Brown (ed.), The Social Responsibility of the Scientist (New York: Free
Press, 1971), 1-2.
 36

scientific research in the United States, it also suggested that the American research agenda was

integrally connected to political interests. After World War II, that meant military development and,

eventually, the space race. Of the $17 billion in funds made available in 1969, $8.2 billion came

from the Department of Defense and $4.5 billion from NASA. Departing the White House in 1961,

President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned against the growing predominance of the military-

industrial complex. From his vantage point in 1962, Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas

echoed Veblen’s concerns. “The new centers of power are in the hands of those who control

science; and one who traces the controls back to origins often finds the Pentagon in the central

position,” he wrote in a pamphlet entitled Freedom of the Mind. “Those who finance the scientific

revolution,” he continued, “usually control those who work for them. The impact of this control on

our universities is so great that their autonomy is threatened.”42 Moreover, that powerful influence

impressed upon the scientific community the importance of secrecy as a means of ensuring

national security, but it also meant doing science in a relative vacuum, in direct contradiction with

the collaborative spirit and the democratic principles of scientific discourse. As a result, new

discoveries risked not receiving the full scrutiny that the scientific method required. According to

Stuart W. Leslie, “the Cold War redefined American science.”43 American science was beholden in

grand scale to the immediacy of the political pressures of the period at the same time that it was

married to a public enthusiasm for technological progress.

42 William O. Douglas, Freedom of the Mind (New York: American Library Association, 1962), 2.

43 Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT

and Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 1. See also Peter J. Westwick, The National Labs:
Science in an American System, 1947-1974 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Paul Forman, "Behind
Quantum Electronics: National Security as a Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940-1960," Historical
Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18 (1987), 149-229; McGrath, Scientists, Business, and the State,
1890-1960; Hart, Forged Consensus; and Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety.
 37

As Americans embraced risk, science and technology continued to raise the stakes

throughout the twentieth century. In the mid-1960s, Commoner reflected on this

entrepreneurialism and technological optimism, conceding that “there is considerable disagreement

about the medical hazards of the new pollutants: about the effects of DDT now found in human

bodies, about the diseases due to smog, or about the long-range effects of fallout.” But that there

was disagreement was a fundamental element in risk assessment. “The crucial point,” he

continued, “is that the disagreements exist, for they reveal that we have risked these hazards

before we knew what harm they might do.”44 In addition, Commoner noted that the powers of

modern science meant that “the permissible margin for error has become very much reduced. In

the development of steam engines a certain number of boiler explosions were tolerated as the art

improved. If a single comparable disaster were to occur in a nuclear power plant or in a reactor-

driven ship near a large city, thousands of people might die and a whole region be rendered

uninhabitable.”45 To Commoner, the persistence of technological optimism after World War II

threatened to embrace such risks.

If there was a singular event that alerted American scientists to the reduction of their autonomy, it

was the atomic bomb. The bomb and its use also definitively resolved a major ethical dilemma

among scientists that had raged for half a century. American scientists’ complicity with war and

politics destroyed any notions that they—especially physicists—were engaged in a pure and

autonomous undertaking. In addition, the aftermath of the Second World War signaled the

beginning of a renewed epistemological examination among scientists and their role in the world

44 Commoner, Science and Survival (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 27. My emphasis.

45 Commoner, Science and Survival, 28-29.

 38

order. Concerned scientists concentrated not only on how science was funded, but also on

questions pertaining to their own social responsibility, especially in a postwar world that frowned

upon dissent and public discourse. Most significantly, scientists like Commoner who were

concerned with these questions gravitated toward politics with the realization that only through

political engagement could they command or reclaim the direction of national science policy.

Soon after the conclusion of the Second World War, the renowned physicist J. Robert

Oppenheimer delivered a paper entitled “Physics in the Contemporary World” at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Referring to the devastation the atomic bombs had

inflicted upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer stated that “in some sort of crude sense

which no vulgarity, no humor, no over-statement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known

sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”46 In this poignant statement,

Oppenheimer—the former director of the Manhattan Project—recognized the gravity represented

by the advent of nuclear power as a political entity every bit as much as a scientific one at the

dawn of the Cold War era. For some, the success of the Manhattan Project constituted a portal

toward an endless frontier in which well-funded science would systematically unlock the mysteries

of human life and the universe. For others, according to Worster, Oppenheimer’s suggestion that

the physicists now knew sin begged the implied question: “whether they also knew the way to

redemption.”47

Not until after the Second World War did a small but organized group of scientists publicly

raise doubts about the rationality and, more significantly, the controllability of such unbridled

technological optimism. As the United States experienced a rapid transition to a highly technical

46 J. Robert Oppenheimer, “Physics in the Contemporary World.” Second Arthur Dehon Little Memorial

Lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 25 November 1947, 11.

47 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 342.

 39

society, many scientists insisted they become more involved in the political arena. And by then, it

was too late. The Cold War occupied the concentration of government and military and leading

scientists found themselves relegated from partners to subordinate technicians supplying weapons

for the Cold War arms race. Military influence continued to dominate American science. Whereas

directly after the Second World War scientists were enjoying the height of their political influence,

the national security and arms race priorities of the Cold War channeled that influence dramatically

during the 1950s. Domestic anticommunism and McCarthyism made the expression of dissent all

the more difficult, especially for scientists who posed a particular threat of supplying information to

the enemy; in sum, American scientists endured what historian Jessica Wang called “an age of

anxiety.”48 As scientists working on particularly sensitive projects required military clearance,

questions of scientists’ national loyalty constituted a major restriction on scientific and political

freedom. This dynamic had begun in the 1930s and carried over into the secrecy surrounding the

Manhattan Project and the race for the atomic bomb. American physicists acquired considerable

political prominence during World War II and the postwar demands on national security guaranteed

further visibility and influence. But those same conditions also drastically restricted physicists’

freedoms. Scientists had dutifully accepted the need for wartime secrecy, but the doors never

opened as World War II secrecy transitioned into Cold War secrecy in the guise of national

security. As Commoner would later lament: “the basic difficulty with secrecy in science is that

mistakes made in secret will persist.”49

48 Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety.

49 Commoner, Science and Survival, 48. For an interesting historiographic discussion on the impact of the

transformations of scientific practice during the period, see McGrath, Scientists, Business, and the State, 1890-1960;
and Dennis, “A Change of State.” McGrath adopts the former argument that scientists’ subordination to outside forces
was the most significant factor, whereas Dennis contends that the rise of secret knowledge and the blurring of
boundaries between civilian and military were more important. Given my discussion of politico-scientists and a public
audience for dissenters like Commoner, I am more persuaded by Dennis’s position, though there are certainly grounds
 40

But just as the oppressive nature of McCarthyism and loyalty oaths inhibited scientists’

freedoms, Lawrence Badash argues that they also created a context that helped in the political

maturity of American scientists.50 The first challenge to the scientists’ sense of social responsibility

emerged during the political debate over how best to manage nuclear power immediately after the

war’s conclusion. In 1946, the Atomic Energy Act established the Atomic Energy Commission, to

manage the postwar program to develop the military, scientific, and industrial potential of atomic

and nuclear energy. The Act was passed almost a year after atomic bombs had been dropped on

Hiroshima and Nagasaki, amid controversy as to whether the new agency should be put in the

hands of civilians or the military. In an attempt to quickly push legislation through Congress in the

fall of 1945, the May-Johnson Bill, which favored military control, was introduced in the House. Its

Congressional and military supporters believed that maintaining the secrecy of the atomic bomb’s

construction could only be preserved through military control. Its supporters were surprised,

however, by the fervent opposition of atomic scientists, who felt that extensive public hearings

should be held on such an important matter. That initial concern spread to the mainstream. Time

asked: “is the military about to take over U.S. science lock, stock, and barrel, calling the tune for

U.S. universities and signing up the best scientists for work fundamentally aimed at military

results?”51 In response to the growing tumult, the Senate ordered the creation of a special

committee—headed by Senator Brien McMahon of Connecticut—to assess the position and

recommend a course of action. After contentious congressional hearings, the McMahon Bill

ultimately compromised by affirming civilian control while situating “military applications” of atomic

to support McGrath’s claim that scientists’ power had been limited. For a general discussion of the influence of these
transformations on American democracy, see Yaron Ezrahi, The Descent of Icarus: Science and the Transformation of
Contemporary Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). For a broader study of science and
anticommunism, see Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety.

50 Lawrence Badash, “Science and McCarthyism,” Minerva 38 (2000), 53-80.

51 Time quoted in Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light, 145.

 41

energy as its top priority.52 While research into peaceful uses for atomic energy was a part of its

stated purpose, the new Atomic Energy Commission’s emphasis lay in the development and

manufacture of weapons as military need dictated. Nevertheless, the Atomic Energy Commission

was, at least in theory, under civilian control and the American voters could participate in the

establishment of future policies.53 Commoner, who played a role in putting the Atomic Energy

Commission under civilian control as a scientific aide to West Virginia Senator Harley Kilgore,

interpreted the scientists’ efforts as being the last feature of their wartime military duty. More than

any sector of American society, scientists were aware of the power—and especially the destructive

power—that the bomb constituted.

Just as importantly, scientists were quite publicly major contributors to the successful war

effort. While scientists lost the ear of policy makers as Cold War tensions rose—by the end of

1949, the Berlin crisis had frayed nerves, China had succumbed to the Maoist Revolution, the

Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb, and the arms race was on—they discovered that

the public audience was more interested and more concerned than ever in what they had to say.54

What ensued was a deliberate attempt by some scientists to reposition themselves and establish

their relevance in the public discourse. The bomb changed the political landscape of science.

52 The McMahon Bill of 20 December 1945 became the 1946 Atomic Energy Act and is reprinted in full in
Philip L. Cantelon et al. (eds.), The American Atom: A Documentary History of Nuclear Policies from the Discovery of
Fission to the Present 2nd edition (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991), 77-91.

53 Richard G. Hewlett & Oscar E. Anderson, A History of the United States Atomic Energy Commission: The

New World, 1939-1946 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1962), 428-455. See also Robert
Jungk, Brighter than a Thousand Suns: A Personal History of the Atomic Scientists (New York: Harcourt Inc., 1986),
221-238; Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear
Power, 1945-1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 21-59; George T. Mazuzan & J. Samuel Walker,
Controlling the Atom: The Beginnings of Nuclear Regulation, 1946-1962 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1984), 3-4.

54 See Eric Goldman, The Crucial Decade and After: America, 1945-1960 (New York: Vintage Books, 1960);

Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 128-151; and
Allan Winkler, Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety about the Atom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 57-83.
 42

Science had been a tool with which idealists felt Americans could realize greater progress,

prosperity, and political stability. To many Americans—scientists, military, and public—the bomb

was a continuation or confirmation of that sentiment, but others were notably more pessimistic,

aware that the fruits of progress also threatened the future of humanity. Was science getting out of

hand? Had technology evaded the guided control of the scientists and/or society? These were

important questions, but because of the Cold War political climate, no one seemed willing to openly

ask them.

An interesting element of the ensuing debate entailed scientists and intellectuals trying to

extricate science from its uses. Science, many scientists argued, was still a neutral exercise in

seeking knowledge and solving problems; society—not scientists—put scientific discovery to good

or bad uses. Acquiring knowledge was intrinsically valuable, but what we did with that knowledge

deserved moral, social, and political scrutiny.55 This was a fairly reasonable claim; science

remained the objective pursuit of knowledge, but outside interests (and money) had influenced

which pursuits would receive priority. Technology and its applications, they argued, should

therefore be the focus of any moral criticism, not the science that had produced it. While many

scientists washed their hands of the damage their discoveries had wrought, others—Commoner

prominently among them—felt that scientists should be more politically involved in determining how

science should be used. Science may well be neutral, but scientists, unequivocally, were not. In

essence, Commoner and other socially concerned scientists rejected the notion that science and

technology could be separated, thereby insulating researchers from responsibility for the practical

uses of the technologies they perfected.

55 Philip Kitcher, Science, Truth, and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 85-91.
 43

Many scientists objected to the cloak of secrecy imposed upon their work, but in the

anticommunist environment of postwar America, there was little room for dissent. Prominent

among the dissenters was E. U. Condon, who suffered serious scrutiny from a subcommittee of the

House Un-American Activities Committee. Condon, a notable quantum physicist from the 1920s

and elder statesman of American physics, had been particularly critical of imposed secrecy in

science, and strongly advocated continued international scientific cooperation. On 1 March 1948,

the subcommittee described Condon—at the time, the director of the National Bureau of

Standards—as “one of the weakest links in our atomic security.”56 Condon was by no means a

radical thinker, but he did believe that science only functioned properly in an open society.

Secrecy could only retard research and contradicted the goals of the scientific community. He

argued for intellectual freedom through public writings and in his membership in the American-

Soviet Science Society, which dedicated itself to the exchange of scientific information between the

two superpowers. Condon became a relatively easy target for anti-communists, and his case

became “the scientists’ cause célèbre until the Oppenheimer case overshadowed it.”57

To many scientists, the integrity of the genuine search for knowledge—and the freedom to

engage in that pursuit—had been irredeemably compromised by the lopsided financial support for

science related to weapons research and nuclear physics. Commoner was particularly concerned

56 House Committee on Un-American Activities, Special Subcommittee on National Security, Report to the

Full Committee of the Special Subcommittee on Natural Security of the Committee on Un-American Activities, 1 March
1948, 1.

57 For Condon’s case as the “cause célèbre,” see Alice Kimball Smith, A Peril and a Hope: The Scientists’

Movement in America, 1945-47 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 424. For an overview of Condon’s
position on the importance of intellectual freedom, see E. U. Condon, “Science and Our Future,” Science 103 (5 April
1946), 415-417. Condon promoted international cooperation because he claimed that “the outcome will be world
friendship and cooperation, not atomic war and the destruction of civilization.” Quotation on page 417. For more on E.
U. Condon, see Wang, “Science, Security, and the Cold War: The Case of E. U. Condon,” Isis 83 (1992), 238-269; and
Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety, 130-152. For academic blacklisting during the Cold War, see Ellen
Schrecker, No Ivory Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 265-282.
Commoner believed that Condon was “persecuted, largely because people thought his wife [Emilie Honzik] was a
communist.” Commoner interview with author, 22 November 2002.
 44

with the declining prestige of science’s integrity. As he cautioned in an unpublished paper entitled

“The Scientist and Political Power,” the integrity of science was “the sole instrument that we have

for understanding the proper means of controlling the enormously destructive forces that science

has placed at the hands of man.” Should the integrity of science be eroded, Commoner warned,

“science will become not merely a poor instrument for social progress, but an active danger to

man.”58

In identifying this danger, Commoner also recognized that the potential problems were

social in nature. For example, whereas the discovery and production of thalidomide took place in

the laboratory, the discovery of its deleterious social consequences—deformed babies—invariably

took place outside the laboratory, “well after,” Commoner was quick to point out, “the causative

activity was in full swing.”59 In order to redeem the integrity of science, Commoner strongly

believed that American science needed to refocus its energies on serving the public, not in

realizing financial or military gain. In 1947, as Commoner settled into his botany position at

Washington University in St. Louis, he sought out ways of bringing science and science policy out

of the laboratory and into public politics.

His opportunity arose in the early 1950s after a meeting with the mathematician Warren

Weaver, whose reputation as a manager of science emerged during the1930s as a divisional

director of the Rockefeller Foundation. One of the primary vehicles through which scientists

expressed their concerns to the public was the American Association for the Advancement of

58Commoner, “The Scientist and Political Power,” August 1962 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 14).
Quotations are from pages 4 and 2-3.

59 Commoner, Science and Survival, 24. For the thalidomide scare, see Richard E. McFayden, "Thalidomide

in America," Clio Medica 11 (1976), 79-83; Trent Stephens & Rock Brynner, Dark Remedy: The Impact of Thalidomide
and Its Revival as a Vital Medicine (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishing, 2001); Linda Lear, Rachel Carson: Witness
for Nature (New York: Henry Holt, 1997), 411-412. See also Helen Brooke Taussig, "Dangerous Tranquility," Science
136 (25 May 1962), 683; and Taussig, "The Thalidomide Syndrome," Scientific American 207 (August 1962): 29-35.
 45

Science (AAAS), which started raising questions about the relationship between science and

society in concert with the government’s growing control over science. Shortly after the Korean

War at the height of the Cold War and McCarthyism, Weaver actively sought to encourage the

AAAS to engage in issues that examined the scientists’ social responsibility. In 1951, he had been

a key author of what became the Arden House Statement, designed to foster a broader network

among scientists at a time when their specializations threatened to fracture the AAAS. He also

sought to reinvigorate scientists’ attention to the social effects of their work by emphasizing the

notion that scientists worked for the public.60 In 1953, in Scientific American, Weaver suggested

that the intellectual climate in the United States had reached a low and required immediate

remedy.61 He was not alone. Earlier that year, physiologist Maurice B. Visscher had publicly

insisted that “the paramount ethical problem facing scientists today is what moral stand they should

take in the crisis of freedom of thought and expression.”62 To Weaver, financial support of basic

research was crucial in order to let science develop freely. In July 1953, Weaver and Commoner

met and agreed “that something needed to be done right away to reverse the trend of inaction

among scientists—and to start developing the means of speaking out on the issues which are

60 Warren Weaver, “AAAS Policy,” Science 114 (2 November 1951), 471-472. For accounts of the

preparation of the Arden House Statement, see also Bruce V. Lewenstein, “Shifting Science from People to Programs:
AAAS in the Postwar Years,” The Establishment of Science in America: 150 Years of the American Association for the
Advancement of Science, by Sally Gregory Kohlstedt et al. (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutger University Press, 1999), 103-
165; and Dael Wolfle, Renewing a Scientific Society: The American Association for the Advancement of Science from
World War II to 1970 (Washington, D.C.: AAAS, 1989), 48-57.

61 Weaver, “Fundamental Questions in Science,” Scientific American 189 (September 1953), 47-51. For a

good biographical sketch of Weaver, see Mina Rees, “Warren Weaver,” in Biographical Memoirs 57 (1987), 493-530.
For Weaver in his own words, see Weaver, Scene of Change: A Lifetime in American Science (New York: Charles
Scribner’s Sons, 1970); and Weaver, “Confessions of a Scientist-Humanist,” in What I Have Learned: A Collection of
Twenty Autobiographical Essays by Great Contemporaries from the Saturday Review (New York: Simon and Schuster,
1968), 298-309. See also Robert E. Kohler, Partners in Science: Foundations and Natural Scientists, 1900-1945
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 265-303.

62 Maurice B. Visscher, “Scientists in a Mad World,” Nation (24 January 1953), 69-71. Quotation is from

page 69. Visscher had also been the architect of the AAAS 1948 Committee on Civil Liberties for Scientists. See
Wang, American Science in an Age of Anxiety, 197-204.
 46

bedeviling us.”63 Weaver and Commoner had been in contact before; Commoner had successfully

applied for grants from the Rockefeller Foundation to support his research on the tobacco mosaic

virus. Recognizing and encouraging Commoner’s energy and enthusiasm for social issues,

Weaver later visited Commoner in St. Louis and urged him to get involved to “work out a sensible

program of social responsibility on the part of the AAAS.”64

The AAAS was the largest national body that included scientists from a wide panoply of

different sub-disciplines, but in the trend of over-specialization, the meetings of individual societies

were taking precedence over the annual year-end meetings of the whole association. Attendance

at the St. Louis meeting in December 1952, was “disappointingly low (fewer than two thousand),” of

the 48,740 registered members.65 Disparate scientific fields were, in effect, segregating

themselves from each other. For this reason, Commoner felt the AAAS was declining as a vital

forum for engaging with the larger, more social aspects of science. Commoner recognized that a

revitalized national association could be an exceptionally effective pulpit from which to raise

awareness about the need to restore the integrity of science, and accepted Weaver’s invitation.

When they met in 1953, their central issue was the high degree of external control over science

from government, military, and corporate interests and the climate of secrecy and conformity

enforced by Cold War anti-communist politics. As Commoner noted in a letter to E. U. Condon,

“the main jobs [for the AAAS] seem to be to stop the drive toward timidity and conformism

engendered by the current investigational hysterics, and to ward off the crisis which appears to be

63 Commoner to E. U. Condon, 5 August 1953 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 343).

64 Commoner interview with author, 22 November 2002.

Lewenstein, “Shifting Science from People to Programs,” 113. For a list of AAAS membership numbers
65

between 1848 and 1998, see pages 174-175.

 47

facing scientists as a result of the government’s tendency to cut off much of the support for basic

research.”66

Weaver and Commoner recognized that the AAAS was no longer serving its members if

more and more people were staying away. They also noted the AAAS had not taken up the

broader social and political epistemological issues which the more specialized societies tended to

ignore. First and foremost, they saw the scientists’ struggle for autonomy and funds for basic

research as a necessary political endeavor. Weaver and Commoner hoped that discussion of such

issues might be a way of restoring some relevance to the struggling Association. While these initial

goals did not make social responsibility a priority, Weaver and Commoner did appreciate that an

extension of scientists’ sovereignty over science would allow for the kind of recovery of scientific

integrity that they sought. They also keenly recognized the importance of establishing broader and

more sophisticated channels for communicating to the public the social importance of science and

science policy. One of their stated ambitions was to acquaint the public with the facts and dangers

of uncontrolled technological output and the importance of basic research in order to better

understand the potential risks threatened by these new technologies. In a sense, scientists would

use public interest to regain control of their discipline.

As Commoner recalled his conversation with Weaver in his letter to Condon, his friend and

AAAS president (Weaver would succeed Condon as president at the end of 1953), he concluded

by recommending that Condon use his presidency to appoint committees that would investigate

scientists’ freedom of inquiry and support for science in general. Because of the importance of

these themes, Commoner counseled haste in their establishment, but also suggested “that the

membership include some of the most important members of the AAAS in order to give the

66 Commoner to E. U. Condon, 5 August 1953 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 343).
 48

committee the strength that it needs and emphasize the importance which is placed on the

committee’s work.” Commoner even suggested that Condon and Weaver be members of the

committee, but that younger members also be invited in order to reach out to the younger ranks.

As he confided to Condon in the same letter, “I sometimes despair at the sight of my

contemporaries burying themselves under their immediate tasks, and giving no thought to the

issues broader than their own narrow field. There is more spunk among the older people, and I

think that a special effort should be made to bring into action some of the younger scientific

workers. (Needless to say I would myself be honored to serve).”67

If Commoner was not the originator of activist ideals in the AAAS, by the latter half of the

1950s, he was arguably the Association’s most energetic practitioner. At the 1955 annual meeting

of the AAAS in Atlanta, the council appointed a special interim committee on the social aspects of

67 Commoner to E. U. Condon, 5 August 1953 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 343). The sparse

attendance at the St. Louis meeting added fuel to Weaver’s contention that the AAAS needed to rediscover its
relevance. Condon shared Weaver’s concerns, and in a joint interview, they implied that the Association was
intellectually bankrupt, and that the time had come to “revitalize the association.” Earl Ubell, “Scientists Out to Give
Ideas Popular Appeal: American Association to Reorganize in Face of ‘Intellectual Bankruptcy,’” New York Herald-
Tribune (29 December 1952), 15. While Weaver and Condon received support from politico-scientists like Commoner
for their leadership in trying to turn the AAAS into “the champion and defender of science,” their proposed direction was
not unanimously supported. Lewenstein, “Shifting Science from People to Programs,” 113. In February 1953, less
than two months after the St. Louis meeting, AAAS Administrative Secretary Howard Meyerhoff voiced his vehement
contempt for the AAAS activist persuasion in an editorial in Science. “It is not the Association that lags,” Meyerhoff
retorted, “but those who fail to comprehend the scope and impact of its current program. Intellectual bankruptcy and
deterioration will indeed set in,” he warned, “if the AAAS turns from programming important science merely to
ballyhooing the importance of science.” In the last agenda he prepared for the AAAS Board of Directors, Meyerhoff
presented his own opinions on why the St. Louis meeting had suffered from such poor attendance. “Several societies
… now think it inadvisable to make long-range plans to meet with the [AAAS] because of uncertainties resulting from
the Arden House statement of policy, which … discourages participation on the part of those societies that wish to
have technical sessions.” In contrast to Weaver’s views, Meyerhoff held that the Association was ostracizing its
members by politicizing itself. At the end of March 1953, Meyerhoff and Science executive editor Gladys Keener
resigned, leaving the AAAS in turmoil, until Dael Wolfle was hired to replaced Meyerhoff at the end of the year. A
subsequent resignation by Keener’s replacement meant that Science lacked firm directorship until Graham DuShane
was hired in 1956. As a result, it would take some time before the politico-scientist approach entered the AAAS, with
Commoner very integrally involved. Howard A. Meyerhoff, “Boston, 1953,” Science 117 (20 February 1953), 3A. Also
published in Scientific Monthly 76 (March 1953), 195. For Meyerhoff’s agenda statement, see Wolfle, Renewing a
Scientific Society, 52. Meyerhoff’s relationship with Condon was particularly acrimonious, and Meyerhoff had fanned
the flames by publicly deriding Condon’s continued conflicts with the House Un-American Activities Committee. For
more on the divisions between Meyerhoff and other members of the AAAS executive, see Lewenstein, “Shifting
Science from People to Programs,” 113-115.
 49

science to “assist [the Association] in the integration of science into the general sociological

structure.”68 University of Alabama biochemist Ward Pigman was appointed the first chair of the

interim committee. When biologist Jane Oppenheimer, one of the original Committee members,

resigned, Wolfle recommended Commoner to Pigman as “a very able person who is much

interested in AAAS activities.” “I am sure that if [Commoner] has time to devote to the committee,”

Wolfle continued, “he will be extremely helpful.”69 Over the next few months, Commoner recruited

new members to the Committee and helped Pigman to put together a draft on the Committee’s

findings.

The Committee’s preliminary report, presented to the AAAS Membership at the 1956

meeting and ultimately published in early 1957 in Science as “Social Aspects of Science,” is

perhaps the first tract to deliberately outline how scientists should approach their social

responsibility. “Social Aspects of Science” noted that the society had become “far more dependent

on science than ever before,” which constituted a “new scientific revolution.” The revolution had

occurred, the report contended, during World War II, as a result of accelerated growth in scientific

activity and the subsequent increased use of scientific knowledge. During the Second World War,

the world “experienced a series of classic examples of almost immediate conversion of a scientific

advance to a process of large practical impact upon society: antibiotics, synthetic polymers,

nuclear energy, transistor electronics, microwave techniques, electronic computers.” This rapid

“transformation of scientific experience to industrial operation” was new, the authors noted, and

“probably unique in human history.”70 Yet, the Committee expressed concern over the public’s

68 Ward Pigman to Dael Wolfle, 5 November 1955 (Catherine Borras: Committee Files, AAAS Archives, Box
10).

69 Dael Wolfle to Ward Pigman, 22 June 1956 (Catherine Borras: Committee Files, AAAS Archives, Box 10).

70 “Social Aspects of Science,” Science 125 (25 January 1957), 143-147. Quotations are from page 143.
 50

unquestioning acceptance of new scientific innovations, because “there are indications that the

public interest in science is not commensurate with the important role of science in society.”71

In addition to science’s social position, the Committee recognized a number of problems

with the internal structure of the scientific community, citing unbalanced growth, inadequate funding

for basic research, and difficulties in checking and critiquing new findings. Wartime science had

put a premium on the physical sciences to such an extent that “growth has been based less on

internal needs of science than on the interest of external agencies in possible practical results. In a

sense,” the report continued, “the speed and direction of the development of science has been

determined by the users of science rather than the practitioners of science.” This redirection of

scientific interests naturally contributed to both the lack of funding for basic research and,

ultimately, the difficulties in communication among scientists due to heightened emphases on

secrecy.72 The “Social Aspects of Science” report reached a particularly dramatic conclusion: “that

there is an impending crisis in the relationship between science and American society. … At a time

when decisive economic, political, and social processes have become profoundly dependent on

science, the discipline has failed to attain its appropriate place in the management of public

affairs.”73 The magnitude of the impending crisis resonated in science’s potential—both positive

and negative—and the scientific community’s waning influence on decision-making. It was

imperative, the report insisted, that the new powers of science be used for “the maximum human

good, for, if the benefits to be derived from them are great, the possibility of harm is

correspondingly serious.”74 The Committee finished by turning its attention to the responsibility of

71 “Social Aspects of Science,” 144.

72 “Social Aspects of Science,” 144.

73 “Social Aspects of Science,” 143.

 51

scientists and to the role of the AAAS more specifically. The impending crisis was a “matter that

requires the persistent attention of all scientists. It exemplifies the pressing need that scientists

concern themselves with social action.” Drawing from Weaver’s earlier calls for activism, the

Committee was adamant that the AAAS could not “continue in the face of crucial situations with

closed eyes and a dumb mouth.” That the AAAS recognized that scientists and their social

responsibility was an important subject for discussion was the first step; “what is needed now is a

way to meet it.”75

But then what? Having outlined the problems in science as they stood and made

recommendations on how to address them, the Committee was now left—as it had stated in the

final sentence of “Social Aspects of Science”—with the challenge of how to confront those

problems in practice. Commoner and other members of the Committee were convinced that trying

out specific action was the only legitimate means through which they could test their findings in

“Social Aspects of Science.” They wanted to engage with a specific issue. Other members were

less sure or less willing to engage in more focused activism. The report’s positive reception

resulted in the continuation of the Committee’s work, but not without some personnel changes.

Wolfle invited Ohio State University pharmacologist and assistant dean of the College of Medicine

Chauncey D. Leake to accept the chair of the committee, replacing Pigman, who was becoming

increasingly uncomfortable with the more radical positions advocated by Commoner, Mead, and

Weaver. “Ward Pigman did the Association a real service a year ago at Atlanta in insisting that the

committee be appointed,” Wolfle wrote in his letter to Leake, “but he is not the best person to steer

the effort through to useful conclusion.”76

74 “Social Aspects of Science,” 146.

75 “Social Aspects of Science,” 147.

 52

As the newly reformed Committee on the Social Aspects of Science worked to refocus its

direction after the publication of “Social Aspects of Science,” it found itself drawn into the

maelstrom surrounding the dangers of radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing. In April

1957 world famous philosopher and missionary surgeon Albert Schweitzer issued a declaration of

conscience regarding the threat to humans and human health of nuclear testing. His declaration

was deliberately addressed not to any nation or government, but to the world’s peoples.

Schweitzer was intent that his opposition to nuclear testing not be marred by appearing to take a

political position in the Cold War tensions of the era. He sent his appeal to the Norwegian Nobel

Prize committee—which had in 1952 bestowed its prestigious Peace Prize on Schweitzer for his

humanitarian activities—and, at Schweitzer’s request, broadcast from Oslo on 23 April 1957 in fifty

countries.77 In his prepared statement, Schweitzer called on people around the world to rally

together to demand an end to nuclear testing. “When public opinion has been created … among

all nations, an opinion informed of the dangers involved in going on with the tests and led by the

reason which this information imposes, then the statesmen may reach an agreement to stop the

experiments.” This kind of public opinion, Schweitzer argued, “stands in no need of plebiscites or

of forming of committees to express itself. It works through just being there.”78

In preparing his statement, Schweitzer sought direction from leading scientists to check

and support his argument, and based much of his appeal on scientific information about the

hazards of fallout to air, animals, humans, and human genetics. After introducing the dangers

76 Dael Wolfle to Chauncey D. Leake, 14 February 1957 (Catherine Borras: Committee Files, AAAS
Archives, Box 10).

77 “Schweitzer Urges World Opinion to Demand End of Nuclear Tests,” New York Times, 24 April 1957, 1.

The Norwegian state radio wanted to send a reporter to Schweitzer’s hospital in Lambaréné, in French Equatorial
Africa, to make a recording of the speech he had sent, but the 82 year-old Schweitzer claimed to be too weak to read
the appeal himself.

78 “Excepts From Message by Schweitzer,” New York Times, 24 April 1957, 2.

 53

posed by nuclear testing, Schweitzer debunked some myths about fallout and reassured people

that the levels of radioactive fallout in the air presented only minimal hazards, since it was not

strong enough to penetrate the skin. But the bigger danger came from drinking radioactive water

or eating radioactive food “as a consequence of the increased radioactivity in the air.”79 “When we

eat contaminated cheese and fruits,” his statement continued, “the radioactive elements stored in

them are transferred to us.”80 To support his argument, Schweitzer introduced data on levels of

radioactivity in the Columbia River, into which the Hanford nuclear plant emptied its wastewater.

While the radioactivity of the river water was insignificant, Schweitzer noted that “the radioactivity of

the river plankton was 2,000 times higher, that of ducks eating the plankton 40,000 times higher,

that of fish 15,000 times higher. In young swallows fed on insects caught by their parents in the

river, the radioactivity was 500,000 times higher and in the egg yolks of water birds more than

1,000,000 times higher.”81

Having established a plausible scientific argument for the hazards presented by fallout,

Schweitzer turned to its social and moral implications. “That radioactive elements created by us

are found in nature is an astounding event in the history of the earth,” Schweitzer insisted. “To fail

to consider its importance and its consequences would be a folly for which humanity would have to

pay a terrible price.”82 In effect, Schweitzer was implying that humans now had the capacity to

make the planet unfit for life. Such a statement would typically be regarded as absurdly

melodramatic, but Schweitzer pointed to the power of the hydrogen and cobalt bombs as the

79 “Excerpts From Message by Schweitzer,” New York Times, 24 April 1957, 2.

80 Albert Schweitzer, “Appeal to End Nuclear Tests,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (June 1957), 205.

81 “Excerpts From Message by Schweitzer,” New York Times, 24 April 1957, 2.

82 “Excerpts From Message by Schweitzer,” New York Times, 24 April 1957, 2. Reprinted in The Saturday

Review, 17 May 1957, 17-20; and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (June 1957), 204-205. See also the preface to
Schweitzer’s appeal by Norman Cousins in The Saturday Review, 17 May 1957, 13-16.
 54

embodiments of potential destruction. Even without a war, testing of these super bombs could

render the atmosphere dangerously contaminated. In an interview a couple of months before his

appeal, Schweitzer warned that “danger of this magnitude is not easily grasped by the human

mind. As day after day passes, and as the sun continues to rise and set, the sheer regularity of

nature seems to rule out such terrible thoughts. But what we seem to forget is that, yes, the sun

will continue to rise and set and the moon will continue to move across the skies, but mankind can

create a situation in which the sun and moon can look down upon an earth that has been stripped

of all life.”83 More significantly, Schweitzer called for the peoples’ right to know what hazards these

new weapons comprised. In addressing the world’s populations and not governments and

providing accessible, digestible information, Schweitzer was pursuing a line of activism that

Commoner would soon make his own. Nothing constructive could be achieved, Schweitzer was

saying, until people had the necessary information on the basis of which a moral climate of opinion

could be created. And, at the same time, that kind of informed public participation was urgently

necessary.

Schweitzer’s declaration of conscience was heard by millions of people around the world,

but it was not aired in the United States. The following day, the New York Times put the story on

its first page and included a substantial portion of his appeal on page two. But Robert A. Divine

speculates that Schweitzer’s statement might have gone unnoticed in the United States had it not

been for a widely circulated open letter of response from Atomic Energy Commissioner Willard

Libby, who contended that Schweitzer’s argument was not based “on the most recent information”

on radioactive fallout.84 In his open letter dated 25 April 1957, the day after the New York Times

83 “The Schweitzer Declaration,” The Saturday Review, 18 May 1957, 13-16. Quotation is from page 14.
 55

recounted Schweitzer’s declaration to an American audience, Libby correctly recognized that

concern over fallout was based on perceptions of risk and set out to allay those concerns. “There

is no question that excessive dosages of radioactive strontium can cause bone cancer and

leukemia,” Libby conceded, but that the average levels of exposure from testing were insignificant

compared to natural radiations to which humans were exposed on a daily basis. He did not,

however, make any reference to Schweitzer’s contention that fallout’s greatest harm came not from

external exposure but from its concentration in the food chain, but rather deflected the direction of

the debate toward questions of national security. “No scientist contends that there is no risk,” Libby

concluded. But, he added, “here the choice seems much clearer—the terrible risk of abandoning

the defense effort which is so essential under present conditions to the survival of the free world

against the small controlled risk from weapons testing.”85 In the aftermath of the debate, the

philosopher had made a scientific argument, and the scientist had made a political argument.

The public debate between leading philosopher and humanitarian and leading scientist

reached a mainstream audience as Time, The Saturday Review, and the New York Times

presented Schweitzer’s postulations and Libby’s rebuttal to an interested readership. The popular

attention to the question created a forum for further public debate, and before the end of May,

Leake had written to Commoner suggesting that “this puts responsibility directly upon us [as the

Committee on the Social Aspects of Science] to prepare if possible a preliminary statement on this

matter which may be of such a sort as to be worthy of consideration by the Board of Directors as

respective of AAAS opinion.”86 The American public was looking for more answers, and it was in

84Willard F. Libby, “An Open Letter to Dr. Schweitzer,” The Saturday Review, 25 May 1957, 8-9, 36-37.
Quotation is on page 8. Also reprinted in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (June 1957), 206-207. See Robert A.
Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978),
122.

85 Libby, “An Open Letter to Dr. Schweitzer,” 37.

 56

this kind of a public forum that Leake and others firmly believed the AAAS should be exhibiting

some leadership and direction. In his letter, Leake suggested that Commoner prepare a statement

quickly in order to be able to present it at the Committee meeting to be held in Washington, D.C. at

the AAAS headquarters on 21 June 1957. Leake did urge some caution, however, stating that it

would be wise to give very careful consideration to any statement that the Committee offered to the

Board of Directors. “We want to be sure that we keep our feet solidly on the ground,” he warned

Commoner. “There is a great deal of high feeling now with regard to a possible danger of radiation

fallout from the testing of nuclear weapons. Unfortunately, there is confusion of opinion among

scientists regarding the actual danger. This is a matter that has to be handled carefully, if the

AAAS is to maintain its position of scientific integrity and wisdom of judgment.”87 What Leake didn’t

want was a strong political statement that would very likely divide the AAAS membership. While

the fallout problem constituted a prime example of what the Committee on Social Aspects of

Science was supposed to address, Leake fully recognized the divisive nature of the question

among AAAS membership. In counseling Commoner to restrain his own feelings in the interest of

publishing a AAAS statement that would be roundly accepted and seen as an authoritative

scientific statement, Leake was being politically astute, even at the expense of compromising his

opposition to aboveground nuclear weapons testing. To Leake, the AAAS represented American

scientific authority, and a passive opposition to fallout—sensitive to the complexities inherent in

AAAS and global politics—from the AAAS was more valuable than no such statement at all.

Commoner might not have been quite so conciliatory. Finding a position that accommodated the

conservative views of the AAAS Board of Directors proved too difficult; as Commoner

86 Chauncey D. Leake to Commoner, 24 May 1957 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 310).

87 Chauncey D. Leake to Commoner, 5 June 1957 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 344).
 57

remembered, working with the AAAS Board on a fallout statement was like “walking on eggshells

all the time.”88

By 12 June, Commoner had sent drafts off to Committee members for comment, and

continued revisions until sending off a final draft to the AAAS Board of Directors in advance of their

Board Meeting on 6 July 1957. One of the key features of the report on the radiation problem was

that imbalance in scientific growth constituted a serious problem. While physicists had charged

forward in developing nuclear weapons and testing them, biologists had been poorly positioned to

find and express concerns about the health risks to humans and to the environment. The report

asked “why hasn’t sufficient work, cost and difficulty notwithstanding, already been carried out” to

ascertain the potential future threats incurred by nuclear fallout. Speaking for the AAAS, the

Committee argued that part of the “responsibility for this failure must be accepted by scientists and

the organizations of science.” Government officials concerned with the practical uses of nuclear

energy do not have “the training and insight to foresee the intricate biological problems that are the

remote, but important, consequences of nuclear explosions and reactor operation. One can ask

that such officials be receptive to advice, but the primary source of such advice must be the

scientist.” In addition to recommending that biologists participate more in assessing the potential

health risks inherent in nuclear testing, the Committee also reiterated its belief that secrecy was a

hindrance to science, arguing that “the security of the nation might be better served if the question

of possible radiation hazards were open to full discussion in the normal channels of scientific and

public communication.”89

88 Commoner interview with author, 17 July 2003.

89 “Statement on the Radiation Problem: Revised by Dael Wolfle, following discussion by the Board of
Directors on 6 July 1957” (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 344).
 58

Over-confident of the Board of Directors’ support, Commoner sent drafts of the fallout

report to Robert Plumb at the New York Times and John Lear of the Saturday Review so that

editors “may have an opportunity to consider it in advance of the release date.” Commoner

described the statement as “the first effort which the committee has made to carry out the mandate

of the AAAS Council to develop a AAAS approach to social problems of scientific origin.” Leading

his media connections, Commoner suggested that the statement on fallout might “be of interest

both as a commentary on the radiation problem itself and as a follow-up to the committee’s report

last Christmas.” In his letter to Plumb, Commoner also hoped that the Times would be “interested

in reproducing the committee’s statement in full.”90

On 6 July, however, the Board of Directors refused to authorize its public release under the

auspices of the AAAS, finding it too long and “not quite satisfactorily worded.”91 It seemed as

though the Board’s conservative nature would make passage of a AAAS statement on fallout

particularly difficult. Remembering his early work in the AAAS, Commoner recalled that “the AAAS,

as a whole, was very leery about politics.”92 The report was sent back to the Committee on the

Social Aspects of Science to be revised in time for the AAAS October Board Meeting. A couple of

days after the 6 July meeting, Plumb telephoned Wolfle to inquire what decision the Board had

reached. Wolfle was outraged that the report had been distributed to the press prior to its

approval, and in an angry letter to Leake, he wrote “would you prefer to tell the members of the

committee or would you prefer to have me tell them that we think it better to have such statements

held in confidence until they are ready for release, and that we very strongly prefer to release such

90 Commoner to Robert Plumb, 2 July 1957 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 344). See also Commoner

to John Lear, 3 July 1957 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 344).

91 Chauncey Leake to Dael Wolfle, 8 July 1957 (Catherine Borras: Committee Files, AAAS Archives, Box 10).

92 Commoner interview with author, 17 July 2003.

 59

statements simultaneously to all interested members of the press, and not to one or two

favorites?”93 This would not be the last time that Commoner would “scoop” an article.

Wolfle’s ire and the difficulties in getting approval for a public statement on fallout from the

AAAS board betrayed the problems inherent in scientists engaging in controversial issues.

Effectively there were two approaches to controversial issues like nuclear fallout. Scientists could

make partisan statements, in which they could advocate actions that they considered desirable.

When making partisan statements, however, the Board cautioned the Committee that the scientist

should “do so as a citizen rather than as a scientist, and ordinarily this principle may preclude

group action by scientific groups, societies, or associations.”94 The alternative was to present

information and analysis of a variety of courses of action as analysts without making value-laden

conclusions. The lesson of these approaches would become the cornerstone of Commoner’s

future environmental activism, as he would use public education as a means of presenting

scientific information to weigh in on difficult social issues. “I’ve made a career out of [the science

information movement] by doing research and [sharing it with the public],” Commoner remembered

reflecting on his confrontation with the AAAS Board over the fallout question.95 But the distinction

between the two alternatives was hardly concrete. By deciding that the fallout problem deserved

consideration, Commoner and the Committee on the Social Aspects of Science were making a

political or partisan decision. By simply engaging in the controversy, Commoner was taking a

value-laden position.

93 Dael Wolfle to Chauncey Leake, 17 July 1957 (Catherine Borras: Committee Files, AAAS Archives, Box
10).

94 Dael Wolfle to Chauncey Leake, 9 July 1957 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 344).

95 Commoner interview with author, 17 July 2003.

 60

Indeed, Commoner felt that he was following the more objective alternative in his various

drafts of the AAAS statement on fallout, but the Board saw only a confrontational polemic on

nuclear testing. Further drafts only intensified the division, and some members of the Committee

became reluctant to lend their names to the statement. In a letter to Leake, Lawrence Kubie,

another committee member, was particularly critical. “As a strategic instrument representing the

AAAS,” he wrote, “it could not possibly be worse…. It preaches. It argues. It belabors the

obvious.”96 Multiple drafts were prepared, and members could only submit a compromised draft of

the statement that did not really satisfy any of them; in October, the Board of Directors again

rejected the document. In his explanation, Wolfle, recognizing that the most recent draft “was a

compromise,” pointed out that the statement lacked focus, lacked a coherent audience, and was

unclear with respect to its directives. “Is the United States Government being supported or

attacked?” Wolfle asked. “Is the document addressed to scientists, and, if so, is it intended to

influence their research or their activities as citizens? Because there was so much uncertainty and

lack of clarity, the Board took no formal action with respect to the statement.”97 Traditionally,

scientists were problem solvers and were devoted to the notion that objective problems had

objective solutions. But in the fallout statement Commoner was embracing complexity and

uncertainty and insisting that scientists could not reach a solution on their own. He understood that

made many scientists leery. In a letter to Leake, submitting the draft, he wrote:

I am not at all pessimistic about the value of the statement as it now stands. …
The statement has an important message, which to my knowledge has not been
put before the public. It is true that we do not solve the problem of telling the
government what it ought to do next; whether or not to stop testing, to concentrate
on fusion processes, or what have you. We also make no attempt to settle the

96 Lawrence Kubie to Leake, 10 September 1957 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 344).

Dael Wolfle to Members of the Committee on the Social Aspects of Science, 30 October 1957 (Barry
97

Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 297).

 61

argument among the experts on biological hazards. It seems to me that no one

can accomplish this right now. Indeed, this is the whole point—that we do not
have information sufficient to make such decisions. If we can get that point across
then scientists and the public generally can proceed to their own political
conclusions as they see fit.98

But as the Board of Directors became more rigid, Commoner became increasingly

frustrated. He claimed: “my original intention was to turn the AAAS into an effective agency in

educating the public about politically sensitive, technological issues, as part of its mission. After a

while, it was clear that this was an uphill fight and particularly around the whole fallout issue.”

Ultimately, Commoner would publish “The Fallout Problem” in Science under his own name, and

not as an official AAAS statement. “It was urgent that it happen,” Commoner insisted, “and I

decided to do it on my own.”99 Organizing under the aegis of a larger organization was difficult,

and reaching any kind of consensus on controversial questions like fallout was near impossible.

After the final revisions from the AAAS Board made it clear that the AAAS would not take a

definitive position on the fallout question, Commoner wrote to Leake, suggesting “it is clear … that

one cannot expect any representative group of scientists not tied together by a more restricted set

of beliefs to arrive at a policy-making decision.” But to Commoner, that conclusion only indicated

the extent to which the integrity of science had been compromised. Referring to their own

experience in trying to write a representative statement on fallout, Commoner continued: “probably

the chief reason for the present lack of agreement is the inadequate interchange of facts and ideas

within the family of science and between scientists and other social groups.”100 As American

scientists of the post-World War II era struggled with the kinds of epistemological questions that the

new age of science demanded of them, the Committee on the Social Aspects of Science raised

98 Commoner to Leake, 2 October 1957 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 344).

99 Commoner interview with author, 17 July 2003.

100 Commoner to Leake, 23 November 1957 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 297).
 62

strategic questions about how to recover the muted dialog among scientists, and how to spark

public interest in science and provide socially relevant information to non-scientists.

Ultimately the Committee did not survive these questions, and it was dissolved after failing

to produce a fallout statement. But in 1960 Commoner was invited to chair the Association’s new

venture into questions of social responsibility, the Committee on Science in the Promotion of

Human Welfare, which included such eminent scientists as Robert Brode, Harrison Brown, and

Margaret Mead. The new Committee became commonly known as the Commoner Committee,

and more successfully raised concerns about the widening gap between “hard” science and the

social sciences, and “the conscious exploitation of science for military advantage.”101 A major

failing of the Committee on the Social Aspects of Science had been its relative inability to establish

a clear agreement that scientists needed to focus on political problems. The Committee had

located the problems it sought to address, but found resistance from within the AAAS in putting

together an effective road map to address them effectively. The subsequent Commoner

Committee proposed a very similar mission statement—“to develop an analysis of the problem of

scientists’ relations to the social issues created by scientific progress”—but as the fallout debate

intensified, the AAAS and the public were increasingly willing to discuss the controversy.102

Scientists more prominent than Commoner were politically active in distributing information to the

public, but Donald Fleming contends that the leading politico-scientists needed to be part of the

new generation of scientists who had come of age during World War II. Established scientists like

Hermann J. Muller, Linus Pauling, and René Dubos had developed professional identities that

101 Donald W. Cox, America’s New Policy Makers: The Scientists’ Rise to Power (New York: Chilton Books,
1964), 237.

102 Statement of Purpose (Committee on Science in the Promotion of Human Welfare, AAAS Archives, Box
1).
 63

made it difficult for them to engage completely in the political sphere. “Nothing could have been

further from their self-conceptions than filling the role of general utility men for manipulating the lay

response to science,” Fleming argued.103 Further, the experiences of Condon, Pauling, and

Oppenheimer in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities suggested that prominent

scientists risked making public activism in science the target every bit as much as themselves.

Since many of these older scientists had had a hand in creating the political and technological

predicament after World War II, they clearly had a vested interest in restoring the integrity of

science. But Weaver and others recognized that the future of the debate lay in the hands of the

younger generation. In Commoner, they had found an ideal and tireless advocate for social

responsibility.

Nevertheless, social activism came at a considerable cost. Inasmuch as the invasive

influence of government, military, and corporate interests altered the practice of science, the

politico-scientists found themselves compromising their own scientific ideals to an extent. In trying

to preserve the integrity of science during the early stages of the Cold War era, the politico-

scientists’ reputation as pure researchers suffered. Just as the older generation of scientists had

identities that prevented them from wholly engaging in the political arena, by 1960 Commoner’s

popular identity had become almost completely immersed in politics. In Social Theory and Social

Structure, the sociologist Robert K. Merton argued that science and scientists functioned in

accordance to a fixed set of norms, which he called the “ethos of science.” This ethos protected

and preserved the scientific community’s standards, and ensured a climate in which good basic

research could be conducted.104 While Commoner and other politico-scientists worked to defend

103 Fleming, “The Roots of the New Conservation Movement,” 40.

 64

that ethos, their own reputations suffered as they were perceived to have breached the tightly held

qualities of disinterestedness and objectivity in their pursuit for a heightened social responsibility.

In the conservative scientific community of the emerging Cold War era, the politico-scientists were

often considered the pariahs to established, disinterested science and traitors to the kind of

integrity that they themselves claimed to defend. Indeed, in the twenty-first century, we know

Commoner more for his political and environmental activism than for his research on the tobacco

mosaic virus—for which he was awarded the prestigious Newcomb Cleveland prize by the AAAS in

1953—or for his pioneering work on the role of free radicals, special molecules with unpaired

electrons possessing a rather apt name given Commoner’s political persuasions. Commoner,

himself, was quite aware of the “sacrifice” that he made, noting candidly in 1973 that “if I hadn’t

offended the Establishment, my work would have justified my being in the National Academy [of

Sciences] a long time ago.”105 But to Commoner, this was a decision he made with little regret.

When he entered Columbia in 1933, he knew he was going to be a biologist, but he was also

aware that he was “intimately concerned with politics.” By the time he graduated from Columbia

and arrived at Harvard to do his graduate work, as Commoner recalled, “I had it clear in my mind

that I was going to do science and at the same time carry out activities that properly integrated

science into public life. That was it; that was everything.”106

Robert K. Merton, Social Theory and Social Structure revised and enlarged edition (Glencoe, IL: Free
104

Press, 1957), 552.

105 Commoner quotation is in Goodell, The Visible Scientists, 67. By 1966, when he turned his attention to

the nitrogen cycle and environmental concerns, Commoner had published more than twenty-five papers on the
tobacco mosaic virus. For a history of the research of the tobacco mosaic virus, see Angela N. H. Craeger, The Life of
a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930-1965 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002).

106 Commoner interview with author, 15 November 2001.

 Chapter 2
Guarding the Public

I know of no safe repository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people
themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their
discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.
—Thomas Jefferson

“The greatest single cause of environmental contamination of this planet is radioactivity from test

explosions of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere,” Commoner wrote in 1964.1 Because of that,

Commoner boldly claimed “the Atomic Energy Commission made me an environmentalist.”2 The

severity of the threat posed by radioactivity from nuclear tests also prompted Commoner to assert

that the 1963 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty was “the first victorious battle in the campaign to save the

environment—and its human inhabitants—from the blind assaults of modern technology.”3

Commoner was particularly optimistic about the symbolic relevance of the Test Ban Treaty and the

growing effectiveness of the science information movement. The struggle over nuclear testing had

been the politico-scientists’ first major effort to engage the public with a universal scientific

problem. “Seen in its true, environmental context,” he claimed, “the power of nuclear technology is

subject less to the control of the technologist than to the governance of the public will.”4 Not only

was the Test Ban Treaty a significant political and environmental victory, it also constituted a rather

impressive example of democracy’s potency as a tool for social change.

Commoner, himself, had every right to be particularly proud of this key victory as his

development of a public information forum—first under the auspices of the AAAS, then with his

Committee for Nuclear Information, and ultimately with the Scientists’ Institute for Public

1Barry Commoner, “Fallout and Water Pollution—Parallel Cases,” Scientist and Citizen 7 (December 1964),
2-7. Quotation is from page 2.

2 Commoner interview with author, 15 November 2001.

3 Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 56.

4 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 65.

 66

Information—was arguably one of the most significant features of the campaign against nuclear

testing. Working in close collaboration with the anthropologist Margaret Mead, Commoner

invented the science information movement while he served as the chair of the AAAS Committee

for Science in the Promotion of Human Welfare. After outlining the program for public information,

Commoner encouraged the growth of several grassroots information groups that provided

information to the public to enable them to participate more actively in critical questions of science

and its applications. The Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information was

among the most prominent and significant of these groups. Its scientists, led by Commoner,

argued that the determination of what constituted acceptable risks was an inherently moral and

public—rather than scientific—issue; in a free and democratic society, citizens should be

appropriately informed in order to make these decisions. What “appropriately informed” meant was

naturally open to debate, but Commoner insisted that public debate was imperative. He openly

conceded that the nuclear test program had been an enormous success in solving exceedingly

difficult problems in physics and engineering, but that Americans were not successful in solving

“the resultant worldwide contamination from fallout.”5 If nuclear technology promised (or

threatened) so much, surely a greater public understanding and endorsement of its inherent risks

was necessary to the continuation of weapons testing. To Commoner, the absence of any such

discussion constituted a very serious “crisis of democracy.”6

This second chapter considers the social significance of the post-World War II science

information movement, but also situates it and the controversy over control of nuclear power as

one of the defining events of the modern environmental movement. Whereas the previous chapter

5 Commoner, “Fallout and Water Pollution—Parallel Cases,” 2.

6Commoner, “Committee for Nuclear Information founding statement draft,” 16 April 1958 (Committee for
Nuclear Information records, Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 56).
 67

examined how secrecy threatened to restrict scientific progress, this chapter outlines how that

secrecy resulted in the accumulation of radioactive fallout in the food chain in a manner that

galvanized the politico-scientists into action. The Washington University-based scientists and

citizens who founded the Committee for Nuclear Information based their call for public information

in part on the importance of the democratic process, but also in recognition of the environmental

consequences that might be incurred if nuclear testing were to continue. As one of their main

catalysts, Commoner warned ominously: “The first lesson to be learned from our experience with

fallout is that given the enormous power and scope of modern physical science, and intense social

pressure for its application, we are likely to put massive technological processes into operation

before we understand their eventual biological consequences.”7 That lesson demonstrated the

significance of the Committee for Nuclear Information’s collaboration with public opposition to

aboveground nuclear testing and constitutes a vitally important parable in our contemporary

environmental understanding. Moreover, we can witness in the debate over nuclear weapons

testing a practical example of scientists agonizing over their social responsibility. Whether

scientists were supposed to be recognized authorities and specialists at the front of the triumphant

march towards progress, or whether they should rein in the technological juggernaut when it

seemed too risky, appeared to constitute a significant schism within the scientific community. No

other technology provoked such a heated debate during the 1950s, nor did any other technology

present such high stakes.8

7 Commoner, “Fallout and Water Pollution—Parallel Cases,” 2.

8 This chapter disagrees with Samuel P. Hays’ interpretation of the antinuclear movement in Beauty, Health,

and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985. Citing a lack of opposition to nuclear power,
Hays argues “the debate [over low-level radiation exposure] did not shift, as had that on lead, to a more open arena but
remained within close industry-government private relationships. As a result, a more independent group of scientists
concerned with the health effects of radiation did not evolve in health agencies and academic circles.” Hays, Beauty,
Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (New York: Cambridge University
 68

With a flash in the desert, human history entered the atomic age. At 5:25:49am, on 16 July 1945,

at the “Trinity” test site at Los Alamos, New Mexico, American scientists detonated the first atomic

bomb. The predawn sky was torn apart by a blinding burst of light. The mood within the test

bunker was mixed. The test had been a success, but only after detonation did they recognize the

full effect or power of the weapon upon which they had labored for several years. Quoting the

Bhagavad Gita as he watched the mushroom cloud rise from ground zero, Manhattan Project

director, J. Robert Oppenheimer lamented “I am become death, the Shatterer of Worlds.” Shaking

Oppenheimer’s hand in congratulations, test director Kenneth Bainbridge dryly stated “now we are

all sons of bitches,” while General James Farrell later expressed concern “that we puny things

were blasphemous to tamper with the forces heretofore reserved to the Almighty.” Within a month,

World War II would be over, as Americans would drop two atomic bombs on Japan, and the United

States would try to reorganize its scientific and military complexes to restore prosperity after almost

two decades of war and depression while simultaneously preparing for the next enemy on the

horizon.9

Press, 1987), 350. The relative success of the Committee for Nuclear Information’s baby tooth drive and the
democratic principles of public information upon which that study was based would seem to suggest otherwise. This
chapter also presents a stern challenge to Barton C. Hacker’s claim that “those responsible for radiation safety in
nuclear weapons testing under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission were competent, diligent, and
cautious.” According to Hacker, scientists and administrators “understood the hazards and took every precaution
within their power to avoid injuring either test participants or bystanders. Testing, of course, meant taking risks, and
safety could never be the highest priority. Those in charge sometimes made mistakes, but for the most part they
managed to ensure that neither test participants nor bystanders suffered any apparent damage from fallout.” Hacker,
Elements of Controversy: The Atomic Energy Commission and Radiation Safety in Nuclear Weapons Testing, 1947-
1974 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 9. This roundabout logic ignores the fact that scientists and
politicians proceeded with tests before they actually understood the extent of the inherent risks, thereby raising doubts
about their competence, diligence, and caution. Indeed, while scientists may very well have genuinely tried to be
cautious, their research necessitated the exposure to risk of American and world citizens. Here, scientists’ intentions
and their funding directives clashed in exactly the manner Commoner feared.

9 Dan O’Neill, The Firecracker Boys (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994), 11-12.
 69

Solutions concerning what to do with the atomic program had been delivered in the 1946

Atomic Energy Act. While the Act had ensured that the Atomic Energy Commission would function

under civilian control, it had compromised and recognized military progress as its primary objective.

Military need was perceived to have grown drastically in September 1949, as Americans

discovered that the Soviet Union had developed and tested an atomic bomb. Prompted by a new

Cold War arms race, the Atomic Energy Commission was caught in a position where secrecy and

uninhibited progress were both thought to be critical to national security. In militaristic terms, it was

essential that the United States maintain its nuclear dominance, but to tap into that potential, the

Atomic Energy Commission needed to be able to develop nuclear technology without such

inhibiting regulatory impediments. Because the Atomic Energy Commission was required to both

develop and regulate nuclear power, it often felt handcuffed when it came to developing nuclear

energy technology. As Commissioner Willard Libby stated, expressing the frustrations of many

members of the commission: “Our great hazard is that this great benefit to mankind will be killed

aborning by unnecessary regulation. There is not any doubt about the practicability of isotopes

and atomic power in my mind. The question is whether we can get it there in our lifetime.”10

If its destructive capacities had horrified its creators, the atomic bomb’s lingering side

effects—fallout—would become a source of domestic tension during the Cold War era. As nuclear

testing began in Nevada and in the Pacific, the Atomic Energy Commission insisted that the

dangers of radioactivity were minimal to Americans living downwind from the tests, and that

accumulations of fallout within the body could never reach hazardous levels. In reassuring

language, the Atomic Energy Commission tried to quell concerns over the testing of hydrogen

10 Cited in George T. Mazuzan & Samuel J. Walker, Controlling the Atom: The Beginnings of Nuclear

Regulation, 1946-1962 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 60. See also Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction:
Expert Debate and Public Participation in American Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975 (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1991); and Thomas Raymond Wellock, Critical Masses: Opposition to Nuclear Power in California,
1958-1978 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998).
 70

bombs in Nevada in 1952, stating that “these explosives created no immediate or long-range

hazard to human health outside the proving ground.”11 But throughout the 1950s, while the Atomic

Energy Commission’s specialists dismissed any danger related to radioactive fallout, a burgeoning

movement within the scientific community argued otherwise. Determined to turn the science and

politics of the Cold War arms race into public issues, scientists across the country demonstrated to

the public that humans were consuming alarming rates of strontium-90 and iodine-131, particularly

dangerous forms of radioactivity that were chemically similar to calcium. One of the primary

reasons for caution was the discovery that strontium-90, a radioactive by-product of the fission of

uranium and plutonium in nuclear weapons testing, fell to earth much sooner than had been initially

expected. Its half-life, the time it took for half of its atoms to disintegrate, was 29 years, and Atomic

Energy Commission scientists had confidently expected that it would remain in the stratosphere at

least that long. However, on 26 April 1953, physicists experimenting with radioactivity at the

Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, noticed a sudden surge in their “background”

radiation counts. The surge, associated with a deluge of rain, was determined to be radioactive

debris—fallout—from nuclear tests in Nevada 36 hours earlier that had blown across the country

and been brought to earth by heavy rain. The hazards of nuclear weapons testing had become

extremely palpable. Strontium-90 was a known hazard, but no one had ever fully investigated its

danger, as it wasn’t supposed to pose a threat from the stratosphere. Uncertainty and rapidly

conducted experiments resulted in substantial differences of opinion among scientists which only

exacerbated the debate, as scientists and citizens waited to learn about each new finding. That it

11 The Thirteenth Semiannual Report of the Atomic Energy Commission (Washington, D.C.: Government
Printing Office, January 1953), 124.
 71

had come down at all suggested that atomic science was proving again to be fallible and anything

but omniscient.12

Because strontium-90 was a chemical relative of calcium, it followed a similar course

through the biological food chain. Entering into the human body through milk and calcium-rich

vegetables, most strontium-90 passed right through the body, but trace amounts collected in bones

and bone marrow and gave off radiation internally, threatening to cause bone cancer, cancer of

soft tissue near bone, and leukemia. As radioactive fallout entered the soil, it accompanied

calcium through the food chain—from soils, to plants, to animals—and into human bodies.

Human—especially children’s—bones were being fortified not only with calcium, but also with a

radioactive isotope, increasing exponentially one’s susceptibility to cancer. Further, given its long

half-life, significant quantities of strontium-90 could accumulate in human bones over a long period

of time. Because of its capacity to contaminate food supplies upon which all Americans were

dependent, the risk of radioactive fallout presented a relatively universal risk.13

During the 1956 presidential campaign, the democratic candidate and former governor of

Illinois, Adlai Stevenson, introduced nuclear fallout as a campaign issue. In April 1956, Stevenson

raised the suggestion that the United States “take the lead in halting further test explosions” at the

American Society of Newspapers, an argument he raised again as the Democratic nominee for

President in Los Angeles before the American Legion Convention in September.14 By the end of

12 The account of radioactive debris falling on Troy is given in Commoner, The Closing Circle, 50. See also

Herbert M. Clark, “The Occurrence of an Unusually High-Level Radioactive Rainout in the Area of Troy, N.Y.,” Science
119 (7 May 1954), 619-622.

13 Good sources on the objective hazards of nuclear fallout from nuclear weapons testing can be found
online at U.S. Government websites. See especially the Center for Disease Control and Prevention:
http://www.cdc.gov/nceh/radiation/fallout/default.htm (28 April 2004); and the Department of Energy
http://tis.eh.doe.gov/ohre/new/findingaids/radioactive/index.html (28 April 2004).

For Stevenson’s campaign speech, see Walter Johnson (ed.), The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson, Vol. 6:
14

Toward a New America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1976). Quotation is from page 440.
 72

the month, Stevenson raised weapons testing again at a speech in Minneapolis, stating that

nuclear disarmament should be “the first order of business in the world today.” Also in

Minneapolis, Stevenson raised “the danger of poisoning of the atmosphere” as another reason for

putting an end to atomic weapons testing.15 It was the first time that fallout had been used as a

political issue in a presidential campaign, and the first time that such public attention had been

given to fallout as a potential health hazard. Stevenson had asked Dr. Evarts Graham, a

pioneering lung surgeon at Washington University, to gather information on the dangers of fallout.

Graham turned to his colleagues in science, including Commoner, to help compile the information

Stevenson requested. Stevenson lost the election to incumbent Dwight D. Eisenhower, but public

interest in putting a halt to atomic weapons tests was growing and scientists were just beginning to

learn how effective they could be as disseminators of public information.16

The scientists’ conclusions radically altered the official U.S. position on atomic fallout and

led to the 1963 Nuclear Atmospheric Test Ban Treaty. More importantly, the Atomic Energy

Commission’s politics of secrecy and misinformation raised serious questions about the

governance of nuclear technology and risk assessment. Even as late as 1963, no standards or

limits had been laid out for acceptable doses of fallout radiation and the government had been slow

in developing any countermeasures to protect the public. Significantly, no government agency had

kept the public informed of radiation’s possible health hazards. Rather, the Atomic Energy

Commission had done its utmost to deny any danger. In October 1956, for example, President

Eisenhower reassured Americans that “the continuance of the present rate of H-bomb testing, by

15 Johnson (ed.), The Papers of Adlai E. Stevenson, Vol. 6, 248-249.

16For an account of Stevenson’s anti-testing platform, see Robert A. Divine, Blowing on the Wind: The
Nuclear Test Ban Debate, 1954-1960 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 86-88.
 73

the most sober and responsible scientific judgment … does not imperil the health of humanity.”17

Eisenhower’s reassurance echoed the government literature that circulated. Published pamphlets

from the Atomic Energy Commission supported Eisenhower’s statement that the various

radioactive components presented very little risk to Americans. Accompanying the Atomic Energy

Commission’s literature, a group of scientists who supported nuclear technology further publicized

the necessity of bomb tests and inquiries into atomic energy.18

Edward Teller was among the most outspoken of these scientists and the foremost

champion of nuclear technology’s potential. As a part of the Manhattan Project, he had attended

the first test at Los Alamos in 1945, but his enthusiastic reaction seemed in stark contrast with the

more somber tone set by Oppenheimer and others in the bunker. “I was looking, contrary to

regulations, straight at the bomb,” Teller recalled. “I put on welding glasses, suntan lotion, and

gloves. I looked the beast in the eye, and I was impressed.”19 After the war, Teller remained at

Los Alamos, and became widely considered as the “Father of the H-Bomb,” after the detonation of

the world’s first thermonuclear bomb on 1 November 1952. In The Legacy of Hiroshima, Teller

dismissed any inherent dangers of nuclear fallout. “Fallout from … testing is dangerous,” he boldly

stated, “only in the imagination.”20 Recent accounts have portrayed Teller as one of the great

17 Associated Press dispatch from Washington, D.C., 24 October 1956. Also cited in Commoner, Science

and Survival (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 14.

18 For literature on nuclear fallout sponsored by the Atomic Energy Commission, see Gordon M. Dunning &

John A. Hilcken (eds.), Symposium [on] the Shorter-Term Biological Hazards of a Fallout Field, Washington, D.C.,
December 12-14, 1956 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1958); and J. Laurence Kulp & Arthur R.
Schulert (eds.), Strontium-90 in Man and his Environment (Palisades, NY: Geochemical Laboratory, Lamont
Geological Observatory, Columbia University, 1961). See also Christopher J. Jolly, “Thresholds of Uncertainty:
Radiation and Responsibility in the Fallout Controversy,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Oregon State University,
2004.

19 Cited in John Langone, “Edward Teller: Of Bombs and Brickbats,” Discover (1984), 65. See also O’Neill,

The Firecracker Boys, 12.

 74

villains of twentieth century American history because he very consciously contributed to the

proliferation of nuclear fallout, but Teller simply saw himself as another politico-scientist, admittedly

from the opposite side of the tracks than Commoner. A Hungarian refugee from Nazi Europe,

Teller saw nuclear power as ultimately making a single world government inevitable; for Teller,

such a world government needed to hinge on the democratic ideals of the West. The continuation

of atomic research and testing was the only way to ensure that the West would be able to resist the

postwar communist threat. He actively used his position to promote the American nuclear program

less for his own immediate benefit—Teller was less interested in personal gain or in saving face

when data on the health risks mounted against his position—than for national security. Given the

tensions of the Cold War, Teller was convinced that a strong nuclear program was essential for

Western survival and—ultimately—victory over Soviet communism. For Teller, national security

was a more immediate priority than public health, which he held was at less risk than many nay-

sayers warned. His position in favor of testing made him a favorite scientist within military circles,

who also supported continued testing and military expenditures.21

This tension between Cold War security and public information serves as one of the

cornerstones of the dynamics that colored Cold War politics in the United States. The communist

threat demanded that greater emphasis be put on secrecy and civil defense, but the perceived cost

20 Edward Teller, The Legacy of Hiroshima (New York: Doubleday, 1962). Cited in Brodine, “On Scientific
and Political Disagreement,” 19.

21 For more on Teller, see Gregg Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb: The Tangled Lives and Loyalties of

Robert Oppenheimer, Ernest Lawrence, and Edward Teller (New York: Henry Holt, 2002); Herbert F. York, The
Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); Stanley A. Blumberg
& Gwinn Owens, Energy and Conflict: The Life and Times of Edward Teller (New York: Putnam, 1976); Teller,
Memoirs: A Twentieth-Century Journey in Science and Politics (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishers, 2001); and
Edward Teller et al., Conversations on the Dark Secrets of Physics (Cambridge, MA: Perseus Publishers, 2002). For
an account and description of the creation of thermonuclear explosions, see Richard Rhodes, Dark Sun: The Making of
the Hydrogen Bomb (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995). Teller was not alone in his political world-view and the role
of nuclear weapons therein. In fact, it was a relatively common view held by many scientists—including Teller’s fellow
Hungarian Eugene Wigner—who had arrived in the United States before the Second World War. For more, see
Donald Fleming & Bernard Bailyn (eds.), The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930-1960 (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1969).
 75

to many was an inhibition of American freedoms, particularly to democracy and to the freedom of

expression. For many scientists and citizens, curtailing American democracy to preserve it

seemed a perverse abuse of Americanism, and many confronted the Cold War administrations of

the early- and mid-1950s. Oppenheimer, the former director of the Manhattan Project, had publicly

fallen from grace after expressing concerns about policy directions pertaining to the development

of nuclear technology. Attacked by 1950s cold warriors, Oppenheimer ironically fell victim because

of his deference to social responsibility over federal service and national security. It appeared that

the political mechanisms that had bestowed so much public attention and power on the scientific

community could just as easily take them away.22

I discussed the E. U. Condon case in the previous chapter. Commoner was instrumental

in getting Condon to join the Washington University faculty in 1956, and they became collaborators

in promoting nuclear information to the citizens of St. Louis. Commoner also came into close

contact with the famed biochemist Linus Pauling. Pauling was an outspoken politico-scientist

roughly a generation older than Commoner. In January 1952, the State Department had refused to

issue Linus Pauling a new passport. Pauling—who would be the unprecedented recipient of two

Nobel Prizes, for chemistry in 1954 and for peace in 1963—was a strong and vocal critic of U.S.

nuclear policy. In 1957, he organized an international petition to the United Nations of scientists

opposed to nuclear weapons, which ultimately collected 11,021 signatures from scientists all over

the world. Demanding a halt to weapons testing and advocating disarmament, the Pauling petition

22 In response to a 1954 survey conducted by Fortune magazine, Commoner called the Oppenheimer
investigation an “unpardonable treatment of [an] outstanding American,” that was “motivated by outright partisan
political objectives and victimizes the nation as well as Oppenheimer.” Wire correspondence from Commoner to
Francis Bello, science editor for Fortune magazine, 17 April 1954 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 2). For more on
Oppenheimer’s loyalty case see Herken, Brotherhood of the Bomb; Harold P. Green, “The Oppenheimer Case: A
Study in the Abuse of Law,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 33 (July 1977), 12-16, 56-61; and Lincoln Wolfenstein,
“The Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Dissent 15 (1968), 81-85. See also Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 10 (May
1954), 173-191.
 76

claimed that the danger to human health was one of its primary concerns. “Each nuclear bomb

spreads an added burden of radioactive elements over every part of the world,” it stated. “Each

added amount of radiation causes damage to the health of human beings all over the world and

causes damage to the pool of human germ plasm such as to lead to an increase in the number of

seriously defective children that will be born in future generations.”23

Similar in tone to Commoner’s AAAS rhetoric about the role of the scientist, the petition

also noted the scientists’ authority in understanding the dangers nuclear weapons presented. The

petition was written in Commoner’s office at Washington University in St. Louis, and the forms were

printed in a St. Louis union shop and bore the union label, but when Pauling was again called

before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he refused to implicate anyone in the

organization of this successful campaign. In this particular incident, Commoner might have been

fortunate to escape the anticommunist sentiments of the period. The House Committee did not

pursue the St. Louis union label, which would have inevitably led back to Commoner’s

participation. Commoner’s close connection with both Condon and Pauling taught him valuable

lessons about how one might voice dissent without suffering political marginalization during an era

of intolerance. His subsequent activism would be informed by—and in reaction to—the political

climate that gave rise to Pauling’s and Condon’s cases.24

23 Linus Pauling, “An Appeal by American Scientists to the Governments and People of the World,” Bulletin of

the Atomic Scientists 13 (September 1957), 264-266. Quotation is from page 264.

24Commoner interview with author, 22 November 2002. For good accounts of Linus Pauling’s life and
activism, see Thomas Hager, Force of Nature: The Life of Linus Pauling (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995); and
Clifford Mead, Linus Pauling: Scientist and Peacemaker (Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2001). For
information on Pauling’s passport revocation, see Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 8 (July 1952). See, in particular,
Linus Pauling, “My Efforts to Obtain a Passport,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 8 (July 1952), 253-255. In addition to
Condon, the Cold War attacks on the scientific community at Washington University targeted the engineer Alexander
Suss Langsdorf. In 1956, Langsdorf, who in 1958 would be the Committee’s first president, had been accused of
Communist Party membership, a charge that was never substantiated.
 77

After the dissolution of the Interim Committee on the Social Aspects of Science, the AAAS Board of

Directors created a new Committee on Science in the Promotion of Human Welfare. In January

1959, AAAS Secretary Dael Wolfle wrote to Commoner inviting him to be a member of the

Committee. “The Committee on Science in the Promotion of Human Welfare is in a fairly direct

sense a descendant of the Committee on the Social Aspects of Science,” Wolfle wrote. The AAAS

was still concerned about questions dealing with the relationship between science and society, and

the new Committee was charged with assessing “the Association’s present activities in terms of

their effectiveness in fulfilling the Association’s constitutional responsibility ‘to improve the

effectiveness of science in the promotion of human welfare.’”25 Margaret Mead was also appointed

to the Committee, and she and Commoner formed an important working relationship that led to the

creation of the science information movement, which in turn served as inspiration for Commoner’s

subsequent environmental activism.

After a few months of inactivity within the newly formed Committee, Commoner was asked

to take over as chair. Still concerned over splits within the AAAS about whether the Association

should become more involved in politics, Commoner was cautious about how best to move the

Committee forward beyond the obstacles faced by the Committee on the Social Aspects of

Science. The AAAS remained a large and diverse organization, and one prone toward

conservatism. As he confided to Mead upon accepting the chair of the new Committee, “I think

that there is still a serious problem of demonstrating that a committee such as ours can be of real

value to the AAAS.”26 What was needed was a method of presenting scientific positions on social

issues without antagonizing other scientists. Dividing scientists over political issues ultimately

25 Dael Wolfle to Commoner, 30 January 1959 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 341).

26 Commoner to Margaret Mead, 27 May 1959 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 341).
 78

resulted in confusing the public as they received differing information from different camps.

Further, trying to ensure that he avoided upsetting the AAAS Board of Directors and the

membership in general, Commoner opted for defending the notion of scientific integrity.

Commoner regarded the integrity of science as “the system of discourse and procedures which

science employs to discover and discuss the properties of the natural world.”27 As defenders of

scientific truth, Commoner felt the Committee could deflect most criticism by taking the moral high

road, but this resulted in a repositioning of scientists and their social responsibility. Whereas

Commoner and other politico-scientists had advocated rousing and stimulating public concern over

issues relating to science and society, the new Commoner Committee moved away from direct

political activism to serve as a more objective outlet for scientific information.

The cornerstone of Commoner’s subsequent activism took on this premise: effective social

activism needed to be unfettered and informed. The scientist’s role, then, was to provide

accessible information pertaining to difficult scientific questions to the public so that they could

make informed decisions. At the height of the science information movement, Commoner reflected

that “the scientist as the custodian of [scientific] knowledge has a profound duty to impart as much

of it as he can to his fellow citizens. But in doing so he must guard against false pretensions, and

avoid claiming for science that which belongs to the conscience.”28

Commoner saw three parts to the politico-scientist platform. First and foremost, he

insisted that scientists should not divorce themselves from social issues raised by their work.

Given the prevalence of technology and the relative ubiquity of science and science policy in the

postwar environment, scientists had a moral responsibility to participate in the social ramifications

27 Commoner, “The Integrity of Science,” Science Journal (April 1966), 75-79. Quotation is from page 75.

28Commoner, “The Scientist and Political Power,” unpublished manuscript, August 1962 (Barry Commoner
Papers, LoC, Box 14), 10.
 79

of their findings. While public policy decisions were not inherently scientific decisions, many of

them were fundamentally reliant on a very important scientific factual basis. Scientists had a duty

to help the public to understand the complexities of the decisions that faced them as they related to

science. Commoner called this “involuntary responsibility,” the scientist’s obligation to inform the

public. Whereas university scientists had obligations to teaching and research—involuntary

responsibilities—this kind of social engagement, to Commoner, constituted a third obligation.29 A

related second point involved the dissemination of scientific information. Commoner and Mead

recognized a need for public information; scientists should no longer confine their efforts to

advising political officials. Their social duty was to the public, not to the policy makers. The public

needed to be more directly and completely informed by scientists about the technical aspects of

social issues. As much as remaining responsible for their research and its applications, scientists

were primarily responsible not to their funding agencies or employers, but to the American public

and the world. Finally, scientists were not prophets. This last point was critical. While it was

imperative that scientists provide information to the public, scientists should not take advantage of

this role to dictate how non-scientists should interpret the moral or political elements of the

scientific findings. Scientists were experts in interpreting the objective aspects of scientific findings;

they were not experts in shaping policy decisions. In this respect, scientists would present data

and information about the relative benefits and costs of a particular new technology—providing

them equally to politicians and to citizens—for them to weigh the risk. The radical element here

was that politico-scientists believed that the public should be involved in policy matters that

affected them.30

29 Commoner interview with author, 15 November 2001.

30 For Commoner as “the Paul Revere of ecology,” see Time, 2 February 1970, 58.
 80

As Commoner understood it, the postwar technological revolution had created as many

social puzzles as scientific ones. Scientists were well positioned to understand the causes of these

problems, but their solutions—because they were social—demanded more public participation.

But for that public participation to be productive and effective, citizens needed to understand the

problem, be able to weigh the pros and cons of differing positions, and make informed decisions.

Given the technical nature of the scientific causes of the social problems, scientists needed to find

a way to filter through the technical language and translate it into lay terms. Commoner saw that

two elements were essential to an effective methodology: clear information and a non-partisan

position. Combined, these two pillars could resurrect a faltering democratic system in relation to

science and its application to society. On an issue as provocative as nuclear testing that combined

both national security interests and public health concerns, clear, objective information could help

the public to determine whether the health risk involved in preserving national security was

acceptable or not. Objectivity, therefore, came to play a critical role in the political discourse of the

science information movement. The intent and purpose of the information movement was to

encourage the adoption of a particular position, but that activism was obscured by the mantle of

objectivity, which produced a far more subtle and convincing line of rhetoric.

If there is a seminal document in the creation of the science information movement, it was

“The Fallout Problem,” which was Commoner’s salvaging of the Committee on the Social Aspects

of Science’s attempt to establish an AAAS position on nuclear weapons testing. At the December

1957 AAAS meeting in Indianapolis, Commoner tested his non-partisan approach to the

dissemination of accessible information. He would later publish the paper in Science in May 1958.

In “The Fallout Problem,” Commoner gave an overview of the long-range effects of worldwide

fallout from nuclear weapons testing and outlined the relationship between scientific knowledge

and public policy. “That governments find advantage in conducting test nuclear explosions may as
 81

well be taken here as a fact of political life. It is not our purpose at this time to debate the validity of

this need.” Rather, Commoner claimed, his job was to consider the possible health hazards of

fallout. He proceeded to describe the science of fallout, defining terms and explaining what fallout

was. Commoner then discussed why scientists disagreed—because there had been so little time

to analyze the consequences of the new technology’s intrusion into nature—and the source of

public confusion—that the public relied on expert opinion, and experts were divided. Nowhere in

“The Fallout Problem” did Commoner take any position on the fallout question. Rather, he

concluded by turning the question over to the informed citizenry. With the proper information, they

should act by following their consciences. “There is a full circle of relationships which connects

science and society,” he stated. “The advance of science has thrust grave social issues upon us.

And, in turn, social morality will determine whether the enormous natural forces that we now control

will be used for destruction—or reserved for the creative purposes that alone give meaning to the

pursuit of knowledge.”31 Without taking a distinct position, Commoner challenged the public to “do

the right thing.”

Commoner’s activism was never quite so objective, of course, but he did emphasize that

the precautionary principle should be the driving force behind policy decisions, and in order for that

to happen, the public needed to be more intimately involved. The first step, therefore, was making

sure that the public was more aware of the stakes. “The power of science over our lives is now so

complex,” he warned at a Washington University lecture in 1960, “that we will do ourselves

harm—blindly, unknowingly and sometimes disastrously.”32 In effect, politico-scientists needed a

citizen constituency in order to help raise their concerns about the misguided nature of American

31 Commoner, “The Fallout Problem,” Science 127 (2 May 1958), 1023-1026. Quotations are from pages

1023 and 1026.

32 “Dr. Commoner Cites Scientists’ Dilemma,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat (13 October 1960), 4.
 82

technological enthusiasm. As Commoner noted later, this alliance of socially engaged scientists

and informed citizens constituted “the one invention of our technological age which can conserve

the environment and preserve life on earth.”33 The politico-scientists often forfeited their status in

the scientific community by reaching out to the public, but they strongly felt that the gravity of the

postwar climate demanded a drastic reform of how science was communicated. Central to this

reform was the increased democratization of science and science communication. Technology

had so altered quotidian American life that politico-scientists believed that the American public

should be more aware of the extent and context of these changes.

Moreover, in an era of anticommunist restrictions on the freedom of expression,

Commoner’s more passive rhetoric made a lot of sense, but with the hazardous implications of

fallout so tangible it must have been difficult to accept a more ambiguous political stance. After all,

the public—even if it was confused—was looking to scientists to offer guidance through the

proverbial minefield, and rather than guiding, Commoner was offering only a map with a list of

possible destinations. Commoner defended this position against criticisms that it was a kind of

political regression from “activist” politics by insisting that “the most vital missing element in our

present political life is not so much leadership for ‘good policies,’” but rather “that all of us,

government and citizens alike, be given the means to know the facts, that we may bring before our

personal and collective conscience the real depth of the troubles of our time.”34 Rather than trying

to be the loudest advocate, Commoner offered a sense of order and calm in a storm of voices and

33 Commoner, Science and Survival, 120.

34 Commoner, “The Scientist and Political Power,” 12.

 83

contradictory opinions. What Commoner was banking on for success was the populist appeal of

public empowerment and the deference accorded to objective expertise.35

Commoner continued to chair the Committee on Science in the Promotion of Human Welfare until

1964. Under his watch, the Committee found a niche in defending the integrity of science and

promoting the importance of public information, while the principles of “The Fallout Problem”

served as a practical directive for all the subsequent work done by the Commoner Committee. But

by the late 1950s, Commoner was shifting much of his energy toward a more grassroots variety of

activism in opposition to nuclear weapons testing. After experiencing considerable frustration in

trying to print the public statement from the AAAS taking a position against the testing of nuclear

weapons—using scientists’ influence to help sway the public—Commoner turned to more

grassroots-oriented activism against atmospheric—also known as aboveground—nuclear testing

by co-founding the Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information. In April 1958, a

group of concerned scientists and local women reformers founded the Committee for Nuclear

Information to combat what they perceived to be a thin veil of government misinformation. They

determined that the Committee’s primary directive should be to collect, evaluate, and make

available to the public information concerning atmospheric nuclear testing. Commoner was among

the co-founders of the group, but St. Louis and Washington University were conducive to this kind

of activism. While his opposition to Commoner’s activism resulted in considerable friction between

the two, the university’s chancellor, Arthur Holly Compton, himself an eminent physicist,

contributed to the growth of activism in St. Louis by recruiting prominent chemists and physicists

35 For a discussion of populist rhetoric as a form of empowerment, see Michael Kazin, The Populist

Persuasion: An American History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). For populism in an environmental context,
see Andrew Szasz, EcoPopulism: Toxic Waste and the Movement for Environmental Justice (Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 1994).
 84

who had worked on the Manhattan Project during the war. In so doing, Compton successfully

improved the prestige of the science faculty at Washington University, but he also unwittingly

recruited scientists who knew sin firsthand, as Oppenheimer put it, and were more naturally

inclined to share Commoner’s belief that scientists should also be socially concerned citizens.36

While the aboveground tests galvanized the group’s formation, the list of their concerns

quickly spread from nuclear tests and weaponry to the potential uses of nuclear energy. Through

its magazine and speakers’ bureau, the Committee for Nuclear Information helped to pioneer the

science information movement. Calling the Committee for Nuclear Information “the pioneer

citizens’ group in the field of nuclear education,” the group’s mission statement claimed that it did

“not stand for or against particular policies. It presents the known facts for people to use in

deciding where they stand on the moral and political questions of the nuclear age.”37 A 1962

brochure reiterated that the Committee took “no position on political or military issues except the

position that a free people must be an informed people.”38

After some debate, the group’s founders affirmed Commoner’s recommendation that the

group maintain a non-partisan stance in the information they publicized, including possible

endorsement of a nuclear test ban. But the Committee’s stated dedication to political neutrality and

scientific objectivity was a point of some controversy among its founding members. Many

members would have preferred to take a more political stand. For example, the physicist John

Fowler, a Quaker, had a difficult time accepting the “information position.” Quakers took positions,

Fowler argued, and the information stance was far too passive. Commoner sympathized and tried

36 Commoner interview with author, 20 November 2003.

37 For the mission statement, see any issue of Nuclear Information.

Committee for Nuclear Information brochure, 1962. Cited in Allen Smith, “Converting America: Three
38

Community Efforts to End the Cold War, 1956-1973,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, American University, 1995, 173.
 85

to compromise with Fowler. Commoner tried to persuade Fowler that he could acknowledge that

he was giving facts as a scientist, but as a citizen and voter he could share his position at the end,

so long as emphasis was placed on the information and not his personal opinion. After some

persuasion, the original Committee members adopted a non-partisan platform with the

understanding that they would evaluate their progress under this rubric after a year.39

For many of the founding members, nuclear fallout was too serious a problem to risk non-

partisan politics, but the rhetoric of impartiality ultimately served the Committee well and it was

ultimately approved after its yearlong test. Their non-partisan position proved an astute tactic that

bolstered their public and political credibility as objective scientists. In order to realize their bigger

goal of inciting a broader citizen participation and political mobilization through increasing concerns

about radiation’s potential harm, the Committee for Nuclear Information maintained a conscious

tension between the importance of public information and their underlying political message. The

decision to abstain from making any partisan statements was prompted in part by the notion that

scientists were objective experts and should therefore adhere to a level of impartiality.40 Their

primary duty was to convey scientific facts to help the public make decisions on controversial social

issues. But a second, and perhaps more critical, explanation for the Committee for Nuclear

Information’s non-partisan approach stemmed from the political climate of the Cold War. As the

Cold War carved out global political divisions, the scientific community became equally split. While

many scientists appreciated the significance of national security, others continued to promote the

39Commoner interview with author, 22 November 2002. See also William Cuyler Sullivan, Jr., Nuclear
Democracy: A History of the Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee for Nuclear Information, 1957-1967 (St. Louis:
Washington University College Occasional Papers, No. 1, 1982).

40 Women’s reform work also tended to base its activism on education principles, and was ultimately open to

non-partisan politics. Indeed, the League of Women Voters was a model for non-partisan politics. For the relationship
between scientists and women reformers in the Committee for Nuclear Information, see Smith, “Converting America,”
133-175. For more on women’s activisms against nuclear testing, see Amy Swerdlow, Women Strike for Peace:
Traditional Motherhood and Radical Politics in the 1960s (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993).
 86

importance of public health and intellectual freedom. Moreover, intellectual freedom, by

implication, also meant international cooperation and communication. The spirit of scientific

sharing, however, conflicted with the overriding political tone of the American government during

the Cold War. Prominent American scientists proposing to share scientific findings with their Soviet

counterparts became easy targets for Senator Joseph McCarthy’s tribunals. In such a polarized

political arena, it was obviously difficult to demonstrate dissent without appearing to have

communist sympathies. The Committee for Nuclear Information avoided this pitfall by advocating a

purer democracy and insisting they were impartial experts providing information and not political

positions. By promoting the importance of an informed public, Committee members positioned

themselves as defenders of democracy, making it difficult to attack them without appearing to

challenge the American affinity with democratic ideals. Further, their impartial position avoided

most charges of radicalism.

Nevertheless, abstaining from taking political positions did not mean that the Committee

for Nuclear Information avoided conflict. On the contrary, the Committee charged that established

governmental agencies were misleading the public and not doing their jobs properly. A regular

target became the Atomic Energy Commission. In July 1957, the Joint Congressional Committee

on Atomic Energy had observed that “information on fallout has evidently not reached the public in

adequate or understandable ways.”41 Hoping to capitalize on this gulf between government and

public, the Committee for Nuclear Information also faced several obstacles, most significantly and

ironically the general public tendency to “leave it to the experts.” How to effectively communicate

nuclear information to a public that showed little interest in becoming involved in the debate proved

41 Cited in Sullivan, Nuclear Democracy, 20.

 87

a difficult process. But by situating the Committee as an objective grassroots organization,

Commoner and the other leaders hoped to forge a link to the public.42

The Committee for Nuclear Information mounted a serious challenge to the Atomic Energy

Commission and to the role that specialists had taken in informing the public about the potential

hazards of nuclear fallout. Commoner and others worried that a nation seemingly engaged in

permanent Cold War might stress “national security” at the expense of a working democracy.

Indeed, they interpreted the classification of information as just that sort of a breach. Keeping

scientific information from scientists constituted a breakdown in scientific progress, but keeping it

from the public it was supposed to serve was even more problematic as it constituted a collapse in

the structure of a functioning democracy. To counteract government secrecy, Commoner and

others adopted a rhetoric that publicly promoted democratic principles. The Committee for Nuclear

Information’s project became the distribution of accessible scientific information to the public in

order to assist them in making moral judgments about radiation risks. Commoner in particular

believed that a citizenry informed of the risks inherent in nuclear testing would share his concerns

about radiation fallout and would object to the shortsighted machinations of its government so

enthralled with cold war. In essence, he interpreted the public information movement as a

movement for public empowerment and as a means of improving the lines of communication

between the citizenry and their elected officials. Independent information publicly distributed

became a powerful political tool.

42 As early as 1956, Commoner had hoped that local chapters of the American Association for the

Advancement of Science could be formed to help disseminate public information, but this notion played into the
popular public inclination to trust the specialists. Smaller groups were more effective in galvanizing a public response.
See Sullivan, Nuclear Democracy, 21.
 88

Compared to his AAAS efforts in informing the public, the Committee for Nuclear Information,

whose budget was a tiny fraction of the bigger organization’s, was a far more successful

enterprise. A lot of this had to do with the energy of its members and their dedication to their

efforts, and just as much had to do with the creativity with which they engaged in getting

information to the public. Through a series of outreach programs and well-advertised projects, the

Committee for Nuclear Information succeeded in establishing itself as a credible source for

scientific information about nuclear technology. Between October 1958 and May 1959, CNI

speakers addressed 75 organizations, including church, parent, student, and business groups.

Biologist Florence Moog’s fictional account of St. Louis one year after a nuclear war, for example,

received considerable attention. Basing her account on hearings by the Joint Congressional

Committee on Atomic Energy regarding the effects of nuclear war, Moog quantitatively speculated

on what might happen to St. Louis in the event of a nuclear war. “Nuclear War in St. Louis: One

Year Later” was very popular; more than a dozen publications worldwide reprinted the article,

which was all the more poignant because it drew on the most recent scientific evidence to create a

piece of science fiction. In December 1959, Dynamic Films approached CNI for film rights, but the

movie was never made. As the Committee for Nuclear Information grew, the BBC, the National

Observer, and Audubon Magazine used the Committee for Nuclear Information as a valuable

resource for making sense of complicated nuclear issues, which they in turn passed on to their

audiences. Moreover, Committee members made regular appearances on local TV and radio

programs, while other news services outside of St. Louis made regular use of Nuclear Information,

the Committee’s monthly bulletin. While membership numbers remained modest, the Committee’s

message enjoyed widespread attention.43

 89

Members of the Committee for Nuclear Information were also continually convinced that

government information on nuclear testing and technology was either based on inaccurate data or,

even more problematically, driven by socio-political—non-scientific—factors, and they weren’t

wrong. Teller, in particular, was the subject of criticisms from scientists in the Committee for

Nuclear Information. Committee letters charged that Teller’s work “failed to conform to the

standards of validity which are customary in scientific work.” In response, Teller accused

Committee scientists of “quibbling” over “small and irrelevant details.”44 But in insisting that

dangers of fallout existed only in the imagination, Teller was twisting statistics on strontium-90

consumption to his own interests. Teller was correct in suggesting that the average level of

strontium-90 was quite low. What his conclusion did not suggest, however, was that he had

combined data from children and adults, which deflated the high levels of strontium-90 in children.

Not only were children’s bodies smaller, children also consumed more calcium—and therefore

more strontium-90—than adults.45

Willard F. Libby was another Atomic Energy Commission scientist who seemed

deliberately to obfuscate questions of nuclear fallout. In June 1957, at the hearings of the Special

Subcommittee on Radiation, Libby was challenged for statements he had made a couple of months

earlier regarding the uniformity of fallout. In 1953, Atomic Energy Commission publications

suggested that fallout would be evenly distributed over the globe, implying that no area would

suffer an excessive amount. By averaging the amount of fallout over the entire globe, the Atomic

43 Florence Moog, “Nuclear War in St. Louis: One Year Later,” Nuclear Information (September 1959), 1-4.
For a detailed discussion of “Nuclear War in St. Louis,” see Sullivan, Nuclear Democracy, 28-29. Sullivan argues that
“Nuclear War in St. Louis” should be considered with Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for
Leibowitz as the great literary works of the horrors associated with the nuclear age.

44 Cited in Richard Dudman, “Washington University Teacher Attacks Teller’s Atomic Fallout Views; Accused

of ‘Fighting Windmills,’” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, undated, (March 1958).

45 Commoner, Review of The Legacy of Hiroshima, Chemical & Engineering News, 28 May 1962.
 90

Energy Commission anticipated a relatively low total of human exposure to fallout. By 1957,

however, meteorologists were beginning to determine that fallout was concentrated in a band in the

North Temperate Zone. Because the majority of the world’s population lived in the North

Temperate Zone, the total human exposure to fallout was clearly much greater than the Atomic

Energy Commission had predicted.46 Libby dismissed the controversy by downplaying

disagreements among scientists regarding how much fallout was indeed safe. He further defended

nuclear testing from attacks by geneticists. Geneticists had become increasingly concerned that

fallout from nuclear testing was posing mutative hazards to subsequent generations, but Libby

casually insisted that “testing constitutes a small risk—very small compared to ordinary risks which

can be tolerated.”47 In his open letter to Schweitzer regarding his appeal in the Saturday Review,

Libby had admitted that fallout represented some risk, but that it was negligible, and that risk was

an integral part of modern life. Risk was inherent in “our pleasures, our comforts, and our material

progress,” he argued.48 That fallout only raised the rate of leukemia by 0.5%, as he suggested,

seemed innocuous enough. In the same issue of the Saturday Review, California Institute of

Technology geochemist Harrison Brown conceded that Libby’s increase seemed small, but pointed

out that “when we say that 10,000 individuals are killed each year … the number suddenly seems

very large.”49 This was a central aspect of the science information movement. The fraction 0.5%

meant very little to the public, but 10,000 people was easier to comprehend. With accessible

46 Commoner, Science and Survival, 16. The Atomic Energy Commission also back-tracked on various

studies that analyzed the potential of genetic mutation resulting from fallout.

47 Hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, The
Nature of Radioactive Fallout and its Effects on Man, 5 June 1957, 1222.

48 Willard F. Libby, “An Open Letter to Dr. Schweitzer,” Saturday Review 40 (25 May 1957), 8-9, 36-37.

Quotation is from page 37.

49 Harrison Brown, “What is a ‘Small’ Risk?” Saturday Review, 9-10. Quotation is from page 10.
 91

information, the public could form their own moral judgments about what constituted acceptable

and unacceptable risks.

To concerned scientists, another troubling element of Libby’s testimony and public writing

was the comparison of risks. For Libby, the health risks from fallout were smaller than those taken

by Americans every day when they boarded an airplane or drove a car, but what Libby failed to

address was that some risks were voluntary and some were not. Eugene Rabinowitch, the editor

of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, objected to Libby’s flippant comparison of risk from fallout to

risks that people took voluntarily, stating that fallout was the product of “deliberate government

action,” and posed a ubiquitous threat to Americans and humans the world over.50 Nobody had a

choice to avoid the risk of fallout, while one could freely decide not to fly or drive or cross the street.

Involuntary risk suggested a breakdown in the democratic process, if citizens could not express

choice over whether or not to accept a particular risk, nor receive the information necessary to

make a choice in the matter. Libby’s professional career wasn’t beyond Commoner’s scorn either.

After Libby left the Atomic Energy Commission, he took a position in the Chemistry Department at

the University of California, Los Angeles. In a letter to Look magazine editor Roland Berg,

Commoner noted Libby’s move to California instead of a return to his former position in Chicago.

“Do you suppose,” Commoner mused in a rather gratuitous swipe, “that he chose to settle down in

that part of the country which has the lowest fallout level?”51

For almost a decade, through persistent questioning of official findings, independent

scientists had pushed the Atomic Energy Commission into a series of often embarrassing

reversals. As radioactivity fell on America’s fields, the possibilities that cattle were consuming

50 Divine, Blowing on the Wind, 123.

51 Commoner to Roland Berg, 23 March 1959 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 431).
 92

strontium-90 raised alarms from independent scientists. On this score, government officials

insisted that the risk of ingesting strontium-90 in addition to calcium was insignificant. Indeed, as

late as 1953 the Atomic Energy Commission had asserted that strontium-90 constituted a minimal

hazard that was limited to human “ingestion of bone splinters which might be intermingled with

muscle tissue during butchering and cutting of meat.”52 By 1954, independent biologists had

reminded the Atomic Energy Commission that most people received far more calcium—and with it,

strontium-90—from milk, not splinters of bone in their hamburgers. By 1956, the Atomic Energy

Commission had conceded that milk was the most significant source of strontium-90 in human

food.53

To further emphasize strontium-90’s danger, the Committee engaged in one of their most

innovative and highly successful campaigns, the Baby Tooth Survey, to determine whether children

in St. Louis were being exposed to more strontium-90 by virtue of the nuclear weapons tests in

Nevada. Because children, and especially infants, needed more milk than adults, it stood to

reason that they were more likely to accumulate more strontium-90. Also smaller bodies were at

greater risk, and roused both the concerns and emotions of parents across the country. The

analysis of baby teeth to measure the build-up of strontium-90, which began in December 1958,

was inspired by biochemist Herman M. Kalckar’s August 1958 article in Nature, entitled “An

International Milk Teeth Radiation Census,” which proposed a scientific study of baby teeth as a

means of determining the extent to which fallout was being absorbed into human bodies. So far,

Kalckar noted that only “erratic data existed, based on autopsy of bone samples derived mainly

from adults.” A radiation census of the type he recommended could “contribute important

52 Atomic Energy Commission Thirteenth Semi-Annual Report, Washington, D.C., 1 January 1953.

53 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 52.

 93

information concerning the amount and kind of radiation received by the most sensitive section of

any population, namely, the children.” “If a continued general trend toward a rise in radioactivity in

children’s teeth were attained,” Kalckar posited, “it might well have important bearings on national

and international policy.” Recognizing the political sensitivity of the testing question, Kalckar also

insisted that “the results [of the study] should be conveyed to the public without interpretations

which might give rise to either complacency or fear, but rather in a spirit that would encourage

sober, continued, active concern.”54 Shortly after its publication, the Committee for Nuclear

Information’s vice-president, pediatrician Alfred S. Schwartz, proposed that the Committee collect

deciduous teeth for strontium-90 analysis after 1958 studies conducted by the United States Public

Health Service found that levels of strontium-90 in St. Louis milk were surprisingly high, the highest

of the ten cities they surveyed.55

In a press statement submitted for release on 21 December 1958, the Committee for

Nuclear Information announced its plans to “collect 50,000 baby teeth a year to provide an

important record of the absorption of radioactive strontium-90 by children.” Echoing Kalckar’s

claim that a baby tooth survey would provide a unique and critical resource, the Committee stated

“the importance of an immediate collection of deciduous, or baby, teeth lies in the fact that teeth

now being shed by children represent an irreplaceable source of scientific information about the

54 Herman M. Kalckar, “An International Milk Teeth Radiation Census,” Nature 182 (2 August 1958), 283-284.

Quotation is from page 283.

55 See W. K. Wyant Jr., “50,000 Baby Teeth,” The Nation (13 June 1959), 535-537. See also Nuclear

Information (24 December 1958). The Committee for Nuclear Information papers seem to exhibit some
inconsistencies as to when Alfred S. Schwartz introduced the notion of organizing a baby tooth analysis campaign in
St. Louis. In the 24 December 1958 issue of Nuclear Information, Schwartz is credited with having raised the Baby
Tooth Survey idea in early summer 1958, in advance of Herman Kalckar’s Nature article. In Yvonne Logan’s account
of the history of the Baby Tooth Survey, Schwartz brought Kalckar’s article to the Committee in fall 1958. See Yvonne
Logan, “The Story of the Baby Tooth Survey,” Scientist and Citizen (September-October 1964), 38-39. While the Baby
Tooth Survey subcommittee consisted of several male scientists during its initial stages, subsequent meetings
consisted almost exclusively of non-scientist women activists, with the exception of Dr. Louise Reiss, who chaired the
subcommittee. See Baby Tooth Survey subcommittee minutes (Committee for Nuclear Information records, Western
Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 194).
 94

absorption of strontium-90 in the human body.” Because strontium-90 had begun to fall to earth

and contaminate food roughly ten years previously, “deciduous teeth now being shed were formed

from the minerals present in food eaten by mothers and infants during … the first few years of the

fallout era and therefore represent invaluable baseline information with which analyses of later

teeth and bones can be compared.”56

The Baby Tooth Survey was the first of its kind and was designed to produce the most

comprehensive body of knowledge of strontium-90 absorption in children. Previous studies had

been based on the analysis of bone samples, and a 1957 Columbia University study had indicated

that one-year-old children possessed the highest levels. But those bone samples came from dead

children, so the sample was naturally rather limited.57 The Committee for Nuclear Information

hoped that their study would offer more conclusive evidence that strontium-90 was accumulating in

children’s bones and that posed a serious health hazard. Deciduous baby teeth offered a ready

and accessible resource for determining levels of strontium-90 absorption. By applying the findings

of strontium-90 in baby teeth, the Committee expected to be able to determine the relative

absorption in bone. Before proceeding, the Committee elicited enthusiastic endorsements from

both the Washington University and the St. Louis University Schools of Dentistry, both of which

became instrumental in forming the Scientific Advisory Group that guided the program. Initial

grants from the American Cancer Society, the Leukemia Guild of Missouri and Illinois, and the

United States Public Health Service helped to instigate the Baby Tooth Survey.58 Dr. Louise Zibold

56 Committee for Nuclear Information Press Release, 20 December 1958 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC,
Box 431).

57 J. Laurence Kulp et al., “Strontium-90 in Man,” Science 125 (8 February 1957), 219-225.

The Committee for Nuclear Information in conjunction with the Washington University dental school won
58

the $197,000 grant from the Public Health Service to measure the levels of radiation. See Smith, “Converting
 95

Reiss, an internist, volunteered full time as the Baby Tooth Survey’s director for the following three

years. Predominantly organized and run by the Committee for Nuclear Information’s women

volunteers, the survey began locally in St. Louis, testing donated baby teeth for absorption of

strontium-90. In order to obtain the necessary information on environmental factors that would

contribute to the uptake of strontium-90, questionnaires were sent out to be returned with the teeth.

The form included questions concerning the child’s date of birth, the date the tooth was lost, the

mother’s residence during pregnancy, the child’s residence for the first year after birth, the duration

of breast feeding, the duration of formula feeding, the kind of milk used in the formula, and other

milk used during the first year. After the tooth and background information was received, children

would be sent a button that read “I gave my tooth to science,” an Operation Tooth Club

membership card, and a new tooth form.

While the Baby Tooth Survey subcommittee worked to send out questionnaire forms and

solicited support from the community, the Committee for Nuclear Information’s publication,

Information, worked both to allay public panic regarding fallout hazards, while also effectively

ensuring that the topic did not leave its newfound place of prominence. In February 1959,

Information was concentrated exclusively on “Milk and the Strontium-90 Problem,” a statement

published at the request of the St. Louis Dairy Council. In its statement, the Committee for Nuclear

Information emphasized the gravity of the issue, but also insisted emphatically that milk was an

essential part of a child’s diet and that “nothing can be gained by reducing milk intake.” The

Committee explained that “cutting down milk consumption would probably have no effect on

strontium-90 absorption. The amount of strontium-90 absorbed by the body seems to depend on

the ratio of strontium-90 to calcium in the diet, and not so much on the total amount of strontium-90

America,” 156. For a detailed analysis of how the Committee for Nuclear Information was funded, see Sullivan,
Nuclear Democracy.
 96

taken in.”59 In March, the Committee focused on “Strontium-90 and Common Foods,” addressing

the relative lack of information on food products other than milk. Within, the article commented on

a three-year survey of wheat samples from Minnesota and the Dakotas. By October 1959, the

Committee’s bulletin, now published as Nuclear Information, addressed food safety for children. In

“Mothers Ask—What Should We Feed Our Kids?” freelance writer Doris Deakin transcribed a

discussion conducted by St. Louis pediatrician-turned-housewife Miriam Pennoyer and a number of

her neighbors, in which Pennoyer explained the connection between strontium-90 and milk, the

connection between strontium-90 and bone cancer and leukemia, and general questions about

radiation and radiation safety. One of the questions raised in “Mothers Ask” had to do with the

disproportionately high levels of strontium-90 in St. Louis milk. While the science of the global

distribution of nuclear fallout was still very much in its infancy in 1959, Pennoyer suggested “we’re

finding that there are hot spots. The middlewest is one. We don’t know why this is so. Maybe it’s

because of where we are, in relation to the bomb testing sites. Maybe it has something to do with

the minerals in our soil. Or both. We’re not sure.”60

In its candor—both in answering questions and in not knowing all the answers—the

Committee for Nuclear Information effectively positioned itself as a reputable voice in the fallout

debate and an organization with an unfailing social conscience. Commoner’s gamble that the

Committee preserve its political neutrality had paid off. As William K. Wyant Jr. noted in The

Nation, in an article devoted to the success of the Committee: “ordinarily, a group that called itself

the Greater St. Louis Citizens Committee for Nuclear Information would not be expected to last for

any great period of time. Mortality among earnest and well-meaning organizations has been …

59 “Milk and the Strontium-90 Problem,” Information (February 1959), 1-2, 4.

60 Doris Deakin, “Mothers Ask—What Should We Feed Our Kids?” Nuclear Information (October 1959), 1-4.
Quotation is from page 3.
 97

great.” What had helped the Committee to beat the odds, Wyant argued, was its decision not to

take a political stand. “The view prevailed that what really was needed was information,” he

continued. “It was felt that too many people—the politicians, the military and the oracles speaking

ex cathedra from the Atomic Energy Commission—were taking decisive attitudes on the basis of

indecisive information, or none.”61 The Committee’s work in general, therefore, offered a public

service, but also insisted upon broader public participation.

The very nature of the tooth campaign necessitated active public participation, and the

Committee couldn’t be sure what kind of response it would receive. The response was

considerable. By the Spring of 1960, the Survey received 17,000 teeth. In late April 1960, St.

Louis Mayor Raymond Tucker declared “Tooth Survey Week,” to initiate the Committee’s Spring

Tooth Drive. Support from the mayor, the St. Louis Dental Society, and the St. Louis

Pharmaceutical Association provided plenty of publicity for the campaign; 10,000 teeth were

collected in the following month alone.62 Reiss tirelessly sought the cooperation of all the schools

and school superintendents in the St. Louis district, and in October 1960, 250,000 questionnaire

forms were published and distributed to children in the lower grades throughout the city.63 Tens of

thousands of small packages poured into the St. Louis post office, and found their way to the

Committee for Nuclear Information’s offices, some addressed only to “The Tooth Fairy, St. Louis.”64

Some teeth, like Gene Smith’s of Decatur, Georgia, even found their way to the Mayor’s office.

The 11 year-old wrote: “I always put my tooth under my pillow for a dime but had rather the

61 Wyant, “50,000 Baby Teeth,” 535.

62 See Louise Z. Reiss, “Baby Tooth Survey—First Results,” Nuclear Information (November 1961), 1-6.
Account of the collection of teeth is mentioned on page 2.

63 “Baby Tooth Survey Forms Going Out,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 23 October 1960, 3. See also “Baby

Tooth Survey Opens,” The Observer, 9 November 1960, 7B.

64 Logan, “History of the Baby Tooth Survey,” 39.

 98

scientists use this one.”65 Assuring the boy that he would forward his tooth to the Committee,

Mayor Tucker, added: “I am enclosing a dime so that you will not suffer any financial loss by

turning this tooth over to the scientists rather than putting it under your pillow.”66

The comments from mothers sending teeth to the survey also demonstrated that the

Committee for Nuclear Information had struck a chord with the public. That nuclear fallout posed a

particular threat to society’s most innocent members—not to mention its future—only compounded

the problems of involuntary risk, and raised more public concern about the potential cost of the

arms race in general. Accompanying some teeth, letters expressed the love and anxiety parents

felt for their children who might be at risk. Mrs. Doris Gould’s letter claimed that “in my rare

moments of leisure I take out those baby teeth and what memories they recall.”67 Mrs. Robert J.

Masten reminded the Committee that the teeth with which they had been entrusted constituted a

“precious commodity,” no doubt much in the spirit of Gould’s nostalgia.68 And while the study

focused on St. Louis, teeth came in from all over the country. Mrs. Norman Steele of Wellesley,

Massachusetts was anxious to learn of the results. “The teeth which I have belonged to my son

who died of cancer of the bone (osteogenic sarcoma) at the age of eleven a year ago,” she wrote.69

Other notes were from children to the Tooth Fairy: “Dear Fairy, I would like to have a

dime,” wrote Jill in a small child’s handwriting. “But do not take my tooth I am going to send it to

65 Gene Smith to Committee for Nuclear Information, 12 May 1960 (Committee for Nuclear Information

records, Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 197).

66 Raymond Tucker to Gene Smith, 17 May 1960 (Committee for Nuclear Information records, Western

Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 197).

67Mrs. Doris Gould to the Committee for Nuclear Information, 17 April 1960 (Committee for Nuclear
Information records, Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 197).

68 Mrs. Robert J. Masten to Committee for Nuclear Information, 11 May 1960 (Committee for Nuclear

Information records, Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 197).

69 Mrs. Norman Steele to Commoner, 17 November 1959 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 431).
 99

siense [sic].”70 Michael Pachulski of Grand Rapids, Michigan, sent a wad of Kleenex with a baby

tooth in it. “If you can use it,” he wrote, “I will be very happy.” He continued: “I’m going to spread

the word to all my friends.”71 Patty Hamley wrote to apologize that she would no longer be able to

send any more teeth. “My reason is that the tooth I sent you was my last baby tooth,” she wrote. “I

will let my brother use the card you sent me. I will be proud to wear the pin, and will tell children

about it.”72 A Mrs. Jenks enclosed one “I gave my tooth to science” button, “which has been

through the washing machine. This has caused one broken heart and floods of tears at our house

and I wonder if you could replace it.”73 Many of the children’s letters expressed some parental

concerns, like Robert Roe’s. “I drink about a quart of milk a day,” the nine year-old wrote in his

letter.74 Parents, fortifying their children’s bones with calcium, must have been stunned and

terrified to learn that they might actually be poisoning them instead. By the Test Ban Treaty of

1963, the Baby Tooth Survey had collected data on 132,000 teeth; by 1966, it had collected more

than 200,000.

In November 1961, Reiss published the Baby Tooth Survey’s preliminary findings in

Science, which presented strontium-90 absorption levels in St. Louis between 1951 and 1954, but

concentrated on the viability of tooth collection and analysis as a legitimate means of analyzing

strontium-90 accumulation in children. “The results reported show that deciduous teeth can be

70 Jill to Committee for Nuclear Information, undated (Committee for Nuclear Information records, Western

Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 197).

71 Michael Pachulski to Committee for Nuclear Information, undated (Committee for Nuclear Information

records, Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 197).

Patty Hamley to Committee for Nuclear Information, 9 June 1961 (Committee for Nuclear Information
72

records, Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 197).

73 Mrs. Jenks to Baby Tooth Survey, 8 January 1962 (Committee for Nuclear Information records, Western

Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 197).

Robert Roe to Committee for Nuclear Information, 17 April 1960 (Committee for Nuclear Information
74

records, Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 197).
 100

usefully employed as a means of monitoring strontium-90 in man,” she wrote in her introduction.75

By that time, 67,500 teeth had been catalogued and 1,335 teeth were used in the initial study.

Reiss noted that 10% of the teeth received came from beyond the study area and another 15%

came from children who were born elsewhere. Other teeth developed outside the time parameters

of the first study. Because tooth calcification begins after the twelfth week of pregnancy and is

completed during the first year of birth, the Baby Tooth Survey was exceptionally particular about

the teeth they used in their analyses.

The study confirmed their suspicions and fears, that strontium-90 was increasingly present

in children’s bones. As the Committee had predicted, the amount of strontium-90 began increasing

after 1952, the year the first hydrogen bomb was detonated. Whereas levels of strontium-90 found

in teeth from 1951 and 1952 contained roughly 0.2 micromicrocuries per gram, that number had

doubled by the end of 1953 and tripled and even quadrupled in 1954. Interestingly, teeth from

babies who had been fed formula milk typically contained higher levels of strontium-90 than teeth

from babies who had been breast-fed. As Pennoyer had suggested in her October 1959

conversation with neighbors, mothers served as a filter that reduced the amount of strontium-90

absorbed by their children.76 The Committee’s published data showed that the baby teeth

examined demonstrated a 300% increase in strontium-90 from 1951 to 1955, the result of

increased nuclear testing. By even the most sober interpretations, more aboveground nuclear

weapons testing meant greater exposure to radioactive fallout.

75 Reiss, “Strontium-90 Absorption by Deciduous Teeth,” Science 134 (24 November 1961), 1669-1673.

Quotation is from page 1669.

76 Tables of strontium-90 levels can be found in Reiss, “Strontium-90 Absorption by Deciduous Teeth,” 1670;

and “Baby Tooth Survey—First Results,” 4. For Pennoyer’s discussion of breast-feeding versus formula, see Deakin,
“Mothers Ask—What Should We Feed Our Kids,” 3.
 101

The Baby Tooth Survey continued until 1968, but from a public information standpoint, the

call for baby teeth was an instant and inspired success. As Reiss commented in Nuclear

Information in November 1961, “the Baby Tooth Survey has apparently lost its own milk teeth, and

has become a growing institution with a bite!”77 More effective than any advertising campaign, the

Baby Tooth Survey served two purposes. First, it brought attention to the hazards of nuclear fallout

to which the nation’s children were particularly susceptible, and second, it required public

participation, involving the public in the initial phase of the study and ensuring widespread interest

in the Committee’s results. The overwhelming response to their requests for teeth, and the

growing number of similar surveys around the country suggested that Americans were becoming

less willing to accept risk out of hand. The popular concern that developed over the potential

health hazards inherent in aboveground nuclear testing—especially to children—marked one of the

incipient stages of modern environmentalism in the United States. Americans wanted to learn

more about the risks to which they and their loved ones were being exposed. The debate even

came into play more prominently in the mainstream media. The widespread news coverage of the

Baby Tooth Study occasionally confused the project’s facts and details, but more often than not

national reports referred to strontium-90 as a “poison” from radioactive fallout that “attacks the

marrow of the bone.”78 While the Committee continued to refrain from using such inflammatory

language itself, concerns about radioactive fallout were becoming more widespread. Whereas

77 Reiss, “Baby Tooth Survey—First Results,” 3.

78 May 1960 local stories (Committee for Nuclear Information records, Western Historical Manuscript
Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, scrapbooks). See also Wyant, “50,000 Baby Teeth”; and “Fallout:
Moment of Tooth,” Newsweek, 25 April 1960, 70. Wyant, whose article was published in The Nation, was a St. Louis
Post-Dispatch journalist. In American Science Policy since World War II, Bruce L. R. Smith argues that the dissolution
of postwar scientific consensus occurred around 1966. While the Committee for Nuclear Information and other
grassroots anti-testing groups were modest in size, they did set the stage for broader expressions of dissent, which
found their feet in the early 1960s. Note, for example, the impact of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). See Smith,
American Science Policy since World War II (Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institute, 1990).
 102

Adlai Stevenson had barely caused a ripple among American voters in 1956 when he proposed a

test ban, a more public debate over the costs and benefits of nuclear testing was front and center

within a half-decade.

In no small measure because of increasing public awareness, Congress ordered a series of

hearings on the potential hazards of nuclear fallout throughout the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The May 1959 hearings, entitled “Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests,” became another

opportunity for the Committee for Nuclear Information to make public their Baby Tooth Survey and

the relevance of the politics of information to the public. Commoner was particularly intent on

having his views included. While he was not physically present at the hearings, Commoner

submitted two previously published essays for the public record. The first article, “The Hazard of

Fallout—Nuclear Bomb Test Policy Should Be Decided by All,” which originally appeared in the

Washington University student magazine, Student Life, evaluated the growing dangers of fallout

and strontium-90 and the existing scientific debate over the results, before concluding that

decisions over fallout should rest with the public rather than with specialists. “[The scientific]

discussion of the fallout hazard has … brought the issue before the public,” Commoner wrote:

Until a few years ago, the public had no way of knowing that the little information
about fallout then allowed to reach the public press was uncertain, incomplete, or
sometimes in error. … But it is fortunate that the issue has now reached the public
generally. There is no scientific basis for judging the relative worth of the political
gains which result from nuclear tests—and the human lives which they cost.79

Commoner’s second submission was “The Fallout Problem,” which had been published in

Science a year earlier. Again, Commoner concluded by emphasizing the importance of an

79 Commoner, “The Hazard of Fallout—Nuclear Bomb Test Policy Should Be Decided by All,” in Fallout from

Nuclear Weapons Tests, hearings before the Special Subcommittee on Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic
Energy, 5-8 May 1959, 2170-2176. Quotation is from page 2175. Previously published as “The Hazard of Fallout,”
Student Life, Washington University, 19 December 1958.
 103

informed citizenry and the scientist’s role in achieving it. Scientists, Commoner argued, were well

positioned to explain to the public what consequences might result from a given policy. As

informed citizens, he continued, scientists had the right and the obligation—shared by all informed

citizens—to express an ethical opinion on the wisdom of enduring that policy. “But there is … no

scientific way to balance the possibility that a thousand people will die from leukemia against the

political advantages of developing more efficient retaliatory weapons.”80 Reiterating his

conclusions from “The Hazard of Fallout,” Commoner insisted that scientists were not equipped

with any special competence with which to resolve moral judgments. His published participation,

enhanced by its non-partisan appearance, was very much in keeping with his professed dedication

to the information process, but Commoner also demonstrated the subtleties of his political activism.

By pitting human lives against an apocalyptic government policy, Commoner was influencing the

way people thought about nuclear testing. In principle, if not entirely in practice, Commoner’s

perspective helped to frame the public debate.

Other findings presented during the hearings substantiated Commoner’s concerns.

Congress learned that “acceptable” levels of strontium-90 did not take into consideration the

cumulative impact of the various other isotopes that were harmful. Indeed, government scientists

conveniently neglected to consider the cumulative effects of other isotopes like strontium-89,

cesium-137, barium-140, and iodine-131, all present in a nuclear reaction and likely as harmful to

humans as strontium-90. In 1959, at the spring subcommittee hearings, Oak Ridge National

Laboratory physicist Karl Z. Morgan advocated the drastic reduction of acceptable levels of

80Commoner, “The Fallout Problem,” in Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests, 2572-2577. Quotation is from
page 2576. Previously published as “The Fallout Problem,” Science 127 (1958), 1023-1026.
 104

strontium-90 in the human body. He argued that the allowable levels of strontium-90 should be cut

in half to take into account the hazards of what amounted to a radiation cocktail.81

As scientists and the public reached a general level of acceptance that strontium-90 was

indeed harmful, the Committee for Nuclear Information turned its attention to iodine-131, which

also concentrated in milk. Though its half-life was only 8 days, compared with strontium-90’s 29

years, iodine-131 accumulated in the more susceptible thyroid gland, rather than in bone. The

small size of a child’s thyroid altered the emphasis of the fallout debate from strontium-90 to iodine-

131. Again, the Atomic Energy Commission downplayed the threat, and again, the Committee for

Nuclear Information produced data that demonstrated flaws in the Atomic Energy Commission’s

position. In this instance, the Atomic Energy Commission argued that levels of radiation did not

exceed established guidelines for external exposure. The Committee for Nuclear Information

concurred, but “only if the fallout which gives rise to this radioactivity does not enter the food

chain.”82 In language that anticipated the ecological rhetoric of the environmental movement, one

Committee scientist criticized the Atomic Energy Commission for continuing to restrict “its concerns

to ‘persons.’ Such a restriction exhibits a startling lack of appreciation of the basic ecological fact

that ‘persons’ cannot exist alone. All living things are interdependent.”83 Adopting the rhetoric of

ecology, the Committee for Nuclear Information challenged the Atomic Energy Commission to think

more holistically. Fallout could enter the food chain and accumulate in human bodies in higher

81 Karl Z. Morgan, “Maximum Permissible Exposure of the Population-at-Large to Sources of Ionizing

Radiation,” in Fallout from Nuclear Weapons Tests, 1614-1633. See especially page 1631. See also J. B. Reynolds &
Barry Commoner, “Hearings Reveal New Facts,” Nuclear Information (May-June 1959), 6. Reynolds and Commoner
noted that these other isotopes had rather short lifetimes, and were only important during a period of explosions and
for a short time thereafter.

82 Committee for Nuclear Information Technical Division, “Local Fallout: Hazard from Nevada Tests,” Nuclear

Information (August 1963), 1-13. Quotation is from p. 2.

83 Quotation from William O. Pruitt Jr., “Comments from Other Scientists,” Nuclear Information (November
1963), 11.
 105

concentrations than occur in initial atmospheric exposure. The Atomic Energy Commission,

therefore, was only measuring one type of exposure, ignoring the often more pertinent

accumulations that resulted from secondary exposures.

In August 1963, at the Joint Committee for Atomic Energy hearings, the Committee for

Nuclear Information presented the results from their recent studies that suggested that residents

living downwind from the Nevada test site in Nevada, Utah, and Idaho had been exposed to fallout

“so intense as to represent a medically unacceptable hazard to children.”84 At the same hearings,

Gordon M. Dunning, deputy director of the Atomic Energy Commission’s Division of Operational

Safety, presented a direct rebuttal to the Committee findings, arguing that Committee

“computations of probable iodine-131 exposure … ‘are either statistically unreliable or cannot be

supported by sound experimental measurements.’”85 In the November 1963 issue of Nuclear

Information, the Committee published its own reply, which listed 14 errors in Dunning’s testimony

and characterized the Atomic Energy Commission as being “careless of the public welfare,” and

“less than candid.”86 At an impasse, in a letter to the Atomic Energy Commission, the Committee

for Nuclear Information insisted that “either you or we are dead wrong.”87

The impact of the Committee for Nuclear Information’s campaigns was far-reaching.

Politicians commented on the numerous letters received from housewives and mothers who

wanted the Test Ban Treaty approved, and substantiated their positions with scientific explanations

84 Fallout, Radiation Standards, and Countermeasures, hearings before the Joint Subcommittee on

Research, Development, and Radiation of the Joint Committee on Atomic Energy, 21 August 1963, 602.

85Atomic Energy Commission, “Iodine 131 in Fallout,” Fallout, Radiation Standards, and Countermeasures,
1103. Also cited in Committee for Nuclear Information Technical Division, “Hazard from Nevada Tests: A Reply to the
Atomic Energy Commission,” Nuclear Information (November 1963), 1.

86 Allen Smith, “Democracy and the Politics of Information: The St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information,”

Gateway Heritage (Summer 1996), 2-13. Quotation is from page 11.

87Eric Reiss to AEC Deputy Director Gordon Dunning, 4 November 1963 (Committee for Nuclear Information
records, Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 278).
 106

on how it would reduce the medical hazards from fallout.88 Clearly, the public information message

was being received loud and clear, and Commoner’s faith in the public desire and ability to

understand scientific information was well justified. It was further compounded by the signing of

the Test Ban Treaty and by President Johnson’s address in October 1964, a year after it had been

signed. In stark contrast to Eisenhower’s dismissal of the hazards of fallout eight years earlier,

Johnson stated that the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty:

has halted the steady, menacing increase of radioactive fallout. The deadly
products of atomic explosions were poisoning our soil and our food and the milk
our children drank and the air we all breathe. Radioactive deposits were being
formed in increasing quantity in the teeth and bones of young Americans.
Radioactive poisons were beginning to threaten the safety of people throughout
the world. They were a growing menace to the health of every unborn child.89

Johnson’s somber tone represented a drastic shift in the official response to nuclear fallout, but

also a stark contrast to his presidential opponent Barry Goldwater, who had memorably advocated

using nuclear weapons in Vietnam.90 Johnson’s reference to children’s teeth and bones made a

direct link to the work of the Committee for Nuclear Information and their Baby Tooth Survey.

Rather than marking a successful conclusion to the question of atmospheric nuclear weapons

testing, the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty might be properly regarded as laying the groundwork for

environmentalism and a much larger and more diverse means of galvanizing public activism.

Margaret Mead would call this scientific endeavor to alert citizens to particular issues and furnish

them with the appropriate information with which to evaluate the relative benefits and hazards of

88 See Sullivan, Nuclear Democracy.

89 President Lyndon B. Johnson, televised address, 12 October 1964. Also cited in Commoner, Science and

Survival, 14-15.

90 For Goldwater, see James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1996), 558; and Allen Matusow, The Unraveling of America: A History of Liberalism in the
1960s (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), 148-150.
 107

modern technology “a new social invention.”91 In 1963, Commoner and other Committee members

were among the catalysts for the creation of the Scientists’ Institute for Public Information.

Commoner determined the new Institute’s agenda by arguing that “scientists today are the first to

live with the knowledge that our work, our ideas, and our daily activities impinge with a frightening

immediacy on national politics, on international conflicts, on the planet’s fate as a human

habitation.”92 For Commoner, this new organization needed to establish “an independent and

active” information movement similar on a national scale to the Committee for Nuclear

Information’s smaller operation.93 Scientists, Commoner argued, represented the frontline against

ecological hazards, and the job of the Scientist’s Institute for Public Information was to equip the

populace with the knowledge necessary to combat them.

The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty might also represent a palpable admission that the Cold War

priority on national security over public health was inherently flawed and ironically counter-intuitive.

Over the course of a decade, activists had persuaded the public that the fallout hazard constituted

too great a risk and the American testing policy experienced a complete reversal. The subsequent

ban of DDT and some of the other chemicals that comprised the post-World War II technological

revolution further compounded this recognition. As Commoner reflected in Science and Survival, it

became clear that “the government agencies responsible for the development of nuclear weapons

embarked on this massive program before they understood the full biological effects of what they

proposed to do. Great amounts of fallout were disseminated throughout the world before it

became known that the resultant risks were so great as to require that nuclear testing be halted.

91 Commoner, Science and Survival, 120.

92 Cited in “Closing the Information Gap,” Nuclear Information (March-April 1963), 12.

93 “Science and Human Welfare,” Science 132 (8 July 1960), 68-73. The Scientists’ Institute for Public

Information was created in 1963, but Commoner had implored the American Association for the Advancement of
Science to create such an organization in “Science and Human Welfare.”
 108

The enactment of the Test Ban Treaty in 1963 is, in part, a confession of this failure of modern

science and technology.”94

As the debate naturally shifted from whether or not fallout represented a health risk to the

extent of that risk, it exposed serious flaws in nuclear technology’s potential, which hindered the

progress of the atomic energy industry as well. Splitting atoms to boil water, Commoner

maintained, was like “using a cannon to kill a fly.”95 The innovations that characterized the post-

World War II technological revolution had solved very difficult physics and engineering questions,

and had put at human disposal powers greater than any previously imagined. The danger,

however, was that the biological consequences of these new powers had not been evaluated, and

because of the potency of their innovations, more than ever, scientists needed to be absolutely

sure about what they were creating and how they worked. As in Commoner’s analogy of the risk

inherent in the development of the steam engine compared with that of a nuclear power plant,

modern science and technology were simply too powerful to justify a trial-and-error approach.96

Given the potential for disaster, Commoner preferred to err safely on the side of caution.

The notion that decisions on balancing benefits against social and environmental cost

should be made by every citizen and not left to experts—in any environmental problem—became

Commoner’s overriding principle. When he stated in The Closing Circle that “the Nuclear Test Ban

Treaty should be regarded … as the first victorious battle in the campaign to save the

environment—and its human inhabitants—from the blind assaults of modern technology,” he was

94 Commoner, Science and Survival, 19.

95 Commoner interview with author, 22 November 2002. Commoner was referring to the analogy he

presented in Commoner, The Poverty of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 99.

96 Commoner, Science and Survival, 28-29.

 109

referring not only to the result of the campaign, but also to the process that realized that victory.97

Democratic principles had endured as fundamental to American society, and the science

information movement had taken advantage of that rhetoric. Moreover, when Commoner

insinuated in the early draft of the Committee for Nuclear Information’s founding statement that the

country was experiencing a “crisis of democracy,” he was pointing to the symbolic nature of what

the withholding of nuclear information signified. The political climate of the Cold War imposed

priorities on public citizens in an undemocratic manner, wherein they were excluded from the

decision-making process. The philosopher of science Bruno Latour has observed that “when

controversies flair up, the literature becomes more technical,” which is characterized by a shift from

politics to expert opinion.98 Commoner and others feared that the increased importance of the

specialist resulted in the disempowerment of the public.

That fallout posed an involuntary risk to many Americans suggests that the avenues along

which Americans might participate in determining what constituted acceptable risks were closed to

all but a very few. Without the necessary information, “citizens cannot with reason give their

consent to any public policy.”99 In essence, Commoner interpreted the government’s obfuscating

of information relating to fallout as forcing citizens to abdicate their right to make informed

decisions. Because government policy on nuclear matters had taken place without the informed

consent of its citizens, the United States could no longer be considered a full democracy.100

97 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 56.

98 Bruno Latour, Science in Action (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 30.

99 Commoner, “Committee for Nuclear Information founding statement draft,” 16 April 1958 (Committee for

Nuclear Information records, Western Historical Manuscript Collection at the University of Missouri-St. Louis, File 56).

100This contentious statement was implicit rather than explicit, but, to a certain extent, anticipated the social
consternation of the 1960s.
 110

The underlying significance of the debate over fallout resides in the notion that an informed

public rejected government secrecy and pushed for the disclosure of objective information, with

which they could participate in the decision-making. While the Jeffersonian ideal of an educated,

informed electorate may appear somewhat naïve and anachronistic, the fact that our future relies

so heavily upon our environmental stewardship suggests that perhaps environmentalism could

serve as a catalyst for the pragmatic reawakening of Jefferson’s ideal. What democracy currently

exists on the nuclear issue can be directly attributed to the extent to which critics weakened

government control over information. Without the dissent that followed, the quest for technological

progress would have perpetuated public health risks and public exclusion from information and

subsequent decision-making.
 Chapter 3
The New Jeremiad

“If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel you are looking the wrong
way.”
—Barry Commoner

Due in no small measure to opposition to nuclear weapons testing from groups like the St. Louis

Committee for Nuclear Information, the 1960s became the Age of Ecology. In the early 1960s,

synthetic pesticides quickly joined radioactive fallout as poisons known to be ubiquitous in the

environment. By the end of the decade, the Santa Barbara oil spill and flames bursting from the

Cuyahoga River in Cleveland spurred further public recognition of the postwar environmental

decline and culminated in the first Earth Day on 22 April 1970, during which more than 20,000,000

Americans took to the streets in protest and celebration. To many Americans it had become

abundantly clear that the postwar environment had been subjected to unparalleled environmental

threats and they were raising their families in a dangerous environment. As Adam Rome notes,

“the insights of ecology gave countless citizens a new appreciation of the risks of transforming

nature.”1

If Commoner’s activism against aboveground nuclear weapons testing contributed to the

establishment of a link between the scientific community and a burgeoning environmental

awareness, the 1960s helped to foster connections between those two institutions and the peace

movement. The Vietnam War and the environmental crisis were both products of a dangerous

technological logic. As Rome notes, “in Vietnam, Americans destroyed towns to ‘save’ them; at

home, Americans degraded the environment to make ‘progress.’”2 Another element of the public

concern over nuclear weapons dealt quite practically with the dangers of nuclear war. While fallout

1 Adam Rome, “’Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal of American

History 90 (September 2003), 525-554. Quotation is from page 526.

2 Rome, “’Give Earth a Chance,’” 547.

 112

constituted a legitimate domestic threat, the prospect of global war using nuclear weapons raised

questions about the nature of civil defense, which had become a major industry in the late 1950s

and early 1960s. People built fallout shelters in their suburban backyards, the very ones that their

postwar affluence had made affordable. At school, American children futilely practiced atomic

bomb drills by huddling under desks, and Nuclear Information saw fit to devote entire issues to

questions of civil defense. This all led to a growing dissatisfaction with the ominous and

omnipresent threat of war.3

Between such concerns over fallout and pressures of war readiness should the Cold War

turn hot, links between the environmental movement and the peace movement were perhaps

inevitable. Both seemed to demonstrate a relative disillusionment with American policy and its

neglect of public participation. These connections became all the more apparent as the Vietnam

War dragged on and became one of the most controversial events of an already controversial

decade. At the heart of this connection was a more holistic critique of American social structures,

which found its energy in leftist political thought. “Since the age of seventeen,” Commoner

recalled, “I was concerned with racial discrimination, labor problems, unemployment, so I didn’t

have to make a leap from environmentalism to the Peace Movement.” Loath to see himself as

strictly an environmentalist, Commoner insisted that his environmentalism was intimately related to

a broad swath of other social issues, including peace, civil rights, and greater public control over

3 See Nuclear Information (March 1962), (July 1962), (October 1962), (December 1962), (February 1963),
(May 1963), (July 1963), (September-October 1963), (February 1964), (March 1964), and (June-July 1964). For the
culture of Atomic Age America, see Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the Dawn
of the Atomic Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985); Spencer R. Weart, Nuclear Fear: A History of
Images (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); and Allan M. Winkler, Life Under a Cloud: American Anxiety
About the Atom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). Winkler’s examination of popular responses to the bomb
through books, articles, songs, poems, films, television shows, and other cultural artifacts demonstrates that fear was
an “undeniable part of our nuclear age.” Quotation is from page 5.
 113

the free market system.4 Of his efforts to arrest aboveground nuclear weapons testing, Commoner

declared: “personally, I was not an environmentalist. What I was doing was … dealing with a

hazard to people that happened to go through the environment and sure it goes through the air,

and gets in the grass and the cows eat it and so on. It became clear after awhile that this was

something called ecology.”5 This branch of environmentalism was less interested explicitly in the

preservation of wild lands or natural resources, and more immediately concerned with

environmental factors that contributed to health, welfare, and social progress. The environment

became less a place or concept associated with non-human, organic life, but one in which humans

were participant organisms.6

Increasingly, as broader understanding of the risks of nuclear fallout galvanized concerns

over environmental health, critics began to suggest that the emerging environmental crisis was the

result of the pressures imposed on nature by the capitalist system. Another leading thinker and

writer of this new strand was anarchist social theorist Murray Bookchin. Writing under the

pseudonym Lewis Herber, Bookchin published Our Synthetic Environment in 1962, arguing that the

“pernicious laws of the market place are given precedence over the most compelling laws of

biology.”7 Bookchin had been drawn to the postwar environmental crisis through his work on

4 Barry Commoner interview with author, 17 July 2003.

5 Commoner interview with author, 15 November 2001.

6 Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985

(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 13-39.

7 Lewis Herber, Our Synthetic Environment (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1962), 26. During the summer of
1961, Bookchin arranged to send his chapter on the potential hazards of needless exposure to ionizing radiation to
Commoner for review and comment. He noted that “my views on fallout have been influenced by your remarkable
article in Student Life (December 19, 1958) and by your contributions to Nuclear Information.” Seeking Commoner’s
comment, Bookchin asserted that “I do not believe that we are socially or morally prepared to enter the ‘nuclear age.’
… I doubt there is anything that will keep us from so doing, but, if enter we must, I would like to see us tread with the
utmost caution. I do not know if you share my views about modern man’s social and moral qualifications for using
nuclear energy at the present time, but it seemed to me that you argue admirably for prudence in such matters.”
 114

chemical additives in various foods and—as Commoner had through his opposition to nuclear

testing—came to recognize that the postwar technological revolution had exacerbated a whole host

of public health concerns and chronic diseases like heart disease, cancer, and asthma.8 In his

next book, The Crisis in the Cities, Bookchin identified the environmental crisis as being a

predominantly urban problem, again emphasizing the social elements of environmental

deterioration.9 Published a year after the groundbreaking 1964 Wilderness Act, The Crisis in the

Cities made clear that the new environmentalism had branched markedly from the more

established conservation movement.

The philosopher Herbert Marcuse shared Commoner’s and Bookchin’s more holistic

critique. In One-Dimensional Man, published in 1964, Marcuse described the postwar order as one

driven by a militarized, waste-oriented economy. According to Roderick Nash, Marcuse believed

that “capitalism … reduced both nature and people to raw materials with strictly utilitarian value.”10

His subsequent call for “the liberation of nature” echoed his earlier criticisms of the unequal

characteristics inherent in science, technology, and the capitalist system that organized them.11 To

radical leftists like Bookchin, Marcuse, and Commoner, environment, peace, civil rights, labor, and

Murray Bookchin to Commoner, 15 July 1961 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 4). Commoner replied to
Bookchin’s letter, stating that he was pleased to learn of Bookchin’s efforts to write Our Synthetic Environment. “The
[relationship between the environment and public health] is very much in need of the public’s informed attention,” he
encouraged. Commoner to Murray Bookchin, 3 August 1961 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 4).

8 Herber, “The Problems of Chemicals in Foods,” Contemporary Issues 3 (1952), 206-241. Bookchin’s
critique of capitalism in Our Synthetic Environment concentrated on this earlier interest in the petrochemical industry.

9 Herber, The Crisis in the Cities (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1965). See also Murray Bookchin, The

Limits of the City (New York: Harper & Row, 1974). For good summaries of Bookchin’s intellectual contributions to the
remaking of American environmentalism, see Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American
Environmental Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 87-88; and Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature: A
History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 164-166. For a strong critique of
Bookchin’s positions, see Andrew Light (ed.), Social Ecology After Bookchin (New York: Guilford Press, 1998). For an
interesting comparison of Commoner’s and Bookchin’s theories, see James O’Connor, Natural Causes: Essays in
Ecological Marxism (New York: Guilford Press 1998), 283-285.

10 Nash, The Rights of Nature, 166.

11 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 59.
 115

feminism were inherently and consistently linked to one another: each consisted of a part of a

larger critique of capitalist modes of production and power and the unequal distribution of wealth

and welfare. Pollution and the exploitation of public resources to generate private wealth were

expressions of social inequity that would later galvanize the environmental justice movement that

sought to blend social and environmental issues in its activism. To Commoner and other political

radicals of the 1950s and 1960s, environmental health and equity were necessary components of a

broader program of interests that sought to promote social progress and its activism derived from

the same social reform impulses that also motivated the civil rights and peace movements.

For the first time, the 1960s moved these disparate movements in concert with each other,

and in the process drew on and altered older thinking about the relations between people and the

natural world. Prior to the 1960s, social concerns—the disparity of wealth distribution, the

importance of public health and hygiene—were not widely considered as environmental issues.

“Environmentalism” in earlier centuries concentrated on nature protection and natural resource

management. For the Romantics and naturalists in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,

nature protection was an exercise in aesthetics. Industrialization was seen as a threat to nature’s

pristine or sublime aesthetic, but these concerns often possessed little proximity to the socio-

political world of the day, much less the health concerns with respect to urban squalor. Indeed, we

might recognize modern strains of environmentalism in the activities of the early Jacksonian-era

urban reformers, but in antebellum America, their work was rather distantly removed from the

naturalism and nature protection of the day.12 Indeed, early interest in nature was distinctly

12 For further reading on nineteenth century urban reform, see Sam Bass Warner, Jr., The Urban Wilderness:

A History of the American City (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution:
Jacksonian America, 1815-1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Sean Wilentz, Chants Democratic: New
York City and the Rise of the American Working Class, 1788-1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984); Stuart
M. Blumin, The Emergence of the Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760-1900 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989); Carroll Smith Rosenberg, Religion and the Rise of the American City: The New
 116

personal or individual, rather than a social or communitarian effort to protect nature. Nature and

civilization were perceived to be mutually exclusive notions, separated by the machine and

reinforced by the outgrowth of technological optimism that followed the Civil War.13 By the time

that Americans welcomed the dawn of the twentieth century—the American Century—their blind

faith that they could indefatigably exploit and reorganize nature to suit their interests was so

ingrained that nature and culture were made to seem completely separate. Progress, efficiency,

and utilitarianism became Progressive-era catchwords. To the majority of Americans, human

ingenuity maintained the confident air that nature could be completely and continually reshaped to

suit human needs and interests. During the nineteenth century, Transcendentalists from Ralph

Waldo Emerson to John Muir incorporated an ethical dimension into nature protection rhetoric,

arguing that Americans had an ethical duty to preserve God’s creation, and that nature itself had

an intrinsic value beyond human use. In 1851 Thoreau had exulted that “in Wildness is the

preservation of the World,” and a generation later, Muir declared that wild nature possessed divine

and mystical powers of inspiration and redemption, themes which would be secularized and

reaffirmed for the post-World War II American public through ecologist Aldo Leopold’s seminal

book, A Sand County Almanac.14 While anti-industrialization acquired some following with the rise

York City Mission Movement, 1812-1870 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971); Amy Bridges, A City in the Republic:
Antebellum New York and the Origins of Machine Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); and John
Duffy, A History of Public Health in New York City, 1625-1866 (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1968).

13 Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1964).

14 Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (New York: Oxford University Press,
1949). For Thoreau quotation, see Henry David Thoreau, “Walking,” in Collected Essays and Poems (New York:
Library of America, 2001), 239. For Muir’s discussion of nature as “the [holy] temple … consecrated by the heart of
man,” see John Muir, The Yosemite (New York: Century, 1912), 261-262. For Thoreau, see Walter Harding, The Days
of Henry David Thoreau (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965); and Nash, The Rights of Nature. For Muir, see Donald
Worster, “John Muir and the Roots of American Environmentalism,” in The Wealth of Nature: Environmental History
and the Ecological Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 190-196; Stephen Fox, The American
Conservation Movement: John Muir and his Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1981); Michael P. Cohen, The
Pathless Way: John Muir and the American Wilderness (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984); Dennis C.
 117

of the Industrial Revolution, it was not until the twentieth century that advocates of nature

protection developed an appreciation for public health and human welfare as integral to an

environmental ethic. In linking public health to environmentalism, health specialists like Alice

Hamilton were echoing the sentiments of urban health reformers from the mid-nineteenth century,

but enjoyed the benefit of being able to demonstrate more completely the environmental effects of

nineteenth century urbanization and the Industrial Revolution.15 Early twentieth century nature

preservationists also pointed to the dark plumes from smokestacks and resource depletion as too

high a price for “progress.” Over the course of the twentieth century, the social and the

environmental began to discover their contemporary political partnership.16

During the 1960s a shift in environmental focus was completed from affirming life to

fighting for survival in the wake of fallout and other poisons, which precipitated a transition from

experiencing nature as an individual exercise to one that was necessarily social and communal.

The intellectual expansion from aestheticism to a broader sense of environmentalism was a slow

process, but marked most noticeably by the human relationship with the physical environment

transforming from a private relationship or retreat, to a decidedly public engagement, which

preached inclusiveness in government, in courtrooms, and in classrooms. Just as the human body

became a concentrated site of environmental decline, the environmental experience and the

struggle for environmental protection became unmistakably social. Whereas Thoreau and Muir

encouraged developing an intimate relationship with the non-human world, their efforts had been

based on escaping civilization. To more socially oriented environmentalists like Commoner, social

Williams, God’s Wilds: John Muir’s Vision of Nature (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002); and Nash,
Wilderness and the American Mind 4th edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 122-181.

15 For Alice Hamilton and American environmentalism, see Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 47-51.

16 For more comprehensive discussion of the evolution of American ideas about nature and nature

protection, see Nash, Wilderness and the American Mind; Nash, The Rights of Nature; and Worster, Nature’s
Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas 2nd edition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
 118

and economic dependence on continual technological progress meant that escape from civilization

was no longer possible, and that the more critical project was to integrate that intimate relationship

with the non-human world into civilization. It was a project begun at the beginning of the twentieth

century by Progressive era conservationists like Gifford Pinchot, but after the Second World War,

the battleground had changed markedly. Seeking to entice conservationists to the larger

environmental struggle, Commoner noted in a 1966 paper, “The conservation movement was

created in the United States to control [nineteenth century industrial assaults on natural resources].

The same thing is happening today, but now we are mortgaging for future generations not just their

lumber or their coal, but the basic necessities of industry, agriculture, and life itself: air, water, and

soil. This is the new and larger task for the conservation movement.”17 This time, the stakes were

much higher; one could not escape nuclear fallout by escaping civilization. Rather, it was time to

confront civilization’s unbridled development.

In this respect, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring might be regarded as the marriage of the

aesthetic impulse with the more recent social environmentalist one, thereby constituting the dawn

of the Age of Ecology. In Silent Spring, Carson, a confirmed nature lover, most happy listening to

birdsong and exploring tidal pools for marine life, blended her deep-seated appreciation for

nature’s splendors with an organized attack on the industrial invasion of new technologies. Carson

deftly and convincingly outlined the technological shortcomings of the pesticide industry and the

unforeseen risks upon which Americans had not been consulted. “Lulled by the soft sell and the

hidden persuader,” she argued, “the average citizen is seldom aware of the deadly materials with

which he is surrounding himself; indeed, he may not realize he is using them at all.”18 Just as

17 Commoner, “A Scientist Views Pollution,” address before the National Industrial Conference Board, New

York City, 15 December 1966 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 493), 17.
 119

pollution was beginning to garner public attention, thanks in no small measure to the fallout

question, Carson demonstrated that health and the environment—and humans and nature—were

intimately and inextricably linked. Carson had accurately charted for the popular audience an

environmental ethic and, according to Maril Hazlett, “vested it in the human flesh: if humans did not

treat nature more wisely, then they too risked death from the long-term effects of persistent

chemical pesticides.”19 In so doing, Carson introduced human physiology as a topic for

environmentalists to consider. “There is also an ecology of the world within our bodies,” she

asserted in Silent Spring.20 Just as ecology demanded that science examine the bigger picture,

Carson—like Commoner, Bookchin, and soon Marcuse—insisted that scientists and activists adopt

a more holistic scope of what constituted an environmental problem. The 1960s environmentalism

embraced ecology’s information, but also its holistic spirit. Environmentalism shifted from

Romantic sentiment to a social practice in harmony with the rise of ecology, and ecologists

emerged, according to Donald Worster, “as the guardians of fragile life,” their science ready to

subvert the mainstream values that deemed humans dominant over nature. Ecology had become

the subversive science.21

Like Commoner, Carson was exceptionally critical of science and the powers of shaping

environments that it had assumed. “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance,”

she boldly stated, “born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed

18 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 157.

19 Maril Hazlett & Michael Egan, “Technological and Ecological Turns: Science and American

Environmentalism,” paper presented at the History of Science Society annual conference, Cambridge, MA, 22
November 2003.

20 Carson, Silent Spring, 170.

21 Worster, Nature’s Economy, 340. For ecology as the subversive science, see Paul Sears, “Ecology—A

Subversive Subject,” BioScience 14 (1964), 11-13; Theodore Roszak, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and
Transcendence in Post-Industrial Society (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), 400; and Worster, Nature’s Economy,
22-23.
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that nature exists for the convenience of man.” This outdated assumption, Carson warned, would

inevitably result in an environment hostile to all life. “It is our alarming misfortune,” she continued,

“that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modern and terrible weapons, and that in

turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.”22 But the intellectual

foundations of twentieth century science were not only hubristic; they were also dangerously

misguided. As Carson noted in the serialized version of Silent Spring, which first appeared in the

New Yorker, industrial science was corrupt and the rapid rise of the pesticide industry after World

War II was suggestive of a new era “dominated by industry, in which the right to make money, at

whatever cost to others, is seldom challenged.”23 Science was indisputably important, but it

needed to be responsibly harnessed.

Industrial scientists did not take such criticisms lying down. The chemical industry

mounted a vehement attack against Carson’s work. Prior to Silent Spring’s publication in book

form, the pesticide manufacturer, Velsicol Corporation, threatened a lawsuit if Houghton Mifflin

published the book. In a letter to Houghton Mifflin, Velsicol charged that Carson’s attack on the

chemical industry portrayed American business interests in a negative light and her critique risked

reducing “the use of agricultural chemicals in this country and in the countries of western Europe,

so that our supply of food will be reduced to east-curtain parity.” Not only was Silent Spring

inaccurate and libelous, Velsicol contended, Carson was also a communist sympathizer.24 Attacks

against the book persisted after its publication, and Carson was summarily dismissed by her critics

either as a communist, an hysterical woman (and often both), or as a woman embittered by her

22 Carson, Silent Spring, 297.

23 Carson cited in Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 86.

24Frank Graham Jr., Since Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1970), 49. Also cited in Gottlieb,
Forcing the Spring, 85.
 121

own—ultimately losing—battle with cancer and wholly incapable of understanding the scientific

nuances of the pesticide industry.

In much of her language and her personality, Carson was a relatively conservative or

reserved person, but behind her love for nature in Silent Spring rested a damning indictment of

industrial capitalism. “For the first time in the history of the world,” she charged, “every human

being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until

death.” This was more than a lament at the loss of nature’s aesthetic value; it was a distinct

declaration of war that sought to bring together conservationists, outdoor recreationists, anti-

technologists, public health advocates, and urban reformers. And it worked.25

Silent Spring’s success was not lost on Commoner. “It was,” he recalled, “the first evidence that

there was a wide affinity for environmentalism among the American public.”26 Its popularity in

serialized form in the New Yorker and its subsequent sales as a book made it perfectly clear that

the Age of Ecology had begun and that the American public was anxious to learn more about the

introduction of human-made health hazards into the environment. Concurrent with the publication

of Silent Spring and the realization of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty came a significant threshold,

wherein Americans increasingly resisted environmental risk. The growing recognition that humans

were susceptible through the flesh to the same invasions from industrial toxins as the landscape

resulted in ever-rising standards of what constituted “acceptable risk.” This shift in environmental

values was most easily recognized in the growing opposition to aboveground nuclear testing, the

25 Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1962), 24. The seminal work on Rachel Carson is Linda

Lear, Rachel Carson. A more recent study is Maril Hazlett, “The Story of Silent Spring and the Ecological Turn,”
unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kansas, 2003.

26 Commoner interview with author, 17 July 2003.

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1961 thalidomide scare in America, the popular acceptance of Silent Spring, and the subsequent

proliferation of campaigns to protect human and environmental health.

Another feature of Silent Spring’s success not lost on Commoner was the validation of his

science information movement as an effective activist tool. Silent Spring warned the public against

leaving decision-making to experts or specialists. Much like Commoner, Carson was

uncomfortable with the suggestion that science and specialists had all the answers. Indeed, both

Commoner and Carson demonstrated that the common trend of “leaving it to the experts,” a

product of the Progressive era that persisted after World War II, was dangerously flawed.

Commoner warned in Science and Survival: “the notion that … scientists have a special

competence in public affairs is … profoundly destructive of the democratic process. If we are

guided by this view, science will not only create [problems] but also shield them from the customary

processes of administrative decision-making and public judgment.” More than just a warning,

Commoner insisted that such a misuse of science was so pervasive and the technical nature of

information was so inaccessible to non-scientists that there already existed an “apparently

insuperable barrier between the citizen, the legislator, the administrator and the major public issues

of the day.”27 Carson was equally vociferous in insisting that dangerous technologies were being

hidden behind complicated scientific jargon designed to confound public scrutiny. Parallel to

Commoner’s own advocacy, Carson insisted that responsible science was science made

accessible and public, open to criticism and dialog, and serving public rather than private interests.

“We live in a scientific age; yet we assume that knowledge of science is the prerogative of only a

small number of human beings, isolated priestlike in their laboratories,” she stated in her 1952

National Book Award acceptance speech. “This is not true. The materials of science are the

27 Commoner, Science and Survival, 108.

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materials of life itself. Science is part of the reality of living; it is the way, the how and the why for

everything in our experience.”28 As with the debate over nuclear fallout, what was needed was

clear accessible science that the public could understand. At its most fundamental level, Silent

Spring adhered to the principles of public information, and translated science for the lay reader.

Avoiding technical language, Carson presented the dangers of pesticide technology to the non-

scientist in a compelling manner, making science accessible, but also breaking down the

boundaries between science and sentiment as a means of humanizing her argument. That Silent

Spring raised public awareness and galvanized citizens to action is testament to the power of

public information. In many respects, Carson’s famous debate with industry scientists over the

relative safety of DDT mirrored Commoner’s struggle against fallout, which preceded it. Carson

even drew on public concerns about radiation to advance her own argument, citing the build-up of

strontium-90 in human bones, and referring to chemical pollutants as the “sinister and little-

recognized partners to radiation in changing the very nature of the world.”29 Later in Silent Spring,

Carson continued: “We are rightly appalled by the genetic effects of radiation; how then, can we be

indifferent to the same effect in chemicals that we disseminate widely in our environment?”30

Indeed, Carson held the Committee for Nuclear Information in high esteem. In a 1963 letter to the

Committee, Carson wrote “I have long admired your organization and have repeatedly referred to it

28 Rachel Carson’s National Book Award acceptance speech is reprinted in Paul Brooks, The House of Life:

Rachel Carson at Work (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1972), 127-129. That the materials of science are the materials of
life poses a direct historiographic challenge to environmental historians and historians of science. The fact that these
two fields of inquiry are not in perpetual conversation with each other seems to be the failing of historians, and not
history.

29 Carson, Silent Spring, 6. For the connection between nuclear fallout and pesticides, see Ralph H. Lutts,

“Chemical Fallout: Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, Radioactive Fallout and the Environmental Movement,”
Environmental Review 9 (Fall 1985), 214-225.

30 Carson, Silent Spring, 37.

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as a model when I am asked about setting up a similar organization for the study of pesticide

problems.”31

Applying the principles of scientific information to environmental problems other than

nuclear testing was a project Commoner had envisioned prior to the success of Silent Spring, and

the Test Ban Treaty provided the context for that kind of transition. In introducing the May 1964

issue of Nuclear Information, editor Virginia Brodine claimed that Nuclear Information was living up

to its long held intention to diversify the range of information it presented, by moving beyond

questions of nuclear technology in its publication. As Brodine noted, the public’s ignorance or

confusion regarding scientific problems extended to “the use of chemical compounds for pest

extermination; it is [also] true of the discharge of the wastes from our urban, industrial civilization

into the air and water; just as it is true of many of the uses of nuclear energy.”32 By August 1964,

Brodine told subscribers that Nuclear Information “outgrew [its] old name when we began to

include other subject matter in addition to nuclear information.” With that issue, Nuclear

Information became Scientist and Citizen. The new name, she continued, “reflects our broadened

interests and represents the purpose that has guided us from the first issue in 1958: To bring

together the citizen who needs information and the scientist who has a responsibility to inform.”33

The leading article in the August 1964 issue was “Water Pollution in Missouri,” by the

chemist James R. Whitley, which considered a number of kinds of water pollution, from mining

31 Carson to Walter C. Bauer, 12 November 1963 (Committee for Nuclear Information records, Western

Historical Manuscript Collection, University of Missouri, St. Louis, Scrapbook #4). I am grateful to Linda Lear for her
assistance in obtaining a copy of this letter. Carson explained much of the popularity of her earlier work on the growing
public interest in science. To a National Book Award audience in 1952—she received the award for her second book,
The Sea Around Us (1951)—Carson suggested that this interest in science was a reflection of quotidian concerns.
“This notion, that ‘science’ is something that belongs in a separate compartment of its own, apart from everyday life, is
one that I should like to challenge. … It is impossible to understand man without understanding his environment and
the forces that have molded him physically and mentally.” Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 82.

32 See masthead for Nuclear Information 6 (May 1964).

33 See masthead for Scientist and Citizen 6 (August 1964).

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runoff to urban waste disposal.34 Water pollution had become a source of particular environmental

concern when the fish kills on the lower Mississippi River in November 1963 gained national

attention, after the Louisiana Division of Water Pollution turned the investigation over to the U.S.

Public Health Service. While there had been fish kills on the lower Mississippi in late fall the

previous three years, the scale of the 1963 kill was alarming. 5,000,000 dead fish floated to the

surface of the river, blocking the intakes to regional power plants and threatening public drinking

water. "The bodies of turtles floated on the waters," The New Republic reported. "Tough 150-

pound garfish and catfish weighing 70 pounds surfaced too weak to move. Crabs lay along the

banks. Thousands of cranes and robins lay dead."35 By April 1964, Public Health Service

biologists had traced the fish kill to minute amounts—roughly half a microgram per gram of blood,

.40 to .56 parts per million—of the pesticide endrin, which had entered the Mississippi from a

Memphis waste-treatment plant owned by Velsicol, the same company that developed endrin and

that had tried to prevent Silent Spring’s publication.36

The discovery not only further validated Silent Spring among skeptics—“How does Rachel

Carson look now?” a reporter asked Public Health Service officials in Mississippi; “pretty good” was

the response—but it also served as occasion for greater public education on the fragility or

vulnerability of the biosphere.37 Disposal of chemicals designed to kill insects poisoned large

numbers of fish and simultaneously threatened or potentially threatened drinking water resources

34 James R. Whitley, “Water Pollution in Missouri,” Scientist and Citizen 6 (August 1964), 1-4.

35 Quoted in Graham, Disaster by Default: Politics and Water Pollution (New York: M. Evans, 1966), 110.

36 U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare, Report on Investigation of Fish Kills in Lower

Mississippi River, Atchafalaya River, and Gulf of Mexico, 6 April 1964. See also Graham, Disaster by Default, 106-
130; Graham, Since Silent Spring, 93-108; and Lear, Rachel Carson, 470-471.

Stuart H. Loory, “Science Tracks Down a Fish Killer,” New York Herald Tribune, 23 March 1964. Cited in
37

Lear, Rachel Carson, 470-471.

 126

in Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The very low levels of endrin that had precipitated the

massive fish kill in the Mississippi also sharpened and emboldened the ecological message. The

high sensitivity of fish to various kinds of water pollution demonstrated in grand form the potential

risks of pollution to humans. Public Health Service warnings concerning pollutant hazards to urban

residents whose water came from the river ran rampant through the media and prompted the 1964

introduction of a Clean Water Bill into the Senate, sponsored by Connecticut Senator Abraham

Ribicoff and signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965.38

Momentum was very definitely on the environmentalists’ side, and Commoner sought to

capitalize on it. In “Fallout and Water Pollution—Parallel Cases,” which appeared in the December

1964 issue of Scientist and Citizen, Commoner compared the problems related to water pollution to

his early work on fallout, and drew on the success of the fallout struggle to suggest that the lessons

learned in that protest might be applied to the control of other contaminants. Problems of water

pollution, Commoner noted, were similar to radioactive fallout insofar as both were “the unwanted

result of the union between modern scientific knowledge and intense social demand for [the] use”

of the technologies that produced them. At the same time, however, accurate assessment of the

two problems could substantively contribute to remedying the bigger problem that linked them.

Scientists and citizens working together, Commoner contended, needed “to learn how the

objectivity of scientific investigation and the judgments of public opinion, properly interrelated, have

now brought [nuclear] contamination to a halt.”39 Here was the lesson that needed to be more

broadly applied to other environmental struggles.

38 The 1965 Clean Water Act was a substantial revision of the original 1960 Act. It was subsequently

strengthened in 1972 and again in 1977.

39 Commoner, “Fallout and Water Pollution—Parallel Cases,” Scientist and Citizen 7 (December 1964), 2-7.
Quotation is from page 2.
 127

In the wake of Silent Spring and the fish kills on the lower Mississippi, chemical pesticides became

an important organizing issue for Commoner and other environmental scientists. Rachel Carson

had been effective in articulating grounds for a passionate opposition to pesticides in addition to

her scientific argument, which had made that issue pivotal to the growth of 1960s

environmentalism, but pesticides were only a small part of a complex range of substances based

on carbon chemistry and produced by a colossal petrochemical industry that over time became the

target of a concerted campaign. Petrochemical products were distinctive by their use of purified

raw materials found in petroleum and their energy intensive chemical reactions involving chlorine

that gave the products shape. The environmental problems posed by the production, use, and

disposal of petrochemical products like pesticides, fertilizers, detergents, PCBs, CFCs, and plastics

varied, but cumulatively, they dramatically changed the context of environmental protest. Since the

petrochemical industry was “uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature,”

Commoner noted in The Closing Circle, its products threatened the environment with “intrusion[s]

into the ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.” Frequently, these intrusions were of

materials like plastic that entered the market at expanded at unprecedented levels. The annual

production of American plastics in 1960, for example, exceeded six billion pounds, and its growth

curve rose steeper than the Gross National Product between the end of World War II and 1965.40

What do with all this plastic presented a new problem; it did not break down in nature. “It therefore

persists as rubbish or is burned—in both cases causing pollution.”41

40 Dominick V. Rosato et al., Markets for Plastics (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Co., 1969), 2.

41 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 127. For plastics, see Jeffrey L. Meikle, American Plastic: A Cultural

History (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1995); Meikle, “Material Doubts: The Consequences of Plastic,”
Environmental History 2 (July 1997), 278-300; and Stephen Fenichell, Plastic: The Making of a Synthetic Century (New
York: HarperCollins, 1996). For the petrochemical industry, see Joe Thornton, Pandora’s Poison: Chlorine, Health,
and a New Environmental Strategy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); and Gerald Markowitz & David Rosner, Deceit
and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
 128

Broader awareness of the hazards of DDT—another petrochemical—resulted in

heightened expectations from the public as to what constituted acceptable risk. In effect, the

hazards of these new technologies constituted more imminent threats on a much larger scale.

Commoner’s main argument was that any amount of pollution could be expected to cause some

damage and that it was often near impossible to predict the extent or consequences of that

damage. “Whenever the biological system exposed to a possibly toxic agent is very large and

complex,” he wrote in 1964, “the probability that any increase in contamination will lead to a new

point of attack somewhere in this intricate system cannot be ignored.”42 The only way to prevent

environmental deterioration as a result of toxic pollution, he contended, was to eliminate pollution

from the environment; it could not be successfully managed.

Another important feature of the campaign against the petrochemical industry was control

over its products’ entry into the marketplace. Once integrated into the economic system, their

removal was, on a practical level, next to impossible. “The costs of correcting past mistakes and

preventing threatened ones are already staggering,” Commoner lamented, “for the technologies

which have produced them are now deeply embedded in our economic, social, and political

structure.”43 The rapid rise of detergents synthesized from organic raw materials present in

petroleum represented an alarming example of this trend. Like many other industries, the energy

intensive petrochemical production of domestic cleaning materials experienced revolutionary

growth and transition in the decade following the end of the Second World War. With the

expansion of suburban living spaces and home ownership came greater demand for materials with

42 Commoner, “Fallout and Water Pollution,” 6.

43 Commoner, Science and Survival, 124.

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which to clean those homes and their amenities, marked most notably by the shift from organic

soaps to synthetic detergents.

Detergent itself is an adjective and synonym for cleansing; soap, therefore, is a detergent.

While synthetic detergents ultimately replaced organic soap, soap possessed some disadvantages

that helped promote synthetic detergents as leading cleansers. In “hard” water with high mineral

content, soap tended to form a deposit, which did not wash away as readily as it did in “softer”

water. In contrast, detergents were mixed with a variety of additives designed to soften hard water

and ensure a more consistent clean without any deposit. Synthetic detergents had been invented

during the First World War in Germany, and were introduced in the United States marketplace by

Proctor & Gamble in 1933. Their sales, however, were limited by their exorbitant cost; in 1934,

detergents cost four to five times as much as soap. As with DDT, World War II created a market

for synthetic detergents. Synthetic detergent’s displacement of laundry soap coincided with the

Second World War because the U.S. Navy sought a cleanser that could be used effectively in salt

water. Further, this increased production of synthetic detergents made their price more

competitive; in contrast, soap’s raw material, fat, was dependent on agriculture, and its quality,

availability, and price subsequently varied. In 1946, Proctor & Gamble introduced Tide, “which was

to initiate a revolution in the U.S. detergent industry.” By 1953, synthetic detergents replaced soap

as the top selling product by weight in the United States; in 1958, 72% of all detergents produced

were synthetic, and constituted more than 90% of all household packaged cleaning products.44

By the late 1940s, however, unprecedented levels of foam at sewage treatment plants,

and even in rivers and lakes—some of which were sources of domestic water supply—were

44 The best source for information on the history of synthetic detergents is William McGucken,

Biodegradable: Detergents and the Environment (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1991). For the rise of
synthetic detergents in the marketplace, see pages 11-19. Quotation is from page 16.
 130

reported all over the United States. Only after billions of pounds of detergents were in use annually

was it discovered that they constituted a serious environmental pollutant. “One aspect of this

technological triumph received no attention in the research laboratories,” Commoner explained:

“the effects of dumping a huge amount of new synthetic substances (about 3.5 billion pounds per

year in the United States in 1960) down drains into waste disposal systems.”45 Unlike soap,

detergents resisted bacterial decay and accumulated in surface waters, resulting in foam coming

from household faucets and other drinking water sources. Because they did not break down,

detergents effectively choked water system bacteria. “The bacteria that act on organic wastes

must have oxygen,” Commoner described in 1966, “which is consumed as the waste is destroyed.

If the waste load becomes too high, the oxygen content of the water falls to zero, the bacteria die,

the biological cycle breaks down, the purification process collapses, and the water becomes a foul

and murky mess.”46 Synthetic detergents were typical of numerous other examples of how the

approval and use of new technologies preceded any clear consensus of their impact on the

environment and human health. Commoner wryly observed that such consequences were a

natural symptom of our economic system, “since the purchases of detergents—and the

consequent profits—result from their effectiveness as cleansers and not from their behavior in

waste systems.”47 Historian William McGucken noted the paradox that “achieving human

cleanliness entailed fouling the environment.”48 By the middle 1960s, the detergents scare had

largely subsided after industrial scientists determined that their early detergents were synthesized

from petroleum derivatives composed of branched molecules that were not biodegradable. Later

45 Commoner, Science and Survival, 20-21.

46 Commoner, “A Scientist Views Pollution,” 3.

47 Commoner, Science and Survival, 21.

48 McGucken, Biodegradable, 7.
 131

detergents consisted of unbranched molecules that decay bacteria could break down. But to

Commoner it remained “useful to ask why we got into trouble with the old detergents, and what we

can learn from past difficulties to avoid new ones.”49 To Commoner, the problem was essentially a

repetition of other environmental problems: detergents “were put on the market before their impact

on the intricate web of plants, animals, and microorganisms that makes up the living environment

was understood.”50

Commoner’s bone of contention with the synthetic detergent industry was the same as his

objection to the earlier unquestioned assault on the environment by nuclear weapons testing:

discoveries in the physical and chemical sciences failed to take into account their impacts on the

life sciences. As he noted in Science and Survival, “since the scientific revolution which generated

modern technology took place in physics, it is natural that modern science should provide better

technological control over inanimate matter than over living things.”51 Whereas ecology endorsed

a more holistic understanding of the environment, industrial science worked in a more reductionist

manner. In “The Integrity of Science,” published in 1965, Commoner illustrated the dangers of this

kind of reductionist approach, noting that the Soap and Detergent Association had admitted that no

biological field tests had been conducted to determine how detergents would interact with the

natural ecosystem.52 “The separation of the laws of nature among the different sciences is a

human conceit,” Commoner concluded. “Nature itself is an integrated whole.”53 This disparity

between the physico-chemical sciences and the biological sciences was a direct consequence of

49 Commoner, “A Scientist Views Pollution,” 7.

50 Commoner, “A Scientist Views Pollution,” 7.

51 Commoner, Science and Survival, 25.

52 Commoner, “The Integrity of Science,” American Scientist 53 (June 1965), 174-198.

53 Commoner, Science and Survival, 25.

 132

the American science policy that followed World War II, as government funding supported nuclear

physics and industry supported developments for the petrochemical industry. As the technological

revolution raced ahead, few stopped to consider its impact. But to conclude that industrial science

simply failed to do its biological homework is to miss the point. Paul Hirt argues that whereas

ecologists promote “awareness of environmental limits to abundance,” specialists—like

government silviculturalists or industrial chemists—strive precisely to “overcome limits and create

greater abundance.”54 This emphasis on maximizing production invariably came at the expense of

environmental health and sustainability. The new environmentalism insisted that new technologies

needed to be governed by what was known—and cautious of what was not known—about life and

its environment. In effect, this constituted a call for greater scrutiny in risk analysis.

Responding to this perceived need, Commoner opened his Center for the Biology of

Natural Systems at Washington University in 1965. Commoner outlined the role of the new Center

as an effort to “adapt our science to the urgent need for understanding the natural biology of the

environment and so help to preserve the community of life from extinction at the hand of man.”55

Such an endeavor was urgently needed and critical. “Too often, today, we fail to perceive this

system as a complex whole,” Commoner lamented in Science and Survival. “Too often has this

blindness led us to exaggerate our powers to control the potent agents which we have let loose on

the environment. Only too often in the recent past has our unperceived ignorance led to sudden

hazards to life—contamination of our streams with powerful but poorly understood biochemical

agents; pollution of the air with powerful but poorly understood radiation.”56 By the later 1960s,

54 Paul W. Hirt, A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests since World War II (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1994), 3.

55 Commoner, “A Scientist Views Pollution,” 14.

56 Commoner, Science and Survival, 46.

 133

Commoner’s Center for the Biology of Natural Systems would engage with another poison that was

infiltrating both air and water systems at an alarming rate.

In addition to his role as messenger, Mercury was the Roman god of commerce and was

responsible for escorting the dead down to the underworld. After World War II, this dual role might

have been perceived to be rather fitting, given the relative ubiquity of mercury use in industry and

the severe health hazard it posed. Mercury, the metal, was known to be toxic since Roman times,

but its presence as an environmental pollutant dramatically increased after the Second World War

from fossil fuel emissions—especially coal-fired power plants—its use in paints and fungicides, its

role in the production of chlorine in the chlor-alkali process, and its part in lithium enrichment for

use in thermonuclear weapons.57 As mercury use increased, so did the number of human ailments

associated with it. In 1947, the cause of “pink disease” that afflicted infants in the United States

was connected to the use of mercurous chloride—calomel—in teething powders.58 A little more

than a decade later, a rash of cases of mercury poisoning related to the use of mercury

compounds in fungicides used to treat flour and wheat occurred in Iraq (1960), Guatemala (1963-

1965), and Pakistan (1969). In the late 1950s, the irresponsible dumping of mercury-contaminated

waste into local waters resulted in widespread and high profile poisoning tragedies in Minamata,

Japan, in which hundreds of people were killed and as many as 20,000 were poisoned.59

57 Between 1950 and 1963, lithium enrichment for thermonuclear weapons released many tons of mercury to

air and surface waters from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. For more, see Dennis J. Paustenbach
(ed.), Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: Theory and Practice (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2002), 769-793.
In 1993, studies suggested that mercury releases from operations were responsible for the highest potential non-
cancer health risks of any material used in historical activities in the nuclear lab complex. See ChemRisk, Oak Ridge
Health Studies Dose Reconstruction Feasibility Study Report, Volume I: Phase I Overview. Prepared for the
Tennessee Department of Health and the Oak Ridge Health Agreement Steering Panel, September 1993.

58 For pink disease, see Ann Dally, “The Rise and Fall of Pink Disease,” Social History of Medicine 10 (1997),
291-304.

See J. R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century
59

World (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), 138-139. See also Thornton, Pandora’s Poison, 240.
 134

Indeed, mercury pollution or contamination presents an especially poignant example of

how the industrial processes after World War II emerged to create new, dangerous, and often-

unanticipated environmental problems. While mercury is a naturally occurring element and present

throughout the environment, it rarely occurs independently in nature without human intervention.

Rather, it is trapped in coal and other mineral deposits, and freed into air, soil, and water through

such human activities as waste incineration and coal combustion. According to a 1997

Environmental Protection Agency report, coal-fired power plants in the United States were the

predominant cause of mercury pollution in the environment.60 The environmental hazard posed by

mercury stems from an organic form of the element called methyl mercury, which is present in

mercury vapors. Preventing mercury releases was especially difficult in manufacturing, because

whereas other toxic metals like lead and cadmium were easily trapped with the fly ash in

incinerator control systems, mercury was so easily vaporized that most of it passed through the

control system, “out the incinerator stack, and into the air.”61 Once escaped from the factory,

methyl mercury accumulated in water and entered the food chain, and, unlike most elements of

radioactive fallout, methyl mercury is almost entirely absorbed by humans’ digestive systems. In

1997, the Environmental Protection Agency estimated that about 87 tons of mercury were

deposited annually in the American environment, and that electrical power plants built from the

1940s to the 1970s were responsible for a sizable amount of those emissions.62 While this number

may appear somewhat inconsequential compared to the tonnage of other toxic substances

60U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Mercury Study Report to Congress, Washington D.C. Volume 1:
Executive Summary, 1997.

61 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 119.

62 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Mercury Study Report to Congress, Washington D.C. Volume 1:

Executive Summary, 1997. See also R. Stanfield & C. Lopez, “Lethal Legacy: The Dirty Truth About the Nation’s Most
Polluting Power Plants,” U.S Public Interest Research Group, 2000.
 135

released into the environment, studies indicate that a mere gram of mercury was sufficient to

render fish from a twenty acre body of water unsafe for human consumption.63 Much as trace

amounts of endrin were responsible for the fish kills on the Mississippi, mercury threatened similar

hazards to fish and to humans. Summarizing the postwar recognition that mercury was polluting

the environment in an unprecedented scale, Commoner observed: “that waste mercury would

move through the aquatic ecosystem and accumulate in fish came as a sudden, unpleasant

surprise.”64

As mercury vapors billowed out of power plants and found their way into streams and

lakes and up the food chain toward fish and ultimately Americans’ dinner tables, the ingestion of

mercury became a prevalent source of mercury poisoning. Documented symptoms of mercury

poisoning are widespread, ranging from psychological effects—like irritability to anxiety and

depression—to sensory and motor effects—including loss of sensation in extremities, loss of

hearing, abnormal reflexes, slurred speech, and the loss of fine motor coordination. More serious

exposures to mercury also result in convulsions and seizures, comas, and death. As with

radioactive fallout, children are generally at more risk than adults.65

After the Second World War, mercury also became a widely used element in the

manufacture of synthetic chemicals. In the late nineteenth century, mercury was introduced into

chemical manufacturing to take advantage of its special electrical and chemical properties, and

became a central tool in the manufacturing of chlorine. Chlorine was originally the unwanted

63Electric Power Research Institute, “Mercury in the Environment,” EPRI Journal (April 1990), 5. See also J.
G. Weiner et al., “Partitioning and Bioavailablity of Mercury in an Experimentally Acified Lake,” Environmental
Toxicology and Chemistry 9 (1990), 909-918.

64 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 185.

65 For a more complete list of mercury poisoning symptoms, see Colleen F. Moore, Silent Scourge: Children,
Pollution, and Why Scientists Disagree (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 49-77.
 136

byproduct of the electrolytic chlor-alkali process; by the late nineteenth century, alkali was in high

demand from manufacturers of glass, soap, paper, and textiles, but, according to Martha Moore

Trescott, “markets had to be created [for chlorine], as with almost all of the products introduced by

the electrochemicals industry.”66 Invention was the mother of necessity. During the First World

War, chlorine was used as a war gas on the battlefields of Ypres in 1915. The military industry

quickly made more chlorine-based chemical weapons, including mustard gas.67 After World War I,

the petrochemical industry replaced the electrochemical industry that preceded it, and by the late

1920s and early 1930s, new organochlorine products began to appear, most notably

polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs)—developed by Monsanto in 1929—and chlorofluorocarbon

(CFC) refrigerants, introduced by Du Pont in the early 1930s.68 In 1937, DDT’s insecticidal

qualities were discovered, and increased production of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics, first

marketed in 1936, ensured that chlorine manufacture remained profitable in the decades that

followed World War II.

From being an unwanted byproduct, chlorine became indispensable to the synthesis of

organic chemicals, which were necessary in the production of the raw materials needed for new

synthetic fibers, pesticides, detergents, plastics, and rubber, prompting Commoner to assert in The

66 Martha Moore Trescott, The Rise of the Electrochemicals Industry, 1880-1910 (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 1981), 106. It warrants noting that establishing a public need for a new product is not an uncommon
phenomenon. See, for example, Gary Cross, An All-Consuming Century: Why Commercialism Won in Modern
America (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); and Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumers’ Republic: The Politics of
Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003). This theme is also raised in relation to
polluting technologies in Markowitz & Rosner, Deceit and Denial.

67Thornton notes that “by the end of the war, more than a quarter of all munitions contained chemical
agents, and all of these were chlorine based.” Thornton, Pandora’s Poison, 236.

68 Du Pont chemist Thomas Midgley invented tetraethyl lead, the gasoline additive that would proliferate toxic

lead particles throughout the environment, in addition to CFCs, which would come to deplete the ozone layer. This
dubious distinction prompted historian J. R. McNeill to comment that Midgley “had more impact on the atmosphere
than any other single organism in earth history.” McNeill, Something New Under the Sun, 111. For more on Midgley’s
contributions to speeding the state of environmental decline, see Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in
American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 206-210.
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Closing Circle that “mercury poisoning is a feature of the ‘plastic age.’”69 Just as chlorine was

essential to the manufacture of organic chemicals, mercury was critical to the manufacture of

chlorine. To make chlorine, an electric current is passed through a salt solution via a mercury

electrode. Biologist Joe Thornton notes that typically, “most mercury is recycled, but significant

quantities are routinely released into the environment through air emissions, water discharges,

products, and waste sludges. [During the twentieth century], chlor-alkali production [was] the

largest single source of mercury releases to the environment.”70 Between 1946 and 1969,

Commoner noted that “mercury consumption for this purpose has increased—by 3,930 per cent in

the twenty-five year postwar period.”71

While chlorine production was the second most prevalent source of mercury pollution after

coal-fired power plants, mercury also found its way into the environment in unnaturally large

quantities in a number of other ways. In The Closing Circle, Commoner showed that mercury use

in mildew-resistant paints had grown 3,120%.72 Mercury poisoning was typically associated with

the Mad Hatter, a character made popular in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, that derived from

the use of mercury in the making of felt hats.73 After World War II, mercury maintained its close

connection to occupational hazards. Indeed, the first complaint that the Occupational Safety and

Health Administration addressed under the 1970 Occupational Safety and Health Act pertained to

69 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 166.

70 Thornton, Pandora’s Poison, 239.

71 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 145-146.

72 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 143.

For more on the physiological effects of mercury, see Neville Grant, “Legacy of the Mad Hatter,”
73

Environment 11 (May 1969), 18-23, 43-44.

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worker levels of exposure to chlorine and mercury at an Allied Chemical Corporation chlor-alkali

plant in Moundsville, West Virginia.74

By 1969, Scientist and Citizen had changed its name to Environment. Within a decade,

Ralph Lutts notes that “what began as a mimeographed newsletter about fallout had turned into

one of the nation’s major sources of environmental information,” and Commoner, whose face

would appear on the cover of Time the following year, was widely recognized as one of the icons of

the new American environmentalism.75 In May 1969, Environment released a special issue

devoted to mercury in the environment. The lead article, by Environment editor Sheldon Novick,

examined mercury in pesticides and fungicides. Whereas countries like Sweden and Japan had

banned the mercury pesticides and other means through which mercury might contaminate food,

Novick expressed concern that in the United States there was “almost no information available

about the extent of mercury contamination of food and of the general environment.”76 In “Birds

Give Warning,” Göran Löfroth and Margaret E. Duffy reported on the adverse effects of using

Panogen, a fungicide containing methyl mercury, in great quantity. Commenting on cases in

Sweden and Japan, they noted that birds were being poisoned after eating treated seeds, or after

eating rodents who had eaten treated seed. Once again, toxic chemicals were extending their

reach beyond the uses for which they were intended.77

“All this reminds us of what we have already been told by advertising … that we are

blessed with an economy based on very modern technologies,” Commoner would observe in The

74 For the Moundsville case study, see Markowitz & Rosner, Deceit and Denial, 165-167.

75 Lutts, “Chemical Fallout,” 216.

76 Sheldon Novick, “A New Pollution Problem,” Environment 11 (May 1969), 2-9. Quotation is from page 3.

77 Göran Löfroth & Margaret E. Duffy, “Birds Give Warning,” Environment 11 (May 1969), 10-17. See also
Neville Grant, “Legacy of the Mad Hatter.”
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Closing Circle. “What the advertisements do not tell us—as we are urged to buy synthetic shirts

and detergents, aluminum furniture, beer in no-return bottles, and Detroit’s latest creation—is that

all this ‘progress’ has greatly increased the impact on the environment.”78 Moreover, it contributed

to a growing public sentiment that the technological optimism that immediately followed World War

II was over—or worse—had been a fallacy all along. Still, environmentally hazardous products

flooded the market, and still American consumers rewarded companies that could offer the lowest

prices, regardless of their products’ environmental effects. So while awareness of environmental

protection was growing across the United States, Americans continued to make only token and

selective changes in their behavior.

But it was within this context that the modern science of risk analysis was formulated. “In

view of the large and unknown risks involved in multiple insults to the integrity of the environment,”

Commoner told the National Industrial Conference Board in 1966, “prudence suggests the

withdrawal from our surroundings of as many synthetic pollutants as possible.”79 If risk analysis

was designed to determine the potential threat of a new hazard, this new approach to

environmentalism insisted that that new hazard not be introduced before the risk could be more

fully and publicly assessed and considered. The basic idea was to prevent environmental damage

until the benefits of a new technology could be weighed against its potential costs; waiting until a

new technology was introduced in the environment was invariably too late. Commoner worried

about the manner in which environmentalists typically found themselves reacting to existing

problems rather than participating in preventing their incipience and proliferation.80 Throughout his

78 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 146.

79 Commoner, “A Scientist Views Pollution,” 15.

For in depth discussion of risk analysis and the precautionary principle, see Ulrich Beck, Risk Society:
80

Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1992); Paustenbach (ed.), Human and Ecological Risk
 140

campaign against aboveground nuclear testing, for example, Commoner was at the helm of

criticisms directed toward the Atomic Energy Commission’s rather insular treatment of risk

analysis. Uncertainty in science and a perceived urgency in developing a national security agenda

prompted the approval of numerous nuclear weapons tests on American soil that, later, would be

recognized as a tangible health hazard to American citizens. While in some quarters the Cold War

confrontation justified the risk involved in testing, decisions that put the military-industrial complex

in firm control of the arms race relegated public input to the periphery. Calculating risk of this

nature was not an equation that could be concocted by experts, but rather a question of social

values and ethics that required far greater public participation. Using the Mississippi River fish kill

as an example, Commoner claimed “the very presence in the Mississippi River of substances

known to be toxic to fish at low concentrations and to mammals at higher concentrations must be

regarded as a definite risk to any biological population exposed to it. The only feasible way to

judge the significance of this contamination is to estimate the risks, compare them with the benefits

associated with the use of the pesticides, and strike a balance between risk and benefit that will be

acceptable to the public.”81 By the mid-1960s, Commoner was beginning to recognize that risk

analysis was the vital link across the great divide that separated the postwar technological

revolution and the rising tide of ecological awareness.

If The Closing Circle, published the year after the first Earth Day, is Commoner’s most

celebrated book, Science and Survival might be his most significant. The Closing Circle succinctly

outlined the sources of the environmental crisis from the vantage point of the early 1970s, but the

groundwork for that study had been outlined five years earlier in Science and Survival. “The age of

Assessment; and Carolyn Raffensperger & Joel Tickner (eds.), Protecting Public Health and the Environment:
Implementing the Precautionary Principle (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999).

81 Commoner, Science and Survival, 97.

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innocent faith in science and technology may be over,” he ominously began.82 The book

proceeded to recognize the centrality of postwar technological growth and its influence on

American life. Was science getting out of hand? This was the title of Commoner’s first chapter;

the Mississippi fish kills, detergent foam pouring from household water taps, or the atomic bomb’s

instantly recognizable mushroom cloud seemed to answer in the affirmative. A resolution needed

to be struck between these two powerful but antithetical conceptions of postwar American

consciousness. “It is simply too late to declare a moratorium on the progress of science,”

Commoner conceded. “The real question is not whether we should use our new knowledge, but

how to use it.”83

Commoner began Science and Survival by demonstrating the hazards of not pursuing a

precautionary principle, which he saw as a crucial first step in how science ought to be used.

Commoner expressed alarm at the growing number of environmental problems that seemed to

crop up unexpectedly. Citing urban air pollution as an example, Commoner noted that “the

sunlight-induced chemical conversion of airborne hydrocarbons (such as gasoline vapors) into

smog was discovered, not in a chemical laboratory but in the air over Los Angeles, long after the

chief mode for disseminating these hydrocarbons—the superhighway—was well entrenched in the

urban economy.”84 Just as environmental consciousness was shifting from the personal to the

collective, the laboratory also seemed to be coming outdoors and exposing more people to its test

experiments. In effect, Americans were being exposed to a trial and error approach to science.

To Commoner, there was little question that the industrial application of science was out of

control and that its assault on the environment could ultimately result in insurmountable difficulties

82 Commoner, Science and Survival, 3.

83 Commoner, Science and Survival, 25.

84 Commoner, Science and Survival, 24.

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“in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.”85 In one of his more notorious

statements, Commoner insisted with some dramatic flair that “Lake Erie has already been

overwhelmed by pollutants and has, in effect, died.” Sewage, industrial wastes, and runoff from

intensely fertilized farmlands had increased at such an alarming rate in the postwar years that the

waters had become loaded with such an excess of phosphate and nitrate that the biology of the

lake was suffering from oxygen deprivation and effectively suffocating. If his rhetoric was too

strong for some, his point was that—ecologically—Lake Erie had become little more than a

disposal site for agricultural and industrial waste, even at the expense of the quality of the water

and the fishing industry in the lake. “The fish are all but gone,” he concluded.86 On a global level,

the considerable growth in the combustion of wood, coal, petroleum, and natural gas contributed to

a dramatic increase in carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere. “Between 1860 and 1960,”

Commoner contended, “the combustion of fuels added nearly 14 percent to the carbon dioxide

content of the air, which had until then remained constant for many centuries.”87 Carbon dioxide

played a significant role in regulating the earth’s temperature, and increased levels resulted in what

became known as the “greenhouse effect” behind global warming. Like glass, carbon dioxide lets

visible light pass through it, but it reflects infrared rays. Sunlight passes through the carbon dioxide

and is converted to infrared heat energy through soil and plant absorption, which is then unable to

escape the “greenhouse.” The end result is rising temperatures on earth. Commoner was writing

in 1966, but so many of his concerns—waste disposal, ecological balance, and global

85 Commoner, Science and Survival, 9.

86 Commoner, Science and Survival, 12. Commoner would reiterate this claim in The Closing Circle, 94-111.

87 Commoner, Science and Survival, 10.

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warming—continued to constitute the source of environmental concerns into the twenty-first

century.88

In presenting a series of environmental problems resulting from unforeseen consequences

of technological development, Commoner returned to the problem of risk assessment. More than

ever, scientists needed to be absolutely sure about what they were creating and how it worked.

“Like the sorcerer’s apprentice,” he warned, “we are acting upon dangerously incomplete

knowledge.”89 Incomplete knowledge, however, required more intense debate about the relative

risks of new pollutants. Commoner conceded that considerable scientific disagreement existed

regarding the medical hazards of the new pollutants, “about the effects of DDT now found in

human bodies, about the disease due to smog, or about the long-range effects of fallout.” But

Commoner argued that these disagreements were secondary in the bigger picture. “The crucial

point is that the disagreements exist,” he argued vehemently, “for they reveal that we have risked

these hazards before we knew what harm they might do.”90

But incomplete knowledge—the result of secrecy and misguided science—also made risk

assessment infinitely more difficult if not impossible. “Until known risks can be balanced against

specific benefits,” Commoner argued, “no meaningful action is possible.”91 Central to Science and

Survival was Commoner’s insistence that scientists needed to reintegrate themselves into society,

not as policy-makers, but as disseminators of information. “Scientists have a particular moral

responsibility to counter the evil consequences of their works,” Commoner asserted. “They are

88For a good discussion of global warming, see Spencer R. Weart, The Discovery of Global Warming
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

89 Commoner, Science and Survival, 28.

90 Commoner, Science and Survival, 27. My emphasis.

91 Commoner, Science and Survival, 98.

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also in possession of the relevant technical facts essential to an understanding of the major public

issues which trouble the world.”92 But inasmuch as Commoner felt scientists were largely

responsible for the environmental problems caused by new technologies, he was adamant that

scientists work within a larger social framework to resolve those problems. “The problems are

social,” Commoner insisted, “and must be solved by social processes.”93 The assessment of risk

needed to be a public endeavor, but it could only be achieved when the public had access to the

necessary information. “By this means,” Commoner concluded, “scientists can place the decisions

on the grave issues which they have helped to create in the proper hands—the hands of an

informed citizenry.”94 Scientists’ public involvement in shedding light on the Mississippi fish kills

and Environment’s very focused discussion of mercury were examples of conveying information to

the public. Commoner had established his position of the scientist’s “involuntary obligation” to

society in the context of the nuclear fallout debate, but it clearly applied to all environmental

problems.

While many prominent scientists like Willard Libby and Edward Teller had found the ear of

legislators, Commoner expressed concern that scientists might inadvertently subvert the public

interest by promoting their own scientific or political agendas. This approach would only spawn

confusion in the public. Commoner warned that “when scientists voice their social judgments with

the same authority that attaches to their professional pronouncements, the citizen is bound to

confuse the inevitable and insolvable disagreements with scientific disputes.”95 As debates over

acceptable risk became mired in disputes over how many parts per million of a given pollutant

92 Commoner, Science and Survival, 104.

93 Commoner, Science and Survival, 109.

94 Commoner, Science and Survival, 109.

95 Commoner, Science and Survival, 107.

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constituted a threat to human health, statistics and statistical arguments overshadowed the human

aspects of the disagreement, as lives and health were reduced to columns on a spreadsheet.96

Science and Survival ended with a mission statement for science and scientists working in an

environment in which their work had become politicized. “We have a duty to inform,” Commoner

insisted, “and to inform in keeping with the traditional principles of science, taking into account all

relevant data and interpretations. This is an involuntary obligation to society; we have no right to

withhold information from our fellow citizens, or to color its meaning with our own social

judgments.”97

If there was any question, Science and Survival also made it abundantly clear that Commoner was

acutely aware of the relationship between environmental and physiological health. While his

emphasis remained on the relationship between science and society, much of his language and

examples noted the interconnectedness of nature and culture. “We have come to a turning point in

the human habitation of the earth,” he sermonized in the conclusion.

The environment is a complex, subtly balanced system, and it is this integrated

whole which receives the impact of all the separate insults inflicted by pollutants.
Never before in the history of this planet has its thin life-supporting surface been
subjected to such diverse, novel, and potent agents. I believe that the cumulative
effect of these pollutants, their interactions and amplification, can be fatal to the
complex fabric of the biosphere. And, because man is, after all, a dependent part
of this system, I believe that continued pollution of the earth, if unchecked, will
eventually destroy the fitness of this planet as a place for human life.98

At stake was the health of all organic nature, he argued. There were few more compelling ways to

reassert the centrality of nature to human life; environmental health also meant human health.

96 Theodore M. Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1995).

97 Commoner, Science and Survival, 129.

98 Commoner, Science and Survival, 122.

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Commoner’s alarmism won some reviewers over. In London’s Daily Telegraph, Michael

Maxwell Scott hoped that it would “succeed in frightening people, governments, and industry into

taking precautions.”99 In this nature, Science and Survival followed a rhetorical pattern practiced in

environmental writing for some time. When Commoner appeared on the cover of Time in 1970, he

was touted as the Paul Revere of ecology, the signaler of imminent danger. Within the article, he

was also part of a group of ecologists that Time called the “new jeremiads.” That Commoner

should be labeled both “the Paul Revere of ecology” and a new jeremiah—patriot whistleblower

and harbinger of doom—in the same Time cover story suggests some of the ambiguity and popular

misunderstandings surrounding the emerging environmental movement, but it also implies the

centrality of his role and message within a broader American cultural history. As the Paul Revere

of ecology, Commoner, no stranger to environmental conflict and controversy, gained recognition

as a messenger raising the alarm of the environmental crisis, and also as one of the founding

fathers of the contemporary environmental movement.

The American Jeremiah—who derived from a mode of public exhortation, which sought to

marry social criticism and spiritual renewal—has been a persistent figure in American intellectual

history. In its original use, the jeremiad sought to illuminate the relationship between religious

apocalypse and the imminent Revolutionary War. In its twentieth century incarnation, the jeremiad

took on an ecological flavor, but determined to draw the attention of Americans toward the great

divide between environmental apocalypse and the need for a revolution in how they conceived of

the environment and their place in it. In biblical grandeur, the environmental crisis suggested that

the judgment day was nigh. Sacvan Bercovitch described the jeremiad as an intellectual common

ground for spirituality and revolution. With reference to the American Revolution, Bercovitch

99 Michael Scott Maxwell, “Poisoning the World,” The Daily Telegraph (10 November 1966), 21.
 147

argued that “the meaning of revolution was emphatically and unequivocally progressive.”100

Revolution promised a spiritual renaissance. In a sense, the Time characterizaton of the new

ecologists as the logical heirs of the American jeremiad made perfect sense as they were

effectively trying to incite a spiritual revolution within the American population to refocus its

principles around a more ecologically sustainable mode of life.

The jeremiad form foretold declension and doom, and was a popular method of revitalizing

the social and spiritual mission. Just as Jeremiah’s dire predictions warned of the destruction of

Jerusalem, the new Jeremiahs warned of the ongoing destruction of the Earth’s ability to sustain

life; both lamented the human fall from grace and saw the human condition and attempts at

redemption as almost hopeless. But while the jeremiad’s message foreshadowed despair, there

lingered a glimmer of hope to which audiences were meant to cling. This was a compelling

rhetorical trick. Like the eighteenth century evangelical leaders of the Great Awakening,

Commoner and the other jeremiahs aimed to lead their audiences to despair, but then redeem

them through the narrowest of hopes. Science and Survival may have been a relatively subdued

jeremiad, but in lamenting decline in the integrity of science, Commoner was very consciously

adopting this powerful rhetoric to strengthen the urgency of his message. Presenting perhaps the

blueprint for his four laws of ecology, which would serve as the centerpiece of The Closing Circle,

Commoner offered an ecological principle in Science and Survival that should help make sense of

the risk of intruding upon nature.

100 The seminal study of American jeremiads is Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). Bercovitch argues that the jeremiad has played a major role in creating the
American ethos. For an equally important, though differing perspective, see Perry Miller, Errand into the Wilderness
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1956). While Bercovitch interpreted hope in the jeremiad’s strategy, Miller
emphasized the rhetorical potency of the declensionist narrative. For a discussion of the environmental jeremiad, see
Theodore Roszak, The Voice of the Earth: An Exploration of Ecopsychology (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993).
Quotation is from Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad, 133.
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Any change imposed on [the environment] for the sake of some economic benefit
has a price. For the benefits of powerful pesticides we pay in losses of birdlife and
fish. For the conveniences of automobiles we pay in the rise of respiratory
disease from smog. For the widespread use of combustible fuels we may yet be
forced to pay the catastrophic cost of protecting our cities from worldwide floods.
Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the
natural environment.”101

And herein was the jeremiad. Human folly had created an environmental crisis, the latter-day

flood. The second coming was at hand, and humanity would need to seek redemption. But, in

traditional jeremiad form, Commoner brought his audience back from the abyss. “We are still in a

period of grace, and if we are willing to pay the price, as large as it is, there is yet time to restore

and preserve the biological quality of the environment.”102 That price, he implied, involved a

rejection of many of the technological products and production methods that significantly

threatened human health.

Like any social movement, environmentalism was based upon a kind of moral persuasion

that vigorously sought support through a variety of means. The jeremiad was a way of guilting

people into behavioral change. Its success could be calculated by the popularity of the

environmental leaders who adopted it. Popular scientists like Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, René

Dubos, and ecologists LaMont Cole, Eugene Odum, and Kenneth Watt all used a rhetorical

approach that mimicked previous jeremiads. Further, Silent Spring had been attacked for this kind

of alarmism. In a particularly critical review in the Saturday Evening Post, Newsweek’s senior

editor Edwin Diamond had blamed Carson for creating “a big fuss … to scare the American public

out of its wits.”103 Even before the 1962 publication of Silent Spring, the apocalyptic warnings of

101 Commoner, Science and Survival, 27.

102 Commoner, Science and Survival, 126.

103 Edwin Diamond, “The Myth of the Pesticide Menace,” Saturday Evening Post, 28 September 1963, 16-18.
Also cited in Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 85.
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environmental writers—particularly among those who came from the scientific community—did to a

certain extent emphasize the gloomy consequences of irresponsible environmental actions. Two

highly influential environmental books from 1948 both tended toward the environmental jeremiad in

their rhetoric. In Road to Survival, William Vogt linked his jeremiad to the foibles of American free

enterprise, which was divorced from biophysical understanding and social responsibility, and “must

bear a large share of the responsibility for devastating forests, vanishing wildlife, crippled ranges, a

gullied continent, and roaring flood crests.”104 In contrast, Fairfield Osborn firmly believed that free

enterprise was inherently capable of correcting its own systemic abuses, but he, too, delved into a

jeremiad in Our Plundered Planet, exhorting Americans to be cautious of “technologists [who] may

outdo themselves in the creation of artificial substitutes for natural subsistence.” The only proper

approach, Osborn contended, was to accept “the necessity of cooperating with nature.”105

Not surprisingly, the prospect of nuclear Armageddon spurred popular fiction and cinema.

Nevil Shute’s On the Beach and Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz rate among the great

literary works of the horrors associated with the nuclear age, while Stanley Kubrick’s Dr.

Strangelove brought the terrors of atomic holocaust to the silver screen.106 Even Linus Pauling’s

1957 petition for a nuclear test ban—written in Commoner’s Washington University office—adopted

a jeremiadic tone in warning against potential dangers of not controlling nuclear weapons,

culminating in “a cataclysmic nuclear war.”107 Late in 1960, the ecologist Paul Sears sent

Chauncey Leake a document entitled “A Statement of Conviction About Overpopulation,” asking

104 William Vogt, Road to Survival (New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1948), 133.

105 Fairfield Osborn, Our Plundered Planet (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948), 194, 200-201.

106 For literary and cinematic representations of environmental apocalypse, see Frederick Buell, From

Apocalypse to Way of Life: Environmental Crisis in the American Century (New York: Routledge, 2003), 247-322.

107 Linus Pauling, “An Appeal by American Scientists to the Governments and People of the World,” Bulletin
of the Atomic Scientists 13 (September 1957), 264-266. Quotation is from page 264.
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him to present it to the AAAS board. The document, signed by thirty-eight Nobel Prize winners,

contained a similar ominous tone as it warned that “unless a favorable balance of population and

resources is achieved with a minimum of delay, there is in prospect a Dark Age of human misery,

famine, under-education and unrest which could generate growing panic, exploding into wars

fought to appropriate the dwindling means of survival.”108 Sears’s 1935 classic on soils, Deserts on

the March, was also imbued with gloomy prognostication for the future.109

Carson, therefore, wouldn’t exactly open the floodgates, but as Silent Spring gained

widespread attention, the jeremiad grew louder and bolder. To the most stringent of Jeremiahs,

the end of history was indeed at hand. Garrett Hardin lamented the “tragedy of the commons,” in

which natural resources were being depleted with no chance of being replenished, and would warn

about the dangers of population growth in much the same tone as Paul Ehrlich would in his 1968

bestseller, The Population Bomb. In 1972, the Club of Rome, a group of highly esteemed MIT

scientists, projected that “if the present growth trends in world population, industrialization,

pollution, food production and resource depletion continue unchanged, the limits of growth on this

planet will be reached within the next hundred years. The most probable result will be a rather

sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.”110 But while the

siren calls of the new jeremiad brought considerable attention to the environmental cause, the

project over the next decade would be to decipher the different messages in the jeremiad, and

make sense of environmental decline in America.

108 Paul Sears, “A Statement of Conviction About Overpopulation,” November 1960 (Committee on Science

in the Promotion of Human Welfare Papers, AAAS Archives, Box 2).

109 Sears, Deserts on the March (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1935).

110 Donella H. Meadows et al., The Limits of Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972), 143.
 151

The environmental jeremiad became a powerful form of rhetoric wielded by a select group

of charismatic politico-scientists, who came to be recognized as the shamans of the spring.111

Their felicity at public engagement was instrumental in their relative success; these were not

awkward lab scientists in lab coats, but articulate spokespeople advocating that ecological

awareness was essential to human survival. The rise of the environmental jeremiad also marked

an important development among the politico-scientists. Not only was the jeremiad politically

engaged, it also demonstrated the development of a new language that was better suited to its

audience. This development was absolutely critical to the growing public interest and literacy in

ecology, and the urgency of the jeremiad. Ehrlich, in particular, was adept at offering such

cataclysmic warnings in both his writings and in interviews. In one particularly famous interview

that appeared in Look magazine the day before Earth Day, Ehrlich said: “When you reach a point

where you realize further efforts will be futile, you may as well look after yourself and your friends

and enjoy what little time you have left.” For Ehrlich, in reference to overpopulation, “that point for

me is 1972.”112 According to journalist Stephen Fox: “in his endless round of lectures, interviews,

and TV appearances, Ehrlich—with his thundercloud visage and deeply resonant voice—seemed

the very personification of the Voice of Doom.”113

Ehrlich was convinced that overpopulation had become such a significant problem, that by

1968 it was already too late to prevent disaster. “The battle to feed all of humanity is over,” he

began in The Population Bomb. “At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the

Worster has referred to these politico-scientists as the “new delphic voices” of the Age of Ecology. See
111

Worster, Nature’s Economy, ix.

112 Look, 21 April 1970.

Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and his Legacy (Madison: University of
113

Wisconsin Press, 1981), 311.

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world death rate.”114 According to Ehrlich, famine and devastation were inevitable. Part of

Ehrlich’s success in The Population Bomb was this apocalyptic—jeremiadic—tone that forced his

readers to consider the issue of global overpopulation. After condemning humanity to damnation,

Ehrlich offered a modicum of hope. “Many lives could be saved,” he suggested, “through dramatic

programs to ‘stretch’ the carrying capacity of the earth by increasing food production. But these

programs will only provide a stay of execution unless they are accompanied by determined and

successful efforts at population control.”115 He founded Zero Population Growth, an organization

promoting smaller families in the United States, and outlined the necessity for population control in

his 1968 bestseller. The Population Bomb was an immediate success. Over three decades later it

was still the most popular environmental book ever published, selling over 3,000,000 copies in the

first decade.116 The Population Bomb was well written, which contributed both to its commercial

success and to its persuasiveness. Ehrlich was committed to promoting the authority of science to

combat the environmental crisis, and his ability to communicate his position effectively helped his

cause. Readily adopting the role of Jeremiah allowed for Ehrlich to promote the scientist as the

intellectual and moral leader in the fight against the environmental crisis.117 This authority gave

even greater immediacy and significance to his message. The success of the book, his

subsequent popular appearances, and felicitous public speaking style made him an instant

celebrity and his position all the more popular.

114 Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb (New York: Ballantine Books, 1968), xi.

115 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, xi.

116Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962-1992 (New York:
Hill & Wang, 1993), 22.

117 Subtle examples of Commoner and Ehrlich’s differing opinions on the authority of scientists are sprinkled

throughout their works. Notably, Ehrlich’s academic title—Dr.—is conspicuously attached to his name on the cover
and back of The Population Bomb. In comparison, Commoner’s academic title is conspicuous in its absence in the
various editions of The Closing Circle.
 153

But the frequent adoption of the jeremiad did come at some cost to the environmental movement.

As sociologist Deborah Lynn Guber notes, “by downplaying environmental progress and by using

exaggerated doomsday warnings to motivate public awareness and concern, the environmental

movement has sacrificed its own credibility by giving in to the politics of chicken little.”118 Political

scientist Walter A. Rosenbaum warned that too much publicity and dire warnings posed the danger

that “Americans may become desensitized to the problem or begin to suspect that the constant

emphasis exaggerates the issue.”119 According to critic Charles Rubin, one of the consequences

of the jeremiadic approach was the acquisition of a “public taste” for largesse and omens of

ecological disaster. Citing Carson’s Silent Spring and Commoner’s The Closing Circle, Rubin

argued that writing on environmental issues became:

the intellectual equivalent of a gothic romance, with a large cast of characters,

involuted relationships, and a lurking menace. But the public’s ability to appreciate
the delicate balances and interrelationships of political and social structures has
undergone a corresponding debasement, evident in rampant sloganeering,
shameless emotionalism, and mindless panic and pessimism whenever “what is
wrong with our society” comes under discussion. In this realm, only the crudest
morality tales satisfy. Carson and Commoner have alerted us to matters that may
well demand our attention. But they have done so at the cost of our ability to give
that attention in a thoughtful way.120

But to suggest that Commoner and Carson were responsible for creating a context for “rampant

sloganeering” and “shameless emotionalism” is more than a little misguided. In articulating their

118 Deborah Lynn Guber, The Grassroots of a Green Revolution: Polling America on the Environment

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 4.

119 Walter A. Rosenbaum, The Politics of Environmental Concern 2nd edition (New York: Praeger Publishers,
1977), 27.

120 Charles T. Rubin, The Green Crusade: Rethinking the Roots of Environmentalism (Lanham, MD: Rowman

& Littlefield, 1994), 74. For other critiques of environmental rhetoric, see Ronald Bailey, Ecoscam: The False Prophets
of Ecological Apocalypse (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993); Martin Lewis, Green Delusions: An Environmentalist
Critique of Radical Environmentalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992); and Ron Arnold & Alan Gottlieb,
Trashing the Economy: How Runaway Environmentalism is Wrecking America (Bellevue, WA: Free Enterprise Press,
1993). The classic work is Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981).
 154

critique of industrial practices, they impressed upon the public the gravity of the situation, grounded

their concerns in scientific evidence, and presented them in a style that adhered to their faith in the

power of public information. By the 1960s, there were also scientific bases for environmental

concern; Carson’s fears over pesticides were certainly justified by the Mississippi River fish kills, for

example. Further, Commoner and the other ecological scientists contended, the longer society

ignored their warnings, the more jeremiadic they would—by necessity—become.121

Indeed, to Commoner and the other Jeremiahs, the state of the environment—from air

pollution to soil and water contamination—combined with consumerism as the prevailing public

characteristic warranted a little public alarmism. “We have compiled a record of serious failures in

these recent encounters with the environment,” Commoner insisted in a 1966 address based

heavily upon work that appeared in Science and Survival.

This record shows that we do not yet understand the environment well enough to
make new intrusions on it, on the large scale that is now possible, with any
reasonable expectation of accurately predicting the consequences. But we can
ignore the biology of the environment—and tolerate our present ignorance of
it—only at our peril. Pollution by detergents, pesticides, herbicides, radioisotopes,
and smog is dangerous, in my view, because it represents a blind intrusion into
aspects of the complex biology of the environment which are still poorly
understood. Apart from their known hazards these pollutants represent a huge
gamble. The odds are unknown, but the stakes are enormous.122

Here, in a nutshell, was the significance of risk analysis. Surely the stakes—human health and the

health of our environment—were too high to justify ignoring the potential risk of forging ahead

without greater recognition of the extent and the impact of those intrusions.

Indeed, Commoner’s activism was carefully calculated. He had learned during his

undergraduate years at Columbia in the 1930s the importance of finding a rational way of

121 The tendency to dismiss environmentalists as alarmists became a trend in the 1980s, and was indicative

of the new, alarmist antienvironmentalism that emerged during the Reagan administration. For a strong critique of the
antienvironmentalist rhetoric, see Buell, From Apocalypse to Way of Life, 3-66.

122 Commoner, “A Scientist Views Pollution,” 11.

 155

approaching problems and of publicizing them.123 Distinct from other jeremiads, Commoner’s

method was more deliberate and more premeditated, and, perhaps, less overtly jeremiadic. In his

prose, Commoner maintained a calm tone, designed to engage his readers rather than incite them.

His main priority remained a deep-seated belief that access to information constituted a vital form

of public empowerment. The necessity of public participation and the perceived political power of

an informed citizenry became his standard tactic. If the jeremiad moved Americans toward

numbing fear of environmental problems, then it was hardly the right technique to promote public

participation. Or maybe it was. There was certainly a time in which the jeremiad was exceptionally

persuasive—as evidenced by Ehrlich’s mainstream celebrity—and scientific information relating to

the environment was unquestionably dire. At the heart of the problem remained a popular

acceptance of the industrial and technological “progress,” which continued to ignore the long-term

biological effects of many of its innovations. As Commoner insisted in The Closing Circle, “these

technologies are ecologically faulty because they are designed to solve singular, separate

problems and fail to take into account the inevitable ‘side effects’ that arise, because, in nature, no

part is isolated from the whole ecological fabric.”124

In the popular imagination, ecology was the subversive science brought into the

mainstream by the popular success of Silent Spring, Commoner’s public information movement,

and Paul Ehrlich’s capacity to reach and engage mainstream media. And ecological awareness

presented a new and bold direction for American society, but one that also exhibited more caution.

If there was a unifying framework that brought all environmentalists together, it was the notion that

citizens should have greater access to policy and decision-making, especially when it involved their

123 Commoner interview with author, 22 November 2002.

124 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 193.

 156

communities. No interest had the right to expose people to environmental hazards without their

knowledge and consent. In addition, the 1960s saw the realization of a kind of declaration of

environmental rights that stated that people had a right to reject such exposures, hazards, and

health risks regardless of whether that restricted the freedoms or profits of the business

community. Commoner’s important place in environmental history is secured by his role in

ensuring that the public received information about the existence of such infractions.

The environmental momentum cultivated in the 1960s became the central focus of the

greatest environmental celebration in human history. At its core, Earth Day paid homage to the

ecological imagination, made public its declarations of the importance of more sustainable

industries and lifestyles, and sought to educate the American public in achieving these new goals.

Earth Day was a teach-in and, in that guise, a prime example of the power of public information.

Just as ecology preached a more holistic approach to environmental problems, Earth Day

appealed to a more inclusive sense of movement. Issues of clean air, clean water, and safer foods

were not concerns over which the new, social environmentalists held any kind of monopoly; these

issues also appealed in many ways to the conservative, silent majority, who had been alienated by

much of the 1960s social activism.125 In fact, Earth Day and subsequent environmental activism

illustrated some of the difficulties of bringing divergent interests under the same tent. The more

people sought to identify with environmentalism, the greater difficulty arose in trying to define the

movement or to reconcile different priorities. Was environmentalism about natural resource

conservation? Public health? Wildlands protection? And even within these disparate categories,

rationale for their defense varied significantly. If Earth Day was a celebration of environmentalism’s

ascendance, it would also mark the beginning of the rifts that would divide the movement.

125For a good discussion about the politics surrounding the organization of the first Earth Day, see Gottlieb,
Forcing the Spring, 105-114.
 Chapter 4
When Scientists Disagree

“We have met the enemy—and he is us.”

—Pogo

No singular event more amply illustrated the promise and the chaos of modern environmentalism

than the first Earth Day, on 22 April 1970, which Commoner called “a sudden, noisy awakening.”1

According to Harold Sprout, “not since the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor has any public issue

received such massive support in all the news media, local as well as national.”2 The organizers of

Earth Day sought to define the celebration as a “commitment to make life better, not just bigger

and faster, to provide real rather than rhetorical solutions” to the environmental crisis.3 As broadly

as possible, Earth Day intended to demonstrate the extent to which American values toward the

environment had changed—particularly in relation to the increased rejection of American standards

of acceptable risk—while also articulating the scope of this cultural shift on American society.

Earth Day also reaffirmed Commoner’s connections between peace and

environmentalism. The Vietnam War was still very much the source of fractious sentiment in the

United States, and anti-war activists were prominent among the Earth Day celebrants. Balloons

and banners across the country boldly stated that “war is the worst pollution,” “war is not healthy for

children and other living things,” and “Earth—love it or leave it.”4 Another Earth Day commentator

trying to assuage differences between antiwar and environmental activists concluded that “most

1 Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 5.

2Harold Sprout, “The Environmental Crisis in the Context of American Politics,” in The Politics of Ecosuicide
edited by Leslie L. Roos Jr. (New York: Holt, Rhinehart, and Winston, 1971), 49.

3 From the organizers’ manifesto, as quoted by the Associated Press, “Earth Day Organizers Hope to Halt

Pollution,” The Oregonian, 22 April 1970, 8.

4Joseph Lelyveld, “Mood is Joyful as City Gives its Support,” New York Times, 23 April 1970, 1, 30.
Quotation is from page 30; and “Angry Coordinator of Earth Day,” New York Times, 30.
 158

people don’t want the world to go up in smoke—or under in smog.”5 Commoner was far more

explicit in making the connection. At an Earth Day talk at Brown University, he charged that the

herbicide attacks on Vietnamese forests and agricultural fields constituted “the first ecological

warfare conducted by the U.S. since the attacks on American Indians.”6 In the days preceding 22

April, Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes’s Washington, D.C. office was deluged with requests for

information, slogans, and banners. When one visitor asked for a bumper sticker, one of Hayes’s

young staff members reportedly replied: “we don’t have any bumper stickers. You want to know

why? They go on automobiles.”7 Indeed, Earth Day marked a popular association between

environmental health and conservationist principles. By no stretch of the imagination did Earth Day

revelers share a uniform notion of what environmentalism was or what the day stood for, but there

did appear to be a general acceptance that environmental health—broadly defined—was inherently

connected to physical and spiritual human health, defined equally broadly. And certainly, Earth

Day represented a forum in which the ecological message could be applied holistically. Hayes, a

25-year-old Harvard law student, presented an expansive interpretation of the environmental crisis

and Earth Day’s ambitions at a press conference in Washington, D.C., when he exclaimed:

“ecology is concerned with the total system—not just the way it disposes of its garbage.”8

When Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson conceived of Earth Day in November 1969, he

could not have imagined the extent to which Americans would heed his call for a nationwide

environmental teach-in on college campuses. Nelson would submit that Earth Day ultimately

5 Robb Baker, “Earth Day: A Commie Plot?” Chicago Tribune, 22 April 1970, Section 2, 4.

6 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 22 April 1970 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 131), 17.

7 “Angry Coordinator of Earth Day,” 30.

8 Hayes’s press statement is reprinted in The Living Wilderness 34 (Spring 1970), 12-13.
 159

represented “truly an astonishing grass-roots explosion.”9 Congress stood in recess, the National

Education Association estimated that 10,000,000 public school children participated in teach-in

programs, and citizen groups in more than 2,000 communities across the United States took to the

streets.10 In all, some 20,000,000 Americans participated in public Earth Day activities across the

country, making the first Earth Day the largest single-day public demonstration in American history.

In New York City, Fifth Avenue was closed to traffic between 59th and 14th Streets for two hours

after noon, while 14th Street between Third and Seventh Avenues, “left free for pedestrians

between noon and midnight, became an ecological carnival.”11 Despite a notable absence of smog

in Los Angeles as a result of cooler than average temperatures, hosts of students and activists

attacked air pollution across the city. University of Southern California students buried an

automobile engine—one of many buried across the country—as the Tommy Trojan statue

witnessed the proceedings from behind a gas mask.12 At an anti-pollution rally in Atlanta’s Hurt

Park, a sign reading “Fight Dirty” reportedly “summed up the thousands of words spoken

throughout Georgia … in observance of Earth Day.”13 Thousands also congregated on the

Washington Monument grounds at the Sylvan Theater for several hours of speakers and folk

songs, concluding with a performance by folksinger and environmental activist Pete Seeger, Earth

Day’s honorary chairman.14 Just outside the nation’s capital, fifteen housewives bicycled to the

9 Nelson is quoted in Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962-

1992 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 24.

10 Gladwin Hill, “Activity Ranges From Oratory to Legislation,” New York Times, 23 April 1970, 1, 30.

Quotation is from page 1.

11 Lelyveld, “Mood is Joyful as City Gives its Support,” 1.

12 Ed Meagher, “No Smog on L.A. Earth Day,” Los Angeles Times, 23 April 1970, Section 2, 1-2.

13 Sam Hopkins & Terry Adamson, “Earth Day Marks Assault on Pollution,” Atlanta Constitution, 23 April

1970, 1, 19. Quotation is from page 1.

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Potomac River, and held a stand-up picnic at a nearby dump after picking up piles of dead fish

from the shore.15 At the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, students collected signatures

on a big plastic globe, which they called the “enemy of the earth award” for 28 state Senators

accused of weakening recent anti-pollution legislation.16 In St. Louis, the United Auto Workers led

a parade through the city center, featuring a smog-free propane powered car, while in Tacoma,

Washington, high school students rode down the highway on horseback.17 1,500 students in

Louisville crowded into the school concourse at Atherton High School in a demonstration designed

to illustrate the problems of overpopulation, which ended with pushing, grabbing, and pinching. In

Madison, University of Wisconsin students braved freezing weather to greet the dawn with Biblical

readings and an apology to God for environmental abuse, while just up the road, high school

students in West Bend paid to take part in the destroying of a car, the proceeds going to a school

antipollution group.18 Even a goat in Centralia, Washington participated, wearing a sign reading: “I

eat garbage, what are you doing for your community?”19 In addition, elementary and high school

students across the country participated in collecting litter and cleaning community and city parks,

streets, and landmarks.

Earth Day deserves careful attention as a key event in the reification of American

environmentalism. Historical accounts that “periodize” American environmentalism often recognize

14 Herbert L. Denton & Claudia Levy, “March on Interior to Highlight Earth Day Activities in D.C.,” Washington

Post, 22 April 1970, A6.

15 Maurine McLaughlin, “Housewives Hold Picnic on a Dump,” Washington Post, 23 April 1970, A18.

16 Hill, “Oratory and Legislation Mark Drive on Pollution,” New York Times, 23 April 1970, 30.

17For St. Louis, see “Earth Has Its Day,” San Francisco Chronicle, 23 April 1970, 2. For Tacoma, see Hill,
“Oratory and Legislation Mark Drive on Pollution,” New York Times, 23 April 1970, 30.

18 Arthur Everett (Associated Press Writer), “U.S. Ignores Generation Gap, Focuses on Earth Day Drive,”

The Oregonian, 23 April 1970, 1.

19 Everett, “U.S. Ignores Generation Gap, Focuses on Earth Day Drive,” 1.

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Earth Day as that key moment when the movement became “modern.” The suggestion is that

conservation impulses and urban reform issues became allied under the same roof. But such

contentions to Earth Day’s role in the history of American environmentalism tend to limit the larger

evolution of American environmental values. Samuel P. Hays correctly asserts: “Earth Day was as

much a result as a cause.”20 Indeed, Earth Day 1970 might be recognized as the coming-out party

for modern environmentalism in the United States, inasmuch as the event demonstrated a

considerable public interest in issues of environmental health. According to the political scientist

Walter Rosenbaum, “in the early 1970s, environmentalists mobilized for political action in a

uniquely congenial climate of opinion; perhaps at no time in this century was the American public

more receptive to the environmental gospel,”21 and that congenial climate could never have been

realized without the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, Commoner’s public

information efforts in his opposition to nuclear weapons testing in the years preceding the 1963

Test Ban Treaty, and the growing recognition of the dangers inherent in the rampant technological

optimism that consumed American culture.

Environmentalism’s political power had a resounding impact in the White House, too. If he

was nothing else, President Richard Nixon was a cagey political survivor; his political re-

emergence after losing the 1960 election to Kennedy was testament to that. Very early in his

presidency, Nixon recognized that his administration would have to appear supportive of

environmental protection. While the silent majority that had put Nixon in power remained wary of

20 Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 52. Robert Gottlieb suggests that Earth Day was “a transitional
event,” tied in part to the earlier efforts to spark environmental concern within the American public, but also a template
for how to proceed. See Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement
(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 114. See also Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: The American
Environmental Movement (New York: Hill and Wang, 1993), 111; and Susan Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs: Earth
First! and the Environmental Movement (New York: Viking Press, 1993), 36.

21 Rosenbaum, The Politics of Environmental Concern, 6.

 162

the counterculture embodied in the antiwar movement, the New Left, and black power, polls

indicated that they were concerned about the environment. Indeed, concern about the

environment and support for Earth Day did not split evenly along traditional lines of generational or

political persuasion. In the days leading up the April 1970 festivities, Georgia Comptroller General

and a Republican candidate for governor James L. Bentley had sent out $1,600 worth of telegrams

at taxpayers’ expense, warning that Earth Day might be a Communist plot, because the date

chosen for the event was Lenin’s birthday.22 But on the left, journalist and social commentator I. F.

Stone called Earth Day a “gigantic snowjob” that diverted public attention from the ongoing war in

Southeast Asia.23 Another leading leftist voice, Ramparts magazine, concurred, calling Earth Day

“the first step in a con game that will do little more than abuse the environment further.”24

Capitalizing on the popular concern over the state of the environment—and without the risk of

alienating his core constituency—Nixon had signed the first Endangered Species Act in 1969 and

the National Environmental Policy Act in 1970, co-opting an issue commonly held by prominent

Democratic rivals such as Senators Edmund Muskie and Henry Jackson. He also devoted

considerable energy to the environment in his 1970 State of the Union address, calling

environmentalism the new “selflessness,” and announcing that “the great question of the ‘70s is:

shall we surrender to our surroundings or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make

reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land, and to our water.” Indeed,

22 Bentley’s use of public funds ignited a minor controversy. On Earth Day, Bentley stated publicly he would

pay for the telegram wires himself, amid criticisms from taxpayers. Sam Hopkins, “Earth is Getting Its Day, Finally,”
Atlanta Constitution, 22 April 1970, 1. See also “Anti-Earth Day Wires Cost Official $1,600,” New York Times, 23 April
1970, 30.

Quoted in Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century
23

(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995), 25.

24 “Editorial,” Ramparts (May 1970), 2-4. Quotation is from page 2. Stanley Aronowitz notes the traditional

tension between communist and ecological thought. He points out that “ecological thought was (and, to some extent,
still is) labeled ‘romantic’ and ‘petty bourgeois’ by significant sections of the Marxist left.” See Stanley Aronowitz, The
Death and Rebirth of American Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1996), 109.
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emblazoned over Commoner’s portrait on the cover of Time magazine in February 1970, was the

heading “Environment: Nixon’s New Issue.”25 But while Nixon offered his tacit approval of Earth

Day, he spent a routine day in his White House office, unable to get an invitation to speak; an

article in the Chicago Tribune the following day wryly noted: “Nixon seemed almost the only public

figure in the country not making a speech.”26 Meanwhile, outside the Department of the Interior,

2,500 demonstrators protested that department’s controversial oil leases, chanting “Off the oil!”

“Stop the muck!” and “Give Earth a Chance!”27 In Denver, antinuclear activists bestowed the

Colorado Environmental Rapist of the Year award to the Atomic Energy Commission, while at the

University of Alaska, Interior Secretary Walter Hickel was booed off the stage before he could finish

outlining administration support for the Alaska Pipeline.28 A Herblock cartoon in the Washington

Post on 23 April 1970 satirized the administration’s environmental policies, portraying an official

presenting the administration’s position on air pollution from the back of a car belching exhaust

fumes over a distressed onlooker. Beside the government official in the car were fat-cats

representing the auto and oil companies.29 For all the environmental legislation the Nixon

administration supported prior to Earth Day and in the years following, and as much as Nixon liked

the notion of comparing himself to Theodore Roosevelt as a Republican champion of efficiency,

Time, 2 February 1970. For Nixon’s State of the Union address, see “Summons to a New Cause,” Time, 2
25

February 1970, 7-8.

26 “Americans Rally to Make it Again Beautiful Land,” Chicago Tribune, 23 April 1970, 3. In Nixon and the

Environment, J. Brooks Flippen notes the dilemma Nixon faced. On the one hand, Earth Day constituted a remarkable
political opportunity to co-opt a traditionally Democratic issue, but Flippen points out that Nixon also risked “alienating
traditional conservative allies.” J. Brooks Flippen, Nixon and the Environment (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 2000), 10. In addition, Nixon aides were tentative about the partisan nature of the event; Earth Day was, after
all, conceived by a Democratic senator.

27 Hill, “Activity Ranges From Oratory to Legislation,” 30.

28 See Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 111.

29 For the Herblock cartoon, see Washington Post, 23 April 1970, 22.
 164

progress, and conservation, 22 April 1970 found the Nixon administration under siege by

environmental activists all over the United States.30

Sharing the Nixon administration’s astute observation that the environment was an issue

they needed to appear to support, the American business community, often the target of

environmental protests, also endorsed Earth Day. The Scott Paper Company pledged

$36,000,000 to control pollution at its plant in Washington State, and suggested it might spend an

additional $20,000,000 on its plant in Winslow, Maine.31 Dow Chemical and the Ford Motor

Company sponsored speakers at the University of Michigan teach-in; New York’s Consolidated

Edison provided an electric bus to New York mayor John Lindsay to facilitate his transportation

between scheduled events; and Monsanto reasserted its promise to become one of the industrial

leaders in pollution control technologies.32 Much of this corporate environmental benevolence was

met with less than sincere gratitude from activists who saw such outreach as nothing more than

another iteration of the Janus-faced nature of American industry and corporate greenwashing. In

Miami, yellow dye was dumped into sewage treatment plants to track the progress of wastes into

waterways.33 Also in Florida, activists dumped a dead octopus and several fish at Florida Power &

Light’s headquarters to protest the company’s thermal pollution in Biscayne Bay, and a group

called the “Environmental Vigilantes” deposited used crankcase oil into the reflecting pool outside

the Standard Oil of California building on Market Street in San Francisco. They acknowledged

their act was “indefensible—and indistinguishable from the corporate policy of Standard Oil

30For Nixon’s comparisons with Roosevelt, see Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 109. See also Flippen, Nixon
and the Environment, 74.

31 Richard Harwood, “Earth Day Stirs Nation,” Washington Post, 23 April 1970, A1, A20.

32 See Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 110.

33 Everett, “U.S. Ignores Generation Gap, Focuses on Earth Day Drive,” 1.

 165

Company of California,”34 but that was the point. By polluting the physical environment, American

business interests were increasing their wealth by socializing the costs of their industries. The

petrochemical industry, for example, made money only because it could pollute. The extent of

those social costs depended on society’s evaluations of the risk, and Earth Day indicated that the

American public was starting to consider the size of the bill too great.35

Even the media took the opportunity to criticize American business. The Washington Post

reported on the introduction of Hopfenmaier’s new public relations kit, demonstrating its support for

Earth Day at its rendering plant in Georgetown. As the manager spoke, “the big Hopfenmaier

smokestacks on the Georgetown waterfront were belching their regular emission of contaminants,

produced in the plant by ‘cooking’ livestock remains for use as fertilizer and soap by-products.” In

another display of environmental compassion, Washington-based Pepsi Cola Bottling Co.

marketing director James P. Anderson outlined the company’s new antilitter campaign and kit,

which contained litter bags, bumper stickers, “a brochure on a 28-minute beautification movie

starring Lassie,” and a letter to bottlers from Pepsi president James B. Sommerall asserting that

“you can be a leader in the civic activities of your community by participating in local antilitter

programs.” According to The Washington Post, however, “about half of yesterday’s Pepsi

production in Washington was packaged in the nonreturnable bottles and cans of the type

ecologists say contribute heavily to the nation’s mountains of refuse.”36 Already, many

environmental activists seemed unwilling to accept industrial and legislative compromises in place

of more large-scale action and prevention.

34 For Florida, see Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 111. “An Oil Spill on Market Street,” San Fransisco

Chronicle, 23 April 1970, 2.

35 K. William Kapp, The Social Costs of Private Enterprise (New York: Shocken Books, 1971).

36 Carl Bernstein, “Area Industries Jump on EarthDay Bandwagon,” Washington Post, 23 April 1970, A21.
 166

But as the Nixon administration and other politicians, corporate and industrial interests,

and (not least) the media jostled for public attention on Earth Day, there emerged a growing

concern that the message might be watered-down. As Robert Gottlieb observed, “what became

most disconcerting to the traditional conservationists was the intense media coverage of Earth Day

and the sense of discovery, especially by the media, that a new issue and a new movement had

emerged full-blown with little connection to earlier conservationist and protectionist movements.”37

Similarly, many environmentalists worried about the longevity of environmental concern expressed

by the participants of Earth Day. Frank Renshaw, the chairman of a teach-in sponsored by five

Cincinnati colleges, declared: “we hope that each participant, supplied with some of the facts about

environmental problems in his own back yard, will commit himself to a program of action.”

University of California zoologist Kenneth Watt shared Renshaw’s hope, but also expressed a

deeper concern. Speaking at Swarthmore College, Watt urged students to maintain the day’s

momentum. “The history of movements like this is not very promising,” he warned. “We had great

movements on civil rights and the Vietnamese war. The problems are still with us but the

movements have died away.”38 An Earth Day editorial comment in The Chicago Tribune echoed

Watt’s concern. “After the last speech has been made and the last car buried today,” it averred,

“we hope that Earth day will be followed by a quiet determination by everybody to enlist for the

duration in this war. … This will take more than speechmaking, or listening to speeches, or

publicity stunts. People, not machines, are the prime cause of our environmental troubles.”39 Their

concerns were ultimately well founded. Eight days after Earth Day, Nixon announced his decision

37 Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 108.

38 Associated Press, “Earth Day Organizers Hope to Halt Pollution,” 8.

39 “After the Talkfest on Earth Day,” Chicago Tribune, 22 April 1970, 20.
 167

to send American troops into Cambodia and within a week four students had been killed at Kent

State University in Ohio. Americans and the media turned their attention elsewhere.40

Commoner, himself, expressed a different source of dissatisfaction with the Earth Day

proceedings. “What surprised me most,” he wrote in The Closing Circle, “were the numerous,

confident explanations of the cause and cure of the crisis.” As Americans marched together

throughout the country, it seemed that every environmentalist had a different explanation for the

rise of the environmental crisis. Some blamed affluence; others blamed poverty. Still others

blamed human nature, capitalism, socialism, religion, or technology. Commoner continued:

“Having spent some years in the effort simply to detect and describe the growing list of

environmental problems—radioactive fallout, air and water pollution, the deterioration of the

soil—and in tracing some of their links to social and political processes, the identification of a single

cause and cure seemed a rather bold step.” The environmental crisis was much more complicated

than that, but during Earth Week, Commoner “discovered that such reticence [to accept complex

answers] was far behind the times.” In cleaning up litter and marching for clean air and water,

Americans seemed uninterested in the origins of the problem. “It seemed to me,” Commoner

reflected, “that the confusion … was a sign that the [environmental crisis] was so complex and

ambiguous that people could read into it whatever conclusion their own beliefs—about human

nature, economics, and politics—suggested.”41 Reflecting in 1985 on the inchoate outburst of

sentiments toward the environment, Commoner recalled that “there was damned little organization

at first; everybody was sounding off in one direction or another. What really held it together was

the very simple moral statement that future generations depend on the environment and we have

40 James T. Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1996), 750-755.

41 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 10.

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been blind as to what’s happening to it.”42 And here was the strategic problem the environmental

movement faced in the wake of Earth Day: “Like a Rorschach ink blot, Earth Week mirrored

personal convictions more than objective knowledge.”43 As Commoner found himself at the

vanguard of a new environmental movement, he saw it as his duty to articulate the origins and the

stakes of the environmental crisis and to confront the Babelian state of American environmental

concern. Just as American environmentalism was enjoying the height of its success, internal rifts

threatened to tear apart its tenuous alliances and growing political power.

Commoner was one of the most active figures involved with the Earth Day teach-ins, lecturing on

four different university campuses in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. The day before Earth Day,

Commoner was at Harvard University, where he outlined his agenda and motivations for the Earth

Day celebrations. “Everyone now knows that the environmental crisis is upon us,” he began.

“What is not so clear,” he continued, “is how we got into this mess and what we need to do to get

out of it.”44 Earth Day was an important event, therefore, because it offered the opportunity to chart

a path out of the environmental crisis. “I have come here because there is something I want to say

about the environmental crisis,” Commoner told Brown University students attending his Earth Day

lecture. “But I have also come here to learn.”45 For Commoner, the teach-in element of Earth Day

was critical to the continued success of environmental protection, conceptually and from a policy

standpoint. While issues of environmental health transcended generational barriers, Commoner

recognized the vitality of the student movements of the 1960s and hoped to channel that energy

42 Beverly Beyette, “Environmentalists: Three Who Believe,” Los Angeles Times, 6 June 1985.

43 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 10.

44 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Harvard University, 21 April 1970 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 36), 1.

45 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 22 April 1970, 2.

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into activism for the environment. Averting the environmental crisis was also a long term and

complicated mission; there was no quick fix. Students constituted a fundamentally important

constituency, Commoner told them:

It is marvelously fitting—and to me deeply moving—that the nation’s new fight for

survival is being led … by the youth. For young people and future generations are
the real victims of impending ecological catastrophe. You were born under the
shadow of the bomb. You are the first generation in the history of man to carry
strontium-90 in your bones and DDT in your fat; your bodies will record in time the
full effects of environmental destruction on mankind. It is you who face the frightful
task of seeking humane knowledge in a world which has, with cunning perversity,
transformed the power that knowledge generates into an instrument of
catastrophe.46

Like countless other professors, politicians, and activists, Commoner pointed to the gravity of

environmental decline and offered encouragement for the struggle to come. “The grinding

oppression of environmental deterioration … degrades the hope of our citizens in the future and

their will to secure it,” but grassroots activism to restore environmental health and enforce anti-

pollution ordinances promised to “give tangible meaning to the spirit of environmental revival.”47

There was hope. But Commoner was also determined to outline the course that he felt was most

important. Indeed, it was on Earth Day that Commoner introduced a more comprehensive

explanation for the environmental crisis, which would become the foundation for The Closing

Circle. “I should like to propose a thesis which, I believe, may provide some useful insights into

[the environmental crisis],” he told his Brown University audience. “The thesis is this:

environmental pollution is not to be regarded as an unfortunate, but incidental, by-product of the

growth of population, the intensification of production, or of technological progress. It is, rather, an

46 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 22 April 1970, 1.

47 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 22 April 1970, 20-21.

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intrinsic feature of the very technology which we have developed to enhance productivity.”48

Radioactive fallout; the production of photochemical smog; new detergents, insecticides, and

fertilizers; and countless other synthetic chemicals and carcinogens released into the environment

were all testament to Commoner’s position.

The problem seemed to arise from a misguided sense of scientific priority. Citing sewage

removal in an NBC interview that aired before Earth Day, Commoner claimed: “if we look at the

ecological facts, it’s perfectly clear that organic wastes belong in the soil; that is where nature can

accommodate them into the cyclical process. … If we can put a man on the moon it’s within our

power to collect the organic matter of sewage, handle it in a way to prevent the spread of disease

and get it back in the soil.”49 And herein lay another problem: In 1970, the United States could land

a man on the moon, but could not maintain a healthy environment for its own citizens. “The

environmental crisis, together with all of the other evils that blight the nation—racial inequality,

hunger, poverty, and war—cry out for a profound revision in our national priorities,” Commoner

insisted on Earth Day. “None can be solved until that is accomplished. But, tragically, the nation

remains immobilized by the cost of the Vietnam War and the huge military budget, by the talent-

and money-gulping space program, by the disastrous cuts in the federal budget for research

support, by the reduction in funds for the cities and education.”50

But if Commoner’s Earth Day message and his speeches and interviews before and after

Earth Day were consistent with the holistic nature of his larger environmental critique, only one

message consistently filtered through public and media discourses: Barry Commoner did not

48 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 22 April 1970, 3.

49 “Ecology: Interview with Barry Commoner,” NBC Interview, 17 April 1970 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC,
Box 35), 22.

50 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 22 April 1970, 20.

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consider current population growth to be a real ecological problem. This was a gross misstatement

and oversimplification of Commoner’s position, but it was his attack on population control

advocates in the United States that stuck in the popular interpretation of Commoner’s ecological

activism. The basis of Commoner’s talk at Harvard University the day before Earth Day was a

disavowal of population as the source of the environmental crisis. “In my opinion,” he declared,

“population trends in the U.S. cannot be blamed for the deteriorated condition of the

environment.”51 Commoner contended that the real source of environmental pollution came from

the proliferation of new, polluting technologies since World War II. “In most cases the increases [in

pollution] in the last 20 to 25 years have been in the order of 500 to 1,000%,” whereas the

concurrent changes in population were a more modest 40 to 45%. “Of course,” he continued, “if

there were no people in the country there would be no pollution problem, but the fact of the matter

is that there simply has not been a sufficient rise in the U.S. population to account for the

enormous increase in pollution levels.”52

Over the following year, people all over the United States wrote Commoner criticizing his

anti-population control stance. “Your April 22 speech at Brown University has recently come to my

attention,” wrote Ruth Troetschler of Los Altos, California, “and I was surprised that you, a scientist

with long-term environmental concerns, should have indicated that we do not have a population

problem.”53 Mrs. Lynne H. Perry of Austin, Texas asked: “isn’t it rather foolish and dangerous to

publicly sanction the continuation of indiscriminate breeding, to be unconcerned about the addition

of millions more tomorrow when we haven’t yet managed to cope effectively with the problems of

51 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Harvard University, 21 April 1970, 1.

52 Commoner, Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Harvard University, 21 April 1970, 2.

53 Ruth Troetschler to Commoner, 28 June 1970 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 240).
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the numbers we have now?”54 Dr. L. E. Marshall of Estherville, Iowa, charged that Commoner’s

public efforts to quell concerns about population growth in America constituted “overt, dangerous,

irresponsibility” that was helping the country “about as much as bubonic plague.”55 Even the

supportive letters suggested that the population question was culturally divisive and supporters of

Commoner’s position tended not to fully appreciate the radical nature of his larger message. Sister

Veronita Ruddy of Bloomington, Illinois, asked Commoner to “accept my congratulations for being

one of the few scientists who is not being influenced by the propaganda of Planned Parenthood on

the subject of over-population.”56

Commoner did oppose the suggestion that the environmental crisis in the United States

was attributable to overpopulation—“it is a serious mistake to becloud the pollution issue with the

population for the facts will not support it,” he told his Harvard University audience the day before

Earth Day—but he never dismissed overpopulation as a legitimate and very serious problem on a

global scale and especially in the developing world.57 What Commoner specifically rejected was

the notion that population control would solve the environmental crisis. It was important, then, that

American environmentalism take advantage of Earth Day and its considerable momentum to shift

the movement in line with the real source of the crisis. Never one to shy away from debate,

Commoner doggedly persisted in arguing against the population activists during the early 1970s,

engaging in what ultimately became a bitter and protracted division among environmentalists and

the American public.

54 Mrs. Lynne H. Perry to Commoner, 24 June 1970 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 240).

55 Dr. L. E. Marshall to Commoner, 11 June 1970 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 240).

56 Sister Veronita Ruddy to Commoner, 1 January 1971 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 240).

57 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Harvard University, 21 April 1970, 2.

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By Earth Day, ecologist Paul Ehrlich was the leading proponent of human population

growth as a cause of—and population control as a solution to—the environmental crisis.

Recognizing the environmental movement’s lack of priorities, Ehrlich emphasized the ecological

significance of global overpopulation as the catalyst for the existing environmental crisis and an

appropriate priority for environmental organizations. In his very popular book, The Population

Bomb (1968), Ehrlich had taken a neo-Malthusian approach to the environmental crisis, arguing

that overpopulation posed an ecological strain on the Earth’s carrying capacity and food production

limits. His argument was a modern adaptation of the British economist and demographer Thomas

Robert Malthus’s 1798 essay on population, which predicted an inevitable food supply crisis based

on the world’s multiplying population. Published anonymously in 1798, Malthus’s An Essay on the

Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvement of Society was widely read. The crux

of Malthus’s treatise was the difference in scale between population growth and growth in food

production. Whereas population increased geometrically (1,2,4,8,16), Malthus pointed out that

food production could only increase arithmetically (1,2,3,4,5). At some point, then, something had

to give. More food production not only required more land, though, but also more efficient

technologies—fertilizers and pesticides—in order to maximize yields. Agricultural land was

stressed and industrial output and productivity needed to increase continually. It was an

impossible cycle. Modern day Malthusians like Ehrlich believed the post-World War II

technological revolution was a response to population pressures. Pollution was the result of

population growth. Malthus hypothesized that demographic strains on natural resources—of which

food was far and away the most significant—was ultimately limited, and would be alleviated by

what he called positive checks: famine, disease, or war, which would reduce population size to a

more suitable equilibrium with its resources.58 170 years later, at a time when an American
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audience was never more eager to learn about the impending environmental crisis, Ehrlich

presented arguably the loudest and most persuasive treatise on the ecological problems of human

overpopulation.

In 1967, Ehrlich had given a population speech at the Commonwealth Club in San

Francisco, where David Brower of the Sierra Club heard him, and asked him to write a short book

on the population explosion. The Population Bomb was published the following year, issued in

paperback by Ballantine and the Sierra Club and sold 3,000,000 copies over the next decade.59

Having developed an objective appreciation of the problem of overpopulation through research and

from being influenced by William Vogt and Fairfield Osborn, Ehrlich traced his emotional discovery

of the problem to a trip to Delhi, India, where he discovered the “feel of overpopulation.”60

The streets seemed alive with people. People eating, people washing, people
sleeping. People visiting, arguing, and screaming. People thrusting their hands
through the taxi window, begging. People defecating and urinating. People
clinging to buses. People herding animals. People, people, people, people. As
we moved slowly through the mob, hand horn squawking, the dust, noise, heat,
and cooking fires gave the scene a hellish aspect.61

To Ehrlich, the causes of environmental deterioration were symptoms of an obvious chain of

ecological effects: “Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide,

multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon

58 For a good overview of studies in human population growth, see William H. McNeill, Population and
Politics Since 1750 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990). Population continues to be a rich field in
environmental history. For further reading, see Björn-Ola Linnér, The Return of Malthus: Environmentalism and Post-
War Population—Resource Crises (Isle of Harris: White Horse Press, 2003); Joel E. Cohen, How Many People Can
the Earth Support? (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1995); Massimo Livi-Bacci, A Concise History of World Population
3rd edition (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2001); John Bellamy Foster, “Malthus’ Essay on Population at 200: A Marxian
View,” Monthly Review 50 (December 1998), 1-18; and Jeffrey K. McKee, Sparing Nature: The Conflict Between
Human Population Grown and Earth’s Biodiversity (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003).

59 Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981),
311.

60 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 16.

61 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 15.

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dioxide—all can be traced to too many people.”62 According to Ehrlich, rises in pollution were a

result of more people consuming more products and creating more waste. Population increases

resulted in pollution increases. His solution was to control national and global populations: “we

must have population control at home … by compulsion if voluntary methods fail. We must use our

political power to push other countries into programs which combine agricultural development and

population control.”63 Not addressing overpopulation could have serious consequences, Ehrlich

warned in a quintessentially jermiadic tone. “There are only two kinds of solutions to the population

problem,” he argued. “One is a ‘birth rate solution,’ in which we find ways to lower the birth rate.

The other is a ‘death rate solution,’ in which ways to raise the death rate—war, famine,

pestilence—find us.” Naturally the former solution was preferable, but its implementation

presented logistical difficulties.64 While Ehrlich traced the environmental crisis to too many people,

he concluded by suggesting that overpopulation was both a catalyst and a symptom of

environmental decline. “In the long view,” he wrote midway through The Population Bomb, “the

progressive deterioration of our environment may cause more death and misery than any

conceivable food-population gap.”65

By 1970, the National Wildlife Federation had adopted a resolution that supported

restricting the American population to its current level, while the Sierra Club, which had published

The Population Bomb, also supported numerous population control programs. Indeed, the reaction

to Commoner’s opposition to population control in the United States and Ehrlich’s growing

popularity—he was a regular guest on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show—suggested that

62 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 66-67.

63 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, xi.

64 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 34.

65 Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, 39.

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overpopulation concerns had won the day. While Commoner barnstormed the Northeast on Earth

Day, Ehrlich spoke to 10,000 people gathered at Iowa State University. One Earth Day report even

noted the number of population control balloons apparent in New York City. As people celebrated

Earth Day on the streets, balloons bobbed above the crowd, many of them beseeching families to

“stop at two.”66

Population control’s relative success as an environmental platform on Earth Day only

intensified Commoner’s critique, however. Commoner disagreed vehemently with Ehrlich’s

population thesis, arguing rather that a lack of pollution control was the basis for the crisis. After

Earth Day, Commoner refused to budge on the population question and was not at all interested in

reaching some kind of compromise with the population advocates like Ehrlich. Over the space of a

few years, the population vs. pollution argument became bitter as Commoner and Ehrlich criticized

each other’s scholarship and character as well as each other’s conclusions. As the debate wore

on and the enmity grew, Commoner’s position became increasingly rigid.

Commoner had long kept up with concerns about the global human population crisis, and

was well aware of its existence. But to Commoner, mandatory birth control enforcement as a

means of reducing the global birthrate was neither pragmatic nor moral. And Commoner was also

fairly confident that such a program would not work. In June 1968, Commoner wrote an article

entitled “The Population Problem” for Planned Parenthood. Therein, Commoner drew connections

between population control and social progress, noting that “improvement in living conditions is

closely tied to an interest in limiting family size. People are more likely to want large families when

living conditions are difficult, because it means that there will be more children available to work …

and help support the family.” Conversely, as living standards improve, “people are more willing to

66 Lelyveld, “Mood is Joyful as City Gives its Support,” 30.

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limit family size.”67 Commoner acknowledged that a significant portion of the world’s population did

not get enough to eat, but he also linked developing world population growth to the expansion of

western industrial capitalism. On Earth Day, Commoner recognized that many countries in the

world did suffer from overpopulation, but noted that this was a result of “the exploitation of the

human and natural resources of the underdeveloped world by the technologically advanced

nations.” Citing Nathan Keyfitz’s demographic analysis of the effects of colonialism, Commoner

argued “the development of industrial capitalism in western nations in the period 1800-1950

resulted in the development of a one billion excess world population, largely in the tropics, as a

result of exploitation of these areas for raw materials (with the resultant need for labor) during the

period of colonialism.” The American—and northern world’s—technological revolution after the

Second World War “replaced tropical raw materials with synthetic ones” resulting in a diminished

market for the underdeveloped world’s natural resources. The increased population benefited from

modern medicines and agricultural technologies like insecticides, fertilizers, and

machinery—further reducing the death rate—but lacked the markets to secure higher standards of

living in the post-colonial period—thereby maintaining high birth rates. “The population explosion is

a cost of the western industrial society that we are so proud of,” Commoner concluded.68 The

previous December on an American Association for the Advancement of Science symposium,

entitled “Is There an Optimum Level of Population?,” Commoner had charged: “the population

crisis is the huge hidden cost of the wealth accumulated in the advanced nations as a result of the

Industrial Revolution. If the advanced nations are now confronted with the urgent need to pay this

67 Commoner, “The Population Problem” (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 26), 2.

68 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 22 April 1970, 10. Commoner expanded on this argument in

The Closing Circle, 245. See also, Commoner, “How Poverty Breeds Overpopulation (and not the other way around),”
Ramparts (August-September 1975), 21-25,58-59. For Nathan Keyfitz, see Keyfitz, "National Populations and the
Technological Watershed," Journal of Social Issues 23 (1967), 62-78. See also Clifford Geertz, Agricultural Involution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968).
 178

long-delayed debt, there is at least the moral consolation that it is their own.”69 In sum, rapid

population growth could be explained as being an intrinsic by-product of Western colonialism,

made exponentially worse by the more recent postwar technological revolution.

Commoner’s reaction to complaints of overpopulation in the United States was far less

gentle. On a panel with Ehrlich and fellow neo-Malthusian Garrett Hardin at the December 1970

meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Commoner argued that

“saying that none of our pollution problems can be solved without getting at population first is a

copout of the worst kind.”70 Commoner’s more extensive critique came the following year in The

Closing Circle, where he stated that Ehrlich had succumbed to the temptation of finding a simplistic

solution to a complicated problem. “Since the basic problems are themselves biological,” he

argued, “there is a temptation to short-circuit the complex web of economic, social, and political

issues and to seek direct biological solutions.”71 Commoner was convinced, however, that such

reductionist attempts would ultimately fail. “In the long run,” he insisted, “effective social action

must be based on an understanding of the origin of the problem which it intends to solve.”72

Because Commoner was convinced that polluting technologies and the free market that produced

them caused the environmental crisis, developing biological solutions—as advocated by

Ehrlich—to social problems was misguided.

Commoner wrote The Closing Circle partly in response to his portrayal in the 2 February

1970 issue of Time, in which he had been touted as the “Paul Revere of ecology,” with “a

69 Commoner, “Survival in the Environment: Population Crisis,” AAAS Annual Meeting, Boston, 29 December
1969 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 29), 17.

70 “A Clash of Gloomy Prophets,” Time, 11 January 1971, 56-7.

71 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 247-48.

72 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 283.

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classroom of millions.”73 As a result, Commoner had become a household name, and in response

to the celebrity and authority that Time afforded him, Commoner wrote The Closing Circle to justify

his standing. He took advantage of the opportunity to explain his own positions more carefully and

in so doing mounted a harsh criticism of Ehrlich’s neo-Malthusian argument.74

More significant than the “population explosion” to which Ehrlich alluded, Commoner

claimed that the earth had experienced a “civilization explosion.”75 The widely accepted

occurrence of an environmental crisis, he wrote, “tells us that there is something seriously wrong

with the way in which human beings have occupied their habitat, the earth.”76 Commoner argued

that the environmental crisis emerged as a result of poor technological decisions coming out of the

Second World War. World War II led to “not only a great outburst of technological innovation, but

also an equally large upsurge in environmental pollution.”77 Commoner believed that Ehrlich’s

biological interpretation of the causes of the environmental crisis failed to appreciate the socially

irresponsible uses of technology and the related over-consumption of material resources in the

developed world, which, if left unchecked, would continue to present increased social and

environmental problems. To Commoner, the pollution from ill-conceived technologies was the

natural expression of the free economy, driven at all costs to increase productivity, output, and

profit. In response to this conundrum, Ehrlich’s population thesis had argued that the only way to

limit output was to reduce population. To Commoner, this solution was “equivalent to attempting to

save a leaking ship by lightening the load and forcing passengers overboard. One is constrained

73 “Paul Revere of Ecology,” Time, 2 February 1970, 58.

74 Commoner interview with author, 15 November 2001.

75 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 114.

76 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 125.

77 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 133.

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to ask if there isn’t something radically wrong with the ship.”78 Suggesting that a better solution

would be more public access to and control over industrial and environmental decisions,

Commoner concluded that the rampant proliferation and dissemination of polluting technologies

was directly related to the capitalist system. Capitalism promoted a growth-at-all-costs free

enterprise system that excused environmental waste in the name of increased profit margins. In

The Closing Circle, Commoner promoted more environmentally responsible commerce through

incentives and penalties on polluting industries. At its most basic level, Commoner wanted to

transform modern technology “to meet the inescapable demands of the ecosystem.”79 This

strategy necessarily required radical changes in the capitalist system.

Indeed, for all the fire that Commoner flung at Ehrlich, the neo-Malthusians, and free

market capitalism, The Closing Circle was, first, a book about ecology and how ecology might help

the public to make sense of the environmental crisis. The ecological sciences constituted a

relatively new field of scientific inquiry. It was first conceived by Ernst Haeckel in the late 19th

century and was introduced to the United States in 1892 by the chemist Ellen Swallow Richards.

Since Richards, ecology had been associated with many of the country’s leading environmental

thinkers, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, René Dubos, and Barry Commoner. In spite of its growing

popularity through the 1960s, ecology had not yet developed a series of cohesive, simplifying

generalizations—laws—as more traditional scientific disciplines like physics had. Commoner’s

introduction of an informal set of Laws of Ecology was arguably the centerpiece—certainly the

best-remembered and most oft-repeated aspect—of The Closing Circle. Commoner posited that

the laws of ecology could be reduced to four:

78 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 255.

79 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 282.

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1. Everything is connected to everything else.

2. Everything must go somewhere.
3. Nature knows best.
4. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

Commoner’s Four Laws of Ecology are a social and historical phenomenon embedded in the

culture of crisis that pervaded the 1970s. They were not incontrovertible scientific fiats, but rather

an articulate roadmap for Americans seeking to understand the environmental crisis. Rather than

representing an infallible interpretation of the workings of complex ecosystems, Commoner’s laws

served as a useful synthesis that was accessible to a lay audience and one that advanced Rachel

Carson’s contention that humans and nature constituted what sociologist Ulrich Beck has called “a

solidarity of living things.”80 Commoner’s laws were not scientific in nature, but rather

generalizations that applied most effectively to the foibles of unchecked technological progress.81

Much of the research in The Closing Circle was not new—chapters on nuclear fallout and

Lake Erie were similar to material that had been worked into Science and Survival—but like Silent

Spring and The Population Bomb, The Closing Circle vaulted its author into the public limelight.

The celebrity status of the post-Earth Day ecologists on the frontline of modern environmentalism

helped keep the movement in the mainstream, but the public dissension in the ranks between

Commoner and Ehrlich threatened to obfuscate the movement’s overriding message. The

pollution vs. population dispute between Commoner and Ehrlich emerged as one of a series of

antagonistic debates within modern environmentalism, illuminating the histories of environmental

philosophy and politics as well as the continuing divisions within the contemporary movement.82

80 Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (London: Sage Publications, 1992), 74.

81 For more on Commoner’s Four Laws of Ecology, see Michael Egan, “The Social Significance of the

Environmental Crisis: Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle,” Organization and Environment 15 (December 2002),
443-457; and Egan, “Die Technologische Wende und Barry Commoners Gesetze der Ökologie: The Closing Circle neu
gelesen,” Natur und Kultur 4 (Fall 2003), 30-47.
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That public disagreement—outlined in The Closing Circle—would demonstrate that

environmentalism represented less a set of policies than a movement that sought to redefine

human values in order to address the existing environmental crisis, but it also illustrated the

precarious balance between disparate priorities. The dispute stemmed from Commoner’s distinctly

humanist approach to the environmental crisis, whereas Ehrlich’s interests lay predominantly in the

naturalist sphere. While Ehrlich interpreted the crisis as principally biological or ecological in

nature, Commoner explained the environmental crisis as having social origins, firmly rooted in the

irresponsible exploitations of technology by capitalism and colonialism.

While Commoner and Ehrlich championed pollution and population respectively as

explanations for the environmental crisis, still other “jeremiads” pointed toward affluence, poverty,

religion, and human nature, among others.83 The diversity of interests within the modern

environmental movement—from wilderness preservation to urban health policies—precluded the

progress of a unified “environmental” agenda. Among these divisions, the humanist-naturalist split

was the most basic and most fundamental, but it was also representative of the changing

landscape of American environmentalism after World War II. Whereas the pre-war conservation

movement had been predominantly shaped and led by white elites, the new environmental

82 A confrontation based on similar anthropocentric-biocentric themes would erupt almost two decades later
between the anarchist Murray Bookchin and Earth First!er Dave Foreman, but the Commoner-Ehrlich debate was far
subtler and came at a time when concern for the environment was more prominently in the spotlight. Whereas
Bookchin chastised Foreman and radical environmentalists of that ilk for what he considered misanthropy and a total
disregard for the social origins of the environmental crisis—as Commoner did of Ehrlich—Commoner and Ehrlich also
accused each other of hiding political arguments in the guise of scientific objectivity. Moreover, whereas Bookchin and
Foreman represented markedly different constituencies, both Commoner and Ehrlich were biologists and both used
their authority as scientists to impress their arguments upon their audience. For the Bookchin-Foreman conflict, see
Steve Chase, “Introduction: Whither the Radical Ecology Movement?,” in Defending the Earth: A Dialogue Between
Murray Bookchin and Dave Foreman, edited by Chase (Boston: South End Press, 1991). Defending the Earth also
contains more conciliatory position pieces from both Bookchin and Foreman. See also Murray Bookchin, “Crisis in the
Ecology Movement,” Z Magazine, July-August 1988, 121-23; and Bookchin, Remaking Society (Montreal: Black Rose
Books, 1989), 7-18. For a recent interpretation of the Bookchin-Foreman debate, see Mark Stoll, “Green Versus
Green: Religions, Ethics, and the Bookchin-Foreman Dispute,” Environmental History 6 (July 2001), 412-27.

For an overview of the myriad interpretations of the causes of the environmental crisis, see Commoner,
83

The Closing Circle, 5-13.

 183

leadership had acquired considerable momentum from a variety of minority groups. This

phenomenon manifested itself not only in a broadening of the mainstream agenda from

conservation to a broader sense of environmentalism, which incorporated more social concerns,

but also in the new movement’s leading philosophers. Indeed, by the first Earth Day, many of the

most vocal, articulate, and charismatic leaders of the movement did not come from the Anglo

middle class. Commoner and Ehrlich—both of Jewish, immigrant descent—were the most

prominent examples of this trend, but lawyers from immigrant backgrounds, like Ralph Nader

(Lebanese) and Victor Yannacone (Italian) also represented a burgeoning of more radical concern

and activity in environmental issues.84 Their emergence in the conservation movement resulted in

a significant shift in environmental priorities, from land use policies to public health. This trend

allowed for the prominence of Commoner’s more humanist environmental politics and for Time to

make Commoner its appointed leader of modern environmentalism in America.85

But the new and more diverse environmental movement was hardly uniform, as the debate

between Commoner and Ehrlich made clear. Born 29 May 1932, Ehrlich grew up with naturalist

tendencies, catching butterflies and frogs near his Maplewood, New Jersey home.86 A mentor at

84 For the new face of environmentalism and environmental leadership, see Stephen Fox, The American

Conservation Movement; and Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring.

85 This trend has continued since the 1970s. While the emergence of the environmental justice movement in
the 1980s represents one of the most important recent additions to the environmental cause, the humanist-naturalist
divide within environmentalism has hampered its full-fledged acceptance by the mainstream environmental
organizations. The environmental justice movement frequently concentrates on environmental protection at the local
level, because environmental hazards are inevitably more prevalent in poor and minority communities. Studies have
indicated that poor health—often a result of higher rates of environmental pollutants—inhibit social progress. To
environmental justice advocates, there is an inherent link between social and environmental protection. See as
preliminary examples Robert Bullard, Dumping in Dixie (Boulder: Westview Press, 1994); Luke W. Cole & Sheila R.
Foster, From the Ground Up: Environmental Racism and the Rise of the Environmental Justice Movement (New York:
New York University Press, 2001); Marcy Darnovsky, “Stories Less Told: Histories of U.S. Environmentalism,” Socialist
Review 22 (October-December 1992), 11-54; and Dorceta E. Taylor, “American Environmentalism: The Role of Race,
Class, and Gender in Shaping Activism, 1820-1995,” Race, Gender & Class 5 (1997), 16-62.

86 Good biographical information on Ehrlich is scarce. The most comprehensive work is in David DeLeon
(ed.), Leaders from the 1960s: A Biographical Sourcebook of American Activism (London: Greenwood Press, 1994).
 184

the American Museum of Natural History in Manhattan encouraged him to pursue butterfly

research, so Ehrlich studied zoology at the University of Pennsylvania. Earning his B.S. in 1953,

Ehrlich pursued graduate studies in biology at the University of Kansas, finishing his Ph.D. in 1957.

Ehrlich received a fellowship from the National Institutes of Health, where he continued his

entomological research at the Chicago Academy of Sciences, eventually taking a position at

Stanford in 1959. He was promoted rapidly to Bing Professor of Biology by 1967, the year before

The Population Bomb was published. While still at college, Ehrlich had been influenced by one of

the major trends in the naturalist writing of the late 1940s, which warned of the imminent

environmental crisis and the dangers posed therein by human population growth. At college, he

read Osborn’s Our Plundered Planet and Vogt’s Road to Survival, both of which demonstrated that

overpopulation and the abuse of natural resources would lead to widespread famine and

impoverishment.87 Ehrlich was persuaded that overpopulation represented the most significant

threat to the environment. While overpopulation introduced an unmistakably human element into

his environmental message, his concerns maintained a naturalist flavor. Aside from the social

repercussions, too many people also compromised the vitality of the earth’s ecosystems. Urban

expansion reduced habitat for various plant and animal species. Moreover, while Commoner’s

career explored nuclear fallout, pesticides, air pollution, water contamination, and urban waste

disposal and how they relate to public health and social progress, Ehrlich’s career focused on

genetic evolution and conservation biology.

Commoner and Ehrlich were the products of divergent politics, influences, and

perspectives. The combination of Commoner’s early fascination with nature and his immersion

See also Anne Becher (ed.), American Environmental Leaders: From Colonial Times to the Present (Santa Barbara,
CA: ABC-Clio, 2000).

87William Vogt, Road to Survival (New York: W. Sloane Associates, 1948); and Fairfield Osborn, Our
Plundered Planet (Boston: Little, Brown, 1948).
 185

within the radical social activism in New York nurtured his more humanist and socialist solutions to

resolving the environmental crisis. Similarly, Ehrlich’s liberal and suburban upbringing influenced

his penchant toward naturalism.88 Whereas Commoner’s politics were overtly socialist, Ehrlich’s

were far more ambiguous. His population control policy suggestions appealed to such divergent

political agendas as Chinese population policy, New Left opposition to consumerism, and

conservative diatribes on Mexican immigration and high birthrates among minorities. Commoner

criticized Ehrlich and others who advocated simple population control, because he felt they were

missing the real cause of environmental decline. “The favorite statistic is that the U.S. contains 6

to 7% of the world population but consumes more than half the world’s resources and is

responsible for that fraction of the total environmental pollution,” Commoner told his pre-Earth Day

audience. “But this statistic hides another vital fact: that not everyone in the U.S. is so affluent.

For that reason the simple test of the slogan ‘Consume Less’ as a basis for social action on the

environment would be to tell it to the blacks in the ghetto. The message will not be very well

received for there are many people in this country who consume less than is needed to sustain a

decent life.”89 To Commoner, the overpopulation perspective blamed humanity’s consumption and

reproduction for the environmental crisis, but ignored the corporate interests that disproportionately

plundered natural resources and spewed pollutants into the environment. With rather

88 Indeed, their subsequent centers’ locations and missions underlined the distinctions between their
humanist and naturalist leanings. In 1979, Commoner moved his Center for the Biology of Natural Systems from
Washington University in St. Louis to Queen’s College in Flushing, New York. In contrast, Ehrlich had located his
Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in remote Crested Butte, Colorado. Commoner’s urban center would focus on
such concerns as urban waste disposal while Ehrlich’s center remained very active in many prominent studies of
conservation biology.

89 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Harvard University, 21 April 1970, 3.

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characteristic panache, Commoner insisted that “pollution begins not in the family bedroom, but in

the corporate board-room.”90

Reading between the lines, Commoner interpreted in Ehrlich’s message—likely more

spitefully than accurately—a Social Darwinist argument in favor of population control.91 In 1803,

Malthus had revised and significantly expanded his essay on population. This second essay has

had a much larger impact on contemporary thought, largely because of Malthus’s severe attack on

the poor. Malthus saw that lower classes tended to reproduce far faster than middle and upper

class people and argued that the poor ought not be entitled to any kind of relief, claiming that any

assistance would only result in their producing more offspring, meaning more poverty. In a strange

reversal of traditional understandings, Malthus believed that poverty could be attributed to too

much charity, rather than not enough. In so doing, Malthus attacked England’s Poor Laws; he

opposed any notions that advocated egalitarianism on the grounds that excessive population

growth among the poor would only dilute the middle classes of society. Several generations before

philosopher Herbert Spencer coined the phrase, Malthus was effectively referring to a socio-

economic “survival of the fittest.” Certainly Ehrlich’s population control colleague, Garrett Hardin,

was not above such arguments, but sometimes Ehrlich’s rhetoric came in line with these less

90 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 22 April 1970 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 131), 20.

91 While Commoner’s rhetoric was unmistakably socialist, Ehrlich’s ambiguity not only got him in trouble with

minority groups, it also associated his arguments with less popular positions, which ultimately tarnished his reputation.
One notable example was the punned Miss Ann Thropy’s short essay on the beneficial environmental effects of AIDS
in The Earth First! Journal, which coincided with virulent anti-immigration polemics from radical environmentalists Ed
Abbey and Dave Foreman. The anonymous author wrote: “If radical environmentalists were to invent a disease to
bring human population back to ecological sanity, it would probably be something like AIDS. … As radical
environmentalists, we can see AIDS not as a problem, but a necessary solution. … To paraphrase Voltaire: if the AIDS
epidemic didn’t exist, radical environmentalists would have to invent one.” Miss Ann Thropy, “Population and AIDS,”
The Earth First! Journal (1 May 1987), 32. Of course, Ehrlich’s position on population was far removed from Miss Ann
Thropy’s extreme take—and it would be wrong to associate such diatribes with his own advocacy—but Miss Ann
Thropy’s short article illustrated the breadth of the division between the humanist and naturalist positions and, perhaps,
the humanist mistrust of the naturalist position. For more on the population and immigration positions in Earth First!,
see Martha F. Lee, Earth First!: Environmental Apocalypse (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995), 96-114. See
also Zakin, Coyotes and Town Dogs; and Chase (ed.), Defending the Earth.
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savory arguments in favor of population control, especially when he talked about involuntary

population control. Commoner particularly objected to Ehrlich’s suggestion that coercion might be

necessary in order to arrest the world’s population growth, because of its social implications, which

“would condemn most of the people of the world to the material level of the barbarian, and the rest,

the ‘fortunate minorities,’ to the moral level of the barbarian.”92 Ehrlich recognized this problem. “I

agree with Commoner when he worries about the political implications of what I’m saying,” he told

Anne Chisholm. “I worry about them myself.”93

Because of their divergent humanist-naturalist beliefs, Commoner and Ehrlich differed on

whom they thought the environmental movement should be courting. Ehrlich’s naturalism clearly

catered to middle-class outdoors enthusiasts, who already comprised the majority of the

movement. In contrast, Commoner’s humanism was more attractive to the urban middle class and

carried more weight or credibility among minorities and groups whom environmental politics had

heretofore marginalized. Commoner raised the public’s awareness of the relationship between

living spaces and the environment. Whereas the mainstream conservation movement had

previously concentrated its efforts on wildlife and wildland preservation, Commoner advocated a

more social interpretation of the immediacy of the environmental crisis. While Ehrlich saw his

population critique as an addition to the existing environmental paradigm, Commoner envisioned

environmentalism as part of a more holistic social revolution. Commoner wanted the

environmental movement to be socially progressive. He interpreted a healthy environment as a

necessary condition for promoting a more egalitarian society.

92 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 297.

93Ehrlich quoted in Anne Chisholm, Philosophers of the Earth: Conversations with Ecologists (New York:
Dutton, 1972), 148.
 188

At the time of its publication, The Closing Circle was arguably the most comprehensive work on the

environmental crisis and its causes. While Commoner ultimately narrowed his critique to a single

cause—the profit-first mentality of the capitalist economy seeking reductions in costs of production

by making use of cheaper, but polluting technologies—his exposé claimed to have established

hypotheses and tested them. Commoner was the first to admit that even science was subjective,

but The Closing Circle’s tone seemed more rational and, perhaps, less jeremiadic, than other

works like The Population Bomb, even if his conclusions insisted upon radical changes in

environmental activities and political and economic systems. In presenting such overtly political

and social statements, Commoner reinforced his longstanding faith in public participation and the

role of scientific information. The environmental crisis represented more of a social than a

scientific problem. Any solution to the crisis was most fundamentally political, so the scientific

community’s primary duty was to disseminate scientific knowledge to enable and empower the

public so that it was sufficiently informed to make its own value judgments. It was a familiar refrain.

If Ehrlich approved of Commoner’s environmental and social concern, he was critical of

Commoner’s conclusions, his science, and his dismissal of the dangers of overpopulation.

Moreover, he became infuriated by the manner in which his views of The Closing Circle were

publicized. In December 1971 Ehrlich and physicist John P. Holdren wrote a very critical review of

The Closing Circle for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, which was to appear in the spring. In

their review, they called the book “inexplicably inconsistent and dangerously misleading.”94 The

crux of their critique rested on Commoner’s complete reduction of demographic factors to an

inconsequential aspect of the environmental crisis. Ehrlich and Holdren introduced a formula by

which to measure the various factors of pollution. They argued that environmental impact

94 Ehrlich & John P. Holdren, “Dispute,” Environment 14 (April 1972), 23-52. Quotation is from page 24.
 189

(pollution) was the product of population, affluence, and technology; the number of people, the

quantity of goods people consume, and the technologies people employ to produce the goods.95

They presented the compact formula as:

I=P•A•T

Essentially, this simple equation dictated that an increase in population or in consumption or in

polluting technologies would result in an increase in environmental impact. According to Ehrlich

and Holdren, the differences between Commoner and Ehrlich, therefore, depended upon the

emphasis given to each of the three factors. Ehrlich and Holdren stressed population and

affluence, while Commoner highlighted the significance of technology, arguing that population and

affluence were intimately linked to technology. Using their formula, Ehrlich and Holdren argued

that Commoner’s adherence to technology as the only significant factor of the equation to the

environmental crisis was problematic. “Obviously,” they contended, “the actual magnitude of the

environmental deterioration engendered by an adverse change in technology depends strongly

both on the initial levels of population and affluence.”96 Ehrlich and Holdren also accused

Commoner of bad science, stating that “examination of the basic mathematics alone, irrespective

of the definitions and analysis behind the numbers Commoner presents, shows that the

relationships are not what he claims.”97 They concluded by defending their population control

position, alluding to Commoner’s analogy of saving a leaking ship. “If a leaking ship were tied up

95 The history of this formula is far more complicated and extensive than this analysis allows. See Holdren,

“A Brief History of ‘IPAT’ (Impact = Population x Affluence x Technology),” unpublished manuscript, 7 September 1993.
For further discussion of the formula, see H. Patricia Hynes, “Taking Population Out of the Equation: Reformulating
I=PAT,” in Dangerous Intersections: Feminist Perspectives on Population, Environment, and Development, ed. Jael
Silliman & Ynestra King (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 1999), 39-73. For the environmental movement’s reaction
to the IPAT formula, see Roy Beck & Leon Kolankiewicz, “The Environmental Movement’s Retreat from Advocating
U.S. Population Stabilization (1970-1998): A First Draft of History,” Journal of Policy History 12 (2000), 123-56.

96 Ehrlich and Holdren, “Dispute,” 31.

97 Ehrlich and Holdren, “Dispute,” 31.

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to a dock,” they posited, “and passengers were still swarming up the gangplank, a competent

captain would keep any more from boarding while he manned the pumps and attempted to repair

the leak.”98 But while Ehrlich calculated population and technology as independent variables in his

equation—and one just had to assess the relative weight of each in the formula—Commoner

contended that population and technology were not independent variables at all. Rather population

and technology were dependent on forms of social organization and control.

Ehrlich and Holdren distributed drafts of their review widely among scientists, journalists,

and environmentalists with an accompanying letter that indicted Commoner and his ideas as being

dangerous.99 The Bulletin informed Commoner that it intended to publish the review, entitled “One-

Dimensional Ecology,” in its April 1972 issue and invited him to submit a rejoinder. Commoner

accepted the invitation, but insisted that his rebuttal appear in the same issue. Because

Commoner could not meet the April deadline, Bulletin editor Richard S. Lewis delayed publication

of “One-Dimensional Ecology” and Commoner’s response until the May issue. In the interim,

Commoner’s own journal, Environment, “scooped” the Bulletin by printing the Ehrlich and Holdren

review and Commoner’s response in its April edition.100 Ehrlich and Holdren were outraged. In a

98 Ehrlich and Holdren, “Dispute,” 38.

99 Sheldon Novick correspondence with author, 27 April 2004. A letter from Environment editor Sheldon
Novick to Ehrlich noted the extent to which the review had been circulated in advance, “judging by the amount of
discussion it produced all over the country, and the syndicated newspaper columns based on it.” Sheldon Novick to
Paul Ehrlich, 5 May 1972 (Paul and Anne Ehrlich Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford
University Libraries, Series 1, Box 23). In a memorandum to Environment’s Science Advisory Board a couple of weeks
later, Novick added: “The review was published by the authors, in mimeographed form, and widely circulated
throughout the country and abroad in a manner which precluded rebuttal. It quickly became a subject of widespread
discussion: I know of at least two instances in which it was used in undergraduate courses, and of two syndicated
newspaper columns which were based on the mimeographed version.” Sheldon Novick to Science Advisory Board, 17
May 1972 (Paul and Anne Ehrlich Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries,
Series 1, Box 23). For newspaper references to Ehrlich and Holdren’s draft, see Anthony Tucker, “The Prophets, and
Doom,” Guardian Extra (28 January 1972), 12; and Harold Gilliam, “The ‘Pollutionists’ and the ‘Depletionists’
Disagree,” San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle (7 March 1972), 28.

100 Environment has a long history, emerging first as Information in 1958 in order to help Commoner and
others distribute their findings on nuclear fallout. The journal went through several metamorphoses in the following
 191

published communication to the Bulletin, they wrote that they “were shocked to discover that Barry

Commoner and Environment pirated ‘One-Dimensional Ecology’ and published it without your

knowledge or ours. We cannot imagine how Commoner could ethically have done this.” They

expressed indignation that Environment would publish an “uncorrected preprint … circulated with a

letter stating that it was a ‘preliminary copy,’ that it was ‘not for publication.’” To add insult to injury,

Environment had also removed Ehrlich and Holdren’s title.101

Commoner clearly violated standard academic ethics in printing “One-Dimensional

Ecology” in Environment without permission and prior to its publication in the Bulletin. And while

Commoner openly defended the decision to scoop the review as his duty—part of his involuntary

responsibility—as a public citizen to spread information,102 the larger rationale seemed to stem

from his intent to defend his position more publicly after Ehrlich and Holdren had circulated their

draft so widely. Publication of his rebuttal in the Bulletin would hardly have reached the same

audience as the draft; because Environment had a larger audience, perhaps Commoner justified

his decision as a means of self-defense. Indeed, the draft’s copyright did appear to be in dispute.

As Environment editor Sheldon Novick wrote to Environment’s Science Advisory Board in defense

of his decision to publish the review: “The Ehrlich-Holdren article had been published without a

proper copyright notice, in a manner which placed it in the public domain, and which left me free to

republish it if I wished.”103

decade, becoming Nuclear Information in 1959, Scientist and Citizen in 1964, and, finally, Environment in 1968.
Regardless of the title, however, the journal has always sought to provide scientific information to a wide audience.

101 “Communications,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 28 (June 1972), 6. Two copies of the Ehrlich and
Holdren review and Commoner’s response were published. See “Dispute”; and “A Bulletin Dialogue on The Closing
Circle,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 28 (May 1972), 8-27 & 42-56.

102 Commoner interview with author, 15 November 2001.

103 Novick also rejected the notion that Environment had deliberately scooped the Bulletin. “It may bear

repeating that my decision to publish, and the timing of publication, were decided by me, and without reference to [The
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists]. The speculations of Ehrlich and Holdren about a calculated delaying tactic by
 192

But if ego was privately at the heart of the bitterness—and in that department, both

Commoner and Ehrlich were exceptionally well endowed—principle was the public rationale.

Ehrlich began transcribing telephone communications with Lewis and Environment Scientific

Director Kevin Shea and zealously solicited support from leading scientists and activists around the

country as a means of enhancing and publicizing his position as the wronged and aggrieved party

in the debate. In the meantime, by distributing his review of The Closing Circle so widely, he had

very consciously launched a concerted attack on Commoner to which Commoner could not easily

respond. His shock at Commoner’s parry was, at best, contrived. For his part, in his complicity

with the theft of Ehrlich and Holdren’s paper, Commoner deliberately avoided the high road. And

his confrontational manner only intensified the dispute. Just over a month later at the United

Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, Commoner and many of his

followers—students and international scientists who criticized family planning as a plot to reinforce

the hegemony of the white and industrialized northern countries—crashed a population session

and prevented Ehrlich from presenting his argument.104

In spite of the ugliness that pervaded their encounter, however, one is inclined to find

something admirable in the disparate motivations—though not the methods—that brought both

combatants to the fray. Both Commoner and Ehrlich fervently recognized what was at stake in

their dispute. Ehrlich very sincerely wanted to quell the public argument, fearing that any public

disagreement between the two would “’split the environmental movement’ and reduce the chances

Commoner are without basis in fact. Commoner’s delay in providing a rebuttal, a problem we are accustomed to with
most authors, forced me to delay the April issue of Environment by almost a month. There is nothing sinister about the
fact that [the Bulletin] was subjected to the same delay.” Sheldon Novick to Science Advisory Board, 17 May 1972
(Paul and Anne Ehrlich Papers, Special Collections and University Archives, Stanford University Libraries, Series 1,
Box 23).

For Commoner and Ehrlich at the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (5-16 June
104

1972), see Wade Rowland, The Plot to Save the World (Vancouver: Clarke, Irwin & Co., 1973), 129-131.
 193

of effective action toward environmental improvement.”105 To Ehrlich, there seemed “little purpose

in deluding the public about the need to grapple simultaneously with overpopulation, excessive

affluence, and faulty technology,” but to Commoner, silencing the debate was unconscionable and

in violation of his commitment to public discourse and even the freedom to express dissent.106

Population control would not resolve the environmental crisis; of this Commoner was sure. Making

it a priority would impede real environmental improvement, especially if population growth was

mitigated by several other social factors and not strictly a biological phenomenon. Moreover,

Commoner was concerned that substantial attention to population questions would divert attention

away from what he considered to be the more pressing environmental issues: polluting technology

and a capitalist means of production that endorsed growing world poverty and a concentration of

wealth.

And while Commoner handled the situation poorly—and even tried to silence Ehrlich in

Stockholm—he did genuinely believe in the importance of public discourse and the value of

disagreement. A false conformity, he argued, would do an even greater disservice to the

environmental agenda; there was a big difference between discourse and compromise.

Commoner defended Environment’s decision to print “One-Dimensional Ecology” for a broader

audience by insisting that “if there is in fact a real and important difference between my views of

the origins of the environmental crisis and Ehrlich’s, then both of us are obliged to express them

openly; otherwise the mechanism by which science generates the truth—open discussion—is

thwarted and our obligations, as scientists, to inform the public, evaded.”107 There is little question

that he could have absorbed criticism more diplomatically and that his posturing inevitably hurt the

105 Commoner, “Dispute,” 25.

106 Commoner, “Dispute,” 44.

107 Commoner, “Dispute,” 25 & 40.

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dialog more than it helped, but Commoner was a hardened political warrior and was reluctant to

compromise or cede any ground. What had long been one of his heroic characteristics became, to

an extent, his tragic flaw.

Commoner didn’t jump over the line with both feet, but criticisms from outsiders suggested

that he did come rather close to finding himself on the wrong side of the divide between critical

intellectual and ideologue. On the wrong side of that separation, Donald Worster has argued,

social critics “become prisoners of ideology rather than masters of it.”108 Indeed Commoner and

Ehrlich both suffered publicly and professionally as a result of their protracted dispute. Letters to

both the Bulletin and Environment indicated that audiences—professional and popular alike—were

tiring of the debate. “Perhaps I am the only reader who feels this way,” one letter began, “but I

think that Ehrlich and Commoner deserve each other, and should spare the rest of us their tedious

controversies.”109 Appeal for peace between Commoner and Ehrlich and a renewed alliance

between their humanist and naturalist positions in their combined efforts to protect the environment

came from a rather unlikely source. In a letter to the editor of Environment in June 1972, folksinger

Pete Seeger offered a proverbial olive branch. In response to “Dispute,” published a couple of

months earlier, Seeger began by applauding both Ehrlich and Commoner, appreciating the

interchange, but hoping that it would not turn vindictive. “Commoner has convinced me,” he wrote,

“that technology and our private profit politics and society must be radically changed and quickly.

But I’m still working hard for Zero Population Growth, because … it’s a big world problem.” Seeger

rejected the false dichotomy presented in the humanist-naturalist debate and insisted that he was

on both sides. “The world is the concern of everyone,” he added. Seeger’s interest in linking and

108 Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford

University Press, 1992), 16.

109 “Communications,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 28 (September 1972), 2.

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promoting population and pollution control globally was that such a movement would serve as “one

of the world’s greatest educational drives.” Seeger saw the need for limits, but they did not need to

come singularly from one place. While he appreciated the critical significance of a more egalitarian

society, he also confessed that he wanted his descendants “to have room to walk on a lonely

beach, or climb a wilderness mountain, or yodel and make noise occasionally for the fun of it. …

The less crowded this earth will be, the better for them.”110

Seeger was right to address the manufactured division between humanists and naturalists.

His comments in Environment demonstrated that the chasm between naturalist and humanist

interests was largely conceptual, and that, from an activist standpoint, both were relatively

compatible. After all, Rachel Carson’s seminal work, Silent Spring, which warned against the

dangers of DDT, contained both humanist and naturalist messages, and in this respect, Silent

Spring’s significance in the history of American environmentalism can hardly be understated.111

Carson lamented DDT’s assault on birds and nature, but she also wrote vigorously on the dangers

it presented to humans, effectively balancing the impact of both social and biological factors. But

this is not to say that the Commoner-Ehrlich debate was moot. Carson had the luxury of writing

when environmentalism had not yet effectively broken into the mainstream. As in many other

social movements, harmony prevailed within the environmental movement, as philosopher Andrew

Feenberg has noted, “precisely in proportion to the burden of exclusion carried by those brave

enough to join.”112 Environmentalists discriminated between their priorities only after they had

110 Pete Seeger, “The Closing Circle: Readers Comment,” Environment 14 (June 1972), 40.

111 Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company). See also Yaakov Garb, “Change and

Continuity in Environmental World-View: The Politics of Nature in Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring,” in Minding Nature:
The Philosophers of Ecology edited by David Macauley (New York: Guilford Press, 1996), 229-256.

112Andrew Feenberg, “The Commoner-Ehrlich Debate: Environmentalism and the Politics of Survival,” in
Minding Nature, 257-282. Quotation is from page 257.
 196

entered the mainstream. The Commoner-Ehrlich debate, therefore, was historically significant

because it marked the first serious fracture within the movement since the energy instilled in it by

Silent Spring and Earth Day. Commoner and Ehrlich’s disparate opinions rested on the relative

significance they afforded to biological and social factors, but also on their interpretations of

science’s role in establishing a cure. For Commoner, every feature of the environmental crisis was

the symptom of social problems relating to capitalism; scientists could search for a panacea, but

the ultimate decisions belonged to the public. For Ehrlich, population growth was the product of

biological processes that had gone out of control; scientists needed to use their authority to lead

attempts to reduce its growth.

Back when the Committee for Nuclear Information was engaging the Atomic Energy Commission in

the debate over aboveground nuclear weapons testing, Commoner was particularly concerned

about the impact that debate might have on the public and especially on its trust in science. While

Commoner was adamant that citizens not entrust experts with all the decision-making powers, he

maintained considerable faith in science done properly. During the often ugly struggle against

nuclear weapons, Commoner was conscious that his attack on the eminent scientists of the Atomic

Energy Commission might confuse and thereby alienate the public from that crucial topic, and he

worked very carefully to ensure that the public was both adequately involved and informed. For

Commoner, the dangers of the post-World War II technological revolution signified not just the

need to re-engage scientists in a dialog, but now also to include the public. It was no longer

possible to argue privately within the scientific community over issues that had more social

implications than scientific ones. Commoner firmly believed that scientists needed to be a good

deal more open in their disagreements and disabuse citizens of their belief that they could leave

these problems to the experts. “Citizens are sometimes disturbed by a disagreement among
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scientists,” claimed an editorial in the May 1962 issue of the Greater St. Louis Citizens’ Committee

for Nuclear Information’s bulletin Nuclear Information on just that issue. “They look toward science

as a means of getting at objective truth.” But disagreement, the editorial continued, was a healthy

part of the scientific process: “open publication and criticism is the way in which science gradually

improves its knowledge and in time develops a body of information which is accepted by all

scientists.”113 The editorial, entitled “When Scientists Disagree,” sought to allay public concerns

about the growing levels of conflict and confrontation among scientists with respect to issues

pertaining to nuclear fallout. By 1962, the Committee for Nuclear Information’s battle against the

Atomic Energy Commission for control over nuclear information was at its height. The Committee

for Nuclear Information interpreted public scientific debate as a valuable “process which can guide

laymen in their effort to find and understand the best scientific information available.”114 Prompted

by increasing government secrecy on atomic issues, the mounting disagreement within the

scientific community about the potential hazards of nuclear testing struck a chord with the public,

which escalated its concern over the Atomic Energy Commission’s authority on questions of atomic

responsibility.

One of the interesting features of the Commoner-Ehrlich debate was the manner in which

both treated their respective positions as vital to the success of the public information movement.

In a sense, Commoner and Ehrlich were engaged in a kind of ecological brinksmanship, in which

neither could back down else their position would be deemed the less consequential. Further, the

politico-scientists were effective at learning and conforming to press standards of newsworthiness.

And controversy is a necessary component. So was the power of the sound bite. Commoner and

113 “When Scientists Disagree,” Nuclear Information (May 1962), 1.

114 Virginia Brodine, “On Scientific and Political Disagreement,” Nuclear Information (July 1962), 20.
 198

Ehrlich were both dynamic, charismatic, and distinguished scientists. And they had both learned

how to effectively communicate to all kinds of audiences. Ironically, then, the Commoner-Ehrlich

debate showcased two politico-scientists at the height of their powers. Just before the fall. In the

end, the media got in the way. In scrambling to present stories on this delicious controversy

between two of the most prominent ecologists, the media simplified their arguments to the extent

that they no longer really represented their respective positions. Ehrlich never meant to suggest

that population was the sole explanation for the environmental crisis and that minorities or

particular religious groups should be further marginalized by mainstream population concerns, and

Commoner never implied that the Earth could hold an infinite number of humans and their growing

consumption, but media oversimplification was the devil’s bargain of the politico-scientist’s entry

into the mainstream. Their arguments were far more nuanced and complicated, but in using the

media to convey their message, they had, to an extent, been hoist with their own petard.

Ultimately the debate contributed to an increased distrust of scientists and their warnings.

Commoner would appreciate the irony: After two decades of attacking establishment science and

insisting that the public should not trust specialists when it came to social and moral judgments, he

found himself a victim of his own advice.

 Chapter 5
Biological Capital

We must not delude ourselves with an idea that the past is recoverable. We
are chained and pinioned in our moment. . . . What we recover from the past is
an image of ourselves, and very likely our search sets out to find nothing other
than just that.
—Bernard DeVoto

To many, the 1970s was a period most aptly interpreted by Doonesbury’s characters, who, at

decade’s end, toasted “a kidney stone of a decade.”1 During the 1970s, the euphoria that followed

World War II dissipated into tension, angst, and crisis, punctuated by the Watergate scandal,

defeat in Vietnam, the oil embargo, and severe economic depression. Noting the popular response

to such unsettling events, Tom Wolfe proclaimed the 1970s the “Me Decade,” characterized by

self-exploration, fragmentation, and separation; Christopher Lasch called it a “culture of

narcissism,” which involved living in the moment and for self, not predecessors or posterity.2 “After

the political turmoil of the sixties,” wrote Lasch, “Americans … retreated to purely personal

preoccupations.”3 A sort of spiritual hedonism swept American culture and helped to insulate

Americans from the crises that pervaded public and political life. In a strange sense, it was a

perfect and yet impossible condition for the burgeoning environmental consciousness that had

progressively become an integral feature of the American mainstream through the 1960s. On the

one hand, the narcissist demanded a clean and beautiful environment; on the other, there existed a

disconnect between present, past, and future that rendered almost hopeless efforts for effective,
1 G. B. Trudeau, The People’s Doonesbury: Notes from Underfoot, 1978-1980 (New York: Henry Holt, 1981).

2 Tom Wolfe, The Purple Decades (New York: Berkley Books, 1983), 265-296; and Christopher Lasch, The

Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1979).
For Wolfe’s famous essay, see also Wolfe, “The ‘Me’ Decade and the Third Great Awakening,” New York (23 August
1976), 26-40. For overviews of the 1970s, see Bruce J. Schulman, The Seventies: The Great Shift in American
Culture, Society, and Politics (New York: The Free Press, 2001); Peter N. Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened:
The Tragedy and Promise of America in the 1970s (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, 1982); Arlene S. Skolnick,
Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty (New York: Basic Books, 1991); Jim Hougan,
Decadence: Radical Nostalgia, Narcissism, and Decline in the Seventies (New York: Morrow, 1975); and James T.
Patterson, Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).

3 Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism, 4.

 200

long-term environmental protection. The immediacy of the crises that struck the 1970s belied their

historical origins, and public and policymakers alike exhibited little vision in scrambling for short-

term fixes to bigger problems. Nowhere was this more apparent than in the popular response to

the energy crisis and the continuing demand for cheap energy, pervasive since the economic boom

after the Second World War.

The debate over the magnitude of environmental risks predated the 1970s, but it became a

defining feature of the environmental landscape during a decade dominated by a series of crises.

The decade began, of course, with Earth Day and the widespread acceptance of an environmental

crisis that demanded public and policy attention. After the unprecedented success of the first Earth

Day, Denis Hayes and other Earth Day organizers targeted “the Dirty Dozen,” the twelve

Congressmen with the worst environmental records; during the fall 1970 elections, seven of the

twelve lost their seats and the environmental movement presented itself as a legitimate and

powerful new force in Washington, D.C. This victory was followed by strong legislation to clean air

and water, control pesticides and pesticide use, and protect endangered species.4 The energy

crisis in 1973 gave credence to the warnings of environmentalists as oil shortages caused mass

hysteria in the press and at the gas pump, but it also muted the broader environmental agenda and

left Americans clamoring for cheap fuel and electricity, not responsible energy use and

conservation. By the middle of the decade, America found itself consumed in a dire economic

crisis, and the environmental momentum gained by successes early in the decade was dead. The

primary significance of Commoner’s activism during the 1970s, then, was to reassert and

demonstrate the social and historical significance of the environmental crisis. Commoner had

4 Among the more prominent pieces of legislation were the National Environmental Protection Act (1970), the

Clean Air Act (1970), the Clean Water Act (1970), the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (1972), and
the Endangered Species Act (1973).
 201

spent the 1950s and 1960s working to provide information about various environmental hazards;

during the 1970s he battled against spreading social apathy fuelled by cultural fragmentation to

illustrate the inherent interconnectedness between environmental decline, economic failure, and

social disillusionment. Most poignantly, Commoner emphasized the direct relationship between

environmental protection and economic sustainability.

“We are living in a false prosperity,” he warned in 1970. “Our burgeoning industry and

agriculture has produced lots of food, many cars, huge amounts of power, and fancy new chemical

substitutes. But for all these goods we have been paying a hidden price.” That price was the

destruction of the ecological system that supported not only human existence, but

also—ironically—the very industries that threatened it. “What this tells us,” Commoner surmised,

“is that our system of productivity is at the heart of the environmental problem.”5 Whereas

Commoner had previously courted the public with his information and sometime-jeremiads, he very

consciously recognized that government and business needed to have environmental destruction

explained in economic terms in order to be swayed by the gravity of the situation. Even before

Earth Day, Commoner was conscious of this, and in a 1969 address at the 11th annual meeting of

the National Association of Business Economists, he translated the environmental crisis into

economic terms:

The environment makes up a huge, enormously complex living machine—the

ecosphere—and on the integrity and proper functioning of that machine depends
every human activity, including technology. Without the photosynthetic activity of
green plants there would be no oxygen for our smelters and furnaces, let alone to
support human and animal life. Without the action of plants and animals in aquatic
systems, we can have no pure water to supply agriculture, industry, and the cities.
Without the biological processes that have gone on in the soil for thousands of
years, we would have neither food, crops, oil, nor coal. This machine is our

5 Barry Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Harvard University, 21 April 1970 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box

36), 5. In 1973, E. F. Schumacher reiterated this general premise in his surprisingly successful book, Small is
Beautiful, an economic tract that defied the maxims of growth and bigness, both perceived as integral to the free
market. E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper & Row, 1973).
 202

biological capital, the basic apparatus on which our total productivity depends. If
we destroy it, our most advanced technology will come to naught and any
economic and political system which depends on it will founder. Yet the major
threat to the integrity of this biological capital is technology itself.6

The message was ecological, but it was also unmistakably and profoundly economic. And it was a

damning indictment of the industrial forces behind the technological revolution. Commoner

summarized these ideas in The Closing Circle. “Environmental problems seem to have an

uncanny way of penetrating to the core of those issues that most gravely burden the modern

world,” he told his readers. “There are powerful links between the environmental crisis and the

troublesome, conflicting demands on the earth’s resources and on the wealth created from them by

society.”7

In economic terms, nature was a resource and pivotal to enterprise.8 But economists have

suggested that we also consider nature to be capital in order to make sense of the full relationship

between economic systems and the natural environment. Indeed, in essence, nature is the world’s

basic capital or wealth. Not only does nature sustain human life, it also drives human economies

with its resources. One of the most fundamental tenets of capitalism, however, is that societies

should not consume their capital base to pay for current expenses. In order to realize real growth,

6Commoner, “The Social Significance of Environmental Pollution,” 11th annual meeting of the National
Association of Business Economists, Chicago, 26 September 1969 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 130), 4.

7 Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 250.

8 The valuation of nature and natural resources is, of course, central to many environmental debates, as

different groups typically value resources differently, or reject the notion of attributing monetary value to places like old
growth forests. Nevertheless, one might conclude generally that environmental protests arise as disputes over the
value of a place or a resource. Risk is naturally a critical value in such disputes, and one that intersects the
quantitative and qualitative aspects of such decision-making. For good recent discussions, see Bruce Braun, The
Intemperate Rainforest: Nature, Culture, and Power on Canada's West Coast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002); and Terre Satterfield, Anatomy of a Conflict: Identity, Knowledge, and Emotion in Old-Growth Forests
(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2002). Alternatively, environmental protests also occur over
disagreements pertaining to property, ownership, or control over the same places or resources. See, for example,
Laura Pulido, Environmentalism and Economic Justice: Two Chicano Struggles in the Southwest (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 1996).
 203

economies need to separate wealth from income and live off of income rather than wealth;

enterprises that consumed their capital and called it profit invariably went bankrupt.9 During the

1970s, Commoner argued that, in principle, American technological systems threatened to

unwittingly commit this gross blunder.

The transition of wealth or growth from one market to another belied the social costs

hidden behind new, polluting industries, often registered in public health concerns and rising

unemployment. Economic theory had no place for these kinds of costs. But because they were

pursuing a traditional economic model, Commoner warned that all industrial nations were rapidly

degrading and dissipating their economy-sustaining and life-sustaining resource base, consuming

capital assets, and counting it as profit. In economic terms, here was another iteration of the

ongoing controversy over environmental risk.

In many respects, Commoner’s explanation for the continuation of high levels of pollution and

ecological destruction was strictly economic: it paid. “Soap companies significantly increased their

profit per pound of cleaner sold when they switched from soap to detergents; truck lines are more

profitable than railroads; synthetic plastics and fabrics are more profitable than leather, cotton,

wool, or wood; nitrogen fertilizer is the corn farmer’s most profit-yielding input; power companies

claim that capital-intensive nuclear plants improve their rate of return; and as Henry Ford II has

9 For a good introduction to the field of ecological economics, see Juan Martinez-Alier & Klaus Shlüpmann,

Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment, and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987); Herman E. Daly, Ecological
Economics and the Ecology of Economics: Essays in Criticism (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1999);
Malte Faber et al., Ecological Economics: Concepts and Methods (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1996);
Charles Perrings, Economics of Ecological Resources: Selected Essays (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing,
1997); Robert Costanza, Frontiers in Ecological Economics: Transdisciplinary Essays by Robert Costanza
(Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 1997); Costanza et al. (eds.), Getting Down to Earth: Practical
Applications of Ecological Economics (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1996); Costanza et al., An Introduction to
Ecological Economics (Boca Raton: St. Lucie Press, 1997); and Daly & John B. Cobb, For the Common Good:
Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press,
1989).
 204

said, ‘minicars make miniprofits.’”10 Industrial pollution was widely recognized as the cost of

postwar affluence; it represented jobs, productivity, and reduced prices on consumer goods and

services. Because the petrochemical industry could manufacture synthetic fertilizers in mass

quantities—which lowered production costs—synthetic fertilizers quickly came to dominate the

market. Pollution controls, sustainable energy consumption, and greater efforts to ensure

workplace safety and health were frequently marginalized, because they reduced the scale of

profits enjoyed by such high polluting industries. Pollution, inefficient energy use, and the

trivialization of worker safety became popularly accepted as the price of progress, but in reality

they cumulatively constituted a critical example of that false prosperity that would drive 1970s

America into an economic crisis. Controls, Commoner argued, were necessary to ensure that the

economic system did not destroy the environment, thereby cannibalizing itself in the process.

More to the point, the real costs of pollution were not accurately appearing on the balance

sheet. While private industries belched carcinogens into the environment, for example, the public

suffered rising cancer rates.11 Until fairly recently, economic theory made little room for

environmental factors, but the rapid increase in environmental problems since World War II

necessarily revised how exchanges took place in economic systems. In classical economic theory,

the exchange of goods, services, and wealth is mutual and voluntary between the exchanging

parties, but the technological boom after World War II created—or, rather, augmented—a context

10 Commoner, “The Energy Crisis: All of a Piece,” The Center Magazine (March/April 1975), 26-31. The

quotation is from page 28.

11 The classic work on the relationship between air pollution and public health is Lester B. Lave & Eugene P.
Seskin, Air Pollution and Human Health (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977). For more recent
discussions of the connection between pollution and cancer, see Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of
Environmental Deception and the Battle Against Pollution (New York: Basic Books, 2002); Sandra Steingraber, Living
Downstream: An Ecologist Looks at Cancer and the Environment (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997); and Jim
Tarter, “Some Live More Downstream Than Others: Cancer, Gender, and Environmental Justice,” in The
Environmental Justice Reader: Politics, Poetics, and Pedagogy edited by Joni Adamson et al. (Tucson: University of
Arizona Press, 2002), 213-228.
 205

for external impacts that extended far beyond the control or interests of the exchanging parties. In

The Closing Circle, Commoner stressed the significance of externalities, the infliction of

involuntary, non-beneficial, or indeed detrimental repercussions on another industry or the

environment or the public. “Mercury benefits the chloralkali producer but harms the commercial

fisherman,” he observed.12 With its pollution and unanticipated costs, the technological revolution

had introduced a whole series of “external diseconomies,” the external or third-party effects of

commerce.13 As early as 1966, Commoner saw this disconnect between the apparent and real

costs of new technologies. “Many of our new technologies and their resultant industries have been

developed without taking into account their cost in damage to the environment or the real value of

the essential materials bestowed by environmental life processes,” he told the National Industrial

Conference Board. “While these costs often remain hidden in the past, now they have become

blatantly obvious in the smog which blankets our cities and the pollutants which poison our water

supplies. If we choose to allow this huge and growing debt to accumulate further, the environment

may eventually be damaged beyond its capacity for self-repair.”14

Air pollution was indeed an excellent example of external diseconomies. Concerns about

air pollution were a prevalent part of the environmental crisis. The proliferation of carbon

monoxide, sulfur oxides, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter into ambient air

posed—individually and in combination—serious health hazards. According to political scientist

Walter Rosenbaum, resulting property damage was also enormous.15 A 1972 Environmental

12 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 253.

13 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 253.

14 Commoner, “A Scientist Views Pollution,” address before the National Industrial Conference Board, New

York, NY, 15 December 1966 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 493), 13.
 206

Protection Agency study estimated that the total annual toll of air pollution to Americans could

approach $20 billion within five years. Of that sum, $7.6 billion consisted of destruction to

materials and vegetation; almost $8 billion was associated with residential property damage; and

health costs would exceed $9 billion. The Environmental Protection Agency study also

acknowledged the conservative nature of its estimate by noting that its calculations anticipated the

introduction of stringent air pollution abatement programs across the country. Those abatement

programs did not materialize in the Environmental Protection Agency’s five-year time frame.16

To Commoner, these externalities hid the true damage of the environmental crisis.

“Environmental degradation represents a crucial, potentially fatal, hidden factor in the operation of

the economic system,” he argued in The Closing Circle.17 Coal-burning power companies were

among the greatest polluters of air. Pointing to the disparity between their rising profits as demand

for electricity increased and the growing social and environmental costs, Commoner argued: “If

power companies were required to show on electric bills the true cost of power to the consumer,

they would have to include the extra laundry bills resulting from soot [from burning coal], the extra

doctor bills resulting from emphysema, the extra maintenance bills due to erosion of buildings [from

acid rain].” These were hidden expenses. “Their true account books are not in balance,”

Commoner continued, “and the deficit is being paid by the lives of the present population and the

safety of future generations.”18 As a result of these kinds of externalities, Commoner argued, “the

costs of environmental degradation are chiefly borne not by the producer, but by society as a

15 Walter A. Rosenbaum, The Politics of Environmental Concern 2nd edition (New York: Praeger Publishers,
1977), 31.

16 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, The Economics of Clean Air: Annual Report of the Administrator of

the Environmental Protection Agency (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1972), 1-11.

17 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 273.

18 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Harvard University, 21 April 1970, 5-6.

 207

whole.”19 If the public was involuntarily involved in paying these external costs, then surely it

deserved a place in the debate over how such social and environmental costs should be

determined. As Commoner noted in The Closing Circle: “A business enterprise that pollutes the

environment is therefore being subsidized by society; to this extent, the enterprise, though free, is

not wholly private.”20 Because it was cheaper to produce nonrenewable, plastic receptacles for

drinks than it was to use glass and then collect them for re-use, most bottling companies switched

to plastic. Because it was cheaper to produce and purchase synthetic fertilizers rather than relying

on the older systems of composting for nitrogen fixation, more synthetic fertilizers entered into

water systems and introduced contamination problems “downstream.” And here was the final

stage of external diseconomies as it related to economic growth and the environmental crisis.

More and more of the wealth accumulated in the hands of a select group of producers, while more

and more of the environmental risk—the red ink in the balance book—was out-sourced to the

public in the form of pollution, health risks, and increasing waste disposal problems.

This question of external diseconomies also resonated among labor groups and served as

further incentive for an alliance between labor and environmentalism. In their firsthand, and long-

term exposure to environmental pollutants during their manufacture, laborers themselves had long

been subsidizing a significant portion of the costs of production. Health risks associated with

mining and factory work had long been established.21 And occupational risks increased after World

19 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 268.

20 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 268.

21 There is a sizable literature on the history of occupational safety and health hazards. See, by way of
introduction, David Rosner & Gerald Markowitz (eds.), Dying for Work: Workers’ Safety and Health in Twentieth-
Century America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Christopher C. Sellers, Hazards of the Job: From
Industrial Disease to Environmental Health Science (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997); Claudia
Clark, Radium Girls: Women and Industrial Health Reform, 1910-1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1997); and Barbara Ellen Smith, Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners and the Struggle Over Black Lung Disease
(Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).
 208

War II. In the mid-1970s, for example, vinyl chloride, the raw material used to make polyvinyl

chloride (PVC), was linked to angiosarcoma of the liver, an unusual form of cancer that occurred in

strikingly high numbers among laborers in a number of polyvinyl chloride plants.22 Further,

polyvinyl chloride’s relative ubiquity by the 1970s—it was present in tile-floors, automobile

upholstery, wallpaper, plumbing, and clothing—suggested that the health risks incurred in its

production constituted an acceptable price given its centrality to economic growth.23 At the same

time, however, it was clear that those who profited from the environmental risk were not those most

directly exposed to the health hazards.

Assaults on the chemical industry and other industries resulted in the inadvertent

propagation of the myth that there existed a natural conflict between environmentalism and the

economy and one had to be sacrificed for the benefit of the other.24 Typically, attempts to curtail

economic growth resulted in job losses, a downward spiraling economy, and labor’s distrust of

environmentalism. According to one observer, Robert Gottlieb, “the slogan ‘No work, no food—Eat

an environmentalist,’ first heard in steel-producing communities during the 1973-75 recession and

later in timber-producing regions, symbolized the potential fissures between environmental and

worker constituencies.”25 Commoner acknowledged this problem in The Closing Circle. “The

22 See Markowitz & Rosner, Deceit and Denial: The Deadly Politics of Industrial Pollution (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2002), 191-192. For more on industrial disease and workers’ health as environmental
issues, see Sellers, Hazards of the Job; and Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water.

23 See Joe Thornton, Pandora’s Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy (Cambridge,

MA: MIT Press, 2000), 251-257.

24 No alliance between labor and environmentalists really materialized in part because of the effectiveness of
industrial campaigns against environmental jeremiads. Whereas Commoner had used rhetoric that made him a
protector of democracy against the bureaucrats of the Atomic Energy Commission, private industry proved to be more
successful in attacking Commoner, Carson, and environmentalists in general as the enemies of free markets, and,
therefore, Americanism.

Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental Movement
25

(Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993), 289.

 209

attempt to meet the real, social costs of environmental degradation, either through increased prices

or reduced wages,” he argued, “would appear to intensify the long-standing competition between

capital and labor over the division of wealth produced by the private enterprise system and worsen

the already intolerable incidence of poverty.”26 If industries were prevented from polluting, the

argument went, jobs would be lost and the economy would suffer. The record certainly indicated

as much. When Congress abandoned the supersonic transport project in 1971, environmentalists

hailed an important environmental victory, but it came in opposition to the unions who supported

the potential growth in jobs.27 Similarly, in 1970, when environmentalists blocked the construction

of a huge BASF chemical plant at Hilton Head, South Carolina, their success ensured the

preservation of an area renowned for its natural beauty, but perpetuated high unemployment, a

less publicized feature of the area.28 At the same time in Oregon, some unions and corporate

interests organized together to oppose the “environmental McCarthyism” of local conservation

groups determined to keep Oregon green.29 Such incidents—and countless others across the

country—placed labor and environmental interests on opposite sides of environmental decisions,

but Commoner insisted that “these manifestations of an apparent built-in antagonism between

labor’s goals and concern for the environment are misleading.”30

26 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 271.

27 For more background on the protest over the supersonic transport project, see Mel Horwitch, Clipped

Wings: The American SST Conflict (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982).

28See Thomas Donaldson & Patricia H. Werhane, Ethical Issues in Business: A Philosophical Approach
(Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996), 1-12.

29 A more recent development in this division occurred during the Spotted Owl controversy in the Pacific

Northwest. See Richard White, “’Are You an Environmentalist, or Do You Work for a Living?’: Work and Nature,” in
Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon (New York: W. W. Norton,
1995), 171-185. See also, William Dietrich, The Final Forest: The Battle for the Last Great Tress of the Pacific
Northwest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
 210

For Commoner, work place health hazards like the production of PCBs were instrumental

to the rise of the environmental crisis. “To a significant extent,” he wrote in Environment in 1973,

“the environmental crisis is an extension of problems that were once confined to the workplace to

the community as a whole; likewise, the burden of these problems, which was once borne almost

exclusively (and still most heavily) by the worker, is now shared by the entire population.”31 When

the externality came home to roost, the public rose up in arms. The disconnect between labor and

environmentalism stemmed more from a conceptual distance between the two interests than from

any kind of economic division of interests once the real costs of production had been assessed.

PCBs were first produced commercially in 1929, but went into large-scale production after

the Second World War, when they were used in electrical insulators, in heat-exchange and

hydraulic systems, in plastics, tires, some textiles, and carbon paper. Like mercury and other toxic

pollutants, PCBs resisted degradation, and entered into the ecological food chain. In their

chemical structure, PCBs resembled DDT, and ecologists were concerned that they were likely to

pose similar dangers to the ecosystem. By the early 1930s, the relationship between the

manufacture of PCBs and workers’ health had already been established. Early laborers in

manufacturing plants experienced skin diseases, like chloracne, which resembled severe acne,

and covered workers’ bodies with pustules, along with other ailments like liver failure. Moreover,

early public health specialists observed that PCBs were so stable that they could be carried home

on workers’ clothing, which frequently caused chloracne among workers’ wives and children. “By

30 Commoner, “Labor’s Stake in the Environment/The Environment’s Stake in Labor,” keynote address before

the conference on “Jobs and the Environment—Whose Jobs? Whose Environment?” San Francisco, CA, 28 November
1972 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 493), 3. See also, Commoner, “Workplace Burden,” Environment 15
(July/August 1973), 15-20. Quotation is from page 15-16.

31 Commoner, “Workplace Burden,” 16.

 211

the end of World War II,” Commoner explained, “it was known, from the workers’ experience that

PCBs were so toxic that industrial techniques ought to be controlled in order to avoid exposure.”32

In 1966, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) were identified in Baltic Sea fish, which incited

a widespread concern about their health and environmental effects. By 1969, the Food and Drug

Administration established acceptable limits for PCBs in foods, and in 1970, the Monsanto

Company declared it had withdrawn PCBs from sale for uses which might lead to food

contamination or other forms of ecological harm. Sales of PCBs in the United States dropped from

a high of 75,000,000 pounds in 1970 to about 35,000,000 pounds in 1971. But from the PCB

workers’ standpoint, those controls were a long time coming. “Although the hazard from PCB was

first discovered in the work place, in 1933, the problem was given relatively little scientific attention

… until 30 years later, when it was first recognized as an environmental hazard.” As Commoner

suggested, the consequence was an environmental focus that tended to exclude human health

from the spectrum of environmental concerns. “We seem to be better informed about the detailed

biological effects of PCBs on quail and minnows than we are about their effects on human beings,”

he continued.33

In many respects, Commoner saw the new technologies that developed after World War II

as being responsible for both the weakening of labor and the tension between labor and

environmentalism. That transition entailed a shift toward an economy that used energy—and not

32 Commoner, “Labor’s Stake in the Environment/The Environment’s Stake in Labor,” 9. More recent studies

have made connections between PCBs and cancer. See, for example,Thornton, Pandora’s Poison, 173-177. See
also Colleen F. Moore, Silent Scourge: Children, Pollution, and Why Scientists Disagree (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003), 78-116.

33 Commoner, “Labor’s Stake in the Environment/The Environment’s Stake in Labor,” 11. For the

relationship between labor and the environment, see Scott Dewey Hamilton, “Working for the Environment: Organized
Labor and the Origins of Environmentalism in the United States, 1948-1970,” Environmental History 3 (January 1998),
45-63; Robert Gordon, “’Shell No!’: OCAW and the Labor-Environmental Alliance,” Environmental History 3 (October
1998), 460-487; and Chad Montrie, “Expedient Environmentalism: Opposition to Coal Surface Mining in Appalachia
and the United Mine Workers of America, 1945-1975,” Environmental History 5 (January 2000), 75-98.
 212

laborers—to do its work, thereby marginalizing labor’s bargaining position. This new shift

emphasized the problem of externalities by reducing internal expenses, but increasing external

expenses—those borne by society at large—in pollution and unemployment. While the “gospel of

efficiency” had been the cornerstone of conservation practices at the beginning of the twentieth

century, private industry had become the staunchest converts to efficiency by the second half of

the century.34 Efficiency experts like Frederick Taylor, Charles Bedaux, and Henry Ford learned

that more efficient production translated into greater profits. During the first half of the twentieth

century, workplace techniques, habits, and materials were revolutionized in the name of efficiency,

progress, and profit.

However, greater workplace efficiency and productivity—and profits—often tended to

result in greater and less efficient consumption of petroleum and other fossil fuels for energy. As

Commoner outlined in his keynote address at the American Institute of Planners’ Annual

Conference in 1972:

Automobile engines have been redesigned to operate at increasingly higher

compression ratios; electric power, generated in very large power plants, has
increasingly replaced geographically-spread home heating directly by fuel;
materials, such as aluminum and certain chemicals, the production of which is
intensely power-consumptive, have increasingly replaced more power-sparing
materials; railroad freight haulage has been displaced by truck freight, which uses
six-times more fuel per ton-mile than the railroads.35

To Commoner, this was a rampant example of the economic system devouring its wealth and

calling it profit. It was also responsible, he claimed, for the series of crises that dotted the 1970s:

“each effort to solve one crisis seems to clash with the solution of the others—pollution control

reduces energy supplies; energy conservation costs jobs. Inevitably, proponents of one solution

34 For the “gospel of efficiency,” see Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The

Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959).

35Commoner, “Planning to Survive,” keynote address before the American Institute of Planners, Boston, MA,
8 October 1972 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 493), 13.
 213

become opponents of the others. Policy stagnates and remedial action is paralyzed, adding to the

confusion and gloom that beset the country.”36 It should come as no surprise that Commoner

considered the clash between pollution, energy, and jobs to be part of a larger, interconnected

whole. All four laws of ecology dictated as much: everything was, after all, connected to everything

else.

To Commoner, the successive crises constituted a breakdown in what he called the three

basic systems “that, together with the social or political order, govern all human activity.” The first

of these systems was the ecosystem, “the great natural, interwoven, ecological cycles that

comprise the planet’s skin, and the minerals that lie beneath it,” which provided all the necessary

resources to support human life and activity. The second system was the production system,

which consisted of the human network of agricultural and industrial processes. The production

system translated the ecosystem’s resources into goods and services—food, manufactured goods,

transportation, and communication, for example—which made up the real wealth that sustained

society. Finally, there was the economic system, wherein those products were exchanged and real

wealth was transformed into earnings, profit, credit, savings, investment, and taxes. Just as

significantly, Commoner argued, the economic system “governs how that wealth is distributed, and

what is done with it.”37 The three systems were intimately connected. As Commoner put it in The

Closing Circle, “wealth … is … produced by human actions which are guided by science, mediated

by technology, governed by an economic system, and exerted through the ecosphere.”38

As Commoner saw it, the dependencies between the three basic systems followed a

directional logic: the economic system depended upon the production system and the production

36 Commoner, The Poverty of Power (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976), 1.

37 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 2.

38 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 116.

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system depended upon the sustainable resource capacity of the ecosystem. But free market

capitalism had tried to reverse this logic. Because capitalism thrived on perpetual growth, the

economic system imposed continual and increasing demands upon the production system, which

in turn stressed the ecosystem. Such inefficient consumption of nonrenewable resources broke

with the kind of economic sustainability and security that Commoner advocated, but it was

suggestive of the economic confidence—or arrogance—that had propelled the American economy

during the postwar years. By the 1970s, however, that confidence was on the wane.

Since the end of World War II, the American economy had been buoyed by unparalleled, rampant

prosperity, unprecedented in its history. Indeed, such was the boom and sense of confidence,

during the 1960s President Lyndon Johnson had tried to fight the Vietnam War without raising

taxes. For a time, it seemed as though the bullish economy would sustain Johnson’s efforts, but by

the time he left office in 1969, his defiance of economic logic posed difficult problems for the Nixon

administration.39 After more than two decades of economic growth and prosperity, the bottom fell

out in the 1970s and the economy was in an acute state of crisis, which precipitated the onset of

stagflation, manifest by a series of related factors: productivity was in decline; unemployment was

on the rise and so were interest rates and inflation, in part a result of Johnson’s tax-free war; and

trade deficits, unbalanced budgets, and a growing deficit were stalling the national economy.

Sagging productivity, galloping inflation, and stifling unemployment—especially among minorities

and the millions of baby boomers now entering the workforce—constituted a difficult challenge for

the new Nixon administration, and it proved quickly that it was not up to the challenge.

39 Robert Hargreaves notes: “even at its worst, [the war in Vietnam] never directly accounted for more than

3.5% of the gross national product. But by dissembling about the true costs of the military involvement and attempting
to pay for it out of deficit spending, Johnson and [Robert] McNamara had unleashed forces that would sooner or
later—but inevitably—bring America to the reckoning.” Robert Hargreaves, Superpower: A Portrait of America in the
1970s (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 111.
 215

The socio-economic and environmental hazards inherent in the inefficient consumption of

energy hit home to Americans with the onset of the 1973 energy crisis. According to Walter

Rosenbaum, “on the eve of the ‘energy crisis’ of 1973, per capita American energy use exceeded

the rest of the globe’s per capita consumption by seven times and remained twice the average of

that in European nations with comparable living standards.”40 In October 1973, Americans

experienced a “crude awakening.” Angered by Nixon’s devaluation of the American dollar—which

had already resulted in raised oil prices and contributed to worldwide inflation—and the American

support for Israel during the Yom Kippur War, Arab leaders of the Organization of Petroleum

Exporting Countries (OPEC) imposed an embargo on shipments of oil to the United States. In

December 1973, OPEC raised the price of oil to $11.65 a barrel, almost four times the cost prior to

the Yom Kippur War. The oil embargo lasted five months—from 16 October 1973 to 18 March

1974—as Americans contended with what Nixon called “a very stark fact: We are heading toward

the most acute shortage of energy since World War II.”41

Nixon’s statement belied a dire miscalculation of the global economic climate on the part of

his administration. American policy dictated that Arab oil exporters needed American capital and

technology more than Americans needed their oil. After all, an attempted embargo in 1967 had

supported this point of view; amid regional instability and embargoes, the oil still got through.42

What had changed by 1973? In short: domestic oil production peaked in 1970. In the spring of

1971, the San Francisco Chronicle printed a cryptic one-sentence announcement: “The Texas

40 Rosenbaum, The Politics of Environmental Concern, 38.

41 Richard Nixon’s speech was published in the New York Times, 8 November 1973, 32. Also cited Carroll, It

Seemed Like Nothing Happened, 118. For a good overview of the American energy crisis in relation to the embargo,
see Martin V. Melosi, Coping with Abundance: Energy and Environment in Industrial America (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1985), 277-293.

42 For the oil crisis of 1967, see Yergin, The Prize, 554-558.
 216

Railroad Commission announced a 100 percent allowable for next month.”43 The Texas Railroad

Commission was effectively a government-sanctioned cartel that matched domestic oil production

to demand. In 1971, Texas wells began pumping oil at full capacity and domestic oil fields could

no longer keep up with American demand. In 1960, Americans consumed 9,700,000 barrels of oil

a day; by 1970, that number had grown to 14,400,000, and had climbed to 16,200,000 in 1974.44

Said Byron Tunnell, chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission, after it reached the decision to

pump at full capacity: “We feel this to be an historic occasion. Damned historic, and a sad one.

Texas oil fields have been like a reliable old warrior that could rise to the task, when needed. That

old warrior can’t rise anymore.”45 The strength of domestic wells had allowed the United States to

stockpile a surplus capacity of about 4,000,000 barrels of oil a day between 1957 and 1963. By

the 1970s, that surplus had dropped to 1,000,000 barrels a day, and the United States was forced

to become a major oil importer. American demand for oil, extraction at full capacity at home, and

growing dependence on an unstable and volatile part of the world for its lifeblood prompted former

Commerce Secretary Peter Peterson to wryly claim: “Popeye is running out of spinach.”46 It

certainly seemed the case. In 1967, 19% of oil for American consumption came from overseas; by

1972, that figure had risen to 30%, and 38% two years later.47 Oil imports more than doubled

between 1967 and 1973—from 2,200,000 barrels a day to 6,000,000 barrels a day—and the

43 Cited in Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (Princeton, NJ:

Princeton University Press, 2001), 4.

44 Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, 119.

45 Hargreaves, Superpower, 176. Also cited in Yergin, The Prize, 567.

46 Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, 121. Also cited in Hargreaves, Superpower, 176.

47 Patterson, Grand Expectations, 785; and Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, 119. Too, the energy

crunch extended beyond oil to natural gas. Indeed, to make matters worse, Martin Melosi notes that “in 1968, for the
first time in U.S. history, more natural gas was sold than was discovered.” Melosi, Coping with Abundance, 282.
 217

increasing importation of Arab oil, not to mention the enormous quantities of dollars held by Arab

oil countries contributed markedly to the devaluation of the dollar in 1971 and again in 1973.48

As a result, the Nixon administration’s position dramatically underestimated the American

dependence on foreign oil.49 According to Bruce Schulman, “the world’s great superpower seemed

suddenly toothless, helpless, literally and metaphorically out of gas.”50 The oil embargo

precipitated a series of events that demonstrated the centrality of oil to the American economic

system. The price of gasoline, heating oil, and propane climbed markedly, as did many

petrochemicals like fertilizers and pesticides that were made from petroleum products. Gasoline

prices, combined with the shortage of gasoline, depressed car sales, and the automotive industry

experienced a serious decline. According to a 1975 issue of Survey of Current Business, a

Department of Commerce publication, within a year of the embargo, the $5.3 billion decline in

gross auto product during the fourth quarter of 1974 accounted for more than 25% of the decline in

real Gross National Product. In simpler terms, the battered auto industry was pinched by the oil

embargo and contributed to the spreading economic alarm by laying off over 100,000

autoworkers.51 Increased fuel prices raised transportation costs and the price of agricultural

chemicals, both of which contributed to inflated grocery bills. Costs for heating went through the

roof.52 “Suddenly,” Commoner recalled after the fact in The Poverty of Power, “energy problems

48 Hargreaves, Superpower, 176. For oil importation numbers, see Yergin, The Prize, 567. In addition to the

limitations of domestic oil, Yergin also stresses the importance of OPEC’s growing strength and its ability to dictate oil
prices on the global market as contributing to the severity of the 1973 oil embargo. See Yergin, The Prize, 554-612.

49 See Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, 117-118.

50 Schulman, The Seventies,125.

51 United States Department of Commerce, Survey of Current Business 55 (February 1975), 2.

Between January 1973 and January 1974, the average monthly residential bill for #2 fuel oil, for example,
52

increased between 59% to 90%. Gas heating prices rose by as much as 25% and electricity prices by as much as
 218

were problems of inflation and unemployment; energy had become firmly enmeshed in the

deepening economic crisis.”53 The energy crisis brought the country to its knees. As Secretary of

State Henry Kissinger told Business Week late in 1974—ironically a year after receiving the Nobel

Prize for Peace—forceful action against Middle Eastern countries withholding oil might be

justifiable in preventing “some actual strangulation of the industrialized world.”54 A few weeks

earlier, Newsweek had quoted a “top U.S. official” as saying that “if the oil-producing nations drive

the world into depression in their greed, the West might be forced into a desperate military

adventure.”55

Commoner was very quick to pick up on the energy crisis as a theme that could be

exploited to emphasize his larger concerns about social, economic and technological systems in

America. “We live in a time of unending crisis,” Commoner told the Council on Foundations in

early May 1974, less than two months after the oil embargo was lifted.56 The energy crisis, he

noted, came on the heels of racial discrimination, urban decay, poverty, the hazards of automation,

the environmental crisis, the population crisis, and the growing demand for food worldwide. “And,

overshadowing all,” Commoner added a few months later at a public convocation sponsored by the

Fund for Peace, “war and the threat of war.”57 “Usually we attempt to solve each crisis in its own

63% over the same period. See Foster Associates, Energy Prices, 1960-1973 (Cambridge, MA: Ballinger Publishing
Company, 1974), 5-7.

53 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 34.

54 Cited in Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 265.

55 “Thinking the Unthinkable,” Newsweek (7 October 1974), 50-51. Quotation is from page 51. In addition to
such dire language, the article was accompanied by sketches of an airborne attack on oil fields.

56 Commoner, “The Energy Crisis: Implications for Foundations,” address at the Council on Foundations Inc.

25th annual conference, San Antonio, 10 May 1974 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 51), 1.

Commoner, “The Energy Crisis: All of a Piece,” address at “The Energy Outlook and Global
57

Interdependence” public convocation sponsored by the Fund for Peace in cooperation with the Scientists’ Institute for
 219

terms,” Commoner claimed, but he insisted that the energy crisis was special: “it sharply

illuminates the complex web of connections among all these problems that has made it so difficult

to solve each of them separately.”58

According to Daniel Yergin, after World War II, oil had become “the lifeblood of the world’s

industrial economies,” and its apparent shortage during the crisis sparked a series of debates

about energy production in the United States.59 “There are no easy answers to these questions,”

Commoner conceded:

But there is one way to begin to look for them. And that is to recognize that
energy problems will not be solved by technological sleight-of-hand, clever tax
schemes, or patchwork legislation. The energy crisis and the knot of
technological, economic, and social issues in which it is embedded call for a great
national debate—to discover better alternatives to the deeply faulted institutions
that govern how the nation’s resources are used.60

Energy was the “red thread” that connected ecosystem, the production system, and the

economic system, Commoner told a teach-in at Fresno State University in April 1976.61 Reliance

on fossil fuels—foreign or domestic—had to be curbed. As the oil embargo made abundantly

clear, nonrenewable fossil fuels would become increasingly costly as reserves were depleted, and

their escalating prices would cause inflation.

But was there really an oil shortage in the United States? Commoner wasn’t convinced.

While American oil companies and the Department of Energy insisted that the shortage was real,

Public Information, New York City, 20 November 1974. The paper was later published in The Center Magazine
(March/April 1975), 26-31. The quotation is from page 26.

58 Commoner, “The Energy Crisis: Implications for Foundations,” 1.

Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991),
59

588. Commoner agreed, claiming: “oil epitomizes the energy crisis. It is the dominant source of energy for most of the
world.” Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 11.

60 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 4.

61Tom Ruppel, “Industries Grab Profits, Waste Energy—Commoner,” The Daily Collegian (Fresno State
College) 27 April 1976.
 220

and that oil magnates were genuinely serving their country by importing oil from the Middle East,

Commoner drew on oil extraction studies to argue that oil companies had stopped looking for

American oil because it was cheaper to buy it from Saudi Arabia.62 Just as profitability had driven

American industries to embrace the postwar technological revolution, profitability created the

context for American dependence on foreign oil. The major oil companies got a higher rate of

return on their investment by producing and refining oil abroad. Due to declining oil supplies in the

United States, domestic exploration became more and more costly as drilling turned up more and

more dry holes. While the maxim “nothing ventured, nothing gained” hinted that more expenditure

would result in more successful wells in the United States, for the oil companies it was a zero sum

game. Major oil companies invested less in exploration in the United States owing to the

inexpensive and easily accessible oil supplies in the Middle East and Venezuela, where the

extraction of oil cost nearly one-tenth what it would cost at home (owing to exploration expenses).

As the energy crisis evolved into a prominent feature of the mid-1970s, disdain toward the oil

companies grew as they continued to enjoy multi-billion dollar profits throughout the energy crisis,

as demand for domestic oil outstripped supply and prices soared.

For their part, the major oil companies were caught between a rock and a hard place. On

the one side, the American public seemed to be experiencing withdrawal symptoms and criticized

the oil companies for not supplying enough oil. On the other side, the Arab nations were imposing

strict limitations on the amount of oil the companies could extract and where it could go. While

they wanted to alleviate the oil shortage in the United States, it was clear that the exporting

62 Commoner presented this argument in a three-part series that appeared in The New Yorker in February

and March 1976, before finding its way into The Poverty of Power later that same year. During the postwar oil boom,
there were seven major oil companies: Texaco, Exxon (formerly Standard Oil of New Jersey), Gulf, Mobil, Chevron,
British Petroleum, and Royal Dutch/Shell. Collectively, the companies were known derisively as “the Seven Sisters.”
Five of the seven were American corporations. For a history of the oil companies, see Anthony Sampson, The Seven
Sisters: The Great Oil Companies and the World They Created (London: Coronet, 1988). See also Yergin, The Prize.
 221

countries in the Middle East would not hesitate to nationalize their oil fields and leave the oil

companies—and the United States—literally and metaphorically high and dry.63 At the same time,

however, tax incentives made the importation of oil even more profitable for the major oil

companies. So while Nixon encouraged conservation and Americans fretted over energy

shortages, major oil companies reported fourth quarter profits in 1973—at the height of the

embargo—that were 57% higher than the previous year.64

In an attempt to alleviate their own public relations crisis, American oil companies engaged

in a vigorous advertising campaign to persuade American consumers that they were actively

engaged in resolving the energy crisis. In Time, Texaco told readers it had spent half a billion

dollars on exploratory drilling in the continental United States.65 In Business Week, the Sun Oil

Company lauded its offshore drilling tracts, and its success rate in finding gas and oil. “And that’s

what this country needs,” the ad concluded.66 Long term commitment to locating American oil

reserves and civic duty were also priorities of the two-page Exxon ad that appeared in the previous

issue of Business Week.67 But public opinion polls increasingly showed little popular support or

sympathy for the oil companies, which most Americans blamed for the crisis.68

In essence, the energy crisis represented a failing in the postwar technological revolution

and the popular enthusiasm that accompanied it. As James Patterson noted: “cheap oil has been

a key to American prosperity and economic growth in the postwar era, enormously benefiting major

63 Yergin, The Prize, 613-652.

64 Carroll, It Seemed Like Nothing Happened, 118.

65 Time, 24 September 1975, 8.

66 Business Week, 16 November 1974, 59.

67 Business Week, 9 November 1974, 26-27.

68See Alvin Richman, “The Polls: Public Attitudes Toward the Energy Crisis,” Public Opinion Quarterly 43
(Winter 1979), 576-585.
 222

industries such as automobiles and utility companies, accelerating large-scale social

transformations such as the spread of suburbanization, and stimulating the consumerism that lay at

the heart of postwar American culture.”69 But as oil prices soared, Americans found themselves at

a crossroads. “The energy crisis signalizes a great watershed in the history of human society,”

Commoner told his Fund for Peace audience. “What we do in response to it will determine, I

believe, for the United States and for every nation in the world, whether our future continues the

progress toward humanism and democracy, or ends in catastrophe and oppression.”70 The

response was underwhelming.

And here was a critical, missed opportunity. Response to the energy crisis could have resulted a

reversal in American policy similar to that of the hazards of fallout or DDT. There existed the small

window of opportunity to impress upon industry, policymakers, and the public the value of adopting

greener and more sustainable modes of production. Indeed, the aftermath of the energy crisis

seemed a unique chance to persuade these disparate interests that alternative modes of

production and consumption were not only feasible, but indeed preferable, environmentally and

economically. Ultimately, though, the cold reality of American over-consumption never struck a

chord with the public. Rather than constituting the kind of crisis that required direct and immediate

attention as had the information on fallout or Carson’s message in Silent Spring, the other side of

the energy crisis might be better understood in relation to the conclusion of the Depression and the

economic boom brought on by the Second World War. This, too, it was hoped, shall pass. And, to

an extent, it did. By the middle of 1976, gas and electricity consumption had returned to pre-

69 Patterson, Grand Expectations, 784. See also David Calleo, The Imperious Economy (Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 1982), 112-113.

70 Commoner, “The Energy Crisis: All of a Piece,” 26.

 223

embargo levels and the United States was importing a greater proportion of its oil than it had in

1972.71

Historian David Nye has suggested that the energy crisis was as much a cultural crisis as

it was a question of energy shortage. Nye argued that Americans perceived the crisis as a series

of cutbacks from energy suppliers rather than as a problem of over-consumption. National public

opinion polls supported his contention. When asked whether the United States should increase

energy production or conserve energy use, Americans consistently and overwhelmingly preferred

the former. Efforts to approve and build the Alaska Pipeline in order to transport oil from Alaska’s

northern slope to American markets seemed to environmentalists a palpable example of American

denial of over-consumption. In an even more grotesque state of denial, the Interior Department in

late 1973 announced it would issue a new environmental impact statement on oil leasing and

drilling in the Santa Barbara Channel, which, four years earlier, had been the site of the calamitous

1969 spill. Outside of Santa Barbara, the announcement created barely a ripple. The

fragmentation described by cultural analysts like Tom Wolfe and Christopher Lasch was already

deeply engrained. The subsequent response to the energy crisis provided strong evidence for

Nye’s claim, as policy and public interest focused on locating new sources of energy rather than on

cutting usage. In spite of a very legitimate scare, the energy crisis resulted in very few changes in

American energy consumption habits.72

Because of the complexity and dynamism of the multitude of factors that drive economies,

it is impossible to predict the outcome of social, political, and economic decisions (or else we would

all be successful stock investors). Optimism and the courage or willingness to gamble on favorable

71 Schulman, The Seventies, 126.

72 David E. Nye, “The Energy Crisis of the 1970s as a Cultural Crisis,” European Contributions to American

Studies 38 (1997), 82-102. For opinion polls, see Richman, “The Polls,” 583-585. For the Alaska Pipeline and Santa
Barbara proposals, see Flippen, Nixon and the Environment, 208-210.
 224

outcomes have long driven the American boom and bust economy, often at the expense of the

environment. According to Worster, during the Depression, “risk was treated … almost as a

positive value, as a needed spur to success. Without risk, there could be no gain.”73 But if the

environmental crisis signaled anything, it was the folly inherent in embracing uncertainty. In The

Poverty of Power, Commoner noted the contradiction between the gravity of the crisis and the

hopeful optimism of the American public: “on the East Coast, gasoline was so hard to find that

motorists spent hours in long lines of cars (their idling engines uselessly burning gasoline) waiting

to buy a few days’ supply.”74 This missed opportunity was not for lack of effort from critics of

American energy policy. While the energy shortage received plenty of attention from all kinds of

environmental groups, they found themselves engaged in a reactive response to the promotion of

nuclear power rather than a concerted public debate on the merits of limiting energy consumption.

Rather, energy consumption had to be reconceived in a manner that did not exhaust or pollute the

ecosystem.

That message did not resonate in the halls of political power. While the United States was

becoming increasingly dependent on foreign oil to satiate its power consumption needs, the energy

crisis was evidence that its access to oil could be severed. This realization led to Nixon’s 7

November 1973 declaration and the White House’s subsequent efforts to produce American

“energy self-sufficiency” by 1980. “Today the challenge is to regain the strength we had earlier in

this century—the strength of self-sufficiency,” Nixon told the nation in a broadcast from the White

House. “Let us unite in committing the resources of this nation to a major new endeavor. An

73 Worster, “The Dirty Thirties: A Study in Agricultural Capitalism,” Great Plains Quarterly 6 (1986), 107-116.

Quotation is from page 113.

74 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 34.

 225

endeavor that in this bicentennial era we can appropriately call Project Independence.”75 Nixon

promoted Project Independence as similar in scope and ambition to the Manhattan Project and the

Apollo space program, but notions of energy self-sufficiency as defined by the Nixon Administration

alarmed environmentalists, as it was tantamount to renewing the raid on domestic resources with

reckless abandon, rather than reducing consumption, improving efficiency, and developing clean

and renewable sources of energy. While his address touched ever so briefly on conservation

measures, the thrust of the new Nixon policy sought to stimulate the rapid development of coal

production and the widespread proliferation of nuclear reactors.76 Both provoked the ire of

environmentalists, because of the belief that further fuel exploration would accelerate the nation’s

energy demands and distract public attention from the reality of limited energy reserves.

Compared with oil, coal could be easily and relatively inexpensively located, but the ecological

impact of coal mining was increasingly taking its toll on the American landscape.77 Further, the

burning of coal emitted methyl mercury and sulfur dioxide, which Commoner called “an especially

pernicious pollutant,” because of its tendency to attack the lungs and its influence on acid rain.78

Much as coal use was seen as an ecological pariah that threatened to devastate the

American landscape and then poison its people with its emissions, the encouragement of nuclear

power plants provoked a similar firestorm. Project Independence indicated that Nixon used the

energy crisis as a means of promoting nuclear power as a solution to American energy demands.

75 “Transcript of President’s Address on the Energy Situation,” New York Times, 8 November 1973, 32.

76 J. Brooks Flippen, Nixon and the Environment (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000), 207.

77 For the impact of coal mining, see Melosi, Coping with Abundance. See also John Opie, Nature’s Nation:

An Environmental History of the United States (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1998), 349-353. For a global perspective
on the impact of coal mining, see J. R. McNeill, Something New Uner the Sun: An Environmental History of the
Twentieth-Century World (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), 31-32.

78 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 77-78.

 226

Through the 1970s, administrative support for nuclear power had gained ground, but with the

advent of Project Independence, Commoner accused Nixon of “using [the] hysteria over energy

shortages to get that particular camel into the tent.”79 In June 1973, Nixon appointed Dixy Lee

Ray, head of the Atomic Energy Commission, to lead a task force assigned to outlining a research

and development plan for the energy future of the United States. “That,” Commoner declared

bitterly, “is like asking the chief fox to work out a research problem in the chicken house.”80

The report was submitted on 1 December 1973 and closely followed Nixon’s guidelines.

The report insisted that “every effort short of administrative controls, if possible, must be made to

reduce energy consumption and to increase the technical efficiency of the energy system,” but

nowhere in the report was there any indication of what those acceptable efforts were.81

Predictably, of the five parts of the program to acquire and maintain energy self-sufficiency, Ray

promoted “validating the nuclear option.” She noted: “a self-sufficiency based on fossil fuels can

only be temporary,” and lauded the promise of nuclear power as an alternative that “must be

ensured and accelerated.”82 Greater dependence on nuclear power was also the realization of a

30-year-old ambition of many American nuclear scientists. As one piercing study suggested: “For

[American nuclear scientists], the transition to civilian atoms represented an indispensable social

legitimation of their scientific interests, the irrefutable historic justification of the primacy of nuclear

physics in the field of science and technology.”83 Robert Righter took the idea even further: “the

79 Larry Dubois, “Playboy Interview: Barry Commoner,” Playboy (July 1974), 55-74. Quotation is from page
58.

80 DuBois, “Playboy Interview,” 72.

81 Dixy Lee Ray, The Nation’s Energy Future: A Report to Richard M. Nixon, President of the United States

(Washington, D.C.: Atomic Energy Commission, 1973), 47.

82 Ray, The Nation’s Energy Future, 49.

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idea of redemption (or guilt) for the destructive power of the atomic bomb played a part in the

scientific community’s dedication to nuclear power.”84

Indeed, hearkening back to J. Robert Oppenheimer’s charge that the nuclear physicists

had known sin, the prospect of nuclear power ensuring American energy self-sufficiency surely

constituted some kind of redemption, though its rise in prominence had already peaked by the time

of Nixon’s endorsement. Growing commercial acceptance of nuclear power as a viable alternative

for generating electricity came on the heels of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. In December

1963—less than a month after the ban on atmospheric nuclear weapons testing—Jersey Central

Power and Light purchased a boiling water reactor for a plant in Oyster Creek, New Jersey. After

the 1956 Suez Crisis and increasing American dependence on foreign oil, nuclear energy emerged

as a powerful bargaining chip designed as an economic deterrent to keep oil prices artificially low.85

In retrospect, it was a bluff—nuclear power did nothing to reduce American demand for foreign oil

and never came close to assuring domestic energy self-sufficiency—but American utilities

companies ordered 235 nuclear plants through 1974.

1974 became the magic date for interest in nuclear reactors. Only 13 were ordered after

that date, and none after 1978. Moreover, more than 100 orders for plants were canceled between

1974 and 1982, even though several were already under construction.86 Electrical energy too

cheap to meter—Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis L. Strauss’s 1954 promise—never

materialized. In part, the failure of the nuclear power industry was a result of bad timing. Ironically,

83 Jean-Claude Debeir et al., In the Servitude of Power: Energy and Civilization Through the Ages (New

Jersey: Zed Books, 1991), 170.

84 Robert W. Righter, Wind Energy in America: A History (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1996),
150.

85 Debeir et al., In the Servitude of Power, 171.

86 John L. Campbell, Collapse of an Industry: Nuclear Power and the Contradictions of U.S. Policy (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1988), 4.
 228

a temporary drop in American electrical consumption after the energy crisis eliminated the need for

new power plants.87 But falling demand also coincided with stricter environmental regulations. The

cost of building nuclear plants that adhered to mounting safety concerns became exorbitant. This

marked another important environmental victory. The nuclear power industry developed in tandem

with the growing environmental consciousness that carried through the 1960s. Recognition that

environmental risks needed to be properly considered, concerns about radiation were widespread.

So were protests against local sitings of reactors for a variety of environmentally motivated

reasons, including the loss of scenery; thermal pollution from power plant discharges, which were

found to be responsible for dramatic fish kills in rivers across the United States between 1962 and

1967; and bigger questions about reactor safety.88 In their efforts to alleviate public concerns and

shore up support for nuclear power, utility companies’ costs skyrocketed. For example, after the

Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Corporation ordered a reactor on the Connecticut River, electricity

prices in Vermont quadrupled.89 In effect, the economic woes experienced by the nuclear power

industry represented a classic example of external diseconomies in practice. As Commoner had

observed in reference to the petrochemical industry: “when environmentally required changes in

technology are imposed upon these highly productive enterprises, these activities do not thereby

gain in productivity.”90 By adding environmental protection to the balance sheet, nuclear power

was priced out of the market.

87 Melosi, Coping with Abundance, 308.

88 Robert J. Duffy, Nuclear Politics in America: A History and Theory of Government Regulation (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 1997), 54-55. For a study of environmental opposition to nuclear power, see Thomas
Raymond Wellock, Critical Masses: Opposition to Nuclear Power in California, 1958-1978 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1998).

89 Duffy, Nuclear Politics in America, 70.

90 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 269.

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Nevertheless, at the behest of the Atomic Energy Commission, Project Independence

advocated a return to nuclear power. Commoner told Larry DuBois, in a July 1974 Playboy

interview, that the Atomic Energy Commission was “leading us blind into a cave of tigers, and I

think it’s totally irresponsible.”91 Two years later, in The Poverty of Power, Commoner outlined

what he perceived to be the absurdity inherent in pursuing a nuclear policy to stem the tide of the

energy crisis. His argument rested on the simple fact that as an energy source, nuclear fission was

inefficient and dangerous. Both constituted too high a risk to warrant serious pursuit. “The use of

nuclear radiation for the relatively mild task of boiling water violates the familiar caution against

attacking a fly with a cannon,” Commoner argued in a now celebrated analogy. “The fly is likely to

be killed, but at the cost of considerable unnecessary damage.”92 So, too, with nuclear power

plants. The most serious concerns related to a nuclear power program’s safety. As Commoner

frequently pointed out, the risk of a plant failure or reactor meltdown was so great that no private

insurance company would provide the kind of insurance that power companies desired.

Ultimately, it took the 1957 Price-Anderson Indemnities Act, which effectively provided for

government insurance of private reactor accidents, to develop the industry. In effect, private

industry in the United States, lauded for its willingness to embrace risk, would not build or insure

nuclear reactors until the federal government appropriated the risk.93 As the tragedy at Chernobyl

and the meltdown at Three Mile Island later suggested, nuclear power constituted a risk perhaps

too great to engage with. While nuclear power was touted as a cleaner energy source—its waste

notwithstanding—Commoner noted in 1990 that “with the accidents at Three Mile Island and

91 Dubois, “Playboy Interview,” 69.

92 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 99.

93 See, for example, Brian Balogh, Chain Reaction: Expert Debate and Public Participation in American

Commercial Nuclear Power, 1945-1975 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and Daniel Ford, Meltdown:
The Secret Papers of the Atomic Energy Commission (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986).
 230

Chernobyl, nuclear power—a presumably ‘peaceful’ technology, spawned by the deplorable,

infinitely dangerous technology of nuclear war—has reached its own unhappy maturity. … Nuclear

power has manifested its proclivity for malfunctions that threaten enormous damage to the

environment.”94

Nor was nuclear energy as environmentally safe as its proponents advocated. While it did

not emit the kinds of air pollutants that sullied oil and coal use, nuclear power produced radioactive

waste that raised serious disposal problems. Commoner highlighted the gravity and scale of this

problem in The Poverty of Power: “The waste produced by a billion-watt nuclear power plant … is

equivalent in radioactivity to about 2500 tons of radium. In contrast, the total amount of radium

used thus far in the world for medical and scientific purposes—all of it handled in very small

amounts and elaborately contained and shielded—probably amounts to a few pounds.” While its

high radioactivity posed dangerous problems, its release into the environment was potentially

lethal. “The radiation from the wastes produced by a city’s nuclear power plant … would be

sufficient to kill 100 times the city’s population.” Storage of such toxic materials also required

critical attention. “Nuclear wastes are persistent,” Commoner explained. “Their radioactivity will

remain at a very harmful level, and will need to be meticulously isolated from people and the

environment for about 200,000 years.”95 This was an especially precarious legacy to pass on to

future generations. With no easy solution for disposing of radioactive waste, the nuclear power

system adopted temporary storage facilities as an interim solution, but these spaces quickly

became overloaded. “Our nuclear cup runneth over,” Commoner observed critically.96

94 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet (New York: Pantheon Books, 1990), 35.

95 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 90.

96 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 93.

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According to Commoner, in supporting nuclear power as the solution to the energy crisis,

the Atomic Energy Commission had tried to suppress a report concluding that solar energy could

“easily compete with nuclear reactors as a source of electricity.”97 The 1973 report, authored by a

solar subpanel of the Atomic Energy Commission was prepared for Dixy Lee Ray in support of a

comprehensive federal energy research and development program. It suggested that an

aggressive research and development program in solar technologies could yield 21% of the

nation’s electrical demand—roughly 5.5% of the total energy budget—by 2000. The report

recommended a budget of $1 billion for this research and development. Ultimately, Ray’s final

recommendation budgeted $200,000,000 for solar technology, half the amount the subpanel

claimed for a “minimum viable” research program. But Ray treated the funds as a sizable

contribution, stating: “because solar energy systems are capital intensive and practical systems

have not been fully developed, Federal involvement in the program is warranted.”98 And then the

subpanel report seemed to temporarily disappear. The Commission initially refused to give the

report to Washington Senator Henry M. Jackson, Presidential Assistant Peter Flanigan, and

Senator James Abourezk, of South Dakota, who only received it after demanding it and citing the

Freedom of Information Act.99 Whether a cover-up occurred or not, it was clear to Commoner that

a more concerted effort was needed to develop affordable technology to procure solar energy and

to make it the centerpiece of the American energy policy.100 Questions of efficiency, safety, and

97 Dubois, “Playboy Interview,” 72.

98Ray, The Nation’s Energy Future, 117. Ray’s language in describing the solar energy option lacked
optimism. She concluded: “problems associated with public and institutional acceptability will require resolution in the
near-term.” Ray, The Nation’s Energy Future, 117. In contrast, Ray awarded $1,450,000,000 to the development of
nuclear power, claiming, “although controlled thermonuclear fusion has yet to be technically demonstrated, recent
program successes indicate high probabilities of success in being able to initiate and sustain fusion reactions. This
factor warrants emphasis in fusion research and development.” Ray, The Nation’s Energy Future, 115.

99 The story of the missing document is recounted in Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 142-144.
 232

waste disposal plagued the nuclear power project in large part because nuclear power sought to

defy the parameters of Commoner’s three basic systems, rather than accept those restrictions.

While promises of energy too cheap to meter drove the economic argument in favor of nuclear

power, its production and the disposal of nuclear waste exacerbated stresses on the ecosystem.

Further, nuclear power promised to preserve levels of consumption, even if those levels were

unsustainable in the long term. An economic system that propelled an ecosystem was doomed to

break down.

And even uranium was a resource that could be depleted. “The supplies of oil, natural

gas, and uranium are limited and rapidly becoming more demanding of capital and higher in price

as the readily exploited deposits are depleted,” Commoner wrote. “Expanded use of these fuels

would worsen environmental deterioration and, in the case of nuclear power, create new and

unmanageable hazards. It is now accepted as inevitable that future energy supplies, unlike

present ones, must be renewable and less harmful to the environment.”101 For Commoner, as for

many environmentalists, solar energy was the answer. “In effect, the sun is a huge, essentially

eternal nuclear reactor, assembled by the play of cosmic forces rather than by the hand of man,”

Commoner commented in The Poverty of Power.102 By 1979, Commoner saw solar energy as

“emerging as a potentially creative force in the economy, while nuclear power has become an

economic cripple.”103 The road to environmental and economic recovery ran through an imperative

change in the direction of American energy policy. “We have a surprisingly clear path to follow,” he

stated in the introduction to The Poverty of Power:

For the chronic under funding of research and development for alternative energy sources, see Righter,
100

Wind Energy in America.

101 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 121.

102 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 125.

103 Commoner, The Politics of Energy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), 33.
 233

It begins with the sources of energy, the fossil and nuclear fuels on which we now
depend, and the huge but still largely unused source—the sun. Here we need to
learn why those energy sources on which we now rely are so poorly adapted to
the purposes to which we put them; why they have begun to seriously disrupt both
the environment and the economic system. Then we need to look at the uses of
energy in the production system and discover why that system has been so
designed as to waste energy so blatantly. Here we will find powerful links between
the ways we use and misuse energy, capital, and labor. And only at that point will
it become evident that our current crisis is a symptom of a deep and dangerous
fault in the economic system.104

Commoner noted that debate over the relative merits of solar energy and nuclear energy

was strangely inverted. “Solar energy,” he commented in his 1979 book, The Politics of Energy,

“the oldest source exploited by human society … was usually regarded as an impractical, exotic

product of advanced science.” At the same time, nuclear energy—“certainly an exotic way to boil

water,” Commoner observed bitterly—was promoted as the more traditional stalwart, championed

by prominent scientific and government figures.105

And Commoner was not alone. Prior to the energy crisis, the scientific trade press had

actually devoted a number of optimistic articles to solar energy’s potential.106 One book, written by

reporters from the Research News section of Science claimed that with substantially more

research and development funding from the government, solar energy could be competitive before

1980.107 But while specialists were become more enthusiastic, the mainstream media paid little

attention.108 After the energy crisis, solar energy gained greater popular support. One 1976 Gallup

104 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 5-6.

105 Commoner, The Politics of Energy, 32. A variety of prominent environmental advocates came out

vociferously in favor of solar energy. Among the more popular works on the topic, see Amory Lovins, Soft Energy
Paths: Toward a Durable Peace (New York: Harper & Row, 1977); and Denis Hayes, Energy: The Solar Prospect
(Washington, D.C.: Worldwatch Institute, 1977).

106 Frank N. Laird, Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2001), 119.

107 Allen L. Hammond et al., Energy and the Future (Washington, D.C.: AAAS, 1973), 61.
 234

poll reported that solar power ranked first among Americans as a long term solution to energy self-

sufficiency, and second only to coal in the short term.109

“The only renewable source of energy is the sun—which, after all, comes up every day and

will continue to do so, its radiant energy essentially undiminished, for billions of years into the

future.”110 In his discussion of solar energy, Commoner included hydropower and wind power, both

of which were produced by the sun. Because the sun warmed the atmosphere unevenly, warm

and cool air cycled around, making wind, which could be harnessed to produce energy. Similarly,

some water molecules from surface waters evaporated in the sun’s heat and were carried by winds

to higher altitudes, where they would then fall as rain or snow—creating streams and rivers whose

downward rush to the sea could be used to produce energy. In addition, Commoner also took an

interest in methane and alcohol as sun-grown alternative fuels.111 These were natural, renewable

cycles. “Energy, radiated from the sun, drives the great biological cycles. Energy, derived from

fuels, powers nearly every production process.”112 Conceptually, the ecosystem might simply be

reduced to the flow of captured energy. That energy comes from the sun, which, through plant

photosynthesis, produces oxygen, which in turn allows for human and animal life on earth. Its

captured heat could also serve as a vital source of power. “Solar energy can not only replace a

good deal, and eventually all, of the present consumption of conventional fuels—and eliminate that

much environmental pollution,” Commoner argued in The Poverty of Power, echoing the Atomic

108 Laird, Solar Energy, Technology Policy, and Institutional Values, 119.

109 Richman, “The Polls,” 583-585.

110 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 121.

111 Commoner, The Politics of Energy, 40-43.

112 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 3.

 235

Energy Commission’s solar subpanel findings, “but [it] can also reverse the trend toward escalating

energy costs that is so seriously affecting the economic system.”113

In the wake of the environmental crisis and the energy crisis, why hadn’t energy

conservation (which only delayed the inevitable) and solar power (which sought to confront it)

caught on? In his Playboy interview, Commoner reminded readers, “Don’t forget that in plumping

for solar energy we’re bucking an enormously powerful, well-heeled atomic energy machine. Don’t

forget that the oil companies now own not the sun but uranium supplies.”114 For Commoner, a shift

toward solar energy would take power—political and electrical—out of the hands of the wealthy

and distribute it more equitably. As Commoner was also keenly aware, nuclear power required

centralization and hierarchy, while solar energy could be easily distributed and controlled more

locally and democratically.115 Commoner’s final chapter in The Poverty of Power turned into a

blistering critique of private enterprise and the capitalist system. Commoner had been working

toward such a conclusion throughout the book, but the conclusion made his overt advocacy of a

more socialist economic system perfectly clear. This was a risky approach, and Commoner

admitted he had some reservations about directly promoting socialism in The Poverty of Power.

To most Americans still experiencing the Cold War, socialism was a pejorative term, and not one

that would help win converts for Commoner’s critique of American energy policy. But the

113 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 122.

114 Dubois, “Playboy Interview,” 72.

115 David Bouchier, Radical Citizenship: The New American Activism (New York: Shocken Books, 1987),
114. Compare Commoner’s aversion to centralized hierarchy to Worster’s interpretation of water use in the American
West. See Worster, Rivers of Empire: Water, Aridity, and the Growth of the American West (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1985), 17-60. It warrants noting that solar energy only theoretically promised a more decentralized
system of energy distribution. Many solar energy advocates have argued that a major solar grid would continue to
require more centralized authority. Nevertheless, the idea of breaking from the corporate control of society has made
solar power an attractive option for environmentalists. Frank Laird distinguishes between the more conservative and
ambitious branches of solar energy advocates. See Laird, Solar Energy, Technologcal Policy, and Institutional Values.
See especially chapter 6.
 236

environmental crisis, the energy crisis, and the economic crisis, Commoner contended,

demonstrated that the capitalist enterprise was leading to imminent disaster. By the 1970s, even

industry was claiming that consumers should consume less and put more money into savings so

that business could access that capital to grow. Such economic realities, however, threatened a

decreasing standard of living. To Commoner, this was especially egregious, because as living

standards were lowered, poorer members of society would be the first to suffer job losses and

strains on their purchasing power. While economic crises hit everyone, they invariably hit the lower

sectors of the economic scale hardest.

According to Commoner, Americans would have to chart a new course to blend a newly

conceived economic socialism with the political democracy that was so fundamental a

characteristic of Americanism. Commoner recognized that repressive regimes in Cuba, China, and

the Soviet Union were hardly glowing endorsements for the adoption of socialist economic

principles in the United States, but he also noted that “no existing example of a socialist society …

is consistent with … the economic democracy of socialism.” Nevertheless, he believed Americans

were capable of the challenge. “It is appropriate, in 1976,” he continued, using rhetoric that

mimicked but countered Nixon’s rationale for Project Independence, “to remind ourselves that such

radical political innovation is a 200-year-old, if long-neglected, tradition in the United States.”116

The Poverty of Power was roundly complimented for the lucidity of his explanation in lay

terms of the complicated Second Law of Thermodynamics. Whether or not journalists, economists,

scientists, engineers, or Department of Energy employees commented positively on the strength of

Commoner’s argument in the book, they almost unanimously praised the quality of his chapter on

the Second Law of Thermodynamics in their reviews. And he had, of course, alluded to socialism

116 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 262.

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in The Closing Circle, when he had intimated that “the socialist system may have an advantage

over the private enterprise system with respect to the basic relationship between economic

processes and ecological imperatives.”117 While the capitalist system required perpetual growth,

the socialist economy—in theory, anyway—did not. His argument in The Poverty of Power was

less demure. As the review of The Poverty of Power in the Philadelphia Inquirer aptly commented:

“it was clear from The Closing Circle that sooner or later Commoner was going to have to come

right out with it. … Society would never be saved with the capitalist system.”118 Fearing the

inevitable reprisals, Commoner was quick to note that leading economists like John Kenneth

Galbraith were arguing the same thing. Reflecting on the woes of the energy crisis and the

imminent and related economic crisis, which he blamed on private industry, Galbraith had claimed

in 1975 that: “the word socialism is one we can no longer suppress.”119

Not everybody was convinced. On a CBS panel hosted by Walter Cronkite in late 1971,

when Commoner asserted that “the entire operation of the economic system depends on the

integrity of the environment [and] at present, the way we run our production is suicidal,” he was

rebuked by Herbert Doan of the Dow Chemical Company. Doan shared Commoner’s concerns

about environmental decline, but dismissed his economic principles. “Mr. Commoner winds up

[The Closing Circle] by advocating … that socialism must be a more easy way to control the

environment than the free enterprise system we live in. This brings me to the point of saying that

Mr. Commoner has within him the ability to speak some utter nonsense.”120

117 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 280.

118 Joel N. Shurkin, “By Another Name, Socialism Could Smell Sweeter,” Philadelphia Inquirer book review of

The Poverty of Power (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 552).

119 John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose (New York: New American Library, 1975),
274.
 238

Within environmental circles Commoner’s socialist message was also often a problem.

Even prior to The Poverty of Power, Commoner’s linking of environmentalism with socialism

provoked stern criticism. Paul Ehrlich, among others, worried that advocating this alliance between

environmentalism and socialism would do no favors to the mainstream environmental movement.

“There is no point in waving a red flag in front of the bulls,” Ehrlich commented in 1971.121 But

consistent with his dedication to public information, Commoner insisted on forging ahead, arguing

that the free enterprise system was hardly free or private anyway. This was certainly the case with

nuclear power, Commoner noted, which constituted “a lopsided partnership between the private

and public sectors, in which the rewards have been private and the huge risks—the hazards to life,

the waste of billions of dollars, the rising cost of power, the impending collapse of the nuclear-

power program, and the ensuing economic chaos—have been assigned to the public.”122 Because

society was already paying the environmental costs—in poor health as a result of air and water

contamination, for example—the public ought to have a more socialized means of controlling these

costs. This inequity would come to the fore in the following decades with the rise of the

environmental justice movement. Returning to his attack on the capitalist system, Commoner

remarked: “when engineers want to understand the strength of a new material they stress it to the

breaking point and analyze how it responds. The energy crisis is a kind of ‘engineering test’ of the

United States’ economic system, and it has revealed a number of deep-seated faults.”123 This was

the poverty of power.

Transcript: Commoner, “Pollution and Profit Motive,” Talk and Q&A on CBS, 14 December 1971 (Barry
120

Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 39).

121 Ehrlich & Richard L. Harriman, How to Be a Survivor: A Plan to Save Planet Earth (New York: Ballantine

Books, 1971), 136.

122 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 120.

123 Commoner, “The Energy Crisis: All of a Piece,” 26.

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At the end of The Closing Circle, Commoner offered a prescription for solving the environmental

crisis. It was a solution steeped in altering wasteful economic and technological practices. “If we

are to survive economically as well as biologically, industry, agriculture, and transportation will

have to meet the inescapable demands of the ecosystem,” he warned.

This will require the development of major new technologies including: systems to
return sewage and garbage directly to the soil; the replacement of many synthetic
materials by natural ones; the reversal of the trend to retire land from cultivation
and to elevate the yield per acre by heavy fertilization; replacement of synthetic
pesticides, as rapidly as possible, by biological ones; the discouragement of
power-consuming industries; the development of land transport that operates with
maximal fuel efficiency at low combustion temperatures and with minimal land use;
essentially complete containment and reclamation of wastes from combustion
processes, smelting, and chemical operations (smokestacks must become
rarities); essentially complete recycling of all reusable metal, glass, and paper
products; ecologically sound planning to govern land use including urban areas.124

His list was comprehensive, and the social restructuring necessary to realize these changes was

significant, but Commoner argued that because the environmental crisis was the product of social

and economic mismanagement, a social and economic reorganization was essential to any attempt

to cure society’s environmental ills. Not surprisingly, the American industrial network embraced

Commoner’s faith in science and technology’s potential, but it and policy makers charted a wide

course around his suggestions aimed at making industry more responsible. “Not surprisingly,”

because the enduring American legacy of growth at all costs is staged to continue, generating the

most fundamental environmental problems of the twenty-first century. To echo William Cronon,

who suggested that the persistent neglect of nature in our history is itself an historical artifact, one

124 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 283-284.

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might be compelled to argue that the neglect of nature in our economy is an equally compelling

historical artifact.125

125 William Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).
 Chapter 6
The “Other” Environmentalism

It may be that we are situated at the beginning of a historical process of

habituation. It may be that the next generation, or the one after that, will no
longer be upset at pictures of birth defects, like those tumor-covered fish and
birds that now circulate around the world, just as we are no longer upset today
by violated values, the new poverty and a constant high level of mass
unemployment. It would not be the first time that standards disappear as a
result of their violation.
—Ulrich Beck

Less than five years after publicly insisting that ecological systems could never be reconciled with

the rapacious nature of the capitalist system and that the only solution was a kind of economic

socialism, Commoner ran for President of the United States. For a long time radical, it appeared a

strange move, but for Commoner it was part of a rational evolution. As he insisted in an interview

shortly after the 1980 campaign: “What I have been doing in recent years is to look for the reasons

for such problems as the energy crisis and the environmental crisis. I’ve ended up concluding that

the reasons have to do with the governance of production decisions: who decides how we use our

resources; what we produce and how we produce it.” He didn’t say it outright, but he certainly

intimated that the manner in which risk was assessed and distributed was central to his critique.

Risk assessment, or the priorities that went into assessing risk, were so frequently the source of

environmental and energy problems and they were intimately connected to the means and modes

of production. The crucial issue, he had determined, was the democratic social governance of the

means of production. Those most subjected to environmental pollution risks should have a more

prominent place at the table. “I’m involved in politics,” he continued, “because it’s become crystal

clear that the issues I’ve been concerned with—nuclear issues, environmental issues, energy

issues—are not going to be solved simply by protest.”1 Commoner had frequently referred to

himself as a congenital optimist, but this was a rather striking reversal on his earlier faith in the

1Frank Smallwood, The Other Candidates: Third Parties in Presidential Elections (Hanover: University Press
of New England, 1983), 210.
 242

scholar’s obligation to dissent. Or was it? For almost three decades, he had put his faith in an

informed public; by 1980 he had concluded that the big change he considered necessary could

only occur from inside and that public pressure from outside wasn’t enough. At the same time, was

there a better venue for raising public awareness than a presidential campaign? He was 63.

Reporting on his presidential candidacy, Newsweek described him as “a rumpled, somewhat

owlish figure, his eyes popping wide with enthusiasm behind his ever-slipping horn rims.”2

In April 1980—ten years after Earth Day—Commoner accepted the Citizens’ Party

presidential nomination at a chaotic convention that gathered in Cleveland. Commoner was one of

the co-founders of the new party, brought to life the previous summer by a group of dissident left-

leaning philanthropists and social activists, including author Studs Terkel, Gray Panthers leader

Maggie Kuhn, and Steelworkers insurgent Ed Sadlowski. Indian-rights activist and founder and

president of Americans for Indian Opportunity LaDonna Harris from Oklahoma was the Vice-

Presidential candidate. The idea behind the Citizens’ Party, Commoner related to Newsweek,

“was to provide an alternative for the growing number of dispirited Americans fed up with the major

parties.”3 During the campaign, Commoner compared the Citizens’ Party’s creation to the rationale

behind the birth of the Republican Party in the mid-nineteenth century. Referring to “the

ignominious period of American politics,” during which Americans “elected all the presidents whose

names you don’t remember” in the years leading up the Civil War, Commoner argued that these

presidential candidates “were carefully chosen as nonentities because none of the political parties

wanted to discuss slavery in a national campaign for fear of losing the election. … The creation of

the Republican Party was really almost forced on the country by the abdication of politics by the

2 “Dr. Ecology for President,” Newsweek (21 April 1980), 48.

3 “Dr. Ecology for President,” 48.

 243

Whigs and the Democrats.”4 By the end of the 1970s, as Commoner laid out at the end of The

Politics of Energy, the major parties seemed to be deliberately avoiding the socio-economic issues

that had given rise to the energy crisis and the environmental crisis.5 The Citizens’ Party offered a

voice to the poor, to labor, and to minorities who were alienated from mainstream American

politics.

In December 1979, an organizing committee had filed papers with the Federal Election

Commission to establish the Citizens’ Party. From the outset, the Citizens’ Party wrangled with the

difficulties of adhering to a strict internal democracy. Its founders insisted that the new party

needed to distinguish itself by establishing a strong sense of democracy within the party

membership, and that all local parties should have input in drafting the national party platform.

This contributed to the convention’s bedlam. Position papers and resolutions were sent in from all

over the country, and the convention sought the input of all the party’s members through a mail-in

voting system, which Commoner later called “an insane idea, which utterly failed.”6 Laudable as

such notions of internal democracy were in theory, in practice they turned out to constitute

organizational nightmares. The Party’s late start also contributed to its difficulty in raising funds;

the Commoner-Harris ticket appeared on the ballot in 30 states and received 234,294 votes, well

behind Republican Ronald Reagan, Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter, upstart independent

John Anderson, and Libertarian candidate Edward Clark. The long-range hope was that the

Citizens’ Party would receive 5% of the vote, which would entitle it to federal matching funds, but

its grassroots principles and idealistic commitment to internal democracy failed to mesh with its

top-down creation, which limited its appeal in the black and low-income communities from which it

4 Smallwood, The Other Candidates, 211.

5 Commoner, The Politics of Energy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1979).

6 Smallwood, The Other Candidates, 217.

 244

had hoped to gain strength. Before the November election, Commoner had expressed high hopes

that the Citizens’ Party would become an established third party, but after its poor showing he

drifted away from the it and eventually became a key advisor to the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s

Rainbow Coalition campaign in 1984, explaining that white leadership could not advance the kind

of politics that was likely to change the American political landscape. Commoner helped Jackson

mobilize the sizable underclass that felt increasingly alienated.7

Indeed, when Commoner claimed in The Closing Circle that “the costs of environmental

degradation are chiefly borne not by the producer, but by society as a whole,” he presaged

sociologist Ulrich Beck’s concern that the production of wealth resulted not only in the unequal

distribution of goods but also in the unequal distribution of environmental hazards.8 The unequal

distribution of environmental risks would become the focus of his activism during the 1980s and

1990s. The costs of environmental degradation were most disproportionately borne by the poor.9

This was especially egregious, for as Commoner had pointed out in The Closing Circle, pollutants

7 Sheila D. Collins, The Rainbow Challenge: The Jackson Campaign and the Future of U.S. Politics (New

York: Monthly Review Press, 1986), 102. For Jesse Jackson and the Rainbow Coalition, see Lorenzo Morris (ed.),
The Social and Political Implications of the 1984 Jesse Jackson Presidential Campaign (New York: Praeger
Publishers, 1984); Ollie A. Johnson III & Karin L. Stanford (eds.), Black Political Organizations in the Post-Civil Rights
Era (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); Lucius J. Barker & Ronald W. Walters (eds.), Jesse
Jackson’s 1984 Presidential Campaign: Challenge and Change in American Politics (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1989); Thomas H. Landess & Richard M. Quinn, Jesse Jackson and the Politics of Race (Ottawa, IL: Jameson
Books, 1985); and Barker, Our Time Has Come: A Delegate’s Diary of Jesse Jackson’s 1984 Presidential Campaign
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988). An accessible biography of Jesse Jackson is Marshall Frady, Jesse: The
Life and Pilgrimage of Jesse Jackson (New York: Random House, 1996).

8 Commoner, The Closing Circle (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 268. Ulrich Beck, “Risk Society and the

Provident State,” in Risk, Environment and Modernity: Towards a New Ecology edited by Scott Lash et al. (London:
Sage Publications, 1996), 27-43. See page 28.

9 Jack M. Hollander, The Real Environmental Crisis: Why Poverty, Not Affluence, Is The Environment’s

Number One Enemy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). This position is also supported in John Bodley,
The Power of Scale: A Global History Approach (London: M. E. Sharpe, 2003); Ramachandra Guha & Juan Martinez-
Alier, Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (London: Earthscan Publications, 1997); and Martinez-
Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (Northampton, MA: Edward
Elgar Publishers, 2002).
 245

that inhibited human health also inhibited social progress.10 Poverty also suggested that problems

of environmental health and safety were imposed most significantly upon communities of color,

exacerbating the uncomfortable existence of an institutional racism in the United States, and

prompting Commoner to charge that “there is a functional link between racism, poverty, and

powerlessness, and the chemical industry’s assault on the environment.”11 New petrochemical

plants invariably sprang up in poorer neighborhoods like those throughout “Cancer Alley,” an 85-

mile, pollution-ridden industrial corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge.12 According to

Commoner, this was easily explained in economic terms. In measuring risk-benefit calculations,

some economists proposed that the value of a human life be based on a person’s lifelong earning

power. “It then turns out that a woman’s life is worth much less than a man’s, and that a black’s is

worth much less than a white’s,” Commoner observed in 1987. “In effect, the environmental harm

is regarded as smaller if the people it kills are poor—a standard that could be used to justify

situating heavily polluting operations in poor neighborhoods.”13

However, the number crunching and economic analysis of the previous chapter left out a

vital component: the prescription of social costs resulting from environmental damage was flawed

because the assessment of social costs assumed that all Americans shared those costs equally.

But while some environmental hazards like nuclear fallout did not discriminate against where they

10 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 79.

11 Commoner is quoted in Dick Russell, “Environmental Racism,” The Amicus Journal (Spring 1989), 22-32.

Quotation is from page 25. For a recent discussion of institutional racism, see Manning Marable, The Great Wells of
Democracy: The Meaning of Race in America (New York: Basic Books, 2002).

12For environmental justice activism in Cancer Alley, see Beverly Wright, “Race, Politics, and Pollution:
Environmental Justice in the Mississippi River Chemical Corridor,” in Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal
World edited by Julian Agyeman et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003), 125-145; and J. Timmons Roberts &
Melissa M. Toffolon-Weiss, Chronicles from the Environmental Justice Frontline (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2001).

13Commoner, “A Reporter at Large: The Environment,” The New Yorker 63 (15 June 1987), 46-71.
Quotation is from page 64.
 246

fell, others like air pollution from power facilities, manufacturing plants, or waste incinerators posed

problems that were more local in nature. The placement of such facilities—invariably in poorer

communities—contributed to an unequal distribution of exposure to risk among Americans that

adhered to class and color lines.14 Subsequently, society’s politically disempowered

groups—those who invariably risked greater exposure to environmental pollutants and the resultant

health hazards and typically had the least access to health care—suffered the most severe

environmental consequences, because they did not have the necessary franchise or organization

to promote their social values and augment change. Through the 1980s, these disempowered

groups found a grassroots voice through the burgeoning movement for environmental justice,

which found a national voice through the Rainbow Coalition.

This chapter sets out to chart this “other” environmentalism and Commoner’s participation.

The socio-cultural divide that broadly fractured American society by race and class also existed

when it came to how Americans organized to protect the environment. To poor communities and

to communities of color, mainstream environmental organizations were not in tune with the socio-

economic conditions outside of the white middle class, and their national priorities and

environmental activisms indicated as much. It often seemed as though the protection of trees and

birds was more important than the protection of human health and human lives. In New York City,

for example, asthma morbidity and mortality rates were not only significantly higher than the

national average, but studies also indicated that those numbers were more prevalent in the city’s

poorer neighborhoods. Further, asthma was also more concentrated in nonwhite communities,

14 An extensive debate has grown over the question of whether polluting industries are sited in poorer
communities, or whether poorer communities are built up on lands with depressed value because of the prior existence
of a polluting industry. While the first argument—which seems to carry more weight—suggests environmental racism,
the latter argument rejects that race or class played a role in the disproportional siting of polluting technologies in
depressed neighborhoods. For an overview of this literature, see Michael Egan, “Subaltern Environmentalism in the
United States: A Historiographic Review,” Environment and History 8 (February 2002), 21-41. See especially pages
25-29.
 247

“with hospitalization and death rates among blacks and Latinos up to five times higher than those

of whites.”15 Such urban realities prompted many environmental justice activists to challenge the

mainstream environmental organizations “to get off the stick of preserving birds and trees and

seals and things like that and talk about what’s affecting real people.”16

The reality was never so black and white, but such tensions and perceptions opened a

very palpable chasm between groups that generally shared related ends. The tension ultimately

arose over the appropriation of the ecological language developed in the years leading up to the

first Earth Day. It was this language that articulated the stakes of the environmental crisis.

Naturally enough, that post-war language was shaped and dominated by the intellectual and

scientific elites, who were prominent among the earliest and loudest broadcasters of the

environmental crisis to a public audience. “Ecology,” “sustainability,” and “quality of life,” not to

mention “beauty, health, and permanence,” entered the popular lexicon as the defining

characteristics of this environmental language.17 While the confluence of science and

environmental ethics was one of the prevailing features of the new environmentalism, that

approach typically concentrated its initial efforts on mapping the scientific implications of

environmental decline: what pollution and despoliation meant to ecological sustainability and

15 Matthew Gandy, Concrete and Clay: Reworking Nature in New York City (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press,
2002), 200. For asthma studies, see Willine Carr, Lisa Zeitel, & Kevin Weiss, “Variations in Asthma Hospitalizations
and Deaths in New York City,” American Journal of Public Health 82 (1992), 59-65; Douglas W. Dockery, “An
Association Between Air Pollution and Mortality in Six U.S. Cities,” New England Journal of Medicine 329 (1993), 1753-
1759; R. Evans, “Asthma Among Minority Children: A Growing Problem,” Chest 101 (1992), 368-371; and D. J.
Gottlieb, A. S. Beiser, & G. T. O’Connor, “Poverty, Race and Medication Use Are Correlates of Asthma Hospitalization
Rates: A Small Area Analysis in Boston,” Chest 108 (1995), 28-35. See also Adam Nossiter, “Asthma Common and
On the Rise in the Crowded South Bronx,” New York Times, 5 September 1995, A1. Nossiter reported on doctors’
responses to an emerging asthma epidemic in the South Bronx, where hospitalization and death rates were eight times
the national average. A good resource on the growing rates of asthma is the American Lung Association website,
http://www.lungusa.org/.

16 West Harlem Environmental Action co-founder Vernice Miller quoted in Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 217.

17Samuel P. Hays, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
 248

human health.18 Critics of this mainstream approach would censure its apparent and “enduring

ambivalence toward modernity, urbanism, and cultural diversity.”19 By and large, the social context

and significance of the environmental crisis was a later addition to this ecological language. Since

Earth Day, “social justice” and “power relations” have been added to the environmental vocabulary.

The sophistication of an alternative race- and class-based ecological language or persuasion grew

markedly during the Age of Ecology, and found its most provocative advocates in the burgeoning

environmental justice movement, which elucidated the intimate connections between

environmental problems and social injustice and the complexities of power politics in environmental

decisions. Its struggle against mainstream environmentalism was over the general acceptance of

its contributions to that language. Risk and whose risk were central to that discussion.

The substance of this apparent split has much to do with perspective, and points to the

significance of pluralism as a prominent feature on the American landscape. Pluralism, Louis

Menand tells us, “is an attempt to make a good out of the circumstance that goods are often

incommensurable.”20 Because people understand the world differently and seek different ends,

different people establish different—and often conflicting—priorities. While this truism obviously

applies across the spectrum of human endeavors, it is no less applicable to divergent

interpretations of the American environmental consciousness. Interest groups that are bigger, or

richer, or more powerful, or better organized, or more energetic can often disproportionately pursue

their interests in the political arena. This power has the effect of muting divergent or minority

18 In many respects, the articulation of an ecological language is the pivotal thrust of Donald Worster’s
account of the development of the ecological imagination. See Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of
Ecological Ideas 2nd edition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994). See also Roderick Nash, The Rights of
Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 161-198.

19 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 215.

20 Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America (New York: Farrar, Straus, & Giroux,
2001), 377.
 249

perspectives and arriving at an artificial or contrived consensus. This is the substance of power

relations, and a critical explanation for Commoner’s vehement opposition to Ehrlich’s population

control advocacy. Pluralism suggests or embraces the notion that different groups are related but

independent of each other. It advocates that there is no one vocabulary, but multiple vocabularies.

How pluralism works in theory and in practice, of course, is a different matter. Typically, however,

the social positionality of grassroots environmental justice advocates altered the context of the

environmental struggle in which they engaged, thereby necessitating the adoption of a vocabulary

distinct from the one already established by other groups. If words like “sustainability” originally

referred to ecosystem health, the new language used them in connection with human and

community survival, which constituted a substantial difference in how Americans imagined ecology

and the environment. And that shift in focus was pluralism’s central—though often

contentious—dialectical contribution to American environmentalism.21 It is also within this interface

that Commoner’s importance to the history of American environmentalism becomes most apparent.

“The emergence of the concept of ecology in American life is potentially of momentous relevance

to the ultimate liberation of black people. Yet blacks and their environmental interests have been

so blatantly omitted that blacks and the ecology movement currently stand in contradiction to each

other.”22 So wrote Black Scholar publisher and sociologist Nathan Hare in April 1970 as Earth Day

activists filled urban centers across the country. While Hare embraced the significance of ecology,

21 Gandy has described the metaphysical origins of twentieth century American environmentalism as a
“regional organicism [which] has evolved into an uneasy relation to ‘nativist’ doctrines that can all too easily be
translated into a fear of strangers, whether plants or people.” Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 215. This rather simplistic
critique of the mainstream movement deserves complication with a deeper investigation of pluralism as a prominent
feature of American environmental activism. See, for example, David Schlosberg, Environmental Justice and the New
Pluralism: The Challenge of Difference for Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).

22 Nathan Hare, “Black Ecology,” The Black Scholar (April 1970), 2-8. Quotation is from page 2.
 250

he lamented the movement’s omission of interests that pertained to people of color and their

particular environmental problems. He cited Robert Rienow’s 1967 study, Moment in the Sun: A

Report on the Deteriorating Quality of the American Environment, which he argued was rather

representative of the environmental literature emerging in the 1960s; it made no reference to

African-Americans. Further, while “suburbia” received considerable attention, “slums” and

“ghettos” did not appear in Rienow’s index.23 To Hare, the suggestion existed that some places

warranted more environmental protection than others. Moreover, while population control policy

suggestions appealed to a significant portion of the environmentally concerned, leading African

Americans opposed zero population growth, which they saw as a serious challenge to their political

survival. Hare argued that the population explosion was less of a problem than the population

implosion, the increasing concentration of peoples on relatively small proportions of the United

States’ land surface.24 This increased urbanization resulted in crowding and environmental

problems, many of which were specific to communities of color, who were invariably poorer and

less mobile. To Hare, the new environmentalists in suburbia were blind to the urban-living

environmental issues most immediately relevant to communities of color.25

23 Robert Rienow, Moment in the Sun: A Report on the Deteriorating Quality of the American Environment

(New York: Dial Press, 1967).

24 Hare, “Black Ecology.”

25 This kind of argument poses a poignant historiographic question to existing literature on the history of the

American environmental movement. Some prominent studies have tended to maintain a rather narrow focus that fails
to recognize the race- and class-oriented aspects of environmental protest that Hare raised. In effect, this literature
does not recognize the significance of the political economy and its relationship with environmental problems. See, for
example, Adam Rome, “’Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal of American
History 90 (September 2003), 525-554; Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of
American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Roderick Nash, Wilderness and the
American Mind 4th edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001); Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of
Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989); Stephen Fox, The American Conservation
Movement: John Muir and his Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981); Andrew Glenn Kirk, Collecting
Nature: The American Environmental Movement and the Conservation Library (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
2001); and Richard W. Judd & Christopher S. Beach, Natural States: The Environmental Imagination in Maine,
Oregon, and the Nation (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, 2003). A few studies have sought to address
 251

Many mainstream environmentalists agreed. As early as 1967, Sydney Howe, the

president of the Conservation Foundation complained that “we are now a racially segregated

profession. … Conservation must be of and for increasingly urban environments and their

people.”26 But even the biggest ecological celebration in history failed to adequately build that

bridge. Earth Day coordinator Denis Hayes had tried to demonstrate that civil rights, poverty,

antiwar, and environmental interests all shared the same platform. Earth Day’s goal, he insisted,

“is not to clean the air while leaving slums and ghettos, nor is it to provide a healthy world for racial

oppression and war.”27 But this message failed to galvanize broader acceptance of a more

pluralist environmentalism, because it was drowned out by messages like Earth Day creator

Senator Gaylord Nelson’s assertion that “the most critical issue facing mankind” was the

environmental crisis, which made “Vietnam, nuclear war, hunger, decaying cities, and all other

major problems one could name … relatively insignificant by comparison.”28 While the spirit of

Nelson’s statement might not have tangibly differed from Hayes’s—the dangers of ecological

degradation contributed to war, famine, oppression, and poverty—its suggestion could not have

been worse in terms of marginalizing the groups that Hayes hoped to bring into the tent. Whereas

Hayes recognized the ambivalence peripheral groups might have felt toward the big celebration

this disparity. See Martin V. Melosi, “Environmental Justice, Political Agenda Setting, and the Myths of History,”
Journal of Policy History 12 (2000), 43-71; Christopher C. Sellers, “Body, Place and the State: The Makings of an
‘Environmentalist’ Imaginary in the Post-World War II U.S.,” Radical History Review 74 (1999), 31-64; Marcy
Darnovsky, “Stories Less Told: Histories of U.S. Environmentalism,” Socialist Review 22 (Winter 1992), 11-54; Scott
Dewey Hamilton, Don’t Breathe the Air: Air Pollution and U.S. Environmental Politics, 1945-1970 (College Station:
Texas A. & M. Press, 2000); Robert Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring: The Transformation of the American Environmental
Movement (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993); Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the
Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995); Andrew Szasz, EcoPopulism: Toxic Waste and the
Movement for Environmental Justice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994); and Schlosberg,
Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism.

26 Howe is quoted in his obituary in the New York Times, 14 April 1996, 39.

27 Hayes is quoted in Dowie, Losing Ground, 25.

28 Nelson is quoted in Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 106.

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that threatened to turn attention away from their own activisms, Nelson’s rhetoric catered to more

eco-centric interests.

Communities of color might have sympathized with Hayes’s initial contention as an attempt

to embrace the holistic nature of environmental problems, but the popular strength of Nelson’s

more traditional statement carried the day. For the vast majority of African Americans, access to

political empowerment—achieved through acquiring economic empowerment—was the ultimate

means of solving the environmental problems endemic to their poorer and more oppressed

communities, and the message they received was that mainstream environmentalism was not yet

ready to address those concerns.29 Minority activists like Freddie Mae Brown of Black Survival in

St. Louis, Arturo Sandoval of La Raza in Albuquerque, and Charles Hayes a prominent African

American union leader in Chicago spoke to large Earth Day audiences, but they received far less

media coverage and attention than did more mainstream activists.30 As a result, black media

sources confirmed the relative absence of widespread African American support for Earth Day.

The April issue of Ebony, the most widely circulated African American periodical, focused on the

continuing civil rights struggle, putting a photograph of the late Martin Luther King Jr. on its cover,

and making no mention of Earth Day in its pages. Neither of the national weekly editions of the

29 The literature on this theme is growing rapidly. See Sylvia E. Washington, Packing Them In: An
Archaeology of Environmental Racism in Chicago (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004); Robert D. Bullard,
Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class, and Environmental Quality 3rd edition (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2000); Bullard
(ed.), Confronting Environmental Racism: Voices from the Grassroots (Boston: Southend Press, 1993); Bullard (ed.),
Unequal Protection: Environmental Justice and Communities of Color (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1994);
Edwardo Lao Rhodes, Environmental Justice in America: A New Paradigm (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2003); James P. Lester et al., Environmental Injustice in the United States: Myths and Realities (Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 2001); David Naguib Pellow, Garbage Wars: The Struggle for Environmental Justice in Chicago
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); and Eddie J. Girdner & Jack Smith, Killing Me Softly: Toxic Waste, Corporate
Profit, and the Struggle for Environmental Justice (New York: Monthly Review, 2002). For a more complete
bibliography and historiography of environmental justice, see Michael Egan, “Subaltern Environmentalism in the United
States: A Historiographic Review,” Environment and History 8 (February 2002), 21-41.

30 See Denis Hayes, “Reclaiming the Vision of the First Earth Day,” Seattle Times, 22 April 2004. See also

Julian Bond, “Redefining the Environmental Movement,” Washington Post, 22 April 2004. I am grateful to Denis Hayes
for bringing the Julian Bond article to my attention.
 253

Pittsburgh Courier or the Baltimore African American carried much coverage of the event, and

Urban League President Whitney Young commented that “the war on pollution is one that should

be waged after the war on poverty is won.”31 The message was clear: the struggle for civil

rights—and not environmental integrity—was of primary importance to African Americans.

Moreover, African American leaders distrusted the growing environmental movement and

interpreted the nation’s widespread celebration of the first Earth Day as a manifestation of its

desire to escape from the civil rights discourse, much as cowardly parties had tried to push the

slavery question into obscurity in the mid-nineteenth century.32 Mutual divisions between the civil

rights movement and the environmental movement existed throughout the 1960s.33 The civil rights

movement initially regarded the environmental movement as a challenge to federal funds and

resources to which it felt it had a moral priority.34 By the 1970s, African American leaders

complained that the environmental movement (as it was originally articulated) ignored the role of

poverty in creating environmentally marginalized spaces for the vast majority of African Americans.

The environmental movement was, in their opinion, ecocentric and threatened to move the national

discussion away from the civil rights discourse, which advocated fuller access to the political

economy.35

To Commoner, civil rights and environmental protection were inseparable. “To resolve the

environmental crisis,” he predicted in The Closing Circle, “we shall need to forego, at last, the

31 Quoted in Dowie, Losing Ground, 25.

32 Washington, Packing Them In.

33 Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring, 235-269.

34 For the division between civil rights activism and environmentalism, see Time, 3 August 1970, 42. The

article made passing reference to the environmental movement as an almost exclusively white organization. See also
Eileen Maura McGurty, “From NIMBY to Civil Rights: The Origins of the Environmental Justice Movement,”
Environmental History 2 (July 1997), 301-23. See especially, 301-305.

35 Washington, Packing Them In.

 254

luxury of tolerating poverty, racial discrimination, and war.”36 As he told the 1972 United Nations

Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm: “a peace among men must precede the

peace with nature.”37 But Commoner also rejected the argument that environmental issues were

so innocuous that they served to divert people from more serious, controversial issues, insisting

that, “as a political issue, environmental protection is neither innocuous nor unrelated to basic

questions of social justice.”38 He equated environmental hazards with obstacles relating to social

progress: “one thing that does clearly emerge from nearly all statistical studies of the effects of air

pollution on health,” he wrote in The Closing Circle, “is that they are most heavily borne by the

poor, by children, by the aged and infirm.”39 In making this assessment, Commoner anticipated the

environmental justice movement—the coalition of environmental and civil rights interests—by more

than a decade.

Much Earth Day environmental rhetoric implied that all Americans were equally guilty of

over-consumption, but Hare and others argued that such contentions were oblivious to the fact that

consumption and affluence were not evenly distributed throughout the country’s population.

Commoner made the same comment in front of an Earth Day audience at Brown University.

“Since the wastes generated by … intense consumption pollute our environment, the eco-activist is

advised to ‘consume less,’” Commoner explained. “In the absence of the added statistic that in the

U.S. the per capita consumption by blacks is much less than that of the white population, such

observations are not likely to make much sense—to blacks, or to anyone who is concerned with

36 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 296.

37 Commoner, “The Meaning of the Environmental Crisis,” United Nations Conference on the Human

Environment, Stockholm, 16 June 1972 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 138) 14.

38 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 207.

39 Commoner, The Closing Circle, 79.

 255

social justice.”40 Because he believed in the inherent relationship between poverty, inequality, and

environmental degradation, Commoner criticized the environmental movement’s lack of foresight in

attempting to make alliances with minority groups; “ecological crusades” against over-consumption

made environmentalism irrelevant to advocates of social justice. On Earth Day, Commoner

described a recent incident to his audience at Brown University, about how San Jose State College

students buried a brand new car as a symbol of environmental rebellion. The burial reflected the

mainstream environmental movement’s contention that excessive consumption was responsible for

the environmental crisis, but it also suggested that the environmental movement had some ground

to cover if it wanted to speak to and for the entire spectrum of the American population. Black

students picketed the event, arguing that the $2,500 paid for the car could have been put to far

better use in the ghetto.41

For Commoner, the division between African Americans and environmentalism, much like

the division between labor and the environment, was grossly overstated, or was not as real as it

seemed. Precisely because of their frontline experiences with urban health issues like lead

poisoning and air pollution, Commoner insisted that “blacks need the environmental movement,

and the movement needs blacks.”42 Commoner acknowledged the kind of marginalization

expressed by critics like Hare and actively sought ways of including African Americans within the

mainstream context. “In many ways,” he argued on Earth Day, “blacks are the special victims of

pollution.”43 Commoner suggested that a white suburbanite could “escape from the city’s dirt,

40 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 22 April 1970 (Barry Commoner Paper, LoC, Box 131), 18.

41 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 18. Commoner repeated the story in The Closing Circle,
207.

42 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 19. See also Commoner, The Closing Circle, 208.

43 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 18. See also Commoner, The Closing Circle, 208.
 256

smog, carbon monoxide, lead, and noise when he goes home,” but that ghetto

dwellers—predominantly minority populations—lived in it.44 “To middle class Americans,”

Commoner asserted, “survival is not a familiar issue. They have not yet learned how to face such

a soul-shaking threat; witness our continued failure to appreciate that the existence of ready-armed

nuclear weapons means that doomsday may be tomorrow. For blacks, the issue of survival is 200

years old.”45

Leading up to Earth Day in 1970, Commoner and his Center for the Biology of Natural

Systems, based at Washington University in St. Louis felt it was both “appropriate and timely” to

engage in a public dialog on race and the environment.46 Under the auspices of the Center, Wilbur

L. Thomas, Jr., the Program Coordinator for the Center’s Environmental Field Program gave a

paper at Southern Illinois University that described what Commoner referred to as “’the double

dose effect’ of environmental hazards that confront most Blacks within our cities.”47 In the paper,

entitled “The Real Issue of Black Survival In Our Polluted Cities,” Thomas essentially made a call

to arms to African Americans by outlining the parameters of the environmental crisis and noting

that minorities bore the brunt of environmental hazards. Galvanizing minority communities,

Thomas argued that the most outspoken advocates for preserving environmental integrity were

those least affected, namely middle class whites. In contrast, he argued, African Americans had

been conspicuously silent. “The ‘nitty gritty’ issues relevant to Blacks,” he stated, “is simply the fact

44 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 18-19. See also Commoner, The Closing Circle, 208.

45 Commoner, “Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 19.

46 Introduction to Wilbur L. Thomas, Jr., “The Real Issue of Black Survival in our Polluted Cities.” This paper

was presented 20 February 1970 in East St. Louis, Illinois, as part of a series of programs concerned with critical areas
within the Black community, and sponsored by the Urban and Regional Department of Southern Illinois University,
Edwardsville Campus. (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 307).

47 Introduction to Wilbur L. Thomas, Jr., “The Real Issue of Black Survival in our Polluted Cities.”
 257

that a disapportional number of blacks are exposed to more environmental health hazards than

non-Blacks. … Exposure to additional hazards such as lead poisoning, infant mortality, air

pollution, and rat control are all indigenous problems to most Black communities.”48 In addition,

Thomas insisted that “Black unity must develop and push for any and everything that could help

improve living conditions.”49

The notion that a disproportional number of African Americans were exposed to more

environmental health hazards than non-African Americans became the basis for the Commission

for Racial Justice’s study of the relationship between toxic waste sites and race in 1987, but

Commoner had recognized this relationship during the 1960s, and saw it as vital rationale for

African Americans to be environmentally concerned and to find ways of including them within the

broader environmental framework.50 But the mainstream organizations’ structural appearance

served as a source of alienation for African Americans and other minority groups. According to

Kirkpatrick Sale, “the people in the important mainstream organizations are very largely white and

very largely well-off, the more so as you move from membership to board of directors, and they are

very largely male as well.”51 Whether or not direct charges of racism or elitism were warranted

oversimplified the very nature of frontline environmental struggles, in which communities of color

frequently worked at the grassroots level with local environmental groups, who were often well

48 Thomas, “The Real Issue of Black Survival in our Polluted Cities,” 6.

49 Thomas, “The Real Issue of Black Survival in our Polluted Cities,” 11.

50 Commission for Racial Justice, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States: A National Report on the

Racial and Socio-Economic Characteristics of Communities with Hazardous Waste Sites (New York: United Church of
Christ, 1987).

51 Kirkpatrick Sale, The Green Revolution: The American Environmental Movement, 1962-1992 (New York:
Hill & Wang, 1992), 98.
 258

organized. But when it came to appearances, it appeared as though mainstream

environmentalism in America had priorities that did not jibe with the ghettoes or people of color.52

After the 1980 Presidential election, Commoner left Washington University and returned to New

York, taking his Center for the Biology of Natural Systems with him to Queens College, where he

had first taught after the Second World War. Early in 1980, the college’s president and provost had

traveled to St. Louis and offered to set up the Center at Queens under very favorable terms: a

hard-money budget including three permanent tenured lines for personnel, adequate quarters, and

the full support of the university administration. Approaching retirement age, Commoner accepted

their offer and, early in 1981, three 18-wheel trucks moved the Center for the Biology of Natural

Systems’ equipment east.53

It would be wrong to suggest that Commoner was chased from Washington University, but

it was clear that conflicts with university administration motivated his departure. Commoner later

recalled that the university had no intention of supporting his Center without him.54 In its fifteen

years in St. Louis, the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, under Commoner’s leadership,

had experienced remarkable success in raising grant money, which meant the Center (and

Commoner) enjoyed considerable independence and autonomy from the university. At the same

time, however, Commoner had frequently clashed with the university over his very public—and

52 It is important to distinguish between environmental organizations working at the national level, and their

satellite members who are active at the local level. While environmental justice antipathy exists toward the powerful
national efforts from groups like the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, or the Audubon Society, there have
been many occasions where local environmental and environmental justice groups have established effective
coalitions against mutually perceived threats. See, for example, Bullard, “Anatomy of Environmental Racism and the
Environmental Justice Movement,” in Confronting Environmental Racism, 15-39. For criticisms of mainstream
organizations with a national orientation, see Dowie, Losing Ground; and Gottlieb, Forcing the Spring.

53 Commoner correspondence with author, 19 May 2004.

54 Commoner interview with author, 20 November 2003.

 259

often confrontational—stances against industry and especially the Vietnam War. While his public

image undoubtedly helped to raise support for the Center, that same public presence upset some

of the university’s major benefactors and hampered university fund-raising efforts in certain areas.

Commoner recalled being regularly intercepted on his way to his office by the chancellor, who

chastised him for costing the university money. In many respects, then, the move to Queens

College was a homecoming, but Commoner did not go home to New York to retire. Indeed,

Commoner showed no signs of or interest in slowing down. Being based in New York City

provided fuller opportunities to engage in environmental and energy problems, and especially

those pertaining to urban environments and the urban poor. At Queens College, in Flushing,

Commoner and his Center confronted a series of urban environmental issues, especially targeting

urban waste disposal and related health issues. As Douglas H. Strong put it, Commoner

“remained dedicated to solving the ‘real problems’ of urban and rural communities.”55 That is to

say, Commoner continued to examine and address the social implications of the environmental

crisis.

Commoner’s return to New York coincided with a new urban crisis: New York City’s waste

management problems. In The Closing Circle, Commoner had attributed the environmental crisis

to the wasteful and sometimes toxic nature of new technologies developed since World War II.

The petrochemical industry in particular had capitalized on the production of new materials that

rendered redundant or too expensive the older, organic, recyclable materials they replaced. But

after disposable diapers and beer bottles and plastic wrap and milk containers were disposed of,

they did not instantly vanish. They accumulated. Until 1970, burning trash had been a popular

method of urban waste disposal—apartment buildings often had their own incinerators to burn

Douglas H. Strong, Dreamers & Defenders: American Conservationists (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
55

Press, 1988), 243.

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residents’ trash—but the 1970 Clean Air Act Amendments raised emission standards higher than

all but a few incinerators could meet. Americans turned to dumping their trash. When the odors

became bad, they dug holes and covered the trash over in landfills.56

It seemed, however, as though waste disposal techniques were another example of what

Commoner called the band-aid approach to environmental problems. Rather than solving the

puzzle, industry sought a technological fix. Burying trash superficially solved the odor problem, but

landfills posed serious environmental problems. In addition to the stench, many landfills also

became repositories for unwanted pesticides and other chemicals, waste motor oil, used cleaning

fluids and solvents, which invariably leached out of the landfill and threatened underground water

supplies and nearby surface waters. “Moreover,” Commoner pointed out in his 1990 book, Making

Peace with the Planet, “the landfill’s organic waste putrefies and ferments, producing inflammable

methane and other gases, some of them quite noxious, that pollute the surrounding air.”57 Rather

than simply contaminating the soil into which it was buried, trash threatened the air and water as

well. It was like applying the band-aid to a gaping wound.

The quantity of solid waste also constituted a serious management problem in many urban

centers, and only intensified the already existent health hazards, especially among poorer

communities. Landfills were situated on cheap land and close to urban centers, invariably next to

poor and minority neighborhoods. But the problem continued to escalate. By 1991, a Department

of Sanitation study estimated that New York City produced more than 24,000 tons per day of

municipal solid waste, not counting medical and construction waste or sewage sludge.58 The

56 For histories of trash in America, see Susan Strasser, Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash (New

York: Henry Holt & Co., 1999); Martin V. Melosi, “Down in the Dumps: Is There a Garbage Crisis in America?” Journal
of Policy History 5 (1993), 100-127; and Pellow, Garbage Wars.

57 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 107.

 261

problem with landfills was that, like fossil fuels, they were a nonrenewable resource; once they had

been filled to capacity, their usability was exhausted. As more and more landfills were closed,

more distant and more expensive new sites became necessary. As Commoner explained in

Making Peace with the Planet: “like any other nonrenewable resource, landfills became

progressively more expensive.”59 As mountains of waste accumulated, the cost of depositing trash

in landfills—the “tipping fee”—rose dramatically, making waste disposal uneconomic, and inciting

many urban centers to find alternative methods of managing their solid waste.

The solution was a return to an old idea: burning the garbage. In 1978, New York City

Mayor Edward I. Koch proposed the construction of a new kind incineration plant at the Brooklyn

Navy Yard, which would turn waste into steam or electricity. These “resource recovery plants”

proposed to solve two problems at once: dispose of waste and produce electric power. But

Commoner was unconvinced. The waste incineration industry consisted of the same corporate

giants—Combustion Engineering, Westinghouse, Bechtel, and Babcock & Wilcox—that had

pioneered the U.S. nuclear power industry before its collapse, and had now turned their attention to

selling trash incinerators as a means of recouping a fraction of their losses. Commoner was also

quick to point out that incinerators and nuclear power plants had one important feature in common:

both produced pollution that did not exist before the plant was switched on. “Just as nuclear power

failed because it created an environmental hazard—radiation—so incinerators turned out to be

gravely hampered by the same sort of self-generated environmental hazard, in this case dioxin.”60

Incineration shrank the size of the mountains of garbage, but waste incineration policies

failed to appreciate the validity of Commoner’s second law of ecology, that everything must go
58 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 309, fn 14.

59 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 107.

60Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 109. See also Peter Montague, “Incineration vs. Recycling,”
Rachel's Environment & Health News 121 (20 March 1989), 1-2.
 262

somewhere. Commoner surmised: “Once regarded as a ‘proven technology’ that created no

environmental hazard, incinerators are now known to emit enough highly toxic compounds to

create a risk of cancer and other diseases that is at best borderline, and more often unacceptable

according to existing guidelines.”61 Chief among these hazards were the dioxins that escaped from

the emissions of chlorine-containing compounds such as plastics and other synthetic materials.

Commoner called the new generation of incinerators “dioxin-producing factories.”62 Dioxin is a

name given to a number of toxic byproducts of the burning of chlorinated wastes, and is generally

regarded as the most potent cancer-inducing synthetic chemical.63 As Commoner warned in a

keynote address at the Second Citizens’ Conference on Dioxin in St. Louis, on 30 July 1994,

“dioxin and dioxin-like substances represent the most perilous chemical threat to the health and

biological integrity of human beings and the environment.”64 Environmental Protection Agency

documents acknowledged that, in addition to causing cancer, dioxin also disrupted hormone

systems related to sexual development; attacked the nervous system; and damaged the

developing immune system, leaving exposed children more susceptible to infectious diseases.65

On 18 May 1995, the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems released a comprehensive

study on dioxin that demonstrated an eerie connection between dioxin and nuclear fallout. Dioxin,

61 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 119.

62 Commoner cited in Melosi, “Down in the Dumps,” 112.

63 U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Health Assessment Document for Polychlorinated Dibenzo-p-

Dioxins (Washington, D.C.: Office of Health and Environmental Assessment, 1985).

64 Commoner quoted in “Turning Point for the Chemical Industry,” Rachel’s Environment & Health News 405
(31 August 1994), 1-2. Quotation is from page 1. For Commoner’s work on dioxin, see Commoner et al., Dioxin
Fallout in the Great Lakes: Where it Comes From, How to Prevent It, At What Cost (Flushing, NY: Center for the
Biology of Natural Systems, 1996); and Commoner et al., Zeroing Out Dioxin in the Great Lakes: Within Our Reach
(Flushing, NY: Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, 1996).

65 See Montague, “Turning Point for the Chemical Industry,” Rachel's Environment & Health News 405 (31

August 1994), 1-2. See also Montague, “How to Eliminate Dioxin,” Rachel’s Environment & Health News 508 (21
August 1996), 1-2.
 263

the study argued, created a toxic chemical fallout problem as the dust could travel more than 1,000

miles through the air before settling. Like strontium-90 falling to earth thousands of miles from test

sites, dioxin, emitted from 1,329 North American sources, was an imminent threat beyond the

immediate vicinity of its source. According to Commoner and Mark Cohen, the primary authors of

the report, the greatest risk of human exposure to dioxin came—as with radioactive

fallout—through the food chain, as dioxin contaminated dairy foods and beef even though they

were produced great distances from the sources of dioxin emissions. Commoner’s interest in

these findings was clear; by maximizing public concern, he hoped to garner enough public support

to reduce or eliminate dioxin emissions in the United States.66

Dioxin contamination quickly came to be perceived as the newest and most potent

environmental threat, and was at the center of a number of environmental health scares. Dioxin

had been detected as a highly toxic impurity in chlorinated herbicides like 2,4,5-T, but was

discovered as an environmental pollutant in 1973, when it was found in fish contaminated with the

defoliant Agent Orange during the Vietnam War.67 In 1976, a pesticide plant accident in Seveso,

Italy, spread dioxin and other contaminants through the community, resulting in abnormally high

rates of cardiovascular disease and cancer.68 At Love Canal, New York, in 1979, the discovery

that the town had been built over a chemical waste dump—into which 130 pounds of dioxin had

been dumped in the 1940s—forced residents to move out of their homes. Similarly, dirt roads and

66 Mark Cohen, Barry Commoner, et al., Quantitative Estimation of the Entry of Dioxins, Furans and

Hexachlorobenzene into the Great Lakes from Airborne and Waterborne Sources (Flushing, NY: Center for the Biology
of Natural Systems, 1995).

67 For Agent Orange, see Michael Gough, Dioxin, Agent Orange: The Facts (New York, Plenum Press,
1986).

68 For the dioxin tragedy in Seveso, see Devra Davis, When Smoke Ran Like Water: Tales of Environmental

Deception and the Battle Against Pollution (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 200-203; Thornton, Pandora’s Poison, 183-
184; and Colleen F. Moore, Silent Scourge: Children, Pollution, and Why Scientists Disagree (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2003), 240.
 264

horse arenas in Times Beach, Missouri were sprayed with 2,000 gallons of dioxin-contaminated oil

for “dust control” on 26 May 1971. 14 years later, in 1985, after the Environmental Protection

Agency issued its first formal cancer risk assessment for dioxin, the town was evacuated and

destroyed when it was found that the quantity of dioxin on the land still considerably exceeded the

established cancer risk.69 In effect, the Times Beach abandonment reinforced Commoner’s

warning that the petrochemical industry produced toxins that broke out of the closing circle. Here

was that dire warning writ large. Much of the polyvinyl chloride (PVC) plastics that are found in

medical products, toys, food packaging, plumbing, and vinyl siding was often thrown in the trash

and incinerated. As Commoner told his keynote audience at the Second Citizens’ Conference on

Dioxin, “toxic waste is not simply a matter of poor housekeeping or bad management; it is an

inescapable part of chlorine-based chemical production.”70 Like Commoner, biologist and

environmental activist Sandra Steingraber called incinerators the “de facto laboratories for dioxin

manufacture,” which disseminated the poison into food and water and ultimately into human

bodies.71 No recycling of organic materials, but rather a straight line from the factory to the

incinerator, through the ecosystem, and into the human body.72

69 For the dioxin scare and evacuation at Times Beach, see C. D. Carter et al., “Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin: An

Accidental Poisoning in Horse Arenas,” Science 188 (16 May 1975), 738-740; “Turning Point for the Chemical
Industry,” Rachel’s Environment & Health News 405 (31 August 1994), 1-2; and U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency, Superfund Permanent Relocations, October 1999. Accessed online at www.epa.gov, 1 March 2004. See
also Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 72-74; and Moore, Silent Scourge, 240-241.

70 Commoner, “Keynote Address at the Second Citizens’ Conference on Dioxin,” St. Louis, 30 July 1994

(Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, Queens College), 4.

71Sandra Steingraber, “Why the Precautionary Principle?: A Meditation on Polyvinyl Chloride (PVC) and the
Breasts of Mothers,” in Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing the Precautionary Principle edited
by Carolyn Raffensperger & Joel Tickner (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1999), 362-365. Quotation is from page
363.

72 The preeminent book on dioxins is Lois Marie Gibbs, Dying from Dioxin (Boston: South End Press, 1995).

For scientific treatments of dioxin, see Joe Thornton, Pandora’s Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental
Strategy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000); and Michael McCally (ed.), Life Support: The Environment and Human
Health (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002).
 265

To Commoner, it appeared that the designers, operators, and regulators of trash

incinerators represented the next generation of deceitful industrialists. As well as dioxin, the new

incinerators also emitted mercury vapors and other heavy metals into the environment. While the

waste industry insisted upon the safety of their factories and denied that they created dioxin in the

combustion process—they promoted their resource recovery plants as state-of-the-art

technology—a 1984 Environment Canada study unequivocally demonstrated that dioxin was

indeed synthesized in trash-burning incinerators.73 Commoner concluded, "Clearly, trash-burning

incinerators have serious environmental problems. But they reveal a failing that is even worse: the

incinerator industry has been building these devices without fully understanding how they operate,

at least with respect to their impact on the environment."74 As Lois Gibbs of the Citizens'

Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste remarked: "state of the art really just means industry's latest

experiment."75

In response to these dangers, the debate over the Brooklyn Navy Yard incinerator took on the

elements of an environmental justice struggle. While the emission of dioxin constituted an

objective health hazard, the location of the site in the poor and minority-dominated neighborhood of

Williamsburg raised the ire of numerous local groups. Commoner and the Center for the Biology of

Natural Systems provided considerable technical aid to the local residents. According to Gandy,

“Commoner, in advance of the emerging consensus against chlorine, succeeded in politicizing the

science of waste incineration to an unprecedented extent and enabled community activists to

73Environment Canada, The National Incinerator Testing and Evaluation Program: Air Pollution Control
Technology, September 1986.

74 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 120.

75 Lois Gibbs cited in Montague, “Scientists Suspect Poisoning of Fish by Mercury Emissions from
Incinerators,” Rachel's Environment & Health News 198 (11 September 1990), 1.
 266

utilize the latest advances in international toxicology and public health research.”76 But in addition

to its studies on dioxins and furans, the Center also engaged in a series of local and national

environmental problems, including asthma, intensive recycling, and ethanol’s replacement of

gasoline in automobiles.77

To Commoner, environmental injustice was inherently connected to the political economy.

“To the economist,” he argued, “a person exists to work and to earn money. Therefore, they call

the value of a life the expected lifetime earnings of that person.” As a result, the argument

followed, the health of the poor was a smaller expense than the health of the wealthy, and

environmental responses could proceed based upon economic value: extensive (and expensive)

clean up in more affluent communities, and less spending in poorer neighborhoods. “Of course,

the American people do not believe that it is fair, right, or moral that poor people should be

exposed to more pollution than rich people,” Commoner continued. “Yet, the strange thing is, that

is exactly what we have been doing. New York City’s proposed trash burning plant is not slated to

be built on Park Avenue.”78 Naturally, the real estate in Williamsburg was cheaper than

comparable real estate on Park Avenue, but this harkened back to Commoner’s earlier point about

public values. Just because the land was more affordable didn’t mean that local residents were

more open to being subjected to air pollution. But that fell outside the scope of the economic

investment. Indeed, according to Gandy, “the processing and disposal of waste products presents

76 Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 204-205.

77 For an overview of the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems’ activities past and present, see the

Center’s website: http://www.cbns.qc.edu/.

78 Commoner, “The Politics of Regional Environment: Pollution-Control and Pollution-Prevention Strategies,”

in Contested Terrain: Power, Politics, and Participation in Suburbia, edited by Marc L. Silver & Martin Melkonian
(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995), 9-18. Quotation is from page 12.
 267

us with one of the sharpest geographical indices of social power etched into the urban

landscape.”79

Politics and economics tied these issues together: the problem of waste disposal resulted

in corporate interests pushing to relax environmental regulations on air pollution, environmental

clean-up, and other impediments to their profitability.80 As Commoner noted in Making Peace with

the Planet, “a reduction in the [official] cancer risk would have powerful consequences not only

reducing the cost of the cleanup in [Times Beach] and many of the Superfund sites, but also

enhancing the environmental acceptability of trash-burning incinerators, weakening the claims of

Vietnam veterans who were exposed to Agent Orange, and affecting the outcome of numerous

court cases.”81 But a reduction in official risk did nothing to reduce the real risk to which people

were exposed. This kind of debate also threatened to limit the options available to resolve the

problem. It was like looking at the gaping wound from a different angle so as to make it appear as

though the band-aid fit better. What this debate obscured was an examination of the alternatives.

In his speech to the New Jersey Environmental Federation, Commoner described two

recycling studies conducted by the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, which, he indicated,

offered some hope for a sustainable solution. In East Hampton, New York, residents conducted a

79Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 190. The construction of the Williamsburg plant was ultimately blocked. For
that environmental justice protest, see Gandy, Concrete and Clay, 187-227.

80 For an extended discussion of this issue, see Girdner & Smith, Killing Me Softly.

81 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 73. For another recent case, see the dispute over the risk of

ammonium perchlorate, used by NASA and the Pentagon for rocket fuel and munitions since the 1950s. Recent
Environmental Protection Agency reports suggest that perchlorate has resulted in the widespread contamination of
groundwater throughout the United States, while NASA and Pentagon scientists have disputed the environmental
agency’s findings. The debate over how many parts per billion constitute a health threat—perchlorate suppresses
hormonal development, and could be especially harmful to small children and fetuses—will ultimately determine the
cost of the cleanup. The Pentagon and industry are currently arguing for a threshold of 200 parts per billion in drinking
water, which would exempt the vast majority of the contamination from cleanup, while the Environmental Protection
Agency is advocating for a limit of no more than one part per billion. The potential cost of the cleanup at the
Environmental Protection Agency-slated standard could amount to $40 billion over ten years. See Jennifer Lee,
“Second Thoughts on a Chemical: In Water, How Much Is Too Much?” New York Times (2 March 2004), D1, D4.
 268

10-week pilot study, during which they separated their garbage into four groups: food garbage,

paper, bottles and cans, and non-recyclable plastics and other waste. The study demonstrated

that with existing recycling technology, the East Hampton residents could recycle 84% of their

trash.82 Commoner also noted that in Seattle, Washington, residents had achieved 60% without

even trying to compost their food wastes. "So it is clear that recycling can substitute for

incineration to do the only thing that incineration is good at, which is to get rid of 70% of the trash.

You can get rid of more of it by recycling."83 And recycling could also be cost effective. While the

East Hampton study suggested that recycling was 35% cheaper than incineration even if

expensive hazardous waste was dumped cheaply and locally, the Center for the Biology of Natural

Systems’ pilot recycling program in Buffalo, New York also showed that recycling was more

economically beneficial to the local community. If communities purchased an incinerator, the study

argued, money left the local community and ended up in the pockets of multi-national corporations.

Intensive recycling, in contrast, created more local jobs, and, in Buffalo’s case, the local economy

would receive a $12,000,000 boost it would not enjoy with the purchase of an incinerator.84

But just as federal agencies funded research on solar energy just enough to suggest they

were serious—but not nearly enough for it to yield any tangible results—state and municipal

authorities set modest goals for recycling that would not damage the profitability of waste

incinerators, those online and those contracted to be built. Commoner argued that the most

significant obstacles to successful recycling programs were state laws that set modest recycling

82For the East Hampton pilot recycling study, see Commoner et al., Development and Pilot Test of an
Intensive Municipal Solid Waste Recycling System for the Town of East Hampton (Flushing, NY: Center for the Biology
of Natural Systems, 1988).

83 Commoner quoted in Montague, “Incineration vs. Recycling,” 1.

84For the Buffalo pilot recycling study, see D. Stern et al., Buffalo Curbside Recycling Pilot Program
(Flushing, NY: Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, 1989).
 269

goals. In New Jersey, for example, the state required all counties to establish programs that

recycled 25% of their trash. “What’s the significance of this?” Commoner asked. “You have to ask,

what happens to the other 75%?”85 He continued in Making Peace with the Planet that 80% of

trash could be recycled or incinerated, “but obviously not both.”86 In sum, Commoner’s critique of

state laws charged that states, which aimed to recycle a quarter of their garbage, were essentially

guaranteeing that much of the remaining three quarters would be incinerated even though the

majority of it could be recycled as well. "I tell you the New Jersey law … [is] a sly method for

ensuring that incinerators will be built," Commoner told his New Jersey audience.87 Indeed, as he

noted in Making Peace with the Planet, “the only insurmountable hindrance to recycling is building

an incinerator.”88 But while there existed an ecological allure to the inclusion of recycling in an

integrated waste management program, Commoner argued that the compromise between

recycling and incineration was not sufficient to prevent further environmental degradation.

However, if the goal was “to give people a sense of ecological virtue, then any token amount of

recycling … will do.”89 Commoner also recognized that the reluctance to adopt a more vigorous

approach to recycling had as much to do with the cost of the incinerators environmentalists and

officials were trying to phase out. That it would take 20 to 30 years to pay off the cost of the

incinerators constituted another external diseconomy, this time the continued hazard to human

health.

85 Commoner, “Untitled Paper,” New Jersey Environmental Federation Conference, New Brunswick, NJ, 4

March 1989 (Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, Queens College), 11.

86 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 138.

87 Commoner, “Untitled Paper,” New Jersey Environmental Federation Conference, New Brunswick, NJ, 4

March 1989 (Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, Queens College), 11

88 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 138.

89 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 138-139.

 270

Commoner noted with some frustration in Making Peace with the Planet that the human capacity to

understand the environmental crisis had not resulted in any kind of remedy. “For the first time in

the 4-billion-year history of life on this planet,” he lamented, “living things are burdened with a host

of alien man-made substances that are harmful to them.”90 The vast majority of these pollutants

had become even more prevalent in animal tissue than they were twenty years earlier when Earth

Day first imposed itself on the popular consciousness The corporate aversion to alternative

technologies—solar energy or recycling, for example, in which they had little or no stake—was the

hub of the enduring nature of the environmental crisis. Risk and access were intimately linked.

Without access to decision-making, the American public was more exposed to environmental

hazards imposed by business interests, and that exposure weighed disproportionately on the poor.

In a short piece that first appeared in Greenpeace in 1989, Commoner reflected on the

environmental legislation that accompanied the American environmental awakening around Earth

Day and asked the “important and perhaps embarrassing question: how far have we progressed

toward the goal of restoring the quality of the environment?”91 His answer the following year in

Making Peace with the Planet was not positive: “The campaign to clean up the environment has

largely failed,” he wrote, “but not for lack of effort.”92 Commoner assessed the modest—and

slowing—progress made since the energetic period immediately after Earth Day, but also pointed

to a number of important and unequivocal successes. “Pollution levels of a few chemicals—DDT

and PCBs in wildlife and people, mercury in the fish of the Great Lakes, strontium-90 in the food

90 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 29.

91 Commoner, “Why We Have Failed,” Greenpeace 14 (September/October 1989), 12-13. Quotation is from

page 12. Also published in Bill Willers (ed.), Learning to Listen to the Land (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1991),
163-168.

92 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 169.

 271

chain and phosphate pollution in some local rivers—have been reduced by 70 percent or more.

Levels of airborne lead have declined more than 90 percent since 1975.” These exceptions to a

less heartening trend, he argued, helped explain what did and did not work. “Every success on the

very short list of significant environmental quality improvements reflects the same remedial action:

production of the pollutant has been stopped.” DDT and PCBs had been banned; mercury had

been eliminated from the manufacture of chlorine; lead had been removed from gasoline; and the

cessation of atmospheric nuclear testing had resulted in a reduction of strontium-90 in the

environment. “The lesson is plain: pollution prevention works; pollution control does not.”93 In

successful cases, instead of legislating limitations on the release of these toxins, governments

restricted their production or use. In contrast, controls on other pollutants had been much less

effective and were, Commoner contended, “ultimately self-defeating.”94 Gradual reduction of

pollutants didn’t seem to work and multiple entry points into the environmental inevitably made

control measures next to impossible. Between 1975 and 1981, the Environmental Protection

Agency recorded that sulfur dioxide emissions, a major contributor to acid rain, had decline by 19

percent, but then remained constant. Between 1975 and 1985, nitrogen oxides emissions from

automobile exhausts and power plants that were converted into photochemical smog increased by

four percent, and in 1987, carbon monoxide, which also caused respiratory problems, still violated

Environmental Protection Agency standards in a number of cities including New York.95 “The few

real improvements,” Commoner argued, “have been achieved not by adding control devices or

concealing pollutants (as by pumping hazardous chemical wastes into deep water-bearing strata)

93 Commoner, “Why We Have Failed,” 12.

94 Commoner, “A Reporter at Large,” 56.

95 See Commoner, “A Reporter at Large,” 47-48.

 272

but simply by eliminating the pollutants.”96 There were two related lessons here. The first

suggested that compromise and control were not as effective as prevention. The only real

successes had occurred when the relevant technologies were changed to eliminate the pollutant.

As a result, the second lesson indicated that reforming production processes—democratizing the

governance of the means of production—was the only effective method of resolving the

environmental crisis. For Commoner, American environmentalism had been concentrating on

treating the symptoms of pollution, not preventing the disease.

In his keynote address at the Second Citizens’ Conference on Dioxin in St. Louis on 30

July 1994, Commoner told his audience:

The history of dioxin is a sordid story of devastating sickness inflicted, unawares,

on chemical workers; of callous disregard for the impact of toxic wastes on the
public; of denial after denial by the chemical industry; of the industry's repeated
efforts to hide the facts about dioxin and, when these become known, to distort
them. ... We need to learn what must be done, now, not merely to diminish, but to
end the menace of dioxin and its many toxic cousins to life.97

To that end, Commoner embraced the environmental justice impulse. Environmental justice

advocates, he argued in a 1987 article in The New Yorker, were better positioned to fight for

environmental health, because for them, "the front line of the battle against chemical pollution is not

in Washington, it is in their own communities. For them, the issues are clear-cut and are not readily

compromised... the corporations are on one side and the people of the community on the other,

challenging the corporation's exclusive power to make decisions that threaten the community's

health." Commoner was less charitable toward the major environmental organizations, who, for a

variety of factors during the 1980s had shifted much of their resources into lobbying and litigating.

96 Commoner, “A Reporter at Large,” 56.

97 Commoner quoted in “Turning Point for the Chemical Industry,” Rachel’s Environment & Health News 405

(31 August 1994), 1-2. Quotation is from page 1. See also Commoner, “Keynote Address at the Second Citizens’
Conference on Dioxin,” St. Louis, 30 July 1994 (Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, Queens College), 2.
 273

For Commoner, this could only result in compromise. "The national organizations deal with the

environmental disease by negotiating about the kind of Band-Aid to apply to it,” he wrote in The

New Yorker. In contrast, “the community groups deal with the disease by trying to prevent it."98

Prevention was the key to environmental justice because those neighborhoods were the final

refuges for much pollution hazards. As Commoner told his New Jersey Environmental Federation

audience, the grassroots environmental movement “exemplifies the cutting edge of

environmentalism,” and was largely responsible for curbing the advances of the

nuclear/incineration industry by asking for facts, seeking the truth, and insisting that their backyards

were not sinks for pollutants.99

For Commoner, the grassroots struggle to participate equally in community and

environmental decision-making processes was part of a much larger engagement to reclaim public

sovereignty over quality of life issues and concerns. In sum, the environmental justice movement

seemed to be fighting for social and democratic governance of production, which had been at the

heart of Commoner’s own activism since before the Second World War. It was also in this

particular struggle that Commoner saw the blending of social and environmental activisms that he

felt was pivotal to the survival and success of American environmentalism. American

environmentalism needed to find itself more in concert with the civil rights movement, the peace

movement, the feminist movement, the anti-war movement, and the labor movement. At the same

time, these other interests needed to imagine the political landscape more holistically as well.

Together, he wrote in a 1987 article in The New Yorker, this larger movement for social

governance "constitute[s] not only the major aspects of public policy but its most profound

98 Commoner, “A Reporter at Large,” 68.

99 Commoner, “Untitled Paper,” New Jersey Environmental Federation Conference, New Brunswick, NJ, 4

March 1989 (Center for the Biology of Natural Systems, Queens College), 13. See also Montague, “Incineration vs.
Recycling,” 1.
 274

expression: human rights; the quality of life; health; jobs; peace; survival. … Here

environmentalism reaches a common ground with all the other movements, for each of them also

bears a fundamental relation to the choice of production technologies."100

In 1990, Commoner began writing Making Peace with the Planet as an analysis of

environmental improvements in the twenty years since Earth Day. “Since the early 1970s,” he

wrote:

the country has been governed by basic laws that were intended to eliminate air
and water pollution and to rid the environment of toxic chemicals and of
agricultural and urban wastes. National and state environmental agencies have
been established; about a trillion dollars of public and private money have been
spent; local organizations have proliferated. Environmental issues have taken a
permanent place in the country’s political life.101

But ozone depletion, global warming, the ongoing contamination of groundwater and oceans,

increasing smog in urban centers, the continuing problems of storing more radioactive waste, and

the widespread chemical contamination of food, water, and human bodies suggested that in spite

of all that legislation and effort to reverse environmental destruction, the American environmental

consciousness was, in journalist Mark Dowie’s words, “losing ground.”102 Both Commoner and

Dowie saw an emerging hope, however, in the environmental justice movement, which advocated

prevention rather than control, and promoted, generally, a zero tolerance approach to toxins and

other pollutants. Some chemicals could not be controlled. As biologist Joe Thornton points out, “if

Love Canal taught us a lesson, it should be this: pollutants do not stay where we put them.”103

100 Commoner, “A Reporter at Large,” 70.

101 Commoner, Making Peace with the Planet, 20.

102 Dowie, Losing Ground.

103 Thornton, Pandora’s Poison, 23.

 275

“Control” was part of the conservationist vocabulary. It made sense. One didn’t want to

prevent resource extraction; one only wanted it to be properly managed so that resources were not

wasted or depleted. “Prevention,” on the other hand, was part of the new environmental language,

which applied to questions of human health and community empowerment. The languages were

fundamentally different and almost required a conflict of interests, especially when it came to the

more dangerous chemical pollutants. But here was the significance of pluralism. Political scientist

David Schlosberg has argued that “there is no such thing as environmentalism. Any attempt to

define the term in a succinct manner necessarily excludes an array of other valid definitions.

‘Environmentalism’ is simply a convenience—a vague label for an amazingly diverse array of ideas

that have grown around the contemplation of the relationship between human beings and their

surroundings.”104

The catch, or the problem, or the source of tension between the nationally based,

mainstream environmental organizations and the environmental justice movement stemmed from

their mutual use of the same language and disagreement over its proprietorship. For local

environmental justice advocates, compromise was rarely a part of their environmental vocabulary

when it came to arresting hazardous pollutants that made their children ill and threatened their

communities. There is no victory in limiting risk, they would argue, when risk should rightly be

abolished. Problems arose, then, when control of environmental pollutants was adopted even

when local residents considered control an empty victory.

The ongoing political marginalization of poor and minority interests from decision-making

processes was consistent with the stratification of American power. That environmental justice

activism provoked the ire of corporate and governmental agencies was hardly surprising, given its

104 Schlosberg, Environmental Justice and the New Pluralism, 3.

 276

hard line message and tactics. But this was a power game and, as Commoner noted,

environmental justice “represents social (as contrasted with private) governance of the means of

production—an idea that is so foreign to what passes for our national ideology that even to mention

it violates a deep-seated taboo.”105 The thrust of environmental justice’s campaign to protect

human lives and communities from dangerous pollutants helped to expand the American

environmental consciousness. Health and quality of life questions had been front and center at

Earth Day, but the environmental justice movement ensured that these questions developed

tangible rather than abstract meaning, while also noting the significance of power relations in

decision-making. Environmental justice, therefore, made an important contribution that pointed to

the existence and significance of pluralism as a feature of American environmentalism. This shift

also called direct attention to the inequitable distribution of environmental hazards and the manner

in which power rested with whoever determined the language and rhetoric of risk and harm. At the

end of the twentieth century, these developments raised serious questions about the extent to

which the United States might regard itself as being socially progressive.

105 Commoner, “Why We Have Failed,” 13.

 Conclusion
If We Would Know Life

“Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.”
—Alfred, Lord Tennyson

On 17 February 1965, at the 4th Mellon Lecture at the University of Pittsburgh’s School of Medicine,

Commoner gave a paper entitled “Is Biology a Molecular Science?” He criticized molecular biology

and the new cult of DNA, which promised to unlock the secret of life, and concluded his remarks

with the assertion: “If we would know life, we must cherish it—in our laboratories and in the world.”1

It was a simple statement, but one that would resonate through most all of his activism and take on

especially poignant significance by the end of the twentieth century. Early in 2002, Commoner

would reiterate this conviction in an article in Harper’s that put him back in the center of a public

and scientific maelstrom. As the Human Genome Project conceded that it would not uncover

enough genes to account for the complexity of our inherited traits, as activists all over the

world—and especially in Europe—had taken to the street to oppose the continued development of

biotechnology and genetically modified food products, Commoner closed another circle by

returning to the discipline in which he had started his career, cautioning against renewed

technological optimism, pointing to the limits of DNA analysis, and reviving his faith in the science

information movement. “Biology once was regarded as a languid, largely descriptive discipline, a

passive science that was content, for much of its history, merely to observe the natural world rather

than change it,” he wrote. “No longer.”2 In many respects, biotechnology is a fitting conclusion to

this study, because it encapsulates the spectrum of Commoner’s larger social and scientific

concerns and the problems that propelled him into the vanguard of American environmentalism.

1 Barry Commoner, “Is Biology a Molecular Science?” 4th Mellon Lecture of the School of Medicine,

University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, PA, 17 February 1965 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 16), 40.

2Commoner, “Unraveling the DNA Myth: The Spurious Foundation of Genetic Engineering,” Harper’s
Magazine (February 2002), 39-47. Quotation is from page 39.
 278

For forty years, Commoner’s criticisms of the petrochemical industry focused on the

manner in which its products barged unwelcome into the chemistry of living things and polluted

people, animals, and ecosystems. While most of the chemicals manufactured or released as

waste by the petrochemical industry resembled the structure of chemical components found in

nature, they were sufficiently different to be hazardous to life. To Commoner, the connection to

twenty-first century genetic engineering was clear: we were in the process of committing the same

tragic error, but this time with the secret of life. According to Stephen Fox, “Commoner resisted

genetic theory, because it applied models from physics and chemistry to living cells, thereby wiping

out the vital distinction between animate and inanimate matter. Without that distinction in place,

modern technology was free to manipulate inanimate nature with a blithe disregard for any

implications for living creatures.”3 But Commoner’s attack was not based on such a strictly

conservationist or philosophical concern over the social repercussions of what constituted

inanimate matter. To Commoner, the politics and economics of scientific research had dubbed

genetic theory as the new field that warranted unconditional support, but genetic theory was prone

to disaster because it did not “take into account all the relevant data and [was] based on an

arbitrary exclusion of certain essential facts.”4 In many respects, then, Commoner’s critique was a

reiteration of his long held concern about technological progress creating or stumbling into

unanticipated problems. Enthusiasm for the potential of technology, he argued, constituted the

protean source of social and scientific mismanagement that “too often … has led us to exaggerate

our power to control the potent agents which we have let loose in the environment.”5 The promise

3 Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of

Wisconsin Press, 1981), 313.

4 Commoner, Science and Survival (New York: Viking Press, 1966), 39.

5 Commoner, Science and Survival, 46.

 279

of genetic engineering represented another example of profit supplanting uncertainty in the

determination of the risk.

With typical flair, Commoner noted in 1967: “It should now be clear that the power given to

man by modern science is based on seriously incomplete knowledge and carries with it the grave

risk of acting in ignorance. The notion that we must unquestioningly use the power that science

endows has now become an unreliable guide to modern life.”6 Out of the laboratory and into the

farmer’s field (and, indeed, the frying pan), genetic engineering immediately became an

environmental issue. To critics, the new science brought dark and ominous implications to

American food production and consumption. Commoner referred to biotechnology as “an endless

invasion into life. … We don’t know what’s going to happen but something will happen and I think

we need to be afraid.”7 As difficult as it was to escape the hazards of nuclear fallout, the relative

ubiquity of molecular biology’s fruits (and vegetables and animals, for that matter) could potentially

pose an equally unavoidable threat. Its capacity to selectively transfer genes from one species to

another was an incredible feat of technology that far surpassed any innovation of Mendelian

selective breeding. The science of the genome has been adopted by the food industry to grow

bigger, faster, cheaper crops. Flavr Savr tomatoes, for example, were designed to ripen more

slowly, so they would last longer after being picked; corn and soy beans were made tolerant to

pesticides; canola, papaya, cotton, and countless other crops were “improved” in one way or

another. As we have already witnessed in the production of automobiles, plastics, and synthetic

chemicals generally, bigger, faster, cheaper does not always mean better, healthier, and more

environmentally sound. Nor does it imply careful analysis of unforeseen environmental costs.

6 Commoner, “The Implications of Molecular Biology for Man,” New School for Social Research, 21 April

1967, New York (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 20), 21.

7 Commoner interview with author, 17 July 2003.

 280

Further, Commoner had warned in Science and Survival, the risk of a single nuclear power plant

malfunctioning was exponentially more disastrous than a steam engine boiler explosion. In trying

to assess the potential risk, the widespread contamination of genetically modified foods was akin to

the nuclear power plant.

Armed with the weapons necessary to break the genetic code, molecular biology

appeared, in Commoner’s words, “poised to assume godlike powers of creation, calling forth

artificial forms of life rather than undiscovered elements and subatomic particles.”8 The molecular

biologists’ conceit eerily mirrored a similar aura of omnipotence that had surrounded the

antagonists of Commoner’s first environmental campaign. After World War II, as the scientific

supremacy of nuclear physics evolved into a Cold War arms race, physicists were increasingly

disparaged for introducing the potential for global annihilation and the unanticipated fallout hazards

that accompanied nuclear weapons testing.9 Physicists successfully smashed the nucleus of the

atom, but they found that they were unable to predict the properties of the whole nucleus by

studying its parts. This oversight had been the ecological failing of the petrochemical industry as

well, as they produced chemicals that reacted poorly in the environment. The results were

alarming, and were indicative of what Pnina Abir-Am regarded as part of the “ongoing historical

process of ‘progressive colonization’ by the so-called exact sciences.”10 Fallout poisoned

Americans indiscriminately; DDT was more effective than it was supposed to be; and at the end of

8 Barry Commoner, “Unraveling the DNA Myth,” 39. The seminal work on the history of molecular biology is

Horace Freeland Judson, The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology (New York: Simon &
Schuster, 1979).

9 Paul Boyer reflects on the cultural transition from nuclear euphoria to Cold War terror after the Soviets
detonated the atomic bomb in 1949. See Paul Boyer, By the Bomb’s Early Light: American Thought and Culture at the
Dawn of the Atomic Age ([1985] Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994).

10 Pnina G. Abir-Am, “The Molecular Transformation of Twentieth-Century Biology,” in Science in the

Twentieth Century, edited by John Krige & Dominique Pestre (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1997), 495-
524. Quotation is from page 495.
 281

the twentieth century, after thirty years of heightened environmental awareness, American airways

and water systems experienced dangerously high levels of toxicity. Commoner argued that only

through examining matter in its natural environment could relationships with other organisms be

properly understood. The human condition was inextricably linked to biological systems.

Everything was indeed connected to everything else.

Commoner’s insistence on the importance of cherishing life struck at the very nerve center

of environmental concern. It preached caution and warned against unmitigated technological

enthusiasm, the products of which had galvanized Commoner, Rachel Carson, and a new

environmental movement to protest the proliferation of chemical pollutants. To cherish life also

meant to abandon the fallacy that humans could completely dominate or control nature. This line

of thinking was the crux of conservationist thought and had developed a strong following since the

Progressive era.11 Further, cherishing life also challenged the unquestioning application of

science. The pursuit of knowledge was a worthy goal, but its utility seemed to have been perverted

from a sense of improving human welfare to promoting industrial progress and equating welfare

with levels of consumption. In this capacity, Commoner spoke as a scientist, criticizing the hubris

of his own discipline. Most importantly, however, cherishing life offered a powerful directive on how

societies and people should interact. How could we work to protect nature if we were unable to

treat each other more humanely? In this vein, working for peace and against poverty, for civil and

women’s rights and against tyranny intersected with more traditional environmental interests as

part of the same mission. In essence, cherishing life meant striving toward a more egalitarian

society.

11For the progressive evolution of American environmental ethics, see Roderick Nash, The Rights of Nature:
A History of Environmental Ethics (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
 282

Just as he readied himself to refocus his energy on genetic theory, Commoner turned eighty. In

recognition of his birthday, a symposium was held in New York City to celebrate him as an

international leader in the environmental movement. Invited speakers from around the

world—friends, colleagues, and fellow activists of all stripes—spoke about Commoner’s influence

and contribution. Peter Montague, the director of the Environmental Research Foundation,

championed Commoner as “the father of grassroots environmentalism,” charting the influence of

his career on grassroots environmentalism in the United States. Montague pointed out that

Commoner “developed many of the fundamental ideas that today propel the burgeoning movement

of grassroots environmental activism.” These included such tenets as the public being the

guardians of moral wisdom and having a right to know the risks inherent in policy decisions;

specialists possessed no special moral authority and had an obligation to make alliances with

citizens; pollution must be prevented, because it cannot be successfully managed; and the

understanding of risk is political in nature, not scientific.12

Commoner’s longtime fellow activist, Virginia Brodine, followed Montague and reflected on

the significance of the Committees for Nuclear and Environmental Information. While Montague

addressed Commoner’s influence on grassroots activism, Brodine talked specifically about the

power of the science information movement as a mode of public empowerment. That movement,

Brodine contended, was buoyed by Commoner’s clarity of purpose. “What carried … the whole

organization along more than anything else was Barry Commoner’s unwavering confidence in the

importance of information and the ability of the public to understand and use it.”13 After Brodine,

12 Peter Montague, “Barry Commoner: The Father of Grassroots Environmentalism,” in Barry Commoner’s

Contribution to the Environmental Movement: Science and Social Action, edited by David Kriebel (Amityville, NY:
Baywood Publishing Co., 2002), 5-14. Quotation is from page 5.

13 Virginia Warner Brodine, “The Day Before Yesterday: The Committees for Nuclear and Environmental
Information,” in Barry Commoner’s Contribution to the Environmental Movement, 15-23. Quotation is from page 17-18.
 283

the labor leader Tony Mazzocchi recalled the environmental and occupational health work in which

Commoner had engaged, demonstrating the relationship between labor and the environment. He

was followed by Ralph Nader, who attacked “junk science,” and the dangerous relationship

between science and corporate money.

Cumulatively, the papers presented in celebration of Commoner’s birthday painted a

picture of Commoner’s activism since World War II. His mode of dissent—the insistence on the

importance of open discourse—was reflective of the period. As the Cold War imposed a cultural

and political conformity that polarized American society and ghettoized disparate social concerns

like those for the environment and social justice, Commoner struggled to create a forum for public

discourse and dissent. He framed his position in American values, particularly the centrality of

democracy to the American condition, and proceeded to draw connections between social and

environmental problems that developed after the Second World War. The message was

unashamedly holistic. As Nader observed, Commoner refrained from limiting his criticism of

environmental issues to particular risk or hazard levels. Rather, “he asks much more fundamental

questions as to what is the utility of the petrochemical industry and why do we even have a fossil

fuel-based industry projected into the next century? What is the nature of industrial organizations

that has to be changed so that we develop different kinds of incentives for different kinds of

environmentally benign technologies?”14 The bigger questions provoked bigger challenges to

American political and economic systems.

Commoner gave the final address that day: a paper entitled “What is Yet to Be Done.” It

was a light-hearted speech, but one laced with a solemn sense of purpose that in more than fifty

years of activism had not waned. “The environmental crisis expresses the relation between

14 Ralph Nader, “Real Junk Science: The Corruption of Science by Corporate Money,” in Barry Commoner’s
Contribution to the Environmental Movement, 31-43. Quotation is from pages 31-32.
 284

science and society in a special way,” he told the gathering. “It illustrates the overriding importance

of action.”15 The themes he presented were familiar and wide-ranging. “The environmental crisis

arises from a fundamental fault,” he claimed:

Our systems of production—in industry, agriculture, energy, and

transportation—essential as they are, make people sick and die. As the Surgeon
General would say, these processes are hazardous to your health. But that is only
the immediate problem. Down the line, these same production processes threaten
a series of global human catastrophes: higher temperatures; the seas rising to
flood many of the world’s cities; more frequent severe weather; and dangerous
exposure to ultraviolet radiation. The non-human sectors of the living ecosystem
are also affected by the crisis: ancient forest reserves are disappearing; wetlands
and estuaries are impaired; numerous species are threatened with extinction.16

But the environmental crisis was a human event, caused by what people do, and the ultimate

measure of its impact was the threat to human health and well-being. If environmentalism was

devoted to human welfare, Commoner argued, then the northern exploitation of the southern world

needed to be addressed. “We, who are environmental advocates, must find a way—for the sake of

the planet and the people who live on it—to join a historic mission to end poverty wherever it exists.

That,” he concluded, “is what is yet to be done.”17

From the late nineteenth century to World War II, Americans witnessed “the transformation of

science from a mostly amateur and individualized undertaking to a complex, professionalized, and

largely government-sponsored endeavor.”18 The organizational and financial advantages of such a

15 Commoner, “What is Yet to Be Done,” in Barry Commoner’s Contribution to the Environmental Movement,

73-85. Quotation is from page 73. This book is made up of the presentations given in celebration of Commoner’s 80th
birthday.

16 Commoner, “What is Yet to Be Done,” 74.

17 Commoner, “What is Yet to Be Done,” 85.

18 Michael A. Bryson, Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of
Exploration to the Age of Ecology (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2002), xii.
 285

transformation were obvious. The danger, however, was that expertise might trump public interest

and culminate in the cloistering of scientific knowledge and, as a result, policy and decision-

making. These fears came to fruition during the Cold War period as concerns over national

security condoned secrecy. By the beginning of the 1960s, outgoing President Dwight D.

Eisenhower warned against the impending powers of the emerging military-industrial complex. In

his study of the postwar science establishment, Stuart W. Leslie called it the military-industrial-

academic complex in order to emphasize the of complicity independent research.19 From its

earliest stages, Commoner’s career sought to reconnect professionalized science with the public

interest. If it sounded like a crusade, that’s because—in a sense—it was. As the 1960s ushered in

a period of receptivity toward environmental protection, Commoner couched his rhetoric in that

burgeoning language.

In so doing, Commoner influenced the direction of the modern environmental movement

and helped foster its sophisticated concern for public health and the human body as an

environmental landscape. The marriage of natural resource conservation and public health was

frequently divisive, but it also generated a new and innovative arsenal as well as novel directions

for environmental activism—economics, class politics, and globalization, for example—and

presented the prospect of further coalitions that transcended race, class, and national boundaries.

That is the optimistic conclusion, anyway. And it is one that sees the contemporary debate over

genetic engineering as the greatest single environmental threat since nuclear weapons, but also

one that has the potential to unite the disparate factions of American environmentalism.

Conservationists, environmental justice advocates, radical environmentalists, and human health

advocates each express grave concerns about genetic engineering’s environmental safety. A

19 Stuart W. Leslie, The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and
Stanford (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
 286

common front might indeed re-stimulate American environmentalism. But that is the optimistic

conclusion. Though ever the congenital optimist, Commoner acknowledged that the scale and the

scope of environmental deterioration were becoming more—rather than less—worrisome. If

Americans were starting to know life as the Age of Ecology implied they were, they were not yet

valuing its lessons.

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1 Taped interviews between Commoner and author have been donated to the Center for the Biology of
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 288

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“Fallout and Water Pollution—Parallel Cases,” Scientist and Citizen 6 (December 1964), 2-
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 310

“The Integrity of Science,” American Scientist 53 (June 1965), 174-198.

“The Integrity of Science,” Science Journal (April 1966), 75-79.

“A Scientist Views Pollution,” address before the National Industrial Conference Board,
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“The Implications of Molecular Biology for Man,” New School for Social Research, 21 April
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“The Scholar’s Obligation to Dissent,” Commencement Address, University of California,

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“The Social Significance of Environmental Pollution,” 11th annual meeting of the National
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“Survival in the Environment: Population Crisis,” AAAS Annual Meeting, Boston, 29

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“Untitled Talk,” Harvard University, 21 April 1970 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 36).

“Untitled Talk,” Brown University, 22 April 1970 (Barry Commoner Papers, LoC, Box 131).

“Planning to Survive,” keynote address before the American Institute of Planners, Boston,
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“Pollution and Profit Motive,” Talk and Q&A on CBS, 14 December 1971 (Barry Commoner
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“The Meaning of the Environmental Crisis,” United Nations Conference on the Human
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“Labor’s Stake in the Environment/The Environment’s Stake in Labor,” keynote address

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“Workplace Burden,” Environment 15 (July/August 1973), 15-20.

“The Energy Crisis: Implications for Foundations,” address at the Council on Foundations
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“The Energy Crisis: All of a Piece,” address at “The Energy Outlook and Global
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 311

“The Energy Crisis: All of a Piece,” The Center Magazine (March/April 1975), 26-31.

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 313

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