-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Nagraj Adve Sent: Tuesday, October 02, 2012 1:46 PM To: Sarai; indiaclimatejustice; Aseem Shrivastava; Thomas Mathew Subject: [Reader-list] Barry Commoner NYT
The first part of a 3-part obit in the New York Times. Not a good time for old people on the left. Nagraj Barry Commoner, a founder of modern ecology and one of its most provocative thinkers and mobilizers in making environmentalism a people’s political cause, died on Sunday in Manhattan. He was 95 and lived in Brooklyn Heights. Related in Opinion - Dot Earth Blog: Barry Commoner's Uncommon Life<http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/10/01/barry-commoners-uncommon-life/?ref=us>(October 1, 2012) [image: National Twitter Logo.] <https://twitter.com/#!/nytnational> Connect With Us on Twitter <https://twitter.com/#!/nytnational> Follow@NYTNational <https://twitter.com/#!/nytnational> for breaking news and headlines. Twitter List: Reporters and Editors<https://twitter.com/#!/NYTNational/nyt-national-journalists/members> Enlarge This Image Jack Fahland/St. Louis Globe Democrat Barry Commoner in 1971 at Washington University in St. Louis. He believed pollution, war and inequality were related issues. Readers’ Comments Share your thoughts. - Post a Comment »<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/us/barry-commoner-dies-at-95.html?_r=1&hp#postcomment> - Read All Comments (130) »<http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/02/us/barry-commoner-dies-at-95.html?_r=1&hp#comments> His wife, Lisa Feiner, confirmed his death. Dr. Commoner was a leader among a generation of scientist-activists who recognized the toxic consequences of America’s post-World War II technology boom, and one of the first to stir the national debate over the public’s right to comprehend the risks and make decisions about them. Raised in Brooklyn during the Depression and trained as a biologist at Columbia and Harvard, he came armed with a combination of scientific expertise and leftist zeal. His work on the global effects of radioactive fallout, which included documenting concentrations of strontium 90 in the baby teeth of thousands of children, contributed materially to the adoption of the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963. >From there it was a natural progression to a range of environmental and social issues that kept him happily in the limelight as a speaker and an author through the 1960s and ’70s, and led to a wobbly run for president in 1980. In 1970, the year of the first Earth Day, Time magazine put Dr. Commoner on its cover <http://www.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19700202,00.html> and called him the Paul Revere of Ecology. He was by no means the only one sounding alarms; the movement was well under way by then, building on the impact of Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring” in 1962 and the work of many others. But he was arguably the most peripatetic in his efforts to draw public attention to environmental dangers. (The same issue of Time noted that President Richard M. Nixon had already signed on. In his State of the Union address that January, he said, “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?” And he followed through: Among other steps, the Environmental Protection Agency was established in December 1970.) Dr. Commoner was an imposing professorial figure, with a strong face, heavy eyeglasses, black eyebrows and a thick head of hair that gradually turned pure white. He was much in demand as a speaker and a debater, especially on college campuses, where he helped supply a generation of activists with a framework that made the science of ecology accessible. His four informal rules of ecology were catchy enough to print on a T-shirt and take to the street: Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch. Although the rules were plain enough, the thinking behind them required leaps of faith. Dr. Commoner’s overarching concern was not ecology as such but rather a radical ideal of social justice in which everything was indeed connected to everything else. Like some other left-leaning dissenters of his time, he believed that environmental pollution, war, and racial and sexual inequality needed to be addressed as related issues of a central problem. *A Critic of Capitalism* Having been grounded, as an undergraduate, in Marxist theory, he saw his main target as capitalist “systems of production” in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation that emphasized profits and technological progress with little regard for consequences: greenhouse gases, nonbiodegradable materials, and synthetic fertilizers and toxic wastes that leached into the water supply. He insisted that the planet’s future depended on industry’s learning not to make messes in the first place, rather than on trying to clean them up. It followed, by his logic, that scientists in the service of industry could not merely invent some new process or product and then wash their hands of moral responsibility for the side effects. He was a lasting opponent of nuclear power because of its radioactive waste; he scorned the idea of pollution credit swaps because, after all, he said, an industry would have to be fouling the environment in the first place to be rewarded by such a program. _________________________________________ reader-list: an open discussion list on media and the city. Critiques & Collaborations To subscribe: send an email to [email protected] with subscribe in the subject header. To unsubscribe: https://mail.sarai.net/mailman/listinfo/reader-list List archive: <https://mail.sarai.net/pipermail/reader-list/> !DSPAM:2676,506b285325482118093946! _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
