The Closing Circle: Nature, Man, and Technology

Copyright

Foreword copyright © 2020 by Michael Egan

Copyright © 1971 by Barry Commoner

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2020, is an unabridged republication of the work originally printed by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1971. The foreword has been specially prepared for this volume.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Commoner, Barry, 1917–2012, author.

Title: The closing circle : nature, man, and technology / Barry Commoner.

Description: Mineola, New York : Dover Publications, Inc., 2020. | This Dover edition, first published in 2020, is an unabridged republication of the work originally printed by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1971.—Title page verso.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019003704| ISBN 9780486837468 | ISBN 0486837467

Subjects: LCSH: Nature—Effect of human beings on. | Global environmental change. | Climatic changes—Prevention.

Classification: LCC GF75 .C65 2020 | DDC 304.2—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019003704

Manufactured in the United States by LSC Communications

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www.doverpublications.com

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2020

For Lucy and Fred

CONTENTS

Foreword by Michael Egan

1.The Environmental Crisis

2.The Ecosphere

3.Nuclear Fire

4.Los Angeles Air

5.Illinois Earth

6.Lake Erie Water

7.Man in the Ecosphere

8.Population and Affluence

9.The Technological Flaw

10.The Social Issues

11.The Question of Survival

12.The Economic Meaning of Ecology

13.The Closing Circle

Notes

Acknowledgments

Index

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

THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

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. School children cleaned up rubbish; college students organized huge demonstrations; determined citizens recaptured the streets from the automobile, at least for a day. Everyone seemed to be aroused to the environmental danger and eager to do something about it.

They were offered lots of advice. Almost every writer, almost every speaker, on the college campuses, in the streets and on television and radio broadcasts, was ready to fix the blame and pronounce a cure for the environmental crisis.

Some regarded the environmental issue as politically innocuous:

Ecology has become the political substitute for the word motherhood. —Jesse Unruh, Democratic Leader of the State of California Assembly*

But the FBI took it more seriously:

On April 22, 1970, representatives of the FBI observed about two hundred persons on the Playing Fields shortly after 1:30 p.m. They were joined a few minutes later by a contingent of George Washington University students who arrived chanting Save Our Earth. . . . A sign was noted which read God Is Not Dead; He Is Polluted on Earth. . . . Shortly after 8:00 p.m. Senator Edmund Muskie (D), Maine, arrived and gave a short anti-pollution speech. Senator Muskie was followed by journalist I. F. Stone, who spoke for twenty minutes on the themes of anti-pollution, antimilitary, and anti-administration. —FBI report entered into Congressional Record by Senator Muskie on April 14, 1971

Some blamed pollution on the rising population:

The pollution problem is a consequence of population. It did not much matter how a lonely American frontiersman disposed of his waste. . . . But as population became denser, the natural chemical and biological recycling processes became overloaded. . . . Freedom to breed will bring ruin to all. —Garrett Hardin, biologist

The causal chain of the deterioration [of the environment] is easily followed to its source. Too many cars, too many factories, too much detergent, too much pesticide, multiplying contrails, inadequate sewage treatment plants, too little water, too much carbon dioxide—all can be traced easily to too many people. —Paul R. Ehrlich, biologist

Some blamed affluence:

The affluent society has become an effluent society. The 6 percent of the world’s population in the United States produces 70 percent or more of the world’s solid wastes. —Walter S. Howard, biologist

And praised poverty:

Blessed be the starving blacks of Mississippi with their outdoor privies, for they are ecologically sound, and they shall inherit a nation. —Wayne H. Davis, biologist

But not without rebuttal from the poor:

You must not embark on programs to curb economic growth without placing a priority on maintaining income, so that the poorest people won’t simply be further depressed in their condition but will have a share, and be able to live decently. —George Wiley, chemist and chairman, National Welfare Rights Organization

And encouragement from industry:

It is not industry per se, but the demands of the public. And the public’s demands are increasing at a geometric rate, because of the increasing standard of living and the increasing growth of population. . . . If we can convince the national and local leaders in the environmental crusade of this basic logic, that population causes pollution, then we can help them focus their attention on the major aspect of the problem. —Sherman R. Knapp, chairman of the board, Northeast Utilities

Some blamed man’s innate aggressiveness:

The first problem, then, is people. . . . The second problem, a most fundamental one, lies within us—our basic aggressions. . . . As Anthony Storr has said: The sombre fact is that we are the cruelest and most ruthless species that has ever walked the earth. —William Roth, director, Pacific Life Assurance Company

While others blamed what man had learned:

People are afraid of their humanity because systematically they have been taught to become inhuman. . . . They have no understanding of what it is to love nature. And so our airs are being polluted, our rivers are being poisoned, and our land is being cut up. —Arturo Sandoval, student, Environmental Action

A minister blamed profits:

Environmental rape is a fact of our national life only because it is more profitable than responsible stewardship of earth’s limited resources. —Channing E. Phillips, Congregationalist minister

While a historian blamed religion:

Christianity bears a huge burden of guilt. . . . We shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man. —Lynn White, historian

A politician blamed technology:

A runaway technology, whose only law is profit, has for years poisoned our air, ravaged our soil, stripped our forests bare, and corrupted our water resources. —Vance Hartke, senator from Indiana

While an environmentalist blamed politicians:

There is a peculiar paralysis in our political branches of government, which are primarily responsible for legislating and executing the policies environmentalists are urging. . . . Industries who profit by the rape of our environment see to it that legislators friendly to their attitudes are elected, and that bureaucrats of similar attitude are appointed. —Roderick A. Cameron, of the Environmental Defense Fund

Some blamed capitalism:

Yes, it’s official—the conspiracy against pollution. And we have a simple program—arrest Agnew and smash capitalism. We make only one exception to our pollution stand—everyone should light up a joint and get stoned. . . . We say to Agnew country that Earth Day is for the sons and daughters of the American Revolution who are going to tear this capitalism down and set us free. —Rennie Davis, a member of the Chicago Seven

While capitalists counterattacked:

The point I am trying to make is that we are solving most of our problems . . . that conditions are getting better not worse . . . that American industry is spending over three billion dollars a year to clean up the environment and additional billions to develop products that will keep it clean . . . and that the real danger is not from the free-enterprise Establishment that has made ours the most prosperous, most powerful and most charitable nation on earth. No, the danger today resides in the Disaster Lobby—those crepe-hangers who, for personal gain or out of sheer ignorance, are undermining the American system and threatening the lives and fortunes of the American people. Some people have let the gloom-mongers scare them beyond rational response with talk about atomic annihilation. . . . Since World War II over one billion human beings who worried about A-bombs and H-bombs died of other causes. They worried for nothing. —Thomas R. Shepard Jr., publisher, Look Magazine

And one keen observer blamed everyone:

We have met the enemy and he is us. —Pogo

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 whatever conclusion their own beliefs—about human nature, economics, and politics—suggested. Like a Rorschach ink blot, Earth Week mirrored personal convictions more than objective knowledge.

Earth Week convinced me of the urgency of a deeper public understanding of the origins of the environmental crisis and its possible cures. That is what this book is about. It is an effort to find out what the environmental crisis means.

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 sculptured 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.

Why, after millions of years of harmonious coexistence, have the relationships between living things and their earthly surroundings begun to collapse? Where did the fabric of the ecosphere begin to unravel? How far will the process go? How can we stop it and restore the broken links?

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.

If we are to survive, we must understand why this collapse now threatens. Here, the issues become far more complex than even the ecosphere. Our assaults on the ecosystem are so powerful, so numerous, so finely interconnected, that although the damage they do is clear, it is very difficult to discover how it was done. By which weapon? In whose hand? Are we driving the ecosphere to destruction simply by our growing numbers? By our greedy accumulation of wealth? Or are the machines which we have built to gain this wealth—the magnificent technology that now feeds us out of neat packages, that clothes us in man-made fibers, that surrounds us with new chemical creations—at fault?

This book is concerned with these questions. It begins with the ecosphere, the setting in which civilization has done its great—and terrible—deeds. Then it moves to a description of some of the damage we have done to the ecosphere—to the air, the water, the soil. However, by now such horror stories of environmental destruction are familiar, even tiresome. Much less clear is what we need to learn from them, and so I have chosen less to shed tears for our past mistakes than to try to understand them. Most of this book is an effort to discover which human acts have broken the circle of life, and why. I trace the environmental crisis from its overt manifestations in the ecosphere to the ecological stresses which they reflect, to the faults in productive technology—and in its scientific background—that generate these stresses, and finally to the economic, social, and political forces which have driven us down this self-destructive course. All this in the hope—and expectation—that once we understand the origins of the environmental crisis, we can begin to manage the huge undertaking of surviving it.

* Quotations and factual information are referenced, and often amplified, in the Notes section beginning on page 289 .

THE ECOSPHERE

To survive on the earth, human beings require the stable, continuing existence of a suitable environment. Yet the evidence is overwhelming that the way in which we now live on the earth is driving its thin, life-supporting skin, and ourselves with it, to destruction. To understand this calamity, we need to begin with a close look at the nature of the environment itself. Most of us find this a difficult thing to do, for there is a kind of ambiguity in our relation to the environment. Biologically, human beings participate in the environmental system as subsidiary parts of the whole. Yet, human society is designed to exploit the environment as a whole, to produce wealth. The paradoxical role we play in the natural environment—at once participant and exploiter—distorts our perception of it.

Among primitive people, a person is seen as a dependent part of nature, a frail reed in a harsh world governed by natural laws that must be obeyed if he is to survive. Pressed by this need, primitive peoples can achieve a remarkable knowledge of their environment. The African Bushman lives in one of the most stringent habitats on earth; food and water are scarce, and the weather is extreme. The Bushman survives because he has an incredibly intimate understanding of this environment. A Bushman can, for example, return after many months and miles of travel to find a single underground tuber, noted in his previous wanderings, when he needs it for his water supply in the dry season.

We who call ourselves advanced seem to have escaped from this kind of dependence on the environment. The Bushman must squeeze water from a searched-out tuber; we get ours by the turn of a tap. Instead of trackless terrain, we have the grid of city streets. Instead of seeking the sun’s heat when we need it, or shunning it when it is too strong, we warm and cool ourselves with man-made machines. All this leads us to believe that we have made our own environment and no longer depend on the one provided by nature. In the eager search for the benefits of modern science and technology we have become enticed into a nearly fatal illusion: that through our machines we have at last escaped from dependence on the natural environment.

A good place to experience this illusion is a jet airplane. Safely seated on a plastic cushion, carried in a winged aluminum tube, streaking miles above the earth, through air nearly thin enough to boil the blood, at a speed that seems to make the sun stand still, it is easy to believe that we have conquered nature and have escaped from the ancient bondage to air, water, and soil.

But the illusion is easily shattered, for like the people it carries, the airplane is itself a creature of the earth’s environment. Its engines burn fuel and oxygen produced by the earth’s green plants. Traced a few steps back, every part of the craft is equally dependent on the environment. The steel came from smelters fed with coal, water, and oxygen—all nature’s products. The aluminum was refined from ore using electricity, again produced by