Another Ignored Prophet Bites the Dust

By the time I became aware of Barry Commoner in the '80s, he had already been demonized by the Reagan adminstration's rape-the-earth-quick-before-the-Rapture freakazoid corporatists.

At the time it just seemed bizarre; now it's obviously the beginning of the repug strategy of screaming Witch! Commie! Moocher! at anybody who dares to speak a fact the repugs don't like.

Ken at Down with Tyranny:

"[W]hen a Times writer once asked [Dr. Commoner's] Queens College office to mail some material, it arrived in an old brown envelope with the crossed-out return address of the botany department at Washington University -- a place where he had last worked 19 years earlier."

-- the conclusion of Daniel Lewis's NYT obit, "Scientist,
Candidate and Planet Earth’s Lifeguard" (links onsite)

My first thought on seeing Barry Commoner's name was: My goodness, is he still alive? Then I realized that almost certainly the reason I was suddenly seeing his name again was that no, now he isn't alive anymore.

Barry Commoner, a founder of modern ecology and one of its most provocative thinkers and mobilizers, died Sunday in Manhattan. He was 95 and lived in Brooklyn Heights.

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 and called him the Paul Revere of Ecology. He was by no means the only one sounding alarms -- the movement was well under way by then, building on the impact of Rachel Carson's book "Silent Spring" in 1962 and the work of many others. But he was arguably the most peripatetic in his efforts to make environmentalism a people's political cause.

(The same issue of Time also 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.)

-- from the NYT obit

I don't know whether to call it irony or what, but Commoner's death comes at a time when the environment has essentially disappeared from view -- and certainly from the presidential election. It's as if all those problems had magically gone away! One thinks of this anecdote Daniel Lewis recalls in connection with Commoner's 1980 run for the presidency as the Citizens' Party candidate:

His own favorite moment of the campaign, he recalled many years later, was when a reporter in Albuquerque asked, "Dr. Commoner, are you a serious candidate, or are you just running on the issues?"

We sure don't have to worry about anyone running on environmental issues this year.

No, we don't. Even though runaway global warming is going to destroy the nation's economy long before Medicare does.