FOREWORD

THE CLOSING CIRCLE AND BARRY COMMONER’S ENDURING HISTORICAL SIGNIFICANCE

“Anyone who proposes to cure the environmental crisis undertakes thereby to change the course of history.”
—Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle

In February 2019, Massachusetts Senator Edward Markey and New York House Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced a fourteen-page resolution for a Green New Deal. Their platform seeks to harmonize economic revitalization with the environmental realities facing the United States. In effect, the Green New Deal is a progressive declaration of a combined war on poverty and on greenhouse gas emissions. Drawing its name from President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal of the Depression era and much of its inspiration from President Lyndon B. Johnson’s visions of a Great Society, the green resolution proposes state-sponsored economic stimulus ventures. At the same time, it stresses green imperatives in a world where climate change has shaken confidence in traditional energy-intensive manufacturing practices to the core.

In seeking to “green” the economy, the Green New Deal marks a historical moment in US politics. It asserts that we have reached a point of no return in our trespasses against nature and that we need to retreat from our unquestioning destruction of the Earth. In short, the only option available to us—if we are to ensure the survival of human societies—is to reverse the relationship between the economy and the environment. Rather than forcing ecological systems to acquiesce to our economic desires, we must look for new ways of transforming our economic appetites to exist within the confines of local and global ecosystems and their limits. The resolution expresses a desire to address these environmental transgressions and kick-start the US economy in a more sustainable direction.

Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle is the blueprint for the Green New Deal. Even almost fifty years removed from its publication, this book remains the template for solving the global environmental crisis.

Commoner was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1917. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he took an early interest in biology and enjoyed early support from family and some teachers, who saw him get to Columbia University for his undergraduate studies. Of that period, Commoner recalled, “I began my career as a scientist and at the same time . . . learned that I was intimately concerned with politics.” Inspired by left politics—support for Spanish Loyalists and labor union movements and opposition to lynchings in the American South—Commoner saw himself as a child of the 1930s Depression. He excelled at his studies and moved to Harvard University to pursue his PhD.

During World War II, Commoner served in the US Navy. After the war, he worked under Connecticut Senator Brien McMahon in drafting new policies for the management of the nation’s new nuclear weapons. At the dawn of the Cold War, Commoner was instrumental behind the scenes in ensuring that nuclear power be kept under civilian, rather than military, control. After a brief period working as an associate editor for Science Illustrated, he moved to Missouri and joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis, where he quickly established himself as an award-winning research scientist.

Commoner sounded an early alarm on the hazards associated with nuclear fallout, air pollution, automobile exhaust, water contamination, pesticides, phosphates, urban waste, and an assortment of other environmental dangers. By the end of the 1960s, he had emerged as the most prominent and radical voice in environmental politics. In March 1970, when Time magazine went looking for the face of American environmentalism for its cover on the eve of the first Earth Day (April 22), Commoner’s relative ubiquity in all corners of the environmental debate made him the compelling choice. He was, according to Time, the leader of the “emerging science of survival” and “the Paul Revere of ecology.”

Throughout his popular writing and public appearances, Commoner was an articulate and deliberate proponent for the environment. He was also principled, unwavering, and confrontational. He further recognized not just the inherent connections between the various environmental issues he addressed but also their relationship to social issues, not the least of which were peace, democracy, poverty, and health. He was equally vocal against the war in Vietnam and racial prejudice, which he saw as being consistent and in concert with his environmental sentiments.

As The Closing Circle makes clear, the environment was not a singular problem. Rather, it was (and remains) part of a much deeper social crisis. Commoner might not have been the first intellectual to draw out this more holistic relationship between nature and society, but The Closing Circle resonates for the unremitting importance of that relationship. Environmental problems cannot be resolved without commitment to social progress and social justice. Similarly, social progress and social justice are impossible without a deeper appreciation for ecological limits.

The Closing Circle was first published in 1971, in the aftermath of the first Earth Day celebration, when more than twenty million Americans took to the streets all across the country. The book outlined the nature of the environmental crisis and a pathway toward resolving it. Commoner asserted that faulty technology spurred on by a free market represented the fundamental origins of the environmental crisis. Its solution demanded reaction against the existing industrial system in order to reduce stress on ecosystems. But in making this claim, he was running up against one of the shibboleths of American culture: that economic well-being and environmental sustainability cannot coexist. Because the physical environment is the source of a nation’s natural wealth, the argument goes, it can be protected only at the expense of economic development. Concomitantly, the same argument asserts, environmental protections inhibit free markets. As a result, one way to read the history of the United States since industrialization in the mid-nineteenth century is to trace its resource extraction and manufacturing growth. This is a story that is implicitly familiar. It follows the mining of coal, the discovery of oil, the damming of rivers, and the deforestation to power the nation. The country’s natural wealth seemed an infinite resource. It was impossible to conceive of scarcity amid such abundance.

After World War II, when the United States was the world’s indomitable and indisputable industrial superpower, Americans enjoyed unprecedented affluence. Consumer goods were readily available and widely accessible. The nation was realizing its potential as a land of plenty. At the same time, however, more and more evidence suggested that the wealth of the land wasn’t quite as infinite as previous assumptions had believed.

The 1970s were a long time coming. Production and consumption were hardly sustainable. The first Earth Day was a chastening moment. It served as tacit acknowledgment that we were destroying the planet. To correct this breaking of the ecology and to reclose the circle of life, humans needed to make sure we adhered to the four laws of ecology, which Commoner expressed in The Closing Circle: 1) everything is connected to everything else; 2) everything must go somewhere; 3) nature knows best; and 4) there is no such thing as a free lunch. These four laws deserve repeating and study, and as much as they have, they also have been neglected in our environmental policies. Our current moment is in urgent need of their lessons.

The four laws of ecology were also an important vehicle for advancing Commoner’s argument. If life and environmental sustainability matter to us at all, then these four laws are incontrovertible. Moreover, accepting their premise permitted him to help people into the murkier debate over the economy and the environment. To confront the irreproachable economic system and to persuade those less inclined to criticize it, The Closing Circle reads like a mystery novel. From its introduction, where Commoner lays out the problematique of the new environmental movement, to its conclusion, where he outlines his solutions to the social and environmental crisis, author and reader follow a methodical argument step-by-step. There is a logic to his thinking that is difficult to dispute.

The other part of Commoner’s apologia is one that stakes a claim within the emerging environmental movement. At the same time that he was outlining the four laws of ecology, another line of thought saw human population growth as the source of the environmental crisis. Headed by scientists such as Garrett Hardin and Paul R. Ehrlich, the neo–Malthusians saw population controls as the necessary priority for the environmental movement. Too many people were consuming too many resources, they contended. Curb population (drastically) and you could limit environmental destruction. For Commoner, this was a backward and elitist argument that threatened to do much social damage; reconfiguring the technological systems that drove modern life was the essential priority.

From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, it is hard not to recognize The Closing Circle as a visionary work. Commoner’s reading of the environmental crisis remains pertinent and pressing. Indeed, reflecting on the past fifty years of social and environmental politics, he was right in his conclusions about the relationship between the environment and every aspect of social life. With sea levels rising, biodiversity loss accelerating, and the increasing concentration of wealth and power, we face an uncertain future.

In spite of his persistent warnings about the environmental troubles sparked by modern industrial practices, Commoner remained a congenital optimist. Inasmuch as The Closing Circle offers a blueprint to the contemporary crisis, it also insists upon a cooperative vision of how to get there. Curing the environmental exigencies, he intoned, was to “change the course of history.” That, in itself, demands widespread social participation: “Sweeping social change can be designed only in the workshop of rational, informed, collective social action. That we must act now is clear. The question which we face is how.”

The book you are holding is as good a road map as any on how we must act. The next step is up to us.

— Michael Egan

Historian/author, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival

Ontario, Canada

January 2020