Barry Commoner

Barry Commoner — American biologist, teacher, and environmentalist who turned fallout data and ecological law into public argument — died in New York City on September 30, 2012. He was ninety-five. Born May 28, 1917, in Brooklyn to Russian-Jewish immigrant parents, he trained at Columbia and Harvard, served in the Navy, then taught plant physiology at Washington University in St. Louis while building the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems. His Baby Tooth Survey helped prove strontium-90 from nuclear tests entered children's bodies, strengthening the case for the 1963 Limited Test Ban Treaty. The Closing Circle (1971) gave general readers four laws of ecology and a warning that technology without accountability was not progress. Time called him ecology's Paul Revere; in 1980 he ran for president on the Citizens Party ticket. Later he moved the center to Queens College and kept pressing on toxins, energy, and the politics of production until retirement. He died in Manhattan, having outlived the first Earth Day generation he helped awaken and still arguing that everything is connected. Brooklyn gave him argument; St. Louis and Queens gave him labs and students. He wrote as if science were obliged to speak in sentences the public could use. He died in New York City on September 30, 2012. Somewhere a tooth survey chart is still telling a quieter story about what falls from the sky. Commoner's gift was civic ecology — making biology into a democratic warning. Notice Nearby keeps the death date so September 30 remembers the Brooklyn-born scientist who taught America that there is no free lunch in nature.