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The Environmental Debate, 3rd Edition

Document 115: Barry Commoner on the Ecosphere (1971)

Barry Commoner’s concern with the environment began with his alarm about nuclear proliferation but broadened into an understanding of the need for a new view of the human role in the environment. One of the first U.S. scientists to comprehend the relationship between political activism and social change, Commoner played a role in the formation of the Union of Concerned Scientists. As a public advocate and articulate spokesperson for a wide-ranging environmental, social, and political agenda, Commoner moved from an early career as a lecturer and then professor of biology at Washington University to a presidential candidate in 1980, when he campaigned on a ticket calling for public control of the energy industry.

The environment has just been rediscovered by the people who live in it. In the United States the event was celebrated in April 1970, during Earth Week. It was a sudden, noisy awakening.

. . .

Earth Week and the accompanying outburst of publicity, preaching, and prognostication surprised most people, including those of us who had worked for years to generate public recognition of the environmental crisis. What surprised me most were the numerous, confident explanations of the cause and cure of the crisis. For 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. During Earth Week, I discovered that such reticence was far behind the times.

After the excitement of Earth Week, I tried to find some meaning in the welter of contradictory advice that it produced. It seemed to me that the confusion of Earth Week was a sign that the situation was so complex and ambiguous that people could read into it what ever conclusion their own beliefs—about human nature, economics, and politics—suggested.

. . .

Earth Week convinced me of the urgency of a deeper public understanding of the origins of the environmental crisis and its possible cures. . . .

Such an understanding must begin at the source of life itself: the earth’s thin skin of air, water, and soil, and the radiant solar fire that bathes it. Here, several billion years ago, life appeared and was nourished by the earth’s substance. As it grew, life evolved, its old forms transforming the earth’s skin and new ones adapting to these changes. Living things multiplied in number, variety, and habitat until they formed a global network, becoming deftly enmeshed in the surroundings they had themselves created. This is the ecosphere, the home that life has built for itself on the planet’s outer surface.

Any living thing that hopes to live on the earth must fit into the ecosphere or perish. The environmental crisis is a sign that the finely sculpted fit between life and its surroundings has begun to corrode. As the links between one living thing and another, and between all of them and their surroundings, begin to break down, the dynamic interactions that sustain the whole have begun to falter and, in some places, stop.

. . .

Understanding the ecosphere comes hard because, to the modern mind, it is a curiously foreign place. We have become accustomed to think of separate, singular events, each dependent upon a unique, singular cause. But in the ecosphere every effect is also a cause: an animal’s waste becomes food for soil bacteria; what bacteria excrete nourishes plants; animals eat the plants. Such ecological cycles are hard to fit into human experience in the age of technology, where machine A always yields product B, and product B, once used, is cast away, having no further meaning for the machine, the product, or the user.

Here is the first great fault in the life of man in the ecosphere. We have broken out of the circle of life, converting its endless cycles into man-made, linear events: oil is taken from the ground, distilled into fuel, burned in an engine, converted thereby into noxious fumes, which are emitted into the air. At the end of the line is smog. Other man-made breaks in the ecosphere’s cycles spew out toxic chemicals, sewage, heaps of rubbish—testimony to our power to tear the ecological fabric that has, for millions of years, sustained the planet’s life.

Suddenly we have discovered what we should have known long before: that the ecosphere sustains people and everything that they do; that anything that fails to fit into the ecosphere is a threat to its finely balanced cycles; that wastes are not only unpleasant, not only toxic, but, more meaningfully, evidence that the ecosphere is being driven towards collapse.

Source: Barry Commoner, The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology (New York: Knopf, 1971), pp. 10-12.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
"Document 115: Barry Commoner On The Ecosphere (1971)." The Environmental Debate, 3rd Edition, edited by Peninah Neimark & Peter Rhoades Mott, Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Envd3e_0125.
APA 7th
Document 115: Barry Commoner on the Ecosphere (1971). The Environmental Debate, 3rd Edition, In P. Neimark & P. R. Mott (Eds.), Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Envd3e_0125.
CMOS 17th
"Document 115: Barry Commoner On The Ecosphere (1971)." The Environmental Debate, 3rd Edition, Edited by Peninah Neimark & Peter Rhoades Mott. Salem Press, 2017. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=Envd3e_0125.