Barry Commoner's Contribution to the Environmental Movement

Science and Social Action

Mary Lee Dunn, David Kriebel, David L Kriebel, David L Kriebel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780415785655
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351845731
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Technology & Engineering

Few people have made greater contributions to protecting and improving the environment than the scientist, teacher, activist Dr. Barry Commoner. For half a century, Dr. Commoner has been an international leader in the environmental movement. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, a symposium was held at which invited speakers discussed his contributions to a wide range of environmental issues. This book, collecting many of the invited papers, provides fascinating insights into the life and work of one of the twentieth century's most influential scientists and social activists. Chapters contributed by other activists, scientists, and scholars including Ralph Nader, Tony Mazzocchi and Peter Montague cover many of Dr. Commoner's major contributions.

CHAPTER 1

Barry Commoner: The Father of Grass-Roots Environmentalism

Peter Montague

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Barry Commoner and his colleagues in the Committee for Nuclear Information and at Washington University in St. Louis developed many of the fundamental arguments and ideas that, today, underpin and propel the grassroots movement for environmental justice, such as: moral wisdom resides in the citizenry; scientists have no special wisdom in moral matters; scientists must make alliances with citizens; pollution must be prevented because it cannot be managed; the burden of proof rests on the polluter; citizens have a right to know; the principle of precautionary action should guide our decisions; environmental impact assessments are essential; and risk assessment is political.

Where did the grass-roots environmental movement come from? Most people would say it began with action by citizens in Warren County, North Carolina, or in Niagara Falls, New York in the late 1970s and early 1980s—and of course they would be partly right. But the world was prepared for grass-roots environmentalism because of certain ideas, and to a surprising degree those ideas originated with one person—a scientist working in St. Louis, Missouri, named Barry Commoner.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Commoner developed many of the fundamental ideas that today propel the burgeoning movement of grass-roots environmental activism. Specifically, in Commoner’s early writings, I find the following ideas that, today, seem entirely contemporary and widely accepted:

• Moral wisdom resides in the citizenry

• Scientists have no special competence in moral matters

• Scientists have an obligation to make alliances with citizens

• Pollution must be prevented; it cannot be successfully managed

• The burden of proof rests properly on the polluter

• Citizens have a right to know

• The precautionary principle should guide our decisions

• Environmental impact assessment is a necessary tool

• Risk assessment is political, not scientific

Commoner was born May 28, 1917, in Brooklyn, New York, the son of a Russian immigrant tailor. In 1933 he entered Columbia University, then Harvard, earning a Ph.D. in cellular biology in 1941. During World War II, he served in the Naval Air Force. In 1947 he took a faculty position with Washington University in St. Louis where he soon distinguished himself as an exceptionally creative and insightful researcher, studying viruses and elusive “free radicals” in living tissues.

Commoner continued to publish work on proteins and free radicals for twenty years, but in the early 1950s something happened that caught his attention and turned his interest to larger questions. On the morning of April 25, 1953, a nuclear bomb was exploded at the Nevada Test Site. Thirty-six hours later, an intense rain storm occurred in the city of Troy, New York, 2,300 miles distant from Nevada, and radiation counters at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) began recording atomic fallout three times as high as natural background radiation [1]. Radioactive debris falling onto Troy became an important news event and suddenly the public began to understand that you didn’t have to live near the Nevada Test Site to be irradiated by atomic bomb tests.

That event started Barry Commoner thinking in a new direction—a direction that would eventually result in the development of many of the key ideas that now underpin the grass-roots environmental movement.

When Commoner tried to learn more about atomic fallout in 1953, he found that much of the information was secret—classified so by the U.S. government. This made it impossible for academic scientists to examine the data—a violation of the principle of open disclosure that is fundamental to the method of science.

As Commoner expressed it, science can only work when scientists can communicate freely their data and their interpretations of the data. “We need recall,” he wrote in Science magazine in 1958,

that the development of a scientific truth is a direct outcome of the degree of communication which normally exists in science. As individuals, scientists are no less fallible than any other reasonably cautious people. What we call a scientific truth emerges from investigators’ insistence on free publication of their own observations. This permits the rest of the scientific community to check the data and evaluate the interpretations, so that eventually a commonly held body of facts and ideas comes into being. Any failure to communicate information to the entire scientific community hampers the attainment of a common understanding [2].

The heart of science is open communication, so secrecy—whether imposed by government or by private corporations—is antithetical to science.

Commoner restated many times his view that the scientific method rests squarely on open communication:

Scientists are, individually, no more truthful than anyone else. Nevertheless, science is a way of getting at the truth, and scientists—most of them—practice their craft in truthful ways. Why? The reason is that science gets at the truth through open discourse. Scientists learn how to practice science truthfully by making their mistakes in public. This permits their colleagues to correct mistaken information and modify faulty conclusions. This is the meaning of open publication of scientific results; it is the essential way in which science approaches the truth [3, p. 7].

The issue of atomic fallout occupied Commoner for a dozen years. While studying it, he derived many of the principles of environmental protection that now form the unspoken basis for grass-roots environmentalism.

MORAL WISDOM RESIDES IN THE CITIZENRY

For example, he clearly established the principle that, in a democracy, scientists have no more right to make decisions than anyone else. Today grass-roots activists might express this as “It’s your world. Don’t leave it to the experts.” Commoner said the same thing forty years ago: decisions with major social consequences must not be left to experts. On the contrary, Commoner said, experts have an obligation to inform the public about the scientific facts and then let the public decide:

Anyone who attempts to determine whether or not the biological hazards of world-wide fallout can be justified by necessity must somehow weigh a number of human lives against deliberate action to achieve a desired military or political advantage. Such decisions have been made before—for example, by military commanders—but never in the history of humanity has such a judgment involved literally every individual now living and expected for some generations to live on the earth [2].

He went on to ask, who should make such judgments, which require a determination of the value of human life: scientific experts or elected political representatives? [2]

SCIENTISTS HAVE NO SPECIAL COMPETENCE IN MORAL WISDOM

Commoner pointed out that scientists have no special competence in matters of moral judgment. Further, he said, “scientists must take pains to disclaim any special moral wisdom” on the issue of continued above-ground nuclear testing. Scientists should speak on the issue, if they have relevant information to convey, but their expertise does not confer upon them any special capacity to draw moral conclusions from their data. When it comes to balancing citizens’ lives against military goals, a scientist is just one more citizen making a moral judgment—his or her scientific expertise has no bearing on the moral equation.

Commoner wrote, “[W]e must not allow this issue [nuclear testing], by default, to rest in the hands of the scientists alone. A question of this gravity cannot be handed over for decision to any group less inclusive than our entire citizenry” [2].

Indeed, it is “self-evident,” Commoner argued in 1958, that “the public must be given enough information about the need for testing and the hazards of fallout to permit every citizen to decide for himself whether nuclear tests should go on or be stopped” [2].

CITIZENS CAN INFORM THEMSELVES AND TAKE CHARGE

“Sometimes it is suggested,” Commoner wrote,

that since scientists and engineers have made the bombs, insecticides, and autos, they ought to be responsible for deciding how to deal with the resultant hazards. But this would deprive everyone else of the right of conscience and the political rights of citizenship. This approach would also force us to rely on the moral and political wisdom of scientists and engineers, and there is no evidence that I know of which suggests that they are better endowed in this respect than other people.

There is an alternative, which, though difficult, is feasible. I believe that citizens can continue to rely on their own collective judgment about the issues of environmental conservation—if they take steps to inform themselves [7, p. 180].

ALLIANCE OF SCIENTISTS AND CITIZENS: THE BABY TOOTH SURVEY

Commoner put his ideas into practice: he helped organize scientists and citizens into the St. Louis Committee for Nuclear Information (CNI). They started a newsletter called Nuclear Information, which evolved into a magazine with the important (and telling) title, Scientist and Citizen.

Commoner, and his fellow scientists at CNI in St. Louis, formed a working alliance with many local citizens. Commoner’s work studying atomic fallout had convinced him that fallout represented a biological hazard to humans. However, the U.S. government insisted that fallout was benign. President Eisenhower reflected this official view when, in 1956, he said, “The continuance of the present rate of H-bomb testing[,] by the most sober and responsible scientific judgment … does not imperil the health of humanity” [4].

CNI put out a call to the parents of children and began collecting baby teeth and sending them to a lab for analysis of their radioactivity. CNI’s goal was to show that strontium-90, one of the main components of fallout from A-bomb testing, was building up in humans. They succeeded. Eight years later, the official U.S. position on atomic fallout had changed completely. In a televised address, in 1964, President Johnson said, “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 poisons were beginning to threaten the safety of people throughout the world. They were a growing menace to the health of every unborn child” [4]. In fact in 1963, President Kennedy had signed an international treaty phasing out above-ground testing of nuclear weapons. It was a triumph of citizen action, working with scientists who helped bring critical facts to light.

Commoner has often acknowledged the important role of an active citizenry:

Nor is the collaboration between scientist and citizen a one-way street. Citizens have contributed significantly to what scientists now know about fallout. Through the St. Louis Baby Tooth Survey, the children of that city have contributed, as of now, some 150,000 teeth to the cause of scientific knowledge about fallout … By such means, and through hard work and financial support many citizens have become partners in the scientific effort to elucidate the fallout problem” [5].

POLLUTION PREVENTION

From this story, we can learn that Commoner pioneered another aspect of modern thinking about the environment. Notice that he did not call for less atomic testing. He called for an end to atomic testing. His training as a biologist convinced him that human intrusions into the global biosphere would have unsuspected consequences:

… [W]henever the biological system exposed to a possibly toxic agent is very large and complex, the probability that any increase in contamination will lead to a new point of attack somewhere in this intricate system cannot be ignored. Finally, the toxic effects of many organic pollutants, like those of radiation, may appear only after a delay of many years. For these reasons, it is prudent to regard any addition of a potentially toxic substance to the biosphere as capable of producing a total biological effect which is roughly proportional to its concentration in the biosphere [5].

In this passage, Commoner is saying there is probably no threshold for pollution effects—any amount of pollution can be expected to cause some damage. Thus, the only way to prevent environmental damage from toxic pollution would be to exclude pollution from the environment completely. Today we call it pollution prevention. Barry Commoner argued for it, and provided the rationale for it, nearly forty years ago.

In 1964, Commoner also warned: “Like radiation, many of the new synthetic substances act on basic biochemical processes that occur in some form in all living things. Hence, we must anticipate some effects on all forms of life” [5, p. 6].

BURDEN OF PROOF

The preceding two quotations reveal another aspect of Commoner’s thinking in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

At that time, most scientists believed that biological systems had a fixed capacity to assimilate pollutants, to absorb insults without harm. If this view were correct, then scientists would merely need to discover the “assimilative capacity” of a biological system (a forest or wetland or bird or human) and then government officials could make regulations that would prevent pollution from exceeding the assimilative capacity. Polluters would not need to show that their pollutants were harmless—the regulatory system would deem them harmless as a matter of science and of law.

Commoner articulated a different view. If any amount of pollution would be expected to cause some damage, and if every form of life would be subject to damage, then the proper level of pollution would not be discoverable by science. It wou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Barry Commoner: The Father of Grass-Roots Environmentalism
• CHAPTER 2 The Day Before Yesterday: The Committees for Nuclear and Environmental Information
• CHAPTER 3 Crossing Paths: Science and the Working Class
• CHAPTER 4 Real Junk Science: The Corruption of Science by Corporate Money
• CHAPTER 5 Barry Commoner’s Science: An Anecdotal Overview
• CHAPTER 6 Barry Commoner and the Hamburger Story: Can Ideology Prevail Over Science?
• CHAPTER 7 The Contribution of Barry Commoner to the Renewal of the Italian Left
• CHAPTER 8 Barry Commoner’s Day
• CHAPTER 9 What is Yet to Be Done
• Contributors
• Index