Vale Barry Commoner!

On 30 September 2012, Barry Commoner died, aged 95.

Commoner is not a household name, even for those of us who have grown up on the heady vapours of environmental thought. He is certainly not as well known as others who were prominent in the environmental flowering around Earth Day in 1970, people such as Paul Ehrlich and Rachel Carson, however his ideas are so well known that they are almost truism. Not adopted, mind, but considered core to environmental thinking.

Consider this quote from his introduction to his 1971 book "The Closing Circle":

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 cycle spew out toxic chemicals, sewage, heaps of rubbish---the 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.

This is almost received wisdom in environmental circles.  Indeed, it sometimes even breaks out into the "mainstream".

Commoner distilled his thinking about the "ecosphere" down to four laws of ecology:

1. Everything is Connected to Everything Else.
2. Everything Must Go Somewhere.
3. Nature Knows Best. 
4. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. 

Again, these laws have stood the test of time, indeed they continue to be strengthened in ways that not even Commoner anticipated. 

Everything is Connected to Everything Else

In school we learn of the connection of everything to everything else in ecology, being taught how different species interact in a web of life. I suspect that lesson is a bit dry and seems not really relevant to us in real life.

There true significance of intense connection has been demonstrated by the globally connected economy and communications we have created. Who could possibly have expected that loosening home lending policies in the US so that more people could own homes would cause riots in the streets of Greece? That the connections formed by the internet would lead to memes spreading faster than anybody could believe, and creating consequences nobody could anticipate.

The sense that everything is connected has been radically strengthened through the internet, and our observations there may well lead to us revaluing the ecological connections around us. If the connected world we have created is so hard to predict, if it can cause such devastation from innocent beginnings, how can we dare presume that our meddling in ecological systems is "within acceptable limits"?

Everything Must Go Somewhere

This is translated into several forms. One of the better known ones is that you can't throw anything away, because there is no away. It is developed in Cradle to Cradle by Michael Braungart and William McDonough. It even got picked up by Shell.

Everything must go somewhere, adopted by Shell

The Germans coined the term "Kreislaufwirtschaft" (or circular economy) based on this notion, and built laws around the recovery of waste materials for input as raw materials back into the economy.

And in popular culture, The Simpsons episode "Trash of the Titans" demonstrated it in perfect satire. In fact, that episode is a perfect demonstration of all of Commoner's four principles.

Nature Knows Best

The idea that nature knows best is built on the idea that, over the millions and millions of years of evolution, nature has formed everything perfectly. It cannot be improved upon.

This concept is clearly highly controversial in a time of genetic engineering, a field of knowledge that has at its core the principle that improvements in life can be designed. I have sympathy for the work of genetic engineering, as it has produced some important things. It has also created uproar with genetically modified foods that have caused intense controversies.

So on one hand you have Amyris, a company that genetically engineers yeast to enable the fermentation of artemisinin (an anti-malarial) and is developing strains to ferment diesel and jet fuel. On the other you have Monsanto, global agribusiness, and villian du jour for much of the environmental movement.

Outside the field of genetic engineering, this principle became rather literal in biomimicry, where nature is used a guide for engineering design. The term was popularised by Janine Benyus in her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, and you see the principle of using nature as a guide influencing waste management. The extensive use of composting to deal with organic waste. Attempting to use natural systems as guides for cradle to cradle designs. In time that will also extend to ending the use of synthetic chemicals in manufacturing, making waste management a simple matter of returning materials to where they are needed.

There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch

The notion that nothing can be taken from nature without being replaced underpins pretty much everything. You will eventually have to pay the piper. That the piper is calling doesn't mean we are prepared.

Indeed (and to continue the metaphor), it seems that we prefer to be forever paying off our credit card debt by rolling that debt into our mortgage - and then spending freely again.

Landfills are the perfect example. We are quite good at preventing short term, immediate environmental impacts, but replace them with long term, drawn out impacts. The addition of synthetic liners delays the leakage of contaminated water into groundwater, certainly long after the operator has moved on, but does not stop it. We accept chronic problems as a replacement for acute ones, and hope they will sort themselves out before we have to deal with them again.

The free lunch is really the whole point with waste. Waste needn't exist. The fact that it does exist, the fact it has a multitude of challenges in its management, all of this is a hint that we are not enjoying a free lunch after all.


The hint that we are not enjoying a free lunch gives us clues as to how it can be resolved. If we work to enhance rich connections, give up the notion of away and learn from nature, we will be a long way advanced toward having design criteria we can work with. Design criteria that can guide not just waste management, but also the economy of material flows in general.

It is not idealistic to plan for this. Real people with real outcomes do it. People like Braungart and McDonough of Cradle to Cradle, like Gunther Pauli and his Blue Economy and all of those people who make it happen every day in everyday ways.

The Blue Economy, by Gunther Pauli

I think we can give a lot of credit to Barry Commoner for rethinking how we interact with the environment, and especially how we interact through technology. He saw that we needed to replace our model of a linear economy, get rid of the arrogance that we know what we are doing, and unwind the hubris that it doesn't matter what we make because if we don't want it we can always throw it away. This thinking is dangerous, and Commoner proposed the perhaps radical ideas that needed to replace it.

Sure, the ideas are now commonplace (sort of), but they needed somebody to formulate them .

Often a great thinker is often overshadowed by his or her ideas. That is surely the fate of Barry Commoner.