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From Citizens to : The Countercultural Roots of

A thesis presented to

the faculty of

the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University

In partial fulfillment

of the requirements for the degree

Master of Arts

Philip A. Wight

August 2013

©2013 Philip A. Wight. All Reserved. 2

This thesis titled

From Citizens to Consumers: The Countercultural Roots of Green Consumerism

by

PHILIP A. WIGHT

has been approved for

the Department of History

and the College of Arts and Sciences by

Kevin Mattson

Connor Study Professor of

Robert Frank

Dean, College of Arts and Sciences

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ABSTRACT

WIGHT, PHILIP A., M.A. August 2013, History

From Citizens to Consumers: The Countercultural Roots of Green Consumerism

Director of thesis: Kevin Mattson

When did American shift from a focus on political action to an obsession with personal lifestyles? This thesis investigates three distinct bodies of environmental thought spanning the 1950s and the mid- to answer this question. The three eco-political studied here are liberal, eco-socialist, and countercultural environmentalism. The heart of this thesis is the debate among key environmental thinkers—, Stewart , and Barry

Commoner—concerning the role of consumers and the importance of public policy. This debate can be viewed as -side (producers) versus -side

(consumers) environmentalism. This thesis argues America’s modern of libertarian, demand-side environmentalism and green consumerism stems from specific values, ideas, lifestyles, and representative of American of the

1960s and 1970s. In championing individual choice, contemporary environmentalism has largely rejected liberal and eco-socialist prescriptions of collective political action and democratic governance.

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To my grandfather, Roger Frost, who sparked my passion for studying the past.

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank my committee members, Dr. Katherine Jellison and Dr. Paul

Milazzo, for their assistance, revisions, and insight in the conception and realization of this thesis. Jessica Blissit also proved invaluable with her discerning editing eye and steadfast support. This thesis would be naught without the patience of my parents, Robert and Margaret Wight, who nurtured my love of the outdoors and encouraged my dream of becoming a history professor. I would also like to acknowledge my brother, Alan Wight, for the countless nights discussing eco- over a pint. Finally, my utmost thanks to

Kevin Mattson, my advisor and friend. You have provided the map and compass—I look to joining you on the trail.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Page

Abstract ...... 3 Dedication ...... 4 Acknowledgments...... 5 List of Figures ...... 7 Introduction: "The Light-Green " ...... 8 Chapter 1: The Conception of Liberal Environmentalism ...... 27 Chapter 2: and Countercultural Environmentalism ...... 74 Chapter 3: " as Politics": The Origins of American Eco- ...... 120 Afterward ...... 170 References ...... 175

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LIST OF FIGURES

Page

Figure 1: Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” Cartoon ...... 155

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INTRODUCTION: “THE LIGHT-GREEN SOCIETY”

What does it mean to be a in contemporary

America? Modern “” slip comfortably into $245 “eco-501” Levi’s jeans and biodegradable Armani shirts. After consuming a guilt-free breakfast of Fair and organic tropical fruit (regardless of season), they might drive to work in a Lexus hybrid limousine. If they have a sweet tooth toward the end of their day, no problem, there is “Rainforest Crunch” ice cream whose profits preserve endangered landscapes.

Home improvements are no hassle, as Home Depot now offers over 2,500 green products under its “Eco Options” program. Even —long the target of for

promoting —claims eco-consciousness. Vanity Fair published a

“green issue” in 2007 and other magazines offer “55 ways to look eco-sexy.” To be an

American environmentalist requires no sacrifice for those with the requisite, dispensable

income.1 Consider the recent book title: It’s Easy Being Green.2

By purchasing eco-friendly products, Americans have invested enormous faith in green consumerism. Advocates contend that individual buyers are both the cause and solution of ecological devastation. Thus, saving the environment is a personal, —not a public or collective imperative. Political scientist Michael Maniates coins this the “individualization of responsibility.”3 When enough consumers purchase

“eco-friendly products,” the market will offer more products

1 Alex Williams, “Buying into the Green Movement,” The Times (July 1st, 2007), accessed February 14th, 2012, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/01/fashion/01green.html?pagewanted=all; M.P. Dunleavey, “Being Green Doesn’t Mean Buying More, New York Times, May 5th, 2007. 2 Crissy Trask, It’s Easy Being Green: A Handbook for -Friendly Living (Layton, UT: Gibbs Smith, 2006). 3 Michael F. Maniates, “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” Global 1, no. 3 (August 2001): 33.

9 and fewer harmful . Consumers hold all the power, advocates claim, as each time they swipe their credit cards, they are “voting” for a more sustainable way of . This form of consumerism rests on the premise that consumers want healthier (fewer chemicals, , hormones), greener (less packaging, , energy-use) and more ethical (cage-free, grain-fed, ) products.4 Because are personally responsible for environmental problems, advocates of green consumerism reject collective political action in regulating production.5

America’s modern environmental consciousness can be explained through historian Michael Bess’s conception of the “light-green society” that grew from an incomplete, amalgamated, and co-opted environmental vision from the . The shade light-green contrasts with deep-green —those who embraced a radical

“ecological critique of industrialism.”6 It is a paradoxical , where a pervasive—if

“shallow”—green consciousness fuels hyper-consumerism; where ’s biggest polluters work hand in hand with the nation’s largest environmental organizations; and when the imperatives of endless economic growth coexist with the axioms of a planet with finite .7 The light-green society also offers a hybrid vision of technological modernization. Bess argues this society is the “gradual confluence of two antagonistic currents of postwar history,” specifically “the headlong rush for technological

4 Ted Steinberg, “Can Save the Planet?” Radical History Review, no. 107 (Spring 2010): 8. 5 Green consumerism can also be understood as a subset of the “Public Choice Theory.” Dave Toke defines such a theory as the “that the public can be best achieved by the pursuit of individual, material self-interest and by minimizing the role of the .” Dave Toke, and Neo- (: Macmillan Press, 2000), 1. 6 Michael Bess, The Light-Green Society: Ecology and Technological Modernity in France: 1960-2000 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 8. 7 Ben Geman, “ took $26M from gas industry to fight -fired power plants.” The Hill. Feb. 3rd, 2012. http://thehill.com/blogs/e2-wire/e2-wire/208477-sierra-club-took-26m-from-gas-industry-to- fight-coal.

10 modernization, and…environmentalists’ radical critique of industrialism.” American has embraced a “shallow” environmentalism both widely accepted and made easy.8

The most salient characteristic of the American “light-green society” is the

pervasive belief in the of green consumerism. Personal consumer decisions have

become the strategy for fighting change and environmental devastation.

Mainstream eco-consciousness reduces every decision to one’s personal environmental

impact. An expanded and globalized version of green consumerism—“Natural

Capitalism,” or green capitalism—is currently the favored economic system to protect the

among politicians, numerous environmental groups, and Wall Street financiers.

But perhaps the most popular advocate of green capitalism is the countercultural

environmentalist . Best known as the founder of the garden supply

Smith and Hawken, he wrote two prominent books that advocate for eco-capitalism: The

Ecology of Commerce (1994) and Natural Capitalism (1999). Hawken encourages a path

“that restores the natural on earth but uses many of the historically effective

organization and market techniques of free enterprise.” No environmental program can

succeed, Hawken argues, if it “requires a wholesale change in the dynamics of the

market.” He contends, “The goal of natural capitalism is to extend the sound of

the market to all sources of material .”9 Eco-capitalism aims to save the environment by commercializing every human-valued aspect of the natural world.10

8 Bess, The Light-Green Society, 8. 9 Paul Hawkin, , L. , Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial (Boston: Little, Brown and Company: 1999), 66, 70-71. 10 Ted Steinberg, “Can Capitalism Save the Planet?,”18-19.

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A greener world through eco- emerged as more than just a strategy of , politicians, and free-market intellectuals though. Saving the planet one purchase at a time is now a mainstay of environmental organizations and advocacy groups. A recent issue of Sierra—the Sierra Club’s magazine—even dreamed of an “eco- friendly mall,” where all the trappings of consumer culture intersected with green products. The editors envisioned an exclusive complex where sustainable and organic clothing could be purchased with a special that simultaneously purchased offsets.11 Brian Tokar’s contention that green consumerism “views all of life as one big mall” becomes evident even within America’s most prominent and venerable environmental organization.12 One shudders to think how the Sierra Club’s founder —who railed against “these temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism”—would react to this idea.13

Even “radical” environmental organizations have embraced buying green. First offered around 1990, ’s merchandise catalog offered eco-warriors a wide variety of earth-friendly products, including “ecologically sound homewares.”14

John Passacantando, Director of Greenpeace USA until 2008, encouraged the selling of eco-friendly products as a way to get more people involved, explaining, “You need participation on a wide front.” Michael Burne, former Executive Director of Rainforest

Action Network—David Bower’s radical offshoot of the Sierra Club—explains, “After

11 Williams, “Buying Into the Green Movement.” 12 Brian Tokar, Earth for Sale: Ecology in the Age of Corporate Greenwash (Boston: South End Press, 1997), xiv. 13 , The : The American : 1962-1992 (New York, Hill and Wang: 1993), 14. 14 Richard Gosden, “Greening All the Way to the Bank,” Arena Magazine 1, no. 16, (April-May 1995): 35- 37.

12 you buy florescent compact light bulbs, you can onto greater goals like banding together politically to shut down coal fired power plants.”15

The strange of contemporary American environmentalism—namely the dominant ideals of green consumerism that suggest that “buying more is a great idea”— beg for historical context: How did American society arrive at this juncture where consumers are encouraged to purchase their way to ? How did personal consumer decisions come to define an issue of collective sustainability? When did green consumerism come to displace collective political action as the dominant strategy of the environmental movement?

“Environmental Imaginations”

In the 1960s and 1970s, three distinct strains of environmental thought emerged and shaped American environmentalism. These three bodies of thought constitute essential “environmental imaginations” that provide the ideological foundations—in both their prominence and absence—for contemporary America’s “light-green” society.16 The thinkers associated with each of these bodies of thought engaged in debates with one another and offered differing theories of social change to redress the environmental crisis.

Beginning with ecologist ’s classic (1949) and reaching an unprecedented audience with ’s (1962), liberal environmentalism precipitated the “Age of Ecology.” This era, also called

“Second Wave Environmentalism,” began with Carson’s Silent Spring and culminated in

15 Brune is now the President of the Sierra Club. Williams, “Buying into the Green Movement.” 16 Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 8.

13 the numerous federal environmental laws of the 1970s.17 Liberal environmentalism disseminated the grave warnings and ecological ideas that precipitated much of the back- to-the-land impulse of the American counterculture. While adopting many liberal insights, countercultural environmentalists fundamentally rejected liberal prescriptions for social change. Countercultural environmentalists eschewed collective political action for individual and cultural rebellion. As the environmental crisis culminated in the energy crisis of the 1970s, more radical liberals built upon the foundation of earlier liberal environmental ideas and forged the of American eco-socialism.

Embracing an ecological variant of , eco-socialists rejected countercultural rebellion and individual action and called for the social control of major modes of production to address the environmental crisis at its economic roots.

Each of these “environmental imaginations” offered explicit answers concerning a range of pressing questions: What were the origins of the environmental crisis? How did the emerging discipline of ecology explain the holistic relationship between individuals and ecological problems? How did ecological insights explain the interactions among consumers, producers, and the state? How did liberal and countercultural environmentalists, as as eco-socialists, understand what sociologist C. Wright Mills termed, “the problem of the historical agency of change?”18 That is, how did each of these thinkers explain how historical change occurred?

With these questions in mind, this thesis is structured around numerous activists and thinkers, including two biologists: Stewart Brand and . Harvard

17 Dowie, Losing Ground, 106. 18 Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action: The Origins of the and Radical Liberalism: 1945-1970 (State College, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 87.

14 economist John Kenneth Galbraith plays a major role as well. Hovering around Brand,

Commoner, and Galbraith are a rich cast of historical actors who play a vital role in advancing liberal environmentalism, countercultural ecology, and eco-socialism: zoologist Rachel Carson, Secretary of the Interior , historian Theodore

Roszak, and Yale School Law professor Charles Reich. Along with the three main characters, these intellectuals provoked a debate about the role of consumers and producers in creating an ecologically just future. The structure of this thesis aims to connect the ideas and of Brand and Commoner to contemporary environmental thought (the prominence of the former’s thought and the near invisibility of the latter’s).

The heart of this thesis is the debate among these figures and their contemporaries concerning the role of the individual and the importance of public policy. Fundamentally, this is a debate between those who favored consumer agency (thereby rejecting centralized, top-down ) and those who believed in the direct regulation of production by the state. Politically, this is a debate between liberals and eco-socialists, on the one hand, and conservatives and libertarians on the other; between those who argued for public control over polluting industries and those who believed private individuals and corporations best governed production processes. Moreover, liberals and eco- socialists favored collective political action, while libertarians favored individual and consumer-driven social change—as evinced by countercultural environmentalism’s embrace of green consumerism and lifestyles. An additional dimension of this debate is the dichotomy between demand-side and supply-side environmentalism.

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Demand side environmentalism focuses on individual decisions, consumer choices and personal responsibility. While it includes and ascetic choices, a focus on individual actions also encompasses “Rainforest Crunch,” Lexus

Hybrids, and green consumerism writ large. Demand side environmentalism constitutes a core tenet of “ Environmentalism,” as libertarian proponents of free markets contend the laws of can provide social change given large cultural shifts in individual lifestyles. In contrast, supply-side environmentalists argue that the sources of are to be found with producers—not consumers. Therefore, must and enforce ecological limits on producers and corporations. Quite simply, demand-side environmentalism refers to individual actions and consumer decisions, while supply-side environmentalism focuses on the , goods produced, and services offered.19

The Countercultural Roots of Green Consumerism

While a number of contemporary scholars and social critics trace the emergence of green consumerism to the mid-—with the founding of in 1986 and the publishing of the 1987 Bruntland Report that coined the phrase “Sustainable

Development”—this thesis argues America’s modern paradigm of libertarian

19 Such a distinction is never absolute. A sharp duality comes into focus when examining a modern, industrialized, and specialized society such as the postwar . As Ted Steinberg argues, the dislocation of individuals from intimate productive processes in the first decades of the remains an indelible legacy. The separation of consumers from producers fueled America’s consumeristic society. Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: ’s Role in American History (New York: ), 175. Also see Gregory Summers, Consuming Nature: Environmentalism in the Fox River Valley: 1850-1950 (Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 2006).

16 environmentalism stems from the American counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s.20 The counterculture embraced specific values, ideas, lifestyles, and worldviews that have come to dominate modern America’s individualistic environmental consciousness. While many of the environmental arguments adopted by the counterculture herald from earlier

American thinkers, in postwar American history, green consumerism originates directly from countercultural ideas, individuals, and publications.21

The values and ideals of countercultural environmentalism gained traction in the

1970s and continue to weigh heavily on contemporary environmental thought. Indeed, the very term “green” in green consumerism is derived from the countercultural ecological views of Charles Reich and his best-selling The Greening of America (1970).22

Four specific intellectual currents can be traced from the counterculture to America’s contemporary environmental paradigm of green consumerism: and the importance of personal consciousness, the rejection of collective political action and institutional reform, the embrace of self-reliance and appropriate , and the acceptance of market-based consumerism. These tenets culminated in one of the era’s most famous publications: Stewart Brand’s The (1968).

20 Gosden, “Greening All the Way to the Bank,” 35-37. 21 Notably Jefferson’s vision of an agrarian , ’s call for back-to- the-land living, Emerson’s , individualism, and defense of , the agrarian populism of the 1890s, and the Progressive ’s emphasis on “The Gospel of Efficiency” and “Wise Use.” As Environmental Historian Ted Steinberg argues the association of environmentalism to “market imperatives goes back a long way, arguably as the efficiency-minded conservation movement of and .” “Can Capitalism Save the Planet?” 8. Richard White argues Emerson furthered “Natural Capitalism” since he “reconciled nature with the busy, manipulative world of . He reconciled with idealism.” Richard White, The Organic : The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York: Hill & Wang, 1995), 35. 22 Erik v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “The Greening of ,” National Review 34, no. 25 (December 1982): 1616.

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Deeply engaged in the social movements of the American counterculture, Brand rejected government-imposed conservation and placed his faith in the socially- lifestyles of the counterculture. Brand's The Whole Earth Catalog envisioned a future where enlightened individuals healed the Earth through the pragmatic application of small-scale sustainable . As a libertarian who embraced culture to disseminate green products, Brand and fellow counterculturalists rejected government intervention and collective political action. He believed that,

“Individual buyers have far more control over economic behavior than voters.”23 Brand’s embrace of markets fueled the first green consumer catalog and his philosophy left an indelible mark on American environmentalism.

Perhaps the book closest to a philosophical manifesto for the counterculture was historian Theodore Roszak's The Making of a Counter Culture (1968). Published the same year as Brand's catalog of green consumer goods, Roszak named and embraced the

American counterculture. He emphasized the importance of personal consciousness, the failure of the political system, the corruption of the human spirit by the corporate state, and the ecological consequences of a society devoted to “mature industrialism.” Roszak echoed Brand's advice for the youth culture to build alternative and decentralized communities and overthrow the traditional social order. Like Brand,

Roszak placed his faith in enlightened individuals and the emerging heterodox culture to drive historical change—not in collective political action.

23 Stewart Brand Ed., The Updated Last Whole Earth Catalog: Access to Tools (Menlo Park CA: Nowles, 1971), 43.

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In 1970, only months after the first Earth Day, Yale Law Professor Charles Reich united countercultural ideas with the growing public concern for the environment in his

The Greening of America. Offering a grand narrative of American history and socio- economic life, Reich looked to youth culture to nonviolently overthrow the of older Americans. Along with Brand and Roszak, Reich rejected politics in solving the environmental crisis and placed his faith in a of enlightened individuals.

He asserted that “lifestyle” choices were essential and insisted one’s “choice of a lifestyle is not peripheral, it is the heart of the new awakening.”24

While several of the core countercultural philosophies imbue modern environmentalism, the counterculture cannot be construed as a monochromatic . Indeed, many in the counterculture dismissed mainstream consumer culture, opposed capitalism, and sought to build a more personalized do-it-yourself culture.

Moreover, while the counterculture can be characterized by its aversion to politics, numerous counterculturalists believed social change must be advanced through political reform. ’s and the political radical serve as two examples against the consumeristic nature of the counterculture. Yet, on balance, the counterculture rejected collective political solutions and embraced cultural rebellion and a shift in one’s consciousness as the favored tools for social change.25

24Charles Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Bantam, 1970), 380. 25 In his , Hoffman rejected mere cultural rebellion: “Smoking dope and hanging Che’s picture is no more a commitment [to the revolution] than drinking milk and collecting postage stamps.” Like those in the New Left who advocated for collective political change, Hoffman understood, “A revolution in consciousness is an empty high without a revolution in the distribution of power.” Yet, to this end, Hoffman failed to call for state-based political reforms, and ultimately evinced a quasi-libertarian politics. Abbie Hoffman, Steal This Book (Cambridge MA: Da Capo Press, 2002 [1971]) xxi, xxiii.

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In advancing this kind of lifestyle politics and myopic focus on personal consumer decisions, counterculturalists embraced a radical new kind of environmentalism that rejected previous philosophies. In dismissing expertise and centralized government , counterculturalists rebuked the “First Wave” environmentalism of Theodore Roosevelt, Gifford Pinchot, and John Muir. In espousing the ability of heroic individuals to overcome the limits of nature with new technologies— evinced by Brand’s claim that “We are as Gods”—counterculturalists rejected the

“Second Wave” environmentalism of postwar liberalism. Beginning with Carson’s Silent

Spring, Second Wave environmentalism called for limitations on corporations and government regulation of commerce.26 Indeed, countercultural environmentalism remains salient not only for the cultural rebellion it promoted, but also for the collective political action it eschewed.

The Liberal Alternative

In the two decades before countercultural environmentalism rose to prominence, the ideals of postwar liberalism dominated the environmental movement. Liberal environmentalists argued that limits must be placed on industry to secure a more verdant future. Only through collective political action, liberal environmentalists believed, —not disconnected personal choices or cultural rebellion—could society ensure a healthy environment. Liberals favored strong federal action and supply-side environmental solutions, although thinkers like Arthur Schlesinger Jr. also embraced the liberal tradition of volunteerism to encourage individual responsibility and conservation. Liberals

26 Dowie, Losing Ground, 106.

20 questioned the imperatives of full-throttle economic growth and the materialistic values of America’s postwar consumer boom, and sought to find limits within . Spearheaded by ecologists Aldo Leopold and Carson, liberals embraced the social nature of ecology, and advocated for greater restraint and limits before deploying new technologies. Liberal environmentalism emerged from a new kind of “qualitative liberalism” that viewed as social necessities and indispensable quality of life concerns.

In 1958, Galbraith connected America's environmental problems with an economic system that created “private opulence amid public squalor” in his best-selling

The Affluent Society. Galbraith argued that because producers created false wants to stimulate demand, production was no longer an urgent social need.27 Galbraith and other liberals—notably Schlesinger—argued against excessive personal consumption because it denigrated the public sphere. Writing at the inception of the “environmental movement,” Galbraith challenged others to realize the social and environmental consequences of America's economic system.

Carson's Silent Spring (1962) popularized the idea of ecology for most Americans and created a public environmental movement. Carson wrote in eloquent and unambiguous language that America's production system failed to respect the laws of ecology. Because of humanity’s shortsightedness, Carson believed humanity harmed itself, the web of life, and the future of human . Reflecting on Silent Spring,

Galbraith called Carson's work one of the most important books in Western .

27John Kenneth Galbraith, (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998), 191.

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Both thinkers argued that the environment was not merely a private product to be consumed, but was a social necessity.28

Secretary of the Interior Udall investigated the problem further and published his diagnosis and prescription in The Quiet Crisis (1963). Udall decried the polluted and eroded America landscape, filled with disposable consumer goods and overused by industry. Like Galbraith and Schlesinger, Udall warned that America’s new material threatened to destroy the nation’s values. While Udall implored corporations and individuals to do their part, he argued government “must continue to play the larger role in traditional conservation work.”29 Galbraith and Carson both informed Udall's ecological view and the importance he placed on public policy.

From Liberal Environmentalism to Eco-Socialism

As countercultural environmental ideas gained traction and influenced the public and future scholars, more radical liberals warned of the limits of individual action and stressed the importance of controlling the “modes of production” through collective political action. Commoner emerged as the most prominent ecologist and defender of political action, as evinced by his portrait on the cover of Time magazine in 1970. He argued that capitalist production technologies were causing the environmental crisis, and the solution lay with the democratic control of polluting industries. Commoner was an early eco-socialist thinker, albeit one who placed a greater emphasis on ecology than socialist ideology. He prescribed banning harmful substances rather than merely trying to

28 Dowie, Losing Ground, 267. 29 Stewart Udall, “Prospects for the Land,” found in Roderick Nash, The American Environment: in the History of Conservation. (, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1976), 215.

22 control them, producing useful rather than profitable goods, and changing the application of technologies to favor integration with—rather than submission of—nature.

Commoner’s most important volume, The Poverty of Power (1976), explicitly advocated a socialist political system based on the laws of ecology.30

Expanding on his best-selling The Affluent Society, Galbraith wrote two more works offering heterodox explanations of American economic life. With The Affluent

Society, Galbraith's The New Industrial State (1967) and Economics and the Public

Purpose (1973) formed a trilogy of thought on the social and environmental consequences of mass consumption amid public privation. The final and most radical volume of the trilogy remains Galbraith's most passionate plea to shift America's to a more enlightened and socially-planned system; the environmental crisis, he argued, could not be relegated to the market system. Galbraith believed the United States had to acknowledge the existence of its nationwide “planning system”—of corporate, rather than democratic control—that prevented socially and ecologically responsible production. The Harvard economist remained devoted to a mixed economic system and rejected any revolutionary prescriptions. While he was concerned with reforming capitalism, his ideas concerning the public control of production remain an unexamined aspect of the origins of eco-socialist thought.31

30 Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power: Energy and the Economic Crisis (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1976). 31 John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973).

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A Note on Primary Sources

This investigation of liberal, countercultural, and eco-socialist thought analyzes many of the era’s best-selling environmental works: The Affluent Society (1958), Silent

Spring (1962), The Quiet Crisis (1963), The Whole Earth Catalog (1968), The Making of a Counter Culture (1968), The Greening of America (1970), Economics and the Public

Purpose (1973), and The Poverty of Power (1976). Within these eight volumes, this thesis gives preferential treatment to the scholarship and lives of Brand and Commoner, as their philosophies best contrast the emergence of green consumerism and road not taken for an ecological restructuring of the economy

To reconstruct the lives and arguments of Brand and Commoner, this thesis draws extensively on their personal papers. Brand’s papers, housed at , reveal a far more complicated, conflicted, distressed, and dynamic individual than the historical literature reflects. Brand’s personal diaries and correspondence are particularly insightful in this regard. Commoner’s papers, housed in the Library of Congress, reveal the extensive public nature of Commoner’s life and work. This thesis draws mainly on the dozens of speeches he gave between 1968 and 1976, but provides insight into his and private thoughts as well.

Historiography

Since the mid-1970s, historians, social critics, and environmental activists have analyzed the growth of green consumerism and decline in eco-social governance. Others

24 have provided key insights for understanding the emergence of liberal environmentalism.

A cadre of thinkers also provided the context for postwar America’s .

Langdon Winner’s “Building the Better Mouse Trap” (1980) brought to bear several important critiques against countercultural environmentalism. Winner derided

“” environmentalism, with its myopic focus on individual action and naivety for eschewing collective political action. Deriding as an amorphous tactic that does little to reform the fundamentals of the economy, Winner contends forging a new “appropriate economics” remains the only viable path forward.32

Environmental historian Ted Steinberg’s “Can Capitalism Save the Planet?”

(2009) provided the ideological framework for this thesis. He explicitly argues, “ originated with the more general loss of faith in political action common among segments of the counterculture.” While Steinberg discusses Brand’s The Whole

Earth Catalog, he fails to provide the historical context to appreciate his ideas.

Furthermore, Steinberg conflates “green liberalism” with “green consumerism” and neglects postwar liberalism’s contributions.33 Political scientist Michael F. Maniates's essay “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?” (2001) also adds to this line of argument. While an excellent source, Maniates rests too heavily on Dr.

Seuss's The Lorax (1971) as a bridge to modern individualized environmentalism.34

32 “Rather than attempt to change the structures that vexed them,” he concluded, “young Americans growing older were settling for exquisite palliatives,” that ignored reforming the “institutions that control the direction of technological and .” Langdon Winner, “Building the Better Mousetrap,” The Whale and the Reactor: Searching for Limits in an Age of High Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 76, 79. 33Steinberg, “Can Capitalism Save the Planet?” 7-24. 34 Maniates, “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?”, 31-52.

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University of Nevada historian Andrew Kirk provides the most scholarship for understanding the counterculture, appropriate technology, and the influence of Brand. In his essay, “ of Loving Grace,” (2002) Kirk focused on the counterculture’s relationship to technology and environmentalism. Countercultural ideas became central to environmentalism because, Kirk argues, the of the New Left failed to convince Americans of the importance of social politics.35Expanding his argument, in

“The New Alchemy: Technology, Consumerism, and Environmental Advocacy,”

(2007)Kirk provides a larger context for the rise of -centric environmentalists.36

Kirk’s most comprehensive work, Counterculture Green (2007), restates many of his arguments and offers an excellent biography of Brand. Yet, Brand's personal papers reveal a deeper, more complex, and more conflicted man than Kirk presents.37

In understanding the ascendance of green consumerism, Sam Brinkley's “The

Seers of Menlo Park” (2003) provides essential insights. Brinkley’s essay connects

Brand’s innovative consumer catalog to contemporary green consumerism and the ideals of .38 Additionally, Lawrence B. Glickman’s Buying Power: A

History of Consumer in America (2009) explains the important distinction between the and , the latter of which entails

35Andrew Kirk, “Machines of Loving Grace,” in Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s (New York Routledge, 2002), 356. 36 Andrew Kirk, “The New Alchemy: Technology, Consumerism, and Environmental Advocacy” in The Columbia History of Post-World War II America (New York: Press, 2007). 37 Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007). 38Sam Binkley, “The Seers of Menlo Park: The Discourse on the heroic consumption in ‘The Whole Earth Catalog’” Journal of Consumer Culture 3, no. 2 (November 2003): 283-313.

26 contemporary green consumerism.39 Lizbeth Cohen’s A Consumer’s (2003) also provides a detailed history of post-war American consumerism and the idea of the

“purchaser as citizen.”40 Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God (2001) and his seminal

The Conquest of Cool (1997) trace “hip consumerism” to the counterculture and coins the evocative phrase “market populism” to describe demand-side consumerism.41

This thesis both builds upon this historiographical foundation and addresses salient gaps in the historical record. Rebuking Steinberg’s thesis on “green liberalism” as the source of contemporary green consumerism, Chapter One highlights liberal environmentalism’s disdain for consumerism and desire to impose limits on capitalism.

Chapter Two reveals the apocalyptic environmentalism of Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog and the counterculture, and analyzes the conception of America’s first green consumerism catalog. Chapter Three focuses on the long-neglected origins of American eco-socialism, and through the ideas of John Kenneth Galbraith and Barry Commoner, explores the unexamined influence of radical liberalism.

39 Lawrence B. Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in America, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 40 Lizabeth Cohen, A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America (New York: Random House, 2003). 41 Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of (New York: Anchor Books, 2001); Thomas Frank, The Conquest of the Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997).

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CHAPTER ONE: THE CONCEPTION OF LIBERAL ENVIRONMENTALISM

In his provocative article “Can Capitalism Save the Planet? On the Origins of

Green Liberalism,” environmental historian Ted Steinberg contends “green liberalism is all the rage today.” He explains, “Green liberalism is the idea that market forces combined with individuals all doing their part can save the planet.”Tracing its roots back to Gifford Pinchot, Theodore Roosevelt, and efficiency-minded Progressive

Conservationists, Steinberg contends that green consumerism, market-based solutions, and demand-side environmentalism are part and parcel of liberal environmentalism. A student of the radical historian Donald Worster, Steinberg is not alone in his contention that liberal environmentalism is an abject ecological failure.1

Deep green critiques liberalism’s complicity with the imperatives of capitalism and the domination of the natural world. Political scientist Paul Wapner contends that contemporary liberalism’s “technocratic, scientific, and even economistic character gives credence to a society that measures the quality of life fundamentally in terms of economic growth, control over nature, and the maximization of sheer efficiency in everything we do.”He derides “Liberal environmentalism” as “so compatible with contemporary material and cultural currents that it implicitly supports the very things that it should be criticizing.”2 Critiques of liberal environmentalism range from leftists, including Wapner and Steinberg, to conservative populists drawing on .

A longtime critic of liberalism, historian offered a trenchant ecological treatment of liberalism in his The True and Only Heaven: and its

1 Steinberg, “Can Capitalism Save the Planet?, 9. 2 Paul Wapner, “Toward a Meaningful Ecological Politics,” Tikkum Vol. 11, No. 3, found in Maniates, “Individualization: Plant a Tree, Buy a Bike, Save the World?,” 41.

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Critics (1991). Lasch contends that “the founders of modern liberalism…argue[d] that human wants, being insatiable, required an indefinite expansion of the productive forces necessary to satisfy them.”3 He harangues the “acquisitive individualism fostered by liberalism” for many reasons, but most notably liberalism’s complicity with infinite economic growth and its concomitant ecological destruction. “The attempt to extend

Western standards of living to the rest of the world,” Lasch warns, “will lead even more quickly to the exhaustion of nonrenewable resources, the irreversible pollution of the earth’s atmosphere, and the destruction of the ecological system, in short, on which human life depends.” While liberals and conservatives dismiss the arguments of radical greens as “doomsayers,” Lasch writes, “The fact remains: the earth’s finite resources will not support an indefinite expansion of industrial civilization.”4 Through stressing the

“environmental limits to economic growth,” the famous social critic aims to “subject the idea of progress to searching criticism.”5

From Steinberg’s dismissal of “green liberalism” as an individualistic and market- based philosophy, to Wapner’s notion of liberal environmentalism as “materialistic” and

3Critics have coined this tendency “the treadmill of production,” and are similarly critical. See , Brett Clark, and Richard York, The Ecological Rift: Capitalism’s War on the Earth (New York: Press, 2010). 4 Lasch remains equally critical of modern , dismissing its “commitment to progress, unlimited economic growth, and acquisitive individualism.” He quotes Paul Gottfried and Thomas Fleming’s argument that the “Political differences between right and left have by now been largely reduced to disagreements over policies designed to achieve comparable moral goals.” Christopher Lasch, The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1991), 22. As Oswaldo de Rivero, the former Peruvian ambassador to the contends, a similar duality can be found in the battle between and capitalism. He writes, “The ideological war between capitalism and communism during the second half of the twentieth century was not a conflict between totally different . It was, rather, a civil war between two extreme viewpoints of the same Western ideology: the search for through the material progress disseminated by the .” Found in Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of : Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004), 261. 5 Lasch, The True and Only Heaven, 13, 15, 23, 14.

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“consumeristic,” to Lasch’s rebuke of liberalism’s commitment to endless economic growth and its concomitant progress measured in GDP, one is forced to wonder: is this the genius of liberal environmentalism? Modern green liberalism—as many have coined the strategies of contemporary liberals—represents a drastic departure from the liberal environmentalism of the postwar era. The differences are so vast that green consumerism, affluent environmentalism, and demand-side activism should more appropriately be termed “green .” Such a definition is apt considering the distance mainstream liberalism has traveled to the center-right of the . When did

American liberal environmentalism come to be defined as the decisions of individuals in the corporate marketplace and a feverish commitment to economic growth? Only in the late 1960s and 1970s, with the decline in social democratic solutions, rise of the New

Right, and shift of mainstream liberalism to the center-right—especially in regards to market-based solutions for social and environmental issues—did individual consumer activism triumph. The association of liberal environmentalism with individualistic consumer decisions derives from these historical forces and the transformation of ideas within liberalism itself.

Focusing on a coterie of liberal intellectuals, scientists, and policy-makers in the early 1950s through the mid-1960s, this chapter argues that liberal environmentalism focused on “supply-side” ecological issues—rather than the “demand-side” concerns of green consumerism. Liberal intellectuals concerned with environmental issues engendered a conversation within liberalism to reform the worst ecological excesses of the liberal mind. These thinkers questioned the imperatives of economic growth, blind

30 scientific progress, and materialistic values. They emphasized the need for a strong federal government committed to regulating industry and protecting the nation’s natural resources. Liberal environmentalists like Rachel Carson, Stewart Udall, and Barry

Commoner sought to democratize science and ensure citizens could control the harmful byproducts of techno-centric industry. In advancing social change, liberals emphasized collective political action, institutional reform, pragmatism, and pluralistic public policies. They rejected the conservative of a “free-market” and therefore the belief that consumers—through apolitical individual action—could reform the dynamics of the market. In short, they rejected the consumption of material goods as the basis for social action, the definition of , and for building a “beloved .”

Postwar liberalism must be understood as a philosophy of nuance, variety, and complication. Due to liberalism’s complexities and evolving historical meaning, historian

Gary Gerstle argues, “Any effort to define the liberal community must be firmly located in time and space.”6 Despite many historians’ claims of a “liberal consensus,” in the late

1950s and early 1960s, liberalism faced uncertain prospects. Historians Michael Kazin and Maurice Isserman contend liberalism “was neither sufficiently coherent as a , nor sufficiently well organized as a , to realize many ambitions.”7 Therefore, this chapter is not an in-depth explanation of liberalism’s origins or divisions. Rather, this chapter will analyze the conception of liberal environmentalism and its relationship to the broader philosophy of American postwar liberalism.

6 Gary Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” The American Historical Review, Oct. 1994, (Vol. 99, Issue 4) 1047. 7 Maurice Isserman and Micahel Kazin, American Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 48.

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Postwar liberalism emerged as a political philosophy directly tied to President

Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. Indeed, one of the greatest challenges for postwar liberals was redefining the , as the party had become synonymous with

Roosevelt’s character and policies.8 As Harvard historian and later White House insider

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. quipped, “The existence of Franklin Roosevelt relieved American liberals for a dozen years of the responsibility of thinking for themselves.”9 While the politics of the Democratic Party were not the same as the political philosophy of postwar liberalism, the Democratic Party empowered liberal ideals.

Until the 1960s, the Democratic Party relied on Roosevelt’s alliance of organized labor, intellectuals, African-Americans, and Southerners. Liberalism called for a strong federal government to check the excesses of industry, a to ensure economic security for all Americans, and the rights of organized labor to collectively bargain.10 In terms of ideals, historian Kevin Mattson describes postwar liberalism as a “humanistic philosophy committed to pushing people to think beyond the interests of the self.”

Liberals nevertheless adopted a “realistic outlook on human nature” that understood humanity was “prone to foibles.”11 Government action became necessary to secure the prosperity and of individuals.12

8 While a Republican in name, Theodore Roosevelt spearheaded liberalism’s faith that only big government could check big business. He proclaimed, “The National Government alone can deal adequately with these great corporations.” and Kevin Mattson, The Cause: The Fight for American Liberalism from Franklin Roosevelt to (New York: Viking, 2012), 1. 9 Alterman and Mattson, The Cause, 1. 10 Isserman and Kazin, America Divided, 48. 11 Kevin Mattson, When America Was Great: The Fighting Faith of Postwar Liberalism (New York, Routledge, 2004), 6-7. 12 Gerstle contends a component of this relationship between individuals and the liberal state included . He notes, “liberals turned to the state as an institutional medium capable of reconstructing

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In the early postwar years, liberal intellectuals sought to update liberalism for a post-Depression society. Building on Roosevelt’s 1941 “Four Freedoms” State of the

Union Address, liberals sought to define new rights and securities for Americans. In his

“Four Freedoms” address and his 1944 call for a “Second Bill of Rights,” Roosevelt implored the nation to move beyond “negative freedoms”—the protection of individuals from government intrusion and abuse. Roosevelt rather called for “a strong, interventionist government” to ensure “security” for all citizens through “freedom from want” and “fear.”13 Liberal intellectuals like John Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger

Jr., and Stewart Udall expanded Roosevelt’s call to include “qualitative” benefits, especially environmental securities, like clean and air. Liberal environmentalism combined negative and positive freedoms to argue against environmental harms and for

environmental services that enriched the nation’s quality of life.

More than an intellectual history of liberal environmentalism, this chapter is

concerned with the men and women who understood the power of ideas. Schlesinger,

Carson, Galbraith, and Udall stand as the exemplars of championing intellectual

environmentalism. They maintained that humanity’s relationship with nature was a

product of the mind. Their work echoed this ideal that ideas mattered—that ideas could

forge a more verdant future. Udall encapsulated this argument when he declared:

“Conservation is ultimately something of the mind.” These authors understood that

conservation must entail a set of values and rooted in a new conception of

humanity’s relationship with the earth. society and of educating citizens in the task of intelligent living.” Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” 1046. 13 Isserman and Kazin, America Divided, 54, and Alterman and Mattson, The Cause, 7-8.

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Aldo Leopold: “The Hayek of Ecology”

Published posthumously a year after Aldo Leopold’s death, A Sand County

Almanac (1949) emerged as the most important ecological text before Rachel Carson’s

Silent Spring (1962). Leopold’s ideas imbued liberal environmental thought with his shift from conservation to ecology and his cautionary tale of humanity’s ability to master the natural world. He also understood that a new set of ideals—what he would term a “”—must precipitate the reform of America’s environmental ills.

Leopold’s life experiences, woven throughout the conclusions of A Sand County

Almanac, reflected his intellectual evolution from utilitarian to ecological conservation.

Trained at America’s preeminent conservationist program—Yale’s School of —

Leopold devoted his life to managing and studying America’s forests and public lands. A disciple of Gifford Pinchot—the father of American forestry—Leopold learned the conservationist’s “gospel of efficiency” and developed an influential model of targeting predators to ensure sufficient game for hunters.14 In his book Game Management (1933), he argued that conserving natural resources required “deliberate and purposeful manipulation of the environment.”15 Yet Leopold’s experiences upholding his doctrine of heavy-handed land management caused him to reconsider his views.

In one of the most famous conversion stories of the 20th century, Leopold explained how he came to reject humanity’s domination of nature. When exterminating predators as part of a routine expedition in the Sierra Madre Mountains, Leopold shot a

14 Coined by historian Samuel Hayes, the “Gospel” advocated “The greatest good for the greatest number.” Samuel Hayes, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Pittsburgh PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999). 15 Under Leopold’s policies, over two million coyotes were exterminated between 1915 and 1947. Aldo Leopold, Game Management, (New York: Schribner’s Sons, 1933).

34 wolf on the side of a mountain. Approaching the dying female wolf, he learned that she was pregnant and witnessed “a fierce green fire” in her eyes. He reflected,

I realized then and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—sometime known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, no wolves meant a hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.16

In his later years, Leopold secured a post teaching at the University of Wisconsin.

In a conscious nod to Henry David Thoreau, he purchased a parcel of abused land in

Baraboo, Wisconsin, in 1935 and spent weekends living in a small hut he constructed.

While rehabbing the worn out land, Leopold developed a “land-based ecology”— popularly known as his “land ethic”—and wrote A Sand County Almanac. Remembering the mother wolf, Leopold argued that a species never existed in isolation. “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community,” he wrote, “to include , , plants, and , or collectively: the land.” Rejecting humanity’s total domination over nature, Leopold understood such an ethic, “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”17 Termed, “the

Hayek of Ecology,” by historian Paul Milazzo, Leopold believed that humanity, like all other species, was limited by the laws of nature and must not exceed these limits.18

Leopold’s commitment to a set of values that respected nature’s innate complexity, diversity, and precipitated his critique of the and

16 Dowie, Losing Ground, 19. 17 Philip Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire: An American Environmental Movement ( D.C.: Island Press, 2003), 83-84. 18 I am indebted to Paul Charles Milazzo for this idea. While Fredrich Hayek may seem like a strange bedfellow for the progressive Leopold, the analogy is apt considering their agreement that while government had a role to play, it must be limited in its scope and intent. Indeed, Leopold strongly opposed many New Deal programs, such as parts of the Civilian Conservation Corps devoted to building roads through National Parks.

35 humanity’s commodified relationship with nature. He sought to limit the exploitation of the land and argued the market could not provide the necessary mechanisms for conservation. He admonished, “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to

use it with love and respect.”19 Leopold suggested that Americans should develop “a little

healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings” and advised, “a shift of values can

be achieved by reappraising things unnatural, tame, and confined in terms of things

natural, wild, and free.” With his firm belief in ecological value and the limits of homo

sapiens to dominate nature, Leopold’s most important contribution to the ideas of liberal

environmentalism remains his conclusion that nature must be valued independently from

orthodox economics and the limits of man to dominate the natural world.20

Rachel Carson and the Ecological Critique of “Progress”

While A Sand County Almanac endures as a seminal work in , the most important book for the history of the environmental movement is

Carson’s Silent Spring. Indeed, the term “environment” was not in popular usage until

Carson’s work.21 As environmental historian J.R. McNeil argues, “The single most effective catalyst for environmentalism was an American aquatic zoologist with a sharp

19 Ted Steinberg, Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 242. 20 Leopold’s ecological ideas were indispensable in forming his holistic worldview. In one of the most famous lines of A Sand County Almanac he wrote, “all ethics rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts…A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity and stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”20 In his essay “Thinking like a Mountain,” Leopold encouraged a reflection of nature in deep time and the intricacies and inherent stability of evolution. 21 Dowie, Losing Ground, 1.

36 pen, Rachel Carson.”22 Her provocative work remained on bestseller list for an unprecedented thirty-one weeks.23 In just its first year of publication, Silent

Spring was translated into twelve different languages.24 Critics lauded her as a modern day Harriet Beecher Stowe, a prescient parallel considering the enduring veracity of

Carson’s insight for the .25

Carson’s work and ideas became central to liberal environmentalism for a number of reasons. Because of her recognition of the ecological limits of the “free-enterprise system,” she called for governmental and legislation. As a liberal reformer,

Carson held that the federal government had to regulate the worst excesses of the market.

Yet, like many other liberals, Carson still believed in American capitalism, private , and the market system. As someone who saw democracy and equality in nature,

Carson believed American citizens had a right to essential on pervasive chemicals and to control the production of harmful goods—crucial tenets of liberal environmentalism. Carson’s work also made ecology the central pillar of the growing environmental movement. Conveying ecological insights, she warned of the limits of humanity to control nature and expressed skepticism about scientific progress.

Born in 1907 in the small town of Springdale, Pennsylvania, Carson grew up in the verdant Allegany Mountains. Inspired by her nature-loving Christian mother, she

22 J.R. McNeil, Something New Under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World, (New York: Norton, 2000), 337. 23 Steinberg, Down to Earth, 247. 24 Linda Sargent Wood, A More Perfect World: Holistic Worldviews and the Transformation of American Culture after World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 47. 25 Calvin G. Mackenzie and Robert Weisbrot. The Liberal Hour: Washington and the Politics of Change in the 1960s, (New York: Penguin Books, 2008), 199. For activists parallels with abolitionists, see Wen Stephenson, “The New Abolitionists: Global Warming is the Great Moral Crisis of Our Time,” The Phoenix, Feb. 20th, 2013, http://thephoenix.com/boston/news/151670-new-abolitionists- global-warming-is-the-great/#ixzz2KnsfRWA5

37 became an avid bird watcher and wrote she was happiest “with wild birds and creatures as companions.”26 She recalled, “I was rather a solitary child and spent a great deal of time in woods and beside streams, learning the birds and the insects and flowers.”27 Even in her youth, Carson realized the natural world offered invaluable insights for humanity.

Carson left Springdale to attend the Pennsylvania College for Women, where she earned a degree in in the spring of 1929. That fall, she began as a graduate student in zoology at the nation’s first graduate school, Johns Hopkins University in

Baltimore, Maryland. After earning her Master’s and pursing a Ph.D. for a year, Carson was forced to secure work outside of academia for family and financial reasons. She worked the majority of her adult life—nearly twenty years—as an aquatic biologist for the Bureau of , and later its successor, the U.S. Fish and Service.

Throughout her life, Carson joined environmental advocacy organizations, yet was a deeply private woman who sought solitude in nature.28

Despite her introverted ways, Carson committed herself to using science for the public good. Prefiguring countercultural and New Left critiques of liberalism’s over- reliance on experts, Carson rejected the “priestlike” nature of postwar scientists. In Silent

Spring Carson contended that citizens have a “right to know” information concerning chemicals sprayed in their communities and on their . She cautioned her readers to

26 Shabecoff, A Fierce Green Fire, 29. 27 Mackenzie and Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour, 198. 28 She belonged to the Audubon Society and , joined the radical Society, and in the mid-1950s, opposed the proposed dam at Echo Park. While Carson contributed to larger environmental causes, she was a private and solitary woman who exerted enormous energy to care for her ailing family. Yet Carson always found solitude in her , her writing, and of course the natural beauty that environed her. She purchased a small cottage on the Maine Coast—her own her Thoreauvian Cabin on Walden. Indeed, Thoreau’s journal rarely left her nightstand. Like the Transcendentalists, Carson believed nature offered humanity salvation—a view into God’s soul. Wood, A More Perfect Union, 29-34.

38 reject the “counsel of those who tell us that we must fill our world with poisonous chemicals.” Carson scoffed at the notion that “science is the prerogative of only a small number of human beings.” Rather, “The materials of science are the materials of life itself,” she wrote. “Science is part of the reality of living; it is the way, the how and the why for everything in our experience.”29 Silent Spring showed that information, given and understood by the lay public, was a powerful weapon for social activism.

While Carson focused on the science of ecology and the material consequences of pesticides, she also understood that the environmental crisis was a product of the mind.

Like Leopold before her, and Udall after her, Carson believed the fundamental issue must be “Man’s relationship to his environment.”30 In analyzing what Udall would call the

“Ecology of Man,” she cautioned against humanity’s ability to dominate the natural world. For Carson, “the web of life—or death—that scientists know as ecology,” revealed both the relationship between humans as well as humanity’s biochemical interactions with the natural world. Environmental historian Ted Steinberg contends,

“Carson helped to transform ecology into the rallying cry of the emerging

[environmental] movement.”31 Only by embracing a holistic worldview based on ecology, could humanity forge a healthy relationship with the natural world.

Ecology informed Carson’s critique on humanity’s supposed triumph over nature and future of scientific progress. “Man seems actually likely to take into his hands, ill- prepared as he is psychologically,” she wrote, “many of the functions of God.” She even

29 Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival: The Remaking of American Environmentalism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2007), 87. 30 Wood, A More Perfect Union, 26. 31 Steinberg, Down to Earth, 247.

39 planned on calling her book “Man Against the Earth,” but decided the title was too acerbic for her middle-class audience. Her mollified title aside, Carson warned that despite attempts to “insulate himself, in his of and concrete,” man could not escape from “the of earth and water and the growing seed.” Quite simply, “Man does not live apart from the world,” because, “humans and nature [are] inseparable.”32

As a faithful Christian, Carson rejected the belief that with science, humanity could act as its own savior. She wrote, “Man’s record as steward of natural resources of earth has been a discouraging one.” Her religious perspective carried a humility and feeling of sin concerning humanity’s destruction of God’s creation. “Intoxicated with a sense of his own power,” she said when receiving the John Burroughs’s Writer of the

Year award in 1962, “he seems to be going farther and farther into more experiments for the destruction of himself and the world.” Carson emphasized that humanity could prosper only with the right intellectual disposition, humility, and control of science.33

Carson’s critique of man’s dominance also contained a gender-based rejection of masculine society. More than just his ignorance, Carson warned that man’s arrogance carried a fatal price. She suggested that environmental destruction emerged from male

“control people” who failed to understand the interconnections of nature. Prefiguring later eco-feminist arguments, Carson explained, “Women have a greater intuitive

32 Wood, A More Perfect Union, 26, 41, 45, 28. 33 Ibid, 77, 39, 41. “Through our technology we are waging war against the natural world,” Carson lamented in 1964, only months before she died of . “By acquiescing in needless destruction and ,” she continued, “our stature as human begins is diminished.” This destruction of nature, and humanity itself, had great consequences for Carson’s belief in progress. She questioned, “whether any civilization can do this and retain the right to be called civilized.” Dowie, Losing Ground, 225.

40 understanding of such things.”34 Rather than control nature, Carson stressed that humanity must learn to live with nature.

The solution was a thoughtful reevaluation of humanity’s relationship with nature.

In her last public address, she cautioned, “In spite of our rather boastful talk about progress…we are beginning to wonder whether our power to change the face of nature should not have been tempered with wisdom for our own good, and with a greater sense of responsibility.”35 A prophet of limits in an age of affluence, Carson understood that scientific knowledge was not the same as wisdom.

Carson’s recognition of natural limits and humanity’s hubris also led her to question society’s veneration of the free-market. In Silent Spring, Carson elaborated on the violence wrought by a market blind to ecology. She urged readers to remember that

“the slaughter of the buffalo on the western plains, the massacre of the shorebirds by the market gunners, [and] the near- of the egrets for their plumage” were all accomplished through the “” of the free market. This dark history must be recognized, she counseled, because through the veneration of the market, humanity would repeat past mistakes by “adding a new chapter and a new kind of havoc” to its record of destruction. Indeed, Carson warned that the ascendance of the industry following World War II threatened a dystopian era “dominated by industry, in which the right to make , at whatever cost to others, is seldom challenged.”36

34Adam , “’Give Earth a Chance’: The Environmental Movement and the Sixties,” Journal of American History, September 2003, 42. 35 Wood, A More Perfect Union, 45. 36 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 85.

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Like Galbraith and later Commoner, Carson also questioned the notion of consumer sovereignty and believed producers were responsible for flooding the market with unsafe goods. She recognized the imbalance of power between consumers and producers that nullified the ability of inchoate individual action. Invoking the evocative title of ’s 1957 bestseller, The Hidden Persuaders, Carson warned, “Lulled by the soft sell and the hidden persuader, the average citizen is seldom aware of the deadly materials with which he is surrounding himself; indeed, he may not realize he is using them at all.”37 Carson contended that producers, not consumers, were more responsible for environmental damage.

Despite her reformist attitudes, the chemical industry and Chamber of Commerce

painted Carson as an environmental fanatic—or even worse during the Cold War, a

Marxist—intent on destroying American capitalism. The National Chemicals Association

spent $250,000 to slander Carson as a hysterical woman with a “mystical attachment to

the .”38 The Velsicol Chemical Company claimed Carson was creating

“the false impression that all business is grasping and immoral.”Silent Spring, they claimed, intended to “reduce the use of agricultural chemicals in this country and in the countries of western so that our supply of food will be reduced to east-curtain parity.”39 Carson anticipated this fierce pushback and warned readers in Silent Spring to

beware of industry’s “little tranquilizing pills of half truth.”40

37 , Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 84. 38 Steinberg, Down to Earth, 247 and Mackenzie and Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour, 200. 39 Dowie, Losing Ground, 85. 40 Mackenzie and Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour, 201.

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Despite fierce , Carson’s plea for civility and limits resonated with

millions, especially liberal intellectuals. Supreme Court and conservationist

William O. Douglas lauded the book as “the most important chronicle of this century for

the human race.”41 Galbraith called Silent Spring one of the most urgent books in

Western Literature.42 While his early concern for the environment is salient in The

Affluent Society, Galbraith accelerated his environmental critiques after reading Carson and devoted an entire chapter to ecological concerns in Economics and the Public

Purpose. Likewise, Carson’s holistic worldview and expression of the interconnected relationships of humanity and nature drove Commoner to a more radical social critique of environmental issues. After Carson’s death, Commoner became the most popular

American ecologist, but he never forgot his intellectual to Silent Spring. Carson’s

work, he reflected, “was the first evidence that there was a wide affinity for

environmentalism among the American public.”43 He utilized Carson’s ecological critique of progress to argue for radical reforms to science and technology.

Bernard DeVoto and the Necessity of Federal Action

While Leopold and Carson’s ecological ideas fueled the burgeoning environmental movement, the ideas of postwar liberal intellectuals were perhaps more essential to the conception of liberal environmentalism. As environmental historian J.R.

McNeil writes, “For environmental history the powerful, prevailing ideas mattered more

41 Wood, A More Perfect Union, 47. 42 Dowie, Losing Ground, 267. 43 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 86.

43 than the explicitly environmental ones.”44 In this regard, several liberal intellectuals are especially important for their bestselling works that looked beyond the façade of postwar affluence and envisioned a more verdant, healthy, and wealthy America. Chief among these thinkers was the journalist Bernard DeVoto, Schlesinger, Udall, and perhaps most importantly, Galbraith. Consistent with the nuanced nature of postwar liberalism, each of these thinkers articulated diverse but complementary arguments in favor of the environmental-regulatory state.

In the 1950s, Schlesinger and Galbraith emerged as two of most important thinkers concerned with forging a new liberalism that explicitly focused on quality of life issues like environmentalism. While neither were noted conservationists, DeVoto impressed upon both the need for a national public policy devoted to America’s natural resources.45 A one-time Harvard professor and close friend of Schlesinger’s father,

DeVoto mentored Schlesinger Jr. and exposed him to the nation’s natural cathedrals—its towering mountains, circuitous canyons, and pristine streams. DeVoto helped articulate prescriptions for postwar conservation—especially the necessity of federal action to protect the “posterity of our national wealth.”46

A true son of the West, DeVoto was born in 1897 and matured in Utah. While he spent the rest of his life living on the East Coast, he rarely missed an opportunity to travel westward. DeVoto taught English at both Northwestern and for a number of years, but after being denied tenure at Harvard, settled into a career as a journalist. In the 1920s, he became involved with the acerbic social critic and libertarian

44 McNeil, Something New Under the Sun, 325. 45 Rome, “‘Give Earth a Chance,’” 528. 46 Mattson, When America Was Great, 112, 114.

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H.L. Mencken and his group of writers at the American Mercury. Yet as he grew older,

DeVoto’s political affiliations moved leftward and by the 1950s, he aligned himself with the liberal wing of the Democratic Party—Americans for Democratic Action.47

The issue of natural conservation fueled DeVoto’s affiliation with postwar liberalism and shifted his affiliation with Western populism to a belief in

America’s national greatness. Immediately after World War II, DeVoto witnessed a frenzied land grab by special interests that propelled him into action. From 1946 until his death in 1955, protecting the nation’s public lands was his foremost concern. Rather than paint the West as a “plundered province,” victimized by Eastern elites—as he had before—DeVoto argued exploitation derived from its own laissez-faire frontiersmen.48

He lamented, “The West will destroy the public land system if it is permitted to.”49 The major threat to Western public lands, DeVoto wrote, originated with Western special interests—stockman’s organizations, timber , and mining giants. The title of an essay of his summarized the situation: “The West Against Itself.”50

Marshalling the public against “land grabs” and “fire sales,” he reminded readers that the Western lands—managed by the federal government—were their lands, and the rightful inheritance of their children. Here DeVoto advanced the idea for America’s natural greatness—a kind of environmental patriotism.51 After traveling 13,000 miles in

47 Ibid, 117, 119-120. 48 Mattson, When America Was Great, 118. DeVoto had previously argued, “The pioneer’s tradition of brawn and courage, initiative, individualism, and self-help was” subsumed by Eastern elites and “the Industrial Revolution.” Susan Zakin, Coyotes and Towndogs: Earth First! And the Environmental Movement, (New York: Viking, 1993). 49 Mattson, When America Was Great, 122. 50 Edward K. Muller, DeVoto’s West: History, Conservation, and the Public Good (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2005), xxii. 51 This is a popular idea throughout all of American history that deserves an extended treatment.

45 the summer of 1946, visiting nearly every with his wife and children, he explained, “An American who does not know his national parks has missed a priceless part of his heritage.” America’s past and future, indeed the very identity of the country and its peoples, were inseparable from its natural beauty and resources in DeVoto’s mind.

“We are a wilderness people,” DeVoto wrote, “and there must be places where we and our great-grandchildren can revisit our roots.”52 In December 1946 and January 1947,

DeVoto published his first two essays, in a series of over three dozen, to lobby public support against the private raiding and despoilment of public lands.53

To defend the “public domain” against efforts by congressional Republicans to give away federal lands to private interests or the states, DeVoto used his “Easy Chair” column in Harpers magazine as a bully pulpit to appeal directly to the American people.

To “protect the posterity of our national wealth,” DeVoto admonished, “only the federal government is able to withstand the pressure of special interest groups [and]… is willing to spend sums necessary for repair and maintenance.”54 The “land grabs” were merely an effort by the Republican “boys in the backroom”—as he called them—to transfer federal lands to the states, where politicians were easily manipulated. Only the federal government could uphold the Supreme Court’s decision in Light v. United States (1911) that “All public lands are held in trust for the people of the whole country.”55

Yet DeVoto, like Leopold before him, did not blindly entrust decisions to the federal government. He held that conservation policy must respect natural limits. DeVoto

52 Mattson, When America Was Great, 124. 53 Muller, DeVoto’s West, xiii. 54 Mattson, When America Was Great, 122, 126. 55 Muller, DeVoto’s West, xxiv, xxvi.

46 stressed, “We know that limits are absolutely fixed by the topography and distances of the West, by its capacity to sustain , by its soils and climate, by the amount of water, and by the facts of life.” Following the diagnosis of famed explorer and hydrologist John Wesley Powell, DeVoto cautioned that the West was defined by “its aridity; lack of water sets an absolute limitation to its development.”56 As imperfect as federal regulation had been, DeVoto nevertheless argued it was the best defense against the circling vultures of the rapacious market.57

As DeVoto detailed the threats facing America’s natural resources, his support of postwar liberalism increased. In 1946, DeVoto admitted he identified as a “55 or 60 percent New Dealer.”58 Indeed, DeVoto even came to enjoy being criticized as a

“Communist New Dealer.”59 With Republican schemes to sell America’s public lands to

ranchers, miners, and timber-barons, the outspoken journalist lauded liberalism. He explained that “the study of history”—especially the exploitation of the public domain— confirmed “the working principles of American liberalism.” With Galbraith and

Schlesinger, DeVoto wrote speeches for Adlai Stevenson in 1952 and counseled the presidential candidate on conservation issues until his death in 1955.60

As a liberal environmentalist and a historian of the West, DeVoto came to reject the myth of American individualism. He scoffed at the idea—famously advanced by historian Fredrick Jackson Turner in his “Frontier Thesis”—that the West was settled

56 Mattson, When America Was Great, 126. DeVoto wrote on John Wesley Powell, “In the whole range of the American experience from Jamestown on there is no book more prophetic.” Stewart Udall, The Quiet Crisis (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1963), 108. 57 Muller, DeVoto’s West, xxvi. 58 Mattson, When America Was Great, 120. 59 Muller, DeVoto’s West, xxiii. 60 Mattson, When America Was Great, 120, 125.

47 through “rugged individualism.” In response to Turner, DeVoto rejoined, “How indeed did the frontier community exist at all except by means of a close-knit cooperation?”

DeVoto understood the wider implications of this argument for conservationism as well.

To preserve America’s natural greatness, the national community—not the disconnected actions of individuals—must work through the political system.61 DeVoto advocated federal action, increased public spending, natural leisure areas, and above all, the imperative to guard the nation’s natural treasures for posterity.

Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and “Qualitative Liberalism”

As DeVoto’s protégé, Schlesinger articulated his mentor’s prescription of federal spending to combat the ills of private consumerism and the laissez-faire market. Indeed, as a boy, Schlesinger traveled west with DeVoto for several months in the summer of

1940 and embraced the harsh beauty of the daunting Western landscape. For liberal environmentalism, the Harvard historian’s vision emerged as a guiding philosophy for three reasons. Schlesinger showed how excessive private consumption, coupled with a lack of public spending, resulted in pollution and a degraded environment. He rejected consumerism as a guiding ethic and looked beyond the market to inform America’s understanding of itself as a beloved community. Lastly, Schlesinger advocated for a

“fighting faith” to ensure the nation’s general welfare through a that emphasized the social controls on production and the balance of pluralistic forces to control federal power.62

61 Muller, DeVoto’s West, xviii. 62 Muller, DeVoto’s West, xxii.

48

In a 1956 essay “The Future of Liberalism,” Schlesinger delineated his vision for a new “qualitative liberalism.” This emerged from the ashes of the old idea of

“quantitative liberalism” based principally on economic concerns. With postwar prosperity, Schlesinger looked “to the more subtle and complicated problem of fighting for individual dignity, identity, and fulfillment in a .” In one of his most famous excerpts, Schlesinger diagnosed the nation’s ills with a particular focus on environmental issues:

Here is a nation richer than ever before, and getting even richer every moment, and yet devoting a decreasing share of its wealth to the public welfare. Our gross national product rises; our shops overflow with gadgets and gimmicks; consumer goods of ever-increasing ingenuity and luxuriance pour out of our ears. But our schools become more crowded and dilapidated, our teachers more weary and underpaid, our playgrounds more crowded, our cities dirtier, our roads more teeming and filthy, our national parks more unkempt, our law enforcement more overworked and inadequate.63

The crux of America’s postwar , Schlesinger opined in evocative language repeated by Stevenson and Galbraith, was the contrast between “public squalor and private opulence.”64 Later described by Galbraith as “the problem of social balance,”

Schlesinger explained, “While private wealth heaps up in our shops and homes, we refuse to undertake adequate programs to improve our schools, our hospitals, our cities, our natural resources, our public domain.”65 Schlesinger argued that Americans needed to

“end this belief that every dollar spent on private indulgence is good and every dollar spent for public service is bad—that, to put it simply—tail-fins are better than schools.”66

63 Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “The Future of Liberalism,” in The Reporter, 1956, 8-9, 10. 64 Schlesinger was the first, but certainly not the last to use this phrase. W.J. Rorabaugh, Kennedy and the Promise of the Sixties, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002) 3. 65 Schlesinger, “The Future of Liberalism,” 10. 66 Mattson, When America Was Great, 148.

49

The privation of public spending resulted in serious environmental problems and numerous areas for improvement—including pollution, a lack of open space, conserving

America’s resources, “slum clearance and decent ,” and the “better planning of our cities.”67 As a cure, Schlesinger prescribed “a shift from the private motives of the last decade to a new dedication of public purposes.”68

To forge such a community, Schlesinger advocated a firm commitment to a supra- market ethic—that is, a value system beyond the imperatives of the -motive. He warned that if American society, “let the production of consumer goods for the sake of profit achieve a sort of moral priority in our culture,” the “miseries of an age of abundance” would persist. A nation could not achieve the kind of national greatness liberals sought if Americans did not reject “the false notion that the unlimited pursuit of profit will guarantee the general welfare.” If society refused to reject consumerism as a dominant value, Schlesinger presaged, while “we privately grow richer, our nation will grow in proportion poorer.”69 To bolster the nation’s commitment to essential , Schlesinger argued for increased federal spending.

Like Leopold and DeVoto, though, Schlesinger also understood that private interests often appropriated the federal government for their parochial ends—to the detriment of the public welfare and the public’s faith in government. To counter these concerns, Schlesinger argued “the new liberalism must” assert “that government by a single interest is bad, whatever the nature of the interest.”70 Liberals like Schlesinger

67 Schlesinger, “The Future of Liberalism,” 9. 68 Mattson, When America Was Great, 154. 69 Schlesinger, “The Future of Liberalism,” 10. 70 Ibid, 10.

50 shunned utopian projects and urged politicians to remember the “limitations and possibilities of man.” Such humility informed Schlesinger’s belief that an effective government must rest, “on the diverse and reciprocally conditioned judgments of a plurality of interests; for this alone can faithfully represent the brilliant and wonderful variety that is America.” Fortunately, “the great tradition of American liberalism” offered such a pluralistic possibility. Liberalism embraced “a fighting faith in the necessity of popular control of economic life” with “a fighting faith in the rights of the individual,” and Schlesinger asserted “big government, for all its dangers, remains democracy’s only effective response to big business.”71

John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society

While Schlesinger coalesced these core liberal values, his close friend and fellow

Harvard professor, Galbraith, popularized qualitative liberalism—and its recognition of environmental issues—for a mass audience. Two years after Schlesinger’s influential essay, Galbraith published The Affluent Society. One would be hard-pressed to overstate the importance of The Affluent Society’s effect on Galbraith’s career and future thinking.

Although he would go on the write thirty books over four decades, The Affluent Society endured as his most famous and widely quoted work. Moreover, it elevated his reputation. His biographer Richard Parker explained, “The Affluent Society made John

71 Mattson, When America Was Great, 99, 95.

51

Kenneth Galbraith America’s most famous economist.”72 The popularity of Galbraith’s work derived from his provocative, far-reaching, and controversial assertions.

Galbraith’s upbringing and education disposed him to a unique view of environmental concerns. Raised on a farm in Ontario, , he majored in husbandry and devoted a large share of his time to agricultural economics. While studying economics at the University of , Berkeley, Galbraith studied the work of prominent economists like and . In the 1930s, as a

New Deal reformer, he worked at the Department of and Bureau.73

During World War II, Galbraith worked at the Office of Price Administration and learned which aspects of the market the government could control. After earning tenure as a

Professor of Economics at Harvard in 1949, Galbraith regularly taught “The Economics of Agriculture” and “Agriculture, Forestry, and Land Policy.”74 Throughout his prestigious career, Galbraith’s arguments contained explicit environmental connections, although he did not advance scientific ecological thought.

Galbraith offered four crucial arguments that bolstered and inspired the philosophy of liberal environmentalism in The Affluent Society. Foremost, he aimed to dethrone production as an outmoded social virtue—the product of a society with a

Depression-era .75 He explained, “Production for the sake of the goods produced

72 Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics. (New York: Farr, Straus, and Giroux, 2005), 273, 310. 73 Kevin Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique” in American Capitalism: Social Thought and Political Economy in the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 90. 74 Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 5-6, 273. 75 Although he began the project writing about poverty, Galbraith changed course, explaining, “The rich society was the new and interesting case; poverty was still the common but aberrant situation.” This raised a new set of challenges, as while “the oldest and most agitated of social issues [were]…largely in

52 is no longer urgent.” This led him to question what kinds of things the nation produced.

He argued the affluent society suffered from the “problem of social balance,” where

“public services have failed to keep abreast of private consumption.” Such a social imbalance resulted from the nation’s strong corporate sector, which perverted the market for the ends of stabilized production, consumption, and most importantly, profit.

Galbraith rejected the idea that producers aimed to satisfy the needs and of consumers. Rather, producers created false wants in consumers through then fulfilled these manufactured desires. Galbraith believed this rendered the popular theory of “consumer agency” untenable.76 The Harvard economist reveled in explaining to the free-market faithful that America possessed a corporately-. All of these issues, Galbraith understood, contained explicit environmental implications.77

To bolster Schlesinger’s “qualitative liberalism,” Galbraith showed that

America’s excessive production—which he termed the “paramount position of production”—was unnecessary and socially harmful. He highlighted the paradox that historically high levels of production fueled an increasing concern for even higher levels of production. Galbraith concluded that the obsession with production as a “paramount”

abeyance,” the society with broad material wealth “had never been fully understood or examined.” Yet his initial study of poverty still informed Galbraith’s conclusion, as he argued America’s economic views were “rooted in the poverty, inequality, and economic peril of the past.” Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 280 and John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998 [1958]), 3, 80. 76 At least thirty years before The Affluent Society, the idea that consumers dictated which goods industry chose to produce was pervasive. A publication by the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency in the 1930s is typical. Under “private capitalism,” the booklet argued, “the Consumer…is boss.” As such, “he doesn’t have to wait for election day to vote or for the court to convene before handing down his verdict. The consumer ‘votes’ each time he buys one article and rejects another.” Jeffery Kaplan, “The Gospel of Consumption,” Orion Magazine, May/ June 2008. http://www.orionmagazine.org/ index.php/articles/article/2962/. 77 Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 143, 191.

53 social value was irrational in such an opulent society.78 The origin of this paradox rested with the imperatives of consumer capitalism. Through “high pressure salesmanship, singing commercials, and the concept of the captive audience,” Galbraith believed corporations manufactured wants in consumers.79 Quite simply, he held,

“production…creates the wants it seeks to satisfy.”80

Galbraith’s provocative conclusion precipitated a reevaluation of society’s needs.

Intellectually, reform beckoned, as “one cannot defend production as satisfying wants if that production creates the wants.”81 Following the famous economist—and Galbraith’s most important intellectual antecedent—Thorstein Veblen, and his thesis on

“,” Galbraith argued that because “One man’s consumption becomes his neighbor’s wish…the more wants that are satisfied, the more new ones are born.”82 False wants, created by manipulative advertisers and exacerbated by a system of social worth based on the flashiest and newest consumer good—as the ostentatious tail fins of 1950s Cadillacs evinced—drove an unnecessary system of production that created

78 Ibid, 98, 106. Indeed, The Opulent Society was his original title. See John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times, (New York: Ballantine Books, 1982), 339. 79 Mattson, When America Was Great, 144. 80 Following Vance Packard—whose best-selling The Hidden Persuaders (1957) offered a similar argument less than a year before Galbraith’s work—he originated the “competitive manipulation of consumer desire” in the psychologically coercive efforts of the “persuaders.” Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 127. 81 Ibid, 124. 82 Both Veblen and Keynes served as sources of inspiration for Galbraith on this issue. Veblen also coined the term “defensive consumption”—to explain that consumption habits are propagated downwards, with those at the lowest end of the spectrum spending the most in a futile attempt to compete. As Galbraith highlighted in The Affluent Society, Keynes similarly noted the needs of the “second class”—or those who fall beyond socially acceptable levels of income and consumption, “may indeed be insatiable; for the higher the general level, the higher still are they.” Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Macmillan, 1899), and Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 125-6. Historian later used these intellectual antecedents to argue, “In a consumer society there are inevitably two kinds of slaves: the prisoners of addiction and the prisoners of envy.” Steven Best, Ed. and Anthony J. Nocella, II, [Are both Best and Nocella editors or is Nocella an author of an essay included in Best’s edited collection? Unclear, and either way, this citation needs to be corrected.] Igniting a Revolution: Voices in Defense of the Earth (Oakland CA: AK Press, 2006),114.

54 pollution, waste, and unhappiness. Anyone who upheld such an absurd system was akin to “the onlooker who applauds the efforts of the squirrel to keep abreast of the wheel that is propelled by his own efforts. Among the many models of the good society,” Galbraith quipped, “no one has urged the squirrel wheel.”83

The Harvard economist reasoned that since consumers’ wants were created for the needs of corporations, then producers—not consumers—determined the nature of production. Instead of being “rational maximizers,” as the famous economist Alfred

Marshall argued, Galbraith wrote consumers were manipulated by advertising and were therefore inherently irrational. He argued this “dependence effect” meant, in the words of his biographer, “consumers were being, perversely, transformed into the ultimate end goods of the itself.”84 By rejecting the “untenable theory of consumer demand,” Galbraith interrogated the real logic of the postwar production system.85

Of all of Galbraith’s provocative arguments, few were as important to liberal environmentalism as the problem of “Social Balance.” Galbraith defined this term as “a satisfactory relationship between the supply of privately produced and those of the state.”86 While Galbraith and Schlesinger questioned the values of an affluent

consumer-oriented society, their greater concern rested with the neglect of public

83The Affluent Society, 130. 84 Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 289. 85 Like his other arguments, Galbraith knew such a line of reasoning would be vigorously resisted. He presaged, “Nothing is more likely to produce a similar reaction from defenders of the than an attack on the edifice which now rationalizes the importance of production and the urgency of consumer need.” Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 143. Indeed, the famous conservative economist Fredrich Hayek was more than happy to confirm Galbraith’s prescience. Hayek attacked the “dependence effect” and the myth of consumer agency, and concluded without this, “The whole argument of the book collapses.” In defending free-markets, Hayek aimed to show that The Affluent Society was merely a Trojan horse for “the latest of the old socialist argument.” Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 295, 293. 86 Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 189.

55 services. In a 1955 memo Galbraith explained, “This country is richer than ever before, and is getting even richer every moment—but it is devoting a decreasing share of its wealth to the common welfare.” This neglect of public services intensified in the late

1950s and was a salient concern in The Affluent Society.

Galbraith described the discrepancy between public and private spending.

Because “vacuum cleaners to ensure clean houses” were praised as “essential to our standard of living” by society, while “street cleaners to ensure clean streets” constituted an “unfortunate expense,” he observed, “our houses are generally clean and our streets generally filthy.” While “alcohol, comic books and mouthwash all bask under the superior reputation of the market,” he lamented, “schools, judges, patrolman and municipal swimming pools lie under the reputation of bad kings.” Quite simply,

Galbraith summarized, Americans fulfilled their wants for “private goods with reckless abundance, while in the case of public goods…we practice extreme self-denial.”87

The source of this social imbalance, Galbraith argued, originated from private industry for two important reasons. Private goods were held in such high regard because the “massed drums of modern advertising” praised them as “the ultimate wealth of the community.” Through industry’s imperative to perpetuate high levels of production through the creation of false wants, corporations convinced citizens that private goods were superior to those offered by the public. Second, through denigrating public services, he wrote, the rich checked the specter of increased taxation on their fortunes. Rejecting social services limited the veneration of public servants and the concomitant loss of the

“businessman’s prestige.” Consequentially, “private industry kept alive the notion that

87 Ibid, 109, 111, 193.

56 the public services for which they pay are inherently inferior to privately produced goods.”88 This constituted a “deep and enduring contradiction” because “the public and

corporate purposes diverge.”89

More than merely a boon to the wealthy, Galbraith warned, “the social consequences of the discrimination [against public services]…are considerable and even grave.” The threats exacerbated by this imbalance were manifold: a failure of the education system, insufficient public measures, a fickle economy, and pervasive environmental degradation. Quoting Fabian socialist and British historian R.H. Tawney,

Galbraith told his readers “high individual incomes will not purchase the mass of mankind immunity from , typhus, and ignorance…[until] society begins to make collective provision for the needs no ordinary individual, even if he works overtime all his life, can provide himself.”90 Like DeVoto, Galbraith understood that only —rather than inchoate individual action—could produce the vital social services necessary for a healthy community.

Galbraith sought to correct America’s social imbalance with “corrective” public services and goods. Since the dearth of public spending and services “carries to the point where it is a cause of social discomfort and social unhealth,” he reasoned, “Presumably a community can be as well rewarded by buying better schools or better parks as by buying

88 Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 112, 134. 89 Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 301. 90 Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 112, 186. Galbraith’s biographer explains that Fabian Socialism was “a distinctly English sort of socialism that had long sought non-Marxist, democratic, and egalitarian solutions to the brutal legacy of…laissez-faire capitalism.” Galbraith’s economics increasingly oriented towards this kind of socialism, as evinced by his 1976 Economics and the Public Purpose. Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 277.

57 more expensive automobiles.”91 In a clear rejoinder to conservatives who waxed poetic about the iron laws of the free-market, Galbraith understood that left to its own ends,

“private production will monopolize all resources” to the detriment of the community as a whole. In the tradition of the New Deal, he argued that “social intervention” in the economy through public spending could ensure vital social ends.92

Despite conservative attacks on Galbraith’s prescription for greater spending and rejection of the free-market, the Harvard economist was not a Socialist (with a

“S”) and did not embrace Marxism, although like the famous economist Joseph

Schumpeter, he believed Marx was a “learned man.” Rather than embrace doctrinal

Socialism, he endorsed a properly mixed economy as an ideal system.93 Like Schlesinger,

Galbraith believed a pluralistic economy represented the best path forward for consumers and producers alike. He clarified, “I’ve always believed that capitalism lends itself to more reform, more patching up of one messy sort or another…Personal bias makes me a reformer rather than a revolutionary.”94 Galbraith believed that the means of corporatist management, kept in check by government and labor, could serve socially vital ends. In short, a mixed economy with government oversight and spending, he argued, would best serve individuals’ desires while protecting social necessities.

An early proponent of public spending to alleviate pollution, environmental concerns were especially salient for Galbraith. While in the past society could justify

91 Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 186, 193. 92 Ibid, 224. 93 Galbraith shared Reinhold Niebuhr’s assertion that, “I think a mixed economy and the balances of political democracy come closer to the truth than any alternative system…” Mattson, When America Was Great, 100. 94 Curtis White, The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature (Sausalito CA: PoliPointPress, 2009), 133.

58 pollution and occupational disease on “the grounds that considerations of cost did not permit of its elimination,” this was no longer the case in an affluent society”.95He warned, “If the appropriate services are not provided, the counterpart of increasing opulence will be deepening filth. The greater the wealth, the thicker will be the dirt.” Yet, Galbraith knew the nation’s environmental ills would not be solved through legislation alone; the nation would need to look beyond consumerism.96

Galbraith predicated his provocative arguments on a post-materialist value system. These values rested on the conviction that life was more than the production and consumption of goods in a market-based economy. Rather than “cling” to material goods as the indicator of social position, Galbraith implored readers to judge success based on

“compassion, individual happiness and well-being.” Bucking the view that production was the highest calling, he counseled, “In a world where production is no longer urgent, we can obviously view an increase in voluntary idleness with some equanimity.”97

As he frequently admitted, Galbraith rejected the guiding principles of . First in American Capitalism and even more in The Affluent Society, he advanced a cultural critique of capitalism based not on economics, but on liberal values.98 Such a “disposition to remark on the legitimacy of the desire for more food and

the frivolity of the desire for a more elaborate automobile,” in the field of economics, he

95 Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 213. 96 Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 190. Like Schlesinger and liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Galbraith was appalled at those who equated America’s freedom to consumer choices.96 He rejected the “bigger supermarket theory of liberty,” that connected individual liberty “with the greatest range of choice of consumers’ goods.” Such individuals, Galbraith argued, “are only confessing their exceedingly simple- minded and mechanical view of man and his .”96 Rejecting the “false ideal” that markets should determine America’s values, Galbraith affirmed, “leisure, free time, and intellectual achievement are the real thing.” Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 303. 97 Ibid, 214, 219. 98 See argument of Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique.”

59 quipped, “quickly marks an individual as incompetently trained.”99 Yet to forge a good society, Galbraith understood, “We must explicitly assert the claims of the community against those of economics.”100

Galbraith’s ethics also informed his growing environmental sensibility, especially in the realm of . He believed that the market-dominated world of postwar

America was increasingly ugly. Rejecting the polluted environment and “ghastly” nature of the “superhighway,” Galbraith derided what author James Howard Kunstler would later call America’s “national automobile slum.”101 He found highways “hideous” because the “billboard artists and the motel builders and the sellers of countless things and the neon signs” try to “turn the road into an efficient instrument of commerce.”102

Galbraith affirmed that aesthetics should be a concern equal to that of profit and that limits should be placed on consumption to combat the pollution of affluence.103

Galbraith targeted postwar liberalism’s faith in economic growth. He explained,

“The goal of an expanding economy has also become deeply embedded in the conventional wisdom of the .”104 Admonishing fellow liberals, Galbraith believed growth could not solve many of the nation’s problems, and rejected growth as a priority. Galbraith argued growth said nothing about a nation’s values, about equality or

99 Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 298. 100 Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique,”107. To his critics, such a heresy against the orthodoxy of the discipline of economics merited great scorn. Yet Galbraith loved his status as a gadfly against the conservative establishment, quipping, “Nothing gives me more pleasure than to look over something I’ve written and say, ‘I don’t think David Rockefeller would like that.’” White, The Barbaric Heart, 132. Yet he rejected the blackboard models of academic economists, arguing instead that “contingency” and social needs should govern the discipline. Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 60. 101 Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique,” 101. White, The Barbaric Heart, 174. 102 Mattson, When America Was Great, 146. 103 Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique,” 107, 100. 104 Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 79.

60 health. He asserted: “We must ask ourselves why we want more.” Galbraith understood that economic growth without a public purpose could simply more private wealth and neglect the public sector.105 He explained that growth without a corrective does “not improve proportionately our public position, at least in the absence of a powerful determination on the contrary.”106

As economic growth and the proliferation of consumer goods were linked in postwar society, Galbraith expressed similar concerns for consumerism. Without a

“corrective,” he expressed concern that consumer culture would determine America’s values. Galbraith shared Schlesinger’s concern that hyper-consumption would lead the

United States to a damning reputation in the world community “as a nation of money- grubbing materialists.”107 He argued against excessive consumerism because material goods could not engage citizens, pull them out of their confining private spheres, and direct them “toward a more civilized existence.”108

Galbraith favored limiting growth and consumerism. He argued, “We must now persuade ourselves to sacrifice [production] in return for price stability.”109 Indeed, he convinced President Kennedy to institute price controls on the steel industry to check inflationary pressures.110 Blind growth should not be a priority, Galbraith concluded.

Growth linked to a more socially-planned economy could yield significant qualitative

105 Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique,” 95, 99. 106 Mattson, When America Was Great, 156. 107 Ibid, 161. 108 Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique,” 100. 109 “A policy which holds production below capacity in the interest of price stability inescapably sacrifices economic growth.” Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 181-182. 110 Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique,” 98.

61 advances for the American people. In modern nations, “economic growth and expanding public activity have…gone together. Each has served the other, as indeed they must.”111

Stewart Udall’s “Ecology of Man”

In the early 1960s, the growing chorus of liberal environmentalist ideas coalesced in the administrative leadership and scholarship of Udall. A congressman from Arizona until appointed Secretary of the Interior by President Kennedy in 1961, Udall underwent a precipitous environmental awakening. As an ardent proponent of building dams through the Federal Bureau of Reclamation and the Army Corps of Engineers, Udall’s early priorities stressed economic growth and securing additional water for his arid state. He recalled that “people would say, ‘Udall, what are you going to do about ecology?’ And I would answer, ‘What’s ecology?’” Yet starting in the mid-1950s, Udall began to see the consequences of postwar affluence and started to read liberal environmental critiques of

America’s “progress.” He emerged as a steadfast critic of building more dams and advocated for preserving millions of acres of America’s wilderness.

As a result of his environmental awakening, Udall penned The Quiet Crisis

(1963). Although journalist and historian first suggested the idea of the book to Udall, the newly appointed Secretary of the Interior drew his inspiration from

Galbraith’s The Affluent Society.112 In a line that could have been penned by Galbraith or

Schlesinger, Udall introduced his readers to the problem that “America today stands poised on a pinnacle of wealth and power, yet we live in a land of vanishing beauty, of

111 Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 111. 112 Mackenzie and Weisbrot, The Liberal Hour, 197.

62 increasing ugliness, of shrinking open space, and of an over-all environment that is diminished daily by pollution and noise and blight.”113 Not unlike the contrast Galbraith offered his readers, Udall presented his audience with a paradox. While Americans became materially affluent, they were still guided by impoverished ideas that failed to deliver “the good life.” He questioned, “Is society a success if it creates conditions that impair its finest minds and make a wasteland of its finest landscapes?”114

This imbalance between material wealth and America’s impoverished ecological mind had dire environmental consequences. America’s impressive physical ability to produce “boxes, bottles, cans, gadgets, gewgaws, and a thousand variations of paper products” made the nation “the litter champions of the world.” While Udall privileged the liberal mind’s emphasis on idealism—the importance of ideas and ethics—he remained locked on the material consequences of America’s impoverished environmental thought.

Udall warned that industrialized civilization had “immeasurably” accelerated “our capacity to diminish the quality of the total environment.”115

Udall suggested that consumer comforts could not make the nation wealthier in spirit and connected a limit on consumerism to humanity’s of the Earth. The nation was not successful, he preached, since “we are not better prepared to inherit the earth or to carry on the pursuit of happiness.”116 Udall might as well have quoted Thoreau

113 Udall, The Quiet Crisis, xvii. 114 Ibid, vii. 115 Ibid, “Brilliant successes” like electronics, atomic energy—“encouraged a false sense of well-being,” and these technological allowed man’s perverse ideas to intensify its manipulation of the environment. 116 Udall, “Prospects for the Land,” in Nash, The American Environment, 213, 221, 210.

63 in arguing that America’s relationship with the natural world—its environmental intelligence—had not kept pace with technical advancements.117

Udall appreciated the importance of ideas for a renewed national environmental commitment, explaining, “Beyond all plans and programs, true conservation is ultimately something of the mind—an ideal of men who cherish their past and believe in their future.”118 In the introduction to The Quiet Crisis, he explained the book was “dedicated to the proposition that men must grasp completely the relationship between human stewardship and the fullness of the American earth.”119 Udall coined humanity’s relation with the environment the “Ecology of Man.”120 In a nod to the importance of ideas for historical change, he implored, “ideas must precede action,” and “reform must begin in the minds of men.” These ideas were essential, he believed, to sow a more verdant future.

In his final sentence of The Quiet Crisis, he summarized the necessity of ideas for the renewal of conservationism in America: “Only an ever-widening concept and higher ideal of conservation will enlist our finest impulses and move us to make the earth a better home both for ourselves and for those as yet unborn.”121

117Thoreau critiqued, “While civilization has been improving our houses, it has not equally improved the men who are to inhabit them. It has created palaces, but it was not so easy to create noblemen and kings.”Henry David Thoreau, Walden, , and other Writings (New York: W.W. Norton & Company), 19. 118 The focus on conservation as an intellectual disposition owed its inception in no small part to the ideas and influence of “the historian-novelist-teacher” Wallace Stegner. A student of the history of the American West, Stegner first suggested to Udall a book based on the history and ideas of American conservation. Stegner served as a “special assistant” to Udall during the years when the book came into existence. In his acknowledgements, Udall credited Stegner’s “foremost” involvement in The Quiet Crisis. Udall, The Quiet Crisis, 203. 119 Ibid, viii. 120 Udall, “Prospects for the Land,” 219. 121 Udall, The Quiet Crisis, 64, 192, 202. Yet Udall’s conception of the importance of ideas was not one- dimensional. Rather than ideas creating humanity’s relationship with the earth, Udall reminded readers that the environment also determined values. As the “circular process of history” unfolded “the land… determin[ed] the character of men, who, in turn…determin[ed] the future of the land itself.” Udall’s

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One of Udall’s most important arguments rested on the premise that America’s frontier ethic of individualism could not safeguard the nation’s resources. While Udall championed Thoreau and Emerson as noble individuals, he rebuked their extreme self- reliance and individualism. History confirmed that individuals who championed self- reliance were too often “solely concerned with immediate profits [and] were plundering their way through the forest and across the countryside.” Instead of checking these excesses, Udall noted that Emerson “viewed such developments with unconcern” and

“dismissed flagrant waste with the euphoric observation that pirates and rebels were the real fathers of colonial settlement.”122 It is no surprise that history remembers Emerson as the “poet philosopher of capitalism.”123

Thoreau’s views were similarly problematic for Udall. “The men who were beginning to raid the continent,” Udall wrote, “were motivated by an undisciplined extension of Thoreau’s own individualism.” His own favorite companion, Thoreau did not offer a viable program of conservation because he ignored public action for the “finer fruits” of inner-directed philosophy.124 Due to his disdain for public men and politics,

Thoreau “failed to perceive that it would take government action to stop the destruction.”

conclusion hinted that a continued land-ethic of ambivalence would compound with time, producing men born of eroded land with an unhealthy relationship with the biosphere. In this sense, Udall united the materialist and intellectual environmental critiques. Ultimately, Udall understood, “It is our relationship with the American earth that is being altered by the quiet crisis, our birthright of fresh landscapes and far horizons.” Udall, “Prospects for the Land,” 216. 122 Udall, The Quiet Crisis, 60. It should also be noted that Walt Whitman, as well, suffered from similar excesses of the spirit. In Democratic Vistas, Whitman praises Americans for “beating up the wilderness” to create farms. Whitman in White, The Barbaric Heart, 150. 123 Environmental historian Richard White argued Emerson “reconciled nature with…American capitalism. He reconciled utilitarianism with idealism.” Richard White, The Organic Machine, 35. 124 “I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.” Thoreau, Walden, 66.

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Indeed, as poet and professor Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote, Thoreau “insisted on nibbling his asparagus at the wrong end.”125

Unlike the Thoreau, Udall understood politics could protect the public welfare.

While individual action and a concerted effort on the part of business would be essential,

Udall concluded, “government leadership and government investment…must continue to play the larger role in traditional conservation work.” To contrast Thoreau, Udall invoked the wisdom of Sierra Club founder John Muir. In a provocative excerpt, Udall quoted

Muir’s argument that there was no substitute for federal protection of the nation’s resources. Muir wrote that while “God has cared for these trees, saved them from , disease, avalanches, and a thousand straining, leveling tempests and floods… he cannot save them from fools—only Uncle Sam can do that.”126

To prevent this abuse of the land, Udall understood that only government planning could balance public need and private . Government was instrumental in weighing “social costs against social benefits.”127 The problem of postwar development remained that “‘progress’ outruns planning” and the “bulldozer’s work is done before the and planner arrive on the scene.” Like Theodore Roosevelt and Galbraith,

125 Udall, The Quiet Crisis, 63-64. Udall explained how Thoreau’s views were championed by those voracious individuals who saw their personal fortunes in the communal resources of the west: “They shared his contempt for politics and public men, and they carried his every-man-for-himself attitude into the mountains and the market place, making irresponsible independence a creed which rejected wise management of resources.” Udall, The Quiet Crisis, 65. 126 Udall, The Quiet Crisis, 127. Beyond the power of the federal government, Udall envisioned a future where conservation would become an international endeavor. Like Theodore Roosevelt, who organized the first international conservation conference (it was later cancelled after Taft’s election), Udall believed only “international planning” could ensure the vitality of “common resources.” Supra-national must evolve to encompass conservation, he argued, because “Geography has always been a global science.” Paralleling America’s choice over its two divergent land-ethics, Udall presaged, “Nations can either compete ruthlessly for resources, in a context of scarcity, or co-operate, respect the laws of nature, and share its abundance.” Less than a decade after Udall wrote these words, the first Conference on the Human Environment occurred in , Sweden in 1972. 127 Udall, “Prospects for the Land,” 218.

66 who both rejected capitalism’s ugliness, Udall saw beauty as a public need. Rather than tax those who kept their land undeveloped and beautiful, he questioned, “Why not tax the owners of ugliness, the keepers of eyesores, and the polluters of the air and water?”128

Udall asserted that beauty and other social needs rested beyond the logic of the marketplace. With careful planning, he admonished, citizens and their legislators could ensure a cleaner, more pleasant, and more spiritually edifying visual environment. “We cannot afford,” Udall wrote, “an America where expedience tramples upon aesthetics and development decisions are made with an eye only on the present.” In the annals of

American history, Udall saw the danger of allowing progress to be defined by economic motives alone as fidelity to laissez-faire ideology had historically only benefited those who championed get-rich-quick schemes to the detriment of the nation’s shared resources. Udall offered the example of timber companies who purchased public lands and clear-cut every tree on the property. To reduce costs, companies soon abandoned the land, avoided paying taxes and allowed the land to be ceded back to the government.129

Beyond simply advocating for a kind of top-down to impose ecology on the nation, Udall advanced the volunteerist aspect of liberalism. He understood that both individuals and must embrace conservation. “Just as the search for a sound land policy is a quest for the right balance between public and private ownership,” he wrote, “so our political system is an ongoing endeavor to find the right combination

128 Udall, The Quiet Crisis, 172, 202, 178. 129 Ibid, 68.

67 between government action and private effort.”130 Conservation on a national scale could never be achieved by just “the flourish of a president’s pen or through funds appropriated to fight a business depression.” Rather, such an expansive ideal must be advanced by the

“day-in and day-out effort by business, by government, and by…voluntary organizations.”131 In sum, America needed to develop a cultureof conservation.

With other liberals, Udall rejected America’s postwar mass consumerism as an affront to a higher set of values needed to unite the nation. Like DeVoto, Schlesinger, and

Galbraith, Udall believed America’s newfound affluence threatened the nation’s very soul. Sounding like a preacher, he warned, “The promised land of thousands of new products, machines, and services has misled us.” “Too many of us,” Udall bemoaned,

“have mistaken material ease and comfort for the good life.”132 The plethora of new consumer gimmicks “multiplied waste products that befoul the land [and]…diminish[ed] the quality of indispensable resources.”133 To cultivate a healthy “environmental imagination,” Americans needed to look beyond the of consumerism.

As an early historian of environmental ideas, Udall united the most important voices of postwar liberalism. He praised Leopold’s “land ethic” as a model for how individuals and the nation could heal the land. Inspired by The Affluent Society, Udall questioned America’s social imbalance and excessive veneration of private goods. Like

Carson, Udall warned of humanity’s hubris and dangerous belief in scientific and

130 Indeed, Niebuhr reached a similar conclusion that “The conflict between the of the individual and the community must not be abolished, for it is a source of wisdom and grace for both the individual and community.” Found in Mattson, When America Was Great, 43. 131 Udall, “Prospects for the Land,” 214. 132 Udall, “Prospects for the Land,” 213, 221. 133 Udall, The Quiet Crisis, 212.

68 economic progress at any cost. Adding these crucial liberal environmental ideas to the long history of American environmental thought, The Quiet Crisis became a bestseller and complemented Silent Spring as one of the most important books of the early 1960s.

Liberal Environmentalism’s Promise and Pitfalls

In many regards, environmentalists succeeded in instilling their cause in liberalism. For contemporary liberalism, any platform that neglects environmental concerns would be incomplete and would ostracize a key electoral demographic. In this sense, environmentalism imbued the very fabric of liberalism. Yet this obscures the dialectic of liberal environmentalism. America’s postwar environmental ills made liberalism essential.134 No competing political philosophy emphasized liberalism’s concern for collective political action, federal legislation, pluralism, rationality and pragmatism. Most importantly, the insights of liberalism proved foundational for ecology’s ultimate conclusion: the inescapably social nature of pollution. Liberalism’s focus on the “social costs of private enterprise” became invaluable for environmental critiques of postwar American capitalism.135 Indeed, countercultural, New Left, and eco- socialist thinkers built on liberal environmentalism’s intellectual foundations to advocate

134 James Gustave Speth argues that liberalism and environmentalism are inextricably linked. Without the insights of environmentalism, Speth contends the world “would be an increasingly nasty place.” He therefore stresses the “liberal stake in environmentalism at a deeper level.” Without environmentalism, “the concerns for the poor and powerless and even the average Joe” are likely to be grim. James Gustave Speth, “Letter to Liberals: Liberalism, Environmentalism, and Economic Growth,” in Ethics, Policy, and Environment (Vol. 14, No. 1), March 2011, 44. 135 See K. William Kapp, The Social Costs of Private Enterprise (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1950).

69 for more radical solutions to the ecological crisis.136 The very success of liberal environmentalism engendered many of these critiques.

Postwar liberal environmental ideas offer a powerful rejoinder to Steinberg,

Wapner, and Lasch’s critiques of liberalism. The environmental ideas of Leopold,

Carson, Schlesinger, Galbraith, and Udall converged in the programs of President

Lyndon Baines Johnson. While President Kennedy acted on environmental concerns— specifically Carson’s concerns with pesticides—President Johnson became the first president to embody the ideals of liberal environmentalism. He signed over three-hundred conservation and beautification measures. Like Franklin Roosevelt—his political hero—

Johnson wanted to be remembered as the greatest conservationist President.137 The late

Kennedy’s timid liberalism—especially in his first year of office—on social and environmental issues did little to appease Johnson’s vision. Indeed, after Kennedy’s death, he directed White House adviser Walter Heller: “tell your friends—Arthur

Schlesinger, Galbraith, and other liberals” that the time for liberal reform had come. “To tell the truth,” Johnson quipped, “John F. Kennedy was a little too conservative to suit my .”138 With his wife Lady Bird, who took great interest in beautification and environmental issues, Johnson empowered the ideas of liberal environmentalism.

In his 1965 State of address, Johnson proclaimed the nation must “act

now to protect” the “countryside” and ensure a “green legacy” for future . In

his famous 1964 speech in Ann Arbor, Michigan, he called for the creation of a “Great

136The Marxist sociologist John Bellamy Foster explains that Carson “helped lay the basis for a radical ecological critique of capitalism.” Indeed, Barry Commoner found great common ground with Carson, and used many of her observations in advancing eco-socialist arguments throughout the 1970s. 137 Rome, “Give Earth a Chance,” 532. 138 Kazin and Isserman, American Divided, 104.

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Society”—a “place where man can renew contact with nature” and “a place where men are more concerned with quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.” Johnson invoked the rhetoric and logic of Schlesinger and Galbraith’s “qualitative liberalism.”139

He warned that the “demands of commerce” must be kept in proportion to “the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.” Like Galbraith, he believed that “leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness.”140

He even echoed Galbraith’s plea for aesthetics: “We have always prided ourselves on being not only America the strong and America the free, but America the beautiful.” The

President warned, “Today that beauty is in danger. The water we drink, the food we eat, the very air that we breathe, are threatened with pollution.” Johnson used his legislative prowess and executive authority to tackle these ecological ills.141

Liberal environmentalism achieved tangible successes in the late 1960s and

1970s, specifically the cultivation of a social environmental consciousness and the creation of a stronger environmental-regulatory state. Even ’s historic environmental efforts should be viewed as an extension of liberal environmental policies.

Despite many of the failures of the Great Society and the decline in social democratic solutions, Americans embraced sweeping legislative measures to combat pollution in the early 1970s. Liberal environmentalists thrived in environing liberalism with ecological concerns, moving ecology into mainstream thought, and highlighting the necessity of collective political action. Yet this ascensionist narrative belays liberalism’s complicity with the very imperatives of capitalism that fuel the ecological crisis.

139 Kazin and Isserman, American Divided,116. 140 Glickman, Buying Power, 283. 141 Rome, “Give Earth a Chance,” 534.

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As 20th century liberalism emerged as a political philosophy built on a “capitalist foundation,” it fundamentally rested on growth-oriented economics.142 Lasch’s criticism of a growth-obsessed liberalism remains prescient; the naive idea of endless economic growth continues to guide modern liberalism and liberal environmentalism. The argument for limits to economic growth may be conservatism’s most important contribution to ecology and the future of humanity. As the anarcho-conservative writer

Edward Abbey quipped to his liberal critics, “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.”143 Lasch is but one critic of modern liberalism’s emphasis on economic growth—an argument made famous by (1972).144

Studying postwar liberal environmentalism highlights that liberals were not blind to these critiques. Liberals like Leopold and Carson questioned the limits of humanity to dominate nature and called for a deeper sense of responsibility in dealing with the natural world. Within the framework of a pluralistic democratic society, liberals strived to control the worst excesses of capitalism. As Galbraith and Udall demonstrate, postwar liberals were also vocal critics of blind economic growth.145 Increasingly, contemporary environmentalists and intellectuals are calling on liberals to embrace such a stance.

In a 2010 address reprinted as “Letter to Liberals: Liberalism, Environmentalism, and Economic Growth,” former adviser to Presidents Carter and Clinton, Yale School of

142 As historian William Leuchtenberg argued, Franklin Roosevelt and American liberalism built “a welfare state on a capitalist foundation.” Alterman and Mattson, The Cause, 3. 143 In his famous , Abbey’s character Dr. Sarvis warns, “We are caught in the iron treads of a technological juggernaut. A mindless machine. With a breeder reactor for a heart…A planetary industrialism- growing like a cancer. Growth for the sake of growth. Power for the sake of power.” , The Monkey Wrench Gang, (New York: Harper Perennial, 2006). 144 D.H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and Dennis L. Meadows, The Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update (London: Earthscan, 2004). 145 It must be noted that both Galbraith and Udall were critics of short-term growth rather than the ultimate limits of growth as offered by Abbey, Lasch, and others.

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Forestry and Dean and Vermont Professor

James Gustave Speth calls for liberals and environmentalists to “forge a common agenda.” Speth is among a growing cohort of liberal environmentalists urging a radical shift in economic objectives. His major criticism rests with modern globalized capitalism’s “growth…proceeding with wildly wrong market signals and without needed constraints; and where a failed politics has not meaningfully corrected the economy’s obliviousness to environmental needs.” Speth invokes ecological economist Tim

Jackson’s conclusion that, “the idea of a continually growing economy is an anathema to an ecologist. No subsystem of a finite system can grow indefinitely, in physical terms….

In short, we have no alternative but to question growth.” Echoing arguments offered by

Galbraith, Schlesinger, and Robert F. Kennedy on devaluing the value of GDP-based growth, Speth concludes, “It is time for America to move to a post-growth society where working life, the , our communities and families, and the public sector are no longer sacrificed for the sake of mere GDP growth.”146

For the veracity of Lasch’s insight into the pitfalls of liberalism’s devotion to economic growth, the promise of liberal environmentalism endures. While it remains to be seen if liberalism can check the unsustainable growth of capitalism and protect vital natural “sinks” that rejuvenate and absorb harmful gases, in contemporary American politics, a rejuvenated liberal environmentalism offers the best

146 Speth argues, “GDP is a perfectly terrible measure of national well-being and progress. We tend to get what we measure, so we should measure what we want.” Originally delivered as the “30th E.F. Schumacher Lecture,” a fitting location to discuss the limits to growth. James Gustave Speth, “Letter to Liberals,” March 2011, 46-52. Also see , Prosperity Without Growth: Economics for a Finite Planet (London: Earthscan, 2009).

73 philosophy for checking the voracious appetites of advanced globalized capitalism.147 No other political philosophy balances ecological concerns with human needs, rights with social needs, and with national imperatives. As historian Gary Gerstle argues, for all the problems with the “ideological coherence and integrity” of 20th century liberalism, it always retained “political durability.”148 Despite the pitfalls of liberalism, the insights of Leopold, Carson, Schlesinger, Galbraith and

Udall remain exceedingly important. Only by tempering humanity’s hubris with humility, by democratizing science, by placing social needs before market greed, and by questioning the —liberals understood—could humanity cultivate a sustainable future. Perhaps most importantly, liberal environmentalists understood that the dynamics of capitalism’s ruthless economy could only be reformed through collective political action.

147 This debate has been addressed extensively elsewhere, albeit outside of the historical discipline. See Political Scientist Marcel Wissenburg’s Green Liberalism: The Free and Green Society (London: UCL Press,1998). 148 Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” 1073.

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CHAPTER TWO: STEWART BRAND AND COUNTERCULTURAL

ENVIRONMENTALISM

“A thin blond guy with a blazing disk on his forehead,” journalist described Stewart Brand in his famous account of the counterculture, the Electric Kool-

Aid Acid Test (1968). “No shirt,” Wolfe continued, “just an Indian bead necktie on bare skin and a white butcher’s coat with medals from the King of Sweden on it.” Wolfe described Brand as “restrained” and “reflective,” but he hardly suspected that Brand would become one of the most successful and influential icons of the counterculture.

Brand emerged as a rebellious environmental figure, replete with countercultural views and heterodox beliefs, who aimed to revolutionize American society. As the creator of the first green consumer catalog, the Whole Earth Catalog, Brand made an indelible impression upon American environmentalism.1

Brand’s philosophies—showcased in the Whole Earth Catalog—represented a radical departure, both in style and substance, from the liberal environmentalism of the

1950s and 1960s. Rather than focusing on polluting corporations, governmental regulations, institutions and collective political action—as liberals did—countercultural environmentalists turned to alternative lifestyles, individualistic solutions, appropriate technologies, and green consumerism. Whereas liberals focused on supply-side environmentalism—regulating corporations and attempting to change the dynamics of the economy from the top-down—counterculturalists embraced demand-side environmentalism—the belief that daily personal decisions—the goods one bought,

1 Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam, 1969), 2.

75 where one lived, the technology one used, even the consciousness one embraced— precipitated large-scale social change. Moreover, through personal conservation and consumerism, counterculturalists argued they could change the dynamics of consumer capitalism and install a countercultural business culture. Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog represented the of this new environmentalism, and his life provides a fitting narrative for the rise and evolution of this view.

Brand was born in Rockford, Illinois—a prosperous and exceptionally typical

Midwestern city—in 1938. Raised by an MIT-educated advertising copy-writer father and Vassar-educated homemaker mother, Brand enjoyed all the prerogatives of a comfortable family. He left Illinois at the age of sixteen to attend the prestigious Phillips Exeter Academy and soon after enrolled at Stanford to pursue a degree in biology. Under the direction of Paul Ehrlich, Brand studied ecology and grew interested in humanity’s unhealthy relationship with the natural world. As a member of

Stanford’s Reserve Officer Training Corps, he enlisted in the United States Army following graduation.2 At the time, Brand was a typical Cold Warrior who viewed

Communism as the greatest threat to the United States and his personal liberty, and he supported early military efforts in .

After he left the Army in 1962, Brand spent six years traveling between San

Francisco, Oregon, and . While in the Army, he missed “San Francisco beauty, San Francisco people, San Francisco happiness—the bohemian style” and resolved “To frequent the theaters, music halls, galleries…as a learning participant.”

2 “At government expense,” Brand recalled, “I was trained in leadership and small-unit management.”Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism (Lawrence Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2007), 33-36.

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Fascinated by bohemian lifestyles, subjective art, and personal liberation, he frequented eclectic communities that embraced cannabis, peyote, and LSD to discover new forms of personal consciousness. In New York City, Brand met musician and painter

Robert Rauschenberg and embraced their rejection of an “objective consciousness.” In

Warm Springs, Oregon, he visited and photographed Native American communities, enjoyed peyote in traditional ceremonies, witnessed the burgeoning movement, and lived with the art tribe USCO.

Brand appropriated the spontaneous and decentralized nature of USCO’s performance art shows known as “.”3 USCO viewed drugs as tools for exploring consciousness and its members were frequent guests at ’s notorious Millbrook, New York, mansion—where “endless parties, epiphanies and breakdowns, emotional dramas of all sizes, and numerous raids and arrests”-- and all manner of countercultural occurred.4 A group of artists fascinated with and light, USCO adopted modern technology to convey the symbolic meanings of life and—according to art critic Naomi Feigelson—the “divine geometry of living things and electrical phenomena.” Historian Fred Turner explains that USCO used

“strobe lights, light projectors, tape decks, stereo speakers, slide sorters”—in addition to pot, peyote, and later LSD—to mesmerize and stimulate audiences. Brand transplanted the electronic art of USCO with him to San Francisco in 1963.5

3 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 46-51. 4 Luc Sante, “The Nutty Professor,” Review of Robert Greenfield’s Timothy Leary: A Biography, In The New York Times, June 25th, 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2006/06/25/books/review/25sante.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 5 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 46-51.

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Upon returning to the Bay Area, Brand began frequenting the social circles of author . He read Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1962) and empathized with many of its author’s philosophies. The focused on the capacity of individuals to rebel against coercive institutions and preserve their humanity. At the time,

Brand struggled with how to rebel against the soul-deadening establishment while preserving one’s identity and traditions like “old Indian ways.” Kesey’s book, Brand journaled, showed him that there was “no dilemma” between the two. He continued, making reference to characters in the book, that “The battle of McMurphy versus Big

Nurse is identical with [Warm Springs] Indians verses Dalles Dam.”Kesey’s use of a

Native American narrator further intrigued Brand and pushed him to contact Kesey. In

1963, Brand began a life-long correspondence with Kesey—a fellow Stanford graduate— and the two soon met face-to-face.6

Through Kesey and his collective—known as the “”—Brand immersed himself in the exuberant activities of what would be termed the “Counter

Culture” by social critics like Theodore Roszak. Brand joined Kesey’s inner-circle and participated in the author’s famous “” in the mid-1960s.At Kesey’s homes in

Palo Alto and La Honda, Brand met and befriended a number of the counterculture’s most important figures: , Richard Alpert, Jerry Garcia, and Timothy Leary.

Through these figures, Brand interacted with an even-wider circle of the era’s most famous cultural rebels.7 The exuberant activist Abbie Hoffman considered Brand one of

6 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 59-60. 7 Ibid, 61.

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“the most creative and extraordinary people” he knew.8 As environmental historian

Andrew Kirk summarizes, “By 1966, Brand was in the center of the San Francisco counterculture at its apex.”9

With Kesey and his Merry Pranksters, Brand conceived and organized one of the most memorable events of the counterculture: an electronic art known as the

Trips Festival. A three-day event in January 1966 that attracted tens of thousands, the

Trips Festival combined USCO’s high-tech art projections, an abundance of psychedelic drugs—despite being advertised as a “non-drug re-creation of a ”—and the burgeoning Bay Area art scene. The and Janis

Joplin’s Big Brother and Holding Company provided music for the raucous celebration.

The Festival “captured all the familiar countercultural tropes,” writes Kirk, “sex, drugs, music, art, and spectacle.”10 The beginning of the Haight-Ashbury era, writes Wolfe, the

Trips Festival also marked Brand’s entry as a “counterculture entrepreneur.”11

For Brand, the Festival became an opportunity to share his knowledge of

American Indians and their pressing ecological insights. He designed an exhibit titled

“America Needs Indians,” explaining, “Indians looked perfect…ecological, spiritual, tribal, anarchistic, drug-using, exotic, native, and wronged, the lone genuine holdouts against the American nightmare.”12 Brand argued, “Either the white man or the

8 Letter from Mike Phillips to Stewart Brand, undated, Stewart Brand Papers (SBP), Stanford University, Box 7, Folder 3. Brand said the same of Kesey. 9 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 39. 10 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 40. 11 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 67. 12 “Indians and the Counter-Culture”, by Stewart Brand, Clear Creek, December 1972, 34-37, found in SBP, box 30, folder 5.

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Indian had to be right.”13To convince his audience of the Native American’s insight, Brand created, in his own words, a “mixed-media happening,” part “sensorium, a

Love Feast, a Celebration.” Prefiguring the Whole Earth Catalog’s philosophy, Brand

included a do-it-yourself component, where participants could make their “own Navaho

tea, Venison, jerky, berry soup, or moccasins.”14 The Trips Festival endures as an important marker for Brand and countercultural environmentalism. His “America Needs

Indians” presentation was the first manifestation of Brand’s countercultural environmental model—rebellious, psychotropic, laudatory of drop-out politics—that would ultimately inform the pages of the Whole Earth Catalog.

Brand’s countercultural expeditions between 1962 and 1966 immersed the young environmentalist in a cultural milieu that would come to define his ecological sensibilities and the contents of the Catalog. Brand not only reacted to the cultural events of the

1960s, he shaped them and inspired a of heterodox environmentalists. Behind the Catalog’s artful execution, positive reviews, and trendy countercultural menu lay

Brand’s philosophy of social action. Rejecting the “big nasties” of government, , and higher education, he extolled individual action, pragmatism, experimentation, and human-scale technologies as the vanguard of social change. Brand dismissed America’s postwar emphasis on expertise and upheld a populist model of Do-It-Yourself experimentation.15 Reacting against the dystopian future of a centralized and

13 Charles Perry, The Haight-Ashbury: A History (Vintage Books, Random House, NY), 19, found in SBP,box 30, folder 1. 14 Kirk, 38. Elsewhere Brand described the event as “a peyote meeting without peyote.” Perry, The Haight- Ashbury, 19. Found in SBP, box 30, folder 1. 15 Stewart Brand, ed. The Whole Earth Catalog, 1968, introduction.

80 depersonalized corporate state, Brand sought to forge a more personalized society through and technological .

From “Counter Culture” to Consumer Catalog

In March 1968, Brand’s father passed away. After returning to Illinois to attend his father’s funeral, Brand boarded a plane and began to fly back to California. He recalled, “I was reading by Barbara Ward. Between chapters I gazed out the window into dark nothing and slid into a reverie about my friends starting their own hither and yon in the sticks and how I could help.”16 Thinking about death and the meaning of life, Brand explained later, “you get open to things…I began to think what would I like to do for my friends.”17 Scribbling on the back pages of Spaceship

Earth, Brand envisioned a parallel to the L.L. Bean catalog—a mail-order volume comprising a vast range of consumer goods—“that owed nothing to the suppliers and everything to the users.”18 For years, Brand had “pondered fondly about Mr. Bean’s service to humanity,” and now wished to provide “an exchange for interesting ideas and heresies” for a new generation seeking cultural catharsis.19

Upon returning to the Bay Area, Brand set to work making his “romantic vision” a reality. With $100,000 of inheritance from his late father, he sidestepped traditional

16 Letter from Brand to Mr. Edward S. Cornish, President of the World Future Society, undated (sometime in 1968), SPB, Box 6, folder 5. 17 Thomas Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1. 18 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 1. 19 Letter from Stewart Brand to Mr. Edward S. Cornish, President of the World Future Society, undated, SBP, box 6, folder 5, and Kirk, Counterculture Green, 50.

81 capital-raising efforts and committed himself to a low-cost entrepreneurial model.20 The day after his plane trip, Brand met with his long-time friend Dick Raymond at the latter’s newly-founded in Menlo Park, California. Raymond embraced Brand’s vision and offered financial support and a cubical at Portola. Brand soon assembled preliminary lists of tools, catalogs, reviews, organizations, and other essential information the catalog would offer.21

To disseminate useful tools and knowledge and spread his countercultural vision of decentralized communes and heroic individuals, Brand conceived of the Whole Earth

Truck Store. To provide “small scale access,” Brand recalled in an interview with Rolling

Stone, “I got this romantic notion of a truck, laden with things, that would come around like the older frontier medicine shows—an access mobile.”22 A “preliminary” to the

Catalog, in May 1968 Brand printed a flyer which advertised that the Truck Store was

“traveling in the summer of 1968 to intentional communities, experimental schools, design departments, and the like which may be served by the CATALOG.”23 Brand envisioned himself as a countercultural traveling salesman, providing the consciousness- raising and tangible tools of a new ecological milieu.

In the summer of 1968, Brand packed a collection of goods into a 1963 Dodge truck and visited communes throughout the Southwest with his wife Lois. Brand recalled

20 Brand conceded, “If I had had to go through the pure hell of proposals, chats with foundation officers, all that crap, the WHOLE EARTH CATALOG would never have happened.” Ibid. Yet Brand also realized the great risk of the project. He wrote at the time, “Here I am contemplating the investment of all my stock…all of it.”Kirk, Counterculture Green, 47. 21A member of the cyber visionaries of , Brand noted he loved the Menlo Park area because it was home to “far out ” like Ramparts Magazine. Thomas Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1. 22 Thomas Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1. 23 Whole Earth Truck Store flyer, 1968, SPB, Box 6, Folder 5.

82 that in a month the “Whole Earth Truck Store did a stunning $200 worth of business—No profit, but it didn’t cost too much and was a good education.”24 Yet, Brand confessed to

Kesey that he was “through crawling along on tires for a while. It’s boring access.”25 He wanted a denser, more efficient system—what he termed a “Self-Sustaining Critical

Information Service.” A green consumer catalog would be the means to this end.26

Brand returned to Menlo Park and transformed his lessons from the road into the first tangible Whole Earth Catalog. By the fall of 1968, a sixty-four-page catalog was on sale, offering one hundred and thirty-five consumer goods. One of the first flyers for the

Whole Earth Catalog advertised, “A CATALOG for the following realms: Understanding

Whole Systems, Shelter and Land Use, Industry and , ,

Community, Nomadics, Learning.”27Time described the Catalog as the “Boy Scout

Handbook of the counterculture.”28 For communalists the Catalog offered an invaluable array of tools, books, and processes for forging new off-the-grid ecology societies.

With an IBM Selectric Typewriter and a Polaroid Camera, Brand and his small staff organized reviews and photographs into a finished product without the assistance— and cost—of a professional publisher. Brand then took the completed product to a local newspaper publisher (thus the Catalog’s eccentric size) and published a thousand copies on the cheap. After favorable reviews and mentions in the Detroit Free Press, Esquire,

Time, and , Brand’s upstart and homespun catalog became a commercial phenomenon. By August1969, Brand could write to a friend, “Success is going through

24 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 48 25 Letter from Brand to Kesey, undated, SBP, box 6, folder 7. 26 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 114. 27 Brand Papers, Box 6, Folder 5. 28 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 57.

83 here like a thunderstorm that won’t quit.”29 Within its first year on sale, The Whole Earth

Catalog sold an impressive 60,000 copies.30

A Fullerian Philosophy: Useful Tools and Appropriate Technology

The Whole Earth Catalog reflected a particular philosophy of how to empower individuals to live harmoniously with the biosphere. Brand and his intellectual progenitor, ecological-designer , believed that innovators must create radical and game-changing technologies. In Fuller’s words, such a “comprehensive anticipatory design science,” would change the world through technological efficiency.31

Yet, impressive new technologies by themselves were insufficient. As the subtitle of the

Last Whole Earth Catalog evinces, Brand argued individuals must have “access to tools.”

Furthermore, Brand and other environmental pragmatists called for personal experimentation and the innovative use of these tools and ideas.32

Brand’s emphasis on tools, innovation, and experimentation originate in the philosophy of one of the 20th century’s most eclectic and iconoclastic figures:

Buckminster Fuller. Born in 1895 to a prominent New England family, Fuller was an old but still revolutionary designer by the 1960s. Eschewing his family’s five-generation legacy at Harvard by being expelled from the University not just once, but twice, Fuller was—in the words of one biographer—“an unregenerate anti-academician.”33 Fuller

29 Letter from Brand to Joe Bonner, 12 August 1969, SBP, box 6, folder 6. 30 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 50. 31 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 57. 32 Stewart Brand, The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1972. 33 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 57. Brand agreed: “It’s why fighting college is so irrelevant—you can go out on your own and start anything, and it’s going to be better.” Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1.

84 privileged hands-on experience to academics—often to the detriment of facts and science.

“At times he was blatantly wrong,” historian Linda Sargent Wood explains, “confusing chemical facts, misunderstanding , misinterpreting geometric principles, and dismissing the mathematical notion of pi.” 34 Despite reading Barbara Ward’s Spaceship

Earth, when coming to his revelation about a catalog of green consumer goods, the philosophies behind Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog derive primarily from Fuller.

Brand read Fuller’s Ideas and Integrities (1963) and embraced his argument for the power of the individual as a “comprehensive designer” embodying the “synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.”35 Fuller stressed that with the proper technology and an optimistic attitude, a new generation of designers could change the world. He envisioned a nation of zero-energy homes, disconnected from the grid and capable of producing their own power.36 Rather than engaging in politics and wrestling with existing institutions, Fuller argued one must produce a design so revolutionary it forces the system to change. Brand explained Fuller,

“never tries to fight his enemies, he tries to obsolesce them.”37 For Fuller and Brand, enlightened and pragmatic individuals were the vanguard of social change.

The introduction to the first Whole Earth Catalog paid homage to Fuller’s intellectual contributions. “The insights of Buckminster Fuller are what initiated this

34Wood, A More Perfect Union, 55. Indeed, when Brand wrote Fuller about the prospect of NASA producing a photograph of the whole earth, Fuller believed such a photo was “geometrically impossible.” Letter from Brand to Deborah Raab 27 March 1973, SBP, box 7, folder 2. 35 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 56. 36 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 67. 37 Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1.

85 catalog,” Brand acknowledged.38 He wrote elsewhere that Fuller’s ecological designs

“electrified” the counterculture and provided the model for pragmatic individual action.39

In late 1968, Fuller praised the Catalog as “truly magnificent.”40 The ever-optimistic

Fuller confessed in another letter, “As always, strong spiritual vibes prevail…Whole

Earth sure makes me feel good.”41 The Catalog’s promotion of and radical designs especially enthused Fuller.

For 1960s and readers of the Catalog, appropriate technology meant the small-scale use of labor-saving devices and tools that facilitated living off the grid.

Appropriate technology shed the ’s faith in experts, according to environmental historian Andrew Kirk, in exchange for “an tradition of and technological development.”42 Appropriate technology reflected the precepts of self- reliance, pragmatic individualism, and consumer power. Historian Samuel Hayes notes appropriate technology was salient “not so much for the devices themselves as the kinds

38 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 57. 39 Fuller’s appeal among counterculturalists was certainly not universal. Theodore Roszak, for one, despised Fuller. Roszak derided Fuller’s “blithe eclecticism” and dismissed his efforts as “self- advertisement…by way of grandiloquent obfuscation, to make much out of little: little ideas, little that could be sensationally clothed in cosmic pretensions.” Kirk, Counterculture Green, 60. 40 Letter from Buckminster Fuller to Brand, 5th April, 1968, SBP, box 6, folder 5. 41 Letter from Fuller to “Lois and Stewart”, undated, SBP, box 6, folder 5. 42Personally empowered “individuals working within specific local environments could make everyday choices to use small-scale technology, enabling, if multiplied across a nation, a sustainable economy.”Kirk, Counterculture Green, 6. Kirk defines appropriate technologies as “low investment cost per work-place, low capital investment per unit of output, organizational simplicity, high adaptability to a particular social or environmental movement, sparing use of natural resources, low cost of final product or high potential for .” Andrew Kirk, “Machines of Loving Grace,” found in Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, eds., Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ‘70s (New York City: Routledge, 2002),362.

86 of knowledge and management they implied.” Counterculturalists accepted using certain modern tools and processes to achieve ecological ends.43

Unlike many environmentalists who shunned modern technology as the root of the problem, countercultural environmentalists believed that new technologies were part of the solution. Embracing Fuller’s apolitical “anticipatory design science” and the human-scale technologies essential for communes, the Catalog resounded a “clarion call for technological acceptance.”44 Contrary to popular memory, most counterculturalists and members of the youth generation embraced new technologies. Chronicling the history of the era, Roszak contended many counterculturalists were “in the market for technological astonishments.”45 Members of the youth culture of the era were similarly

“immensely attracted to technology,” according to historian Witold Rybczynski.46 Yet, the source of many technologies—however appropriate—was hardly recognized by communards or historians.

Stanford historian Fred Turner argues Brand’s Catalog “spanned the worlds of scientific research, hippie , ecology, and mainstream consumer culture.”

The Catalog offered a confluence of these seemingly divergent worlds. Ironically, the embrace of technologies and cybernetics in Brand’s Catalog owed its inception to the very forces counterculturalists professed to be rebelling against. “The communards of the back-to-the-land movement,” Turner writes, “often embraced the collaborative social

43 Samuel Hayes, Beauty, Health, and Permanence: Environmental Politics in the United States, 1955-1985 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 262. 44 The Catalog was “predicated on the assumption,” Kirk clarifies, that “technology and modernity were not the antithesis to an ecologically sound future.” Kirk, Counterculture Green, 52, 13. 45 Roszak, From Satori to Silicon Valley: San Francisco and the American Counterculture (San Fransisco: Don’t Call It Frisco, 1986), 19-20. 46 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 55.

87 practices, and celebration of technology, and the cybernetic rhetoric of mainstream military-industrial-academic research.” No matter how far removed from the grid, the

“Cowboy Nomads of the communes” appropriated “materials developed within middle- class consumer culture and its military-industrial complex.”47 Countercultural environmentalism evinced paradox: to escape the destructive technology of modern society, back-to-the-landers embraced a pastoral and Romantic view of nature—but embraced modern appropriate technologies.48

Several New Left thinkers, notably and - thinker , embraced appropriate technologies as requisites for an incipient social reformation. Marcuse connected neo-Marxist political thought to a radical democratization of the and energy generation.49 Social ecologist

Murray Bookchin argued against centralized capitalism’s “technology of abundance,” but asserted, “the poison is…its own antidote.” Bookchin believed the proper ecological technologies could even ensure a “post-scarcity” paradise.50 The revolutionary potential of decentralized technologies united the New Left and counterculture; while both argued such technologies were necessary, Leftists argued they were not sufficient. For counterculture, innovative technologies alone were revolutionary.

Brand recalled, “So many of the problems I could identify came down to a matter of access. Where to buy a windmill. Where to get good information on bee-keeping.

47 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 5, 33, 94. 48 The Catalog was “predicated on the assumption,” Kirk clarifies, that “technology and modernity were not the antithesis to an ecologically sound future.” Kirk, Counterculture Green, 14. 49 Herbert Marcuse, “An Essay on Liberation” (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969). 50 Bookchin, Post-Scarcity (Oakland CA: AK Press, 2004) 11-12.

88

Where to lay hands on a computer without forfeiting freedom.”51 In a letter to Ken

Kesey, Brand wrote with typical countercultural exuberance, “Expand, escalate, accelerate—The weed factor of unstoppable life—and it mostly comes down, comes up, to access these days.”52 Once individuals accessed tools, Brand argued they could begin experimenting, innovating, and forging a new community.

Brand upheld the “Doers” and those “with a functional, grimy grasp on the world.

World-thinkers, drop-outs from specialization. Hope freaks.”53 In a letter to his good friend and founder of the commune in , Steve Durkee, months before his father’s funeral, Brand outlined the evolutionary promise of pragmatic tools. He explained that civilizations evolve with the “threat-promise of new tools.”

“Fire, agriculture, , steam power, cannon, vaccine, dope, computers,” precipitated

“new power, freak out, reorganiz[ation].” Quite simply, the “breakthrough” of the “USE of tools” was the crux of man’s evolution. “There’s no other way to know than use,” he concluded, “anything else goes to fear or idealism.”54 From the very inception of the

Catalog, Brand wanted to create “primarily a research organization, with nifty projects everywhere, earnest folk climbing around on new dome designs, solar generators, manure converters.”55 Pragmatic individualism and —an innovative and experimental

self-reliance—imbued the pages of the Catalog.

51 Letter from Brand to Mr. Edward S. Cornish, undated, SPB, box 6, folder . 52 Letter from Brand to Kesey, undated, SBP, box 6, folder 7. 53 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 74 54 Letter from Brand to Steve Durkee, The Lama Foundation, San Cristobal NM, 17th Dec 68, SBP, box 6, folder 7. 55 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 114.

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Apocalyptic Pragmatism

Brand’s emphasis on pragmatism and access to tools endure in histories of the

Whole Earth Catalog. Yet rarely do historians recall the darker driver of the back-to-the- land movement, communes, and Brand’s Catalog. Kirk claims Brand never embraced jeremiads, environmental “calamity callers,” or “apocalyptic environmentalism”—yet this analysis neglects Brand’s deeper fears and motivations.56 Brand admitted he and his friends were “completely apocalyptic” and confessed the Catalog’s “subplot” was

“surviving Armageddon.”57

As a member of the first generation living under the specter of atomic holocaust,

Brand and other counterculturalists stressed the possibility of annihilation and living for the moment.58 From this fear of death emerged a kind of chastened optimism—what might be termed an apocalyptic pragmatism. The Whole Earth Catalog offered pragmatic tools and can-do philosophies—but they were born of a nightmare of a bleak future. As society seemed to be crumbling before their eyes; countercultural environmentalists sought to reaffirm the basic skills and tools they would need to begin anew.

It is no coincidence that the catalyst for the catalog’s inspiration was the death of

Brand’s father. In thinking about death—and the purpose of life—he dwelled on his friends who had fled from America’s ecologically-destructive society to forge a more harmonious relationship with nature. Like his friends, Brand faced death and destruction

56 Ibid, 12. 57 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 129 and Letter from Brand to Kesey, 19th Jan 73. , SBP, box 7, folder 2. 58 This feeling pervaded the youth generation of the 1950s and 1960s, as the New Left’s confessed, “Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living.” Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture , 34.

90 and embraced a utopian vision. Redemption could only be found in confronting death. In 1969, he privately confessed, “The lover of the CATALOG says,

ARE YOU READY TO DIE?”59 Out of this despair emerged a strange optimism, a back- to-the-land vision that aimed to rebuild a doomed society. The Whole Earth Catalog was the go-to guide for this phoenix civilization.

For Brand and others in the counterculture, the ardent defense of individual freedom became inseparable from a strong survivalist ethic. In a 1973 letter to Kesey, when discussing the evolutionary “prize” of survival, Brand noted the grave threat posed by the “coming…Police State.” Individuals would need to prepare themselves, Brand believed. He envisioned survivalist games, where contestants were judged on their preparation for the end times. Between fears of America’s burgeoning totalitarian government and “the Catalog’s subplot”—“Surviving Armageddon”—Brand’s evinced a dystopian imagination.60 His libertarian politics also informed the Catalog’s survivalist philosophy. As historian Kevin Mattson argues, a “frontier ideal fueled [the] libertarian politics” of the American West—so prevalent in the Catalog—where, “Individuals were responsible only for themselves; for, in the wake of failure, a person could simply light out for open land.”61 For Brand and his ilk, libertarian survivalism no longer just applied to the failure of individuals, but the imminent failure of Western civilization.

Since Armageddon seemed imminent, Brand and many of the Catalog’s ideological advocates championed personal fulfillment and living for the moment.

Echoing his close friend and former professor Paul Ehrlich’s thesis on the apocalyptic

59 Brand Journal Entry, 27th Sep. 1969, SBP, box 18, folder 1. 60 Brand’s letter to Kesey,19th Jan. 1973, SBP, box 7, folder 2. 61 Mattson, When America Was Great, 117.

91 consequences of overpopulation—exemplified by Ehrlich’s

(1968)—Brand clarified his jeremiad. “There’s a shit storm coming,” he warned. “Not a nice clean earthquake or satisfying revolution but pain in new dimensions: world pain, sub-continents that starve...The consequences will dominate our lives.”62 Brand recalled,

“We were the ‘now generation’ because we figured there would be no then.”63 For Brand and other countercultural environmentalists, a dystopian worldview precipitated concerns over individual happiness. Brand’s worldview echoes Ehrlich’s confession in an interview with Look magazine, “When you reach a point where you realize further efforts will be futile, you may as well be looking after yourself and your friends and enjoy what little time you have left.”64 The apocalyptic mood embraced by Brand and the counterculture also reflected ’s libertarian and objectivist philosophies. Like

Ehrlich, Rand argued that in a destructive world, one needed to maximize one’s own happiness and well-being. The counterculture and Brand’s sense of impending doom was not lost on cultural critics.

Historian Christopher Lasch recalled the enduring legacy of Brand’s apocalyptic politics in his best-selling Culture of (1979). “Impending disaster has become an everyday concern,” Lasch observed, “so commonplace and familiar that nobody any longer gives much thought to how disaster might be averted.” Lasch cited Brand’s cheerful comment that sales of his recent Survival Book were “booming; it’s one of our

62 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 108. As Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb, “The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate.” 63 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 128-129. 64 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 102.

92 fastest moving items.” As Lasch summarized, with the political turmoil and defeats of the

1960s, “Americans have retreated to purely personal preoccupations,” even—or perhaps especially—in the face of ecological catastrophe.65

The Libertarian Politics of Anti-Politics

Brand always maintained the Catalog constituted an apolitical venue that offered pragmatic solutions, tools and technologies. As he summarized in a later edition of the

Catalog, “choices about the right technology, both useful old gadgets and ingenious new tools, are crucial” but “choices about political matters are not.” Brand aimed to reject the ideological entrapments of both the political right and left. Yet, in rejecting political solutions to social and environmental problems, Brand affirmed a libertarian political view.66Brand derived his revulsion for politics—or at least his professed rejection of political solutions to solve social and environmental problems—in large part from

Buckminster Fuller, Ken Kesey, and Ayn Rand.

Presaging the countercultural philosophies of Kesey, Brand, Reich, and Roszak,

Fuller argued that politics offered little hope for a more ecological society. Politicians unfairly redistributed the wealth and resources of a perceived zero-sum world, Fuller argued, rather than enlarging the scope of resources. “Anticipatory” designers and engineers like himself, he boasted, were society’s saviors from “pirate politicians.” He recounted, “I was convinced in 1927 that humanity’s most fundamental survival

65 Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1979), 28-29. 66 As Kirk contends, Brand and the Whole Earth Catalog evinced a “libertarian-leaning individualism and distrust of centralization.”Kirk, Counterculture Green, 55, 9, xi. Also Kirk, “Machines of Loving Grace,” 365.

93 problems could never be solved by politics.”67 As such, Fuller advanced apolitical engineering solutions that aimed to avoid the pitfalls of politics.

Decades later, as part of his cultural rebellion, Kesey embraced a similar loathing of politics. During a speech at a 1965 Berkeley anti-war march, Ken Kesey exemplified the sentiment of many in the counterculture. He told the audience, “You know, you’re not going to stop this war with this rally, by marching…That’s what they do.” Kesey chided political activists, the New Left, and all others naïve enough to believe that politics offered salvation. He then played “Home on the Range” on his harmonica and implored his follows to drop out and return to the land.68 Rather than fight and march and engage in politics, Kesey counseled, “Just…turn your back and say…‘Fuck It’ and walk away.”69

While Brand embraced Fuller and Kesey’s sentiments and echoed their talking points, his rejection of government, back-to-the-land fervor and embrace of drug-use and personal freedom reflected a de facto political position. In the January 1970 Whole Earth

Catalog supplement, Brand published a critical letter from Whole Earth employee Jay

Bonner. When Bonner asked Brand to carry “any of a various number of politically oriented underground papers,” Brand declined and admonished, “no art, no religion, no politics.” Bonner retorted that the catalog offered all three—but only Brand’s accepted version of each. “From all the 128 pages of the Whole Earth Catalog,” Bonner concluded, “there emerges an unmentioned political viewpoint.” Based on Brand’s anti-

67 Wood, A More Perfect Union, 55, 62. 68 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 62. 69 Kirk, “Machines of Loving Grace,” 365.

94 government position, individualistic andsurvivalist narrative, and promotion of consciousness-expanding drugs, few failed to see the Catalog’s libertarian politics.70

While Brand dismissed descriptions of the catalog as political, his private sentiments and tacit acknowledgments reaffirmed the libertarian politics of its pages.

Brand’s embrace of Rand’s libertarianism and desire to form an Atlas Shrugged-style mountain commune affirms his politics. Brand first read Rand at Stanford, but returned to her works in the early 1970s. In a 1973 letter to Kesey, he admitted, “I’ve been reading

Ayn Rand (again, after 14 years) and refind [sic] her amazingly reliable…”71

Elsewhere he revealed the ideas of Atlas Shrugged “inspired a lot of our operational stuff, just like Fuller did.”72 Much of Brand’s embrace of communes and the back-to-the-land movement echoed Rand’s plot of Atlas Shrugged, where the protagonist, John Galt, founds a mountain commune of successful pragmatists and producers.73 Indeed, Brand’s journals are filled with musings about such a “mountain fantasy.”

This “mountain fantasy” would be the pragmatic “sequel” to the Catalog and offer a “proving ground” for a community of appropriate technology advocates.74Brand conceived of a “mountain community with air and foot access but no road access” in his journals. The community would be created with an “Ecology master plan in front.” His main concern rested with the “economics and politics” of the community,” where he aimed to foster entrepreneurship and personal responsibility.75 To make this a reality,

70 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 99. 71Brand letter to Kesey, 19th Jan 73. , SBP, box 7, folder 2. 72 Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1. 73 Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (New York: Plume, 1999). 74 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 120. 75 Brand Journal Entry, 5th Aug. 1969, SBP, box 18, folder 1.

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Brand wanted to follow Rand’s literary path: “One approach to Mountain Fantasy would be for me to write a novel about it…then [transform]…the novel into a TV serial, and build the mountain around it.”76 Yet, eventually he scrapped the idea as too utopian.77

Brand’s libertarian theory of social change is furthermore demonstrated in his correspondence with Representative John Brademas (D-IN), Chairman of the Select

Subcommittee on Education. Brademas contacted Brand in 1970 in regards to testifying as an expert at a hearing on . Writing to Brand, Brademas thanked the countercultural icon for his cooperation and extolled his “knowledge and experience in this field.” Brand’s reply surely surprised the Congressman.78

While Brand approved of the subcommittee’s intentions in his response to

Brademas, he clarified his views concerning federal government intervention. Brand argued that any efforts to offer voluntary environmental education to students may well be “poisoned by Federal ‘help.’” Such efforts were akin to the “over-specialized application of and pesticides” which “damaged…natural growth processes.”

Brand feared federal intervention, with its “whole apparatus of application, approval, and funding,” would introduce a “dishonesty…that can never be eradicated.” Since dishonesty was anathema to education, he warned that federal intervention would be counterproductive. Even outside of the nation’s established schools, Brand contended that if the federal government attempted to educate citizens about ecology through mass communications, this would constitute a danger as serious as “rejoining Church and

76 Brand Journal, Entry, 2nd Oct. 1970, SBP, box 18, folder 1. 77 Brand wrote, “So, idealists became pragmatists.” Kirk, Counterculture Green, 120. 78 Letter to Brand from John Brademas, Chairman on the Select Subcommittee on Education, 14th April, 1970, SBP, box 30, folder 4. Letter from Brand to John Brademas, undated, 1970, SBP, box 40, folder 4.

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State.”79 If national environmental legislation perturbed Brand, early attempts at

international governance further heightened his anti-statist position.

Traveling to the world’s first global event, the United

Nation’s 1972 “Conference on the Human Environment” in Stockholm, Sweden, Brand

exhibited his disdain for state power. During the second week of the conference, he wrote

to his wife Lois, “My people turn out to be a few poets, diggers, malcontents who also

feel that ‘one planet’ is what’s real…[but] ‘one world’ is what’s happening in

Stockholm.” He believed efforts at unified and multilateral treaties

were “transnational unrooted bullshit.” The fact that the conference took place in

socialistic Sweden did not pacify Brand either. “Sweden gives me the creeps,” he

admitted, “Too goddamned rational, controlled.”80

Brand’s rejection of the ability of the political system to resolve ecological and social problems is representative of the broader counterculture’s libertarianism. Roszak and Reich argued that social change would only come from a shift in consciousness, not political action. They argued the political system was unable to build sustainable communities that coexisted with nature. Countercultural thinkers viewed the political system as a dehumanizing and impersonal bureaucracy that only offered a failed program of corruption, expertise and militarism. As Grateful Dead lyricist and Whole Earth

Catalog contributor John Perry Barlow recalled, “to engage in the political process was to

79 Letter from Brand to John Brademas, undated, 1970, SBP, box 40, folder 4. 80 Letter From Brand (Stockholm Sweden) to Lois, SBP, box 7, folder 1. In an interview with a U.S. newspaper, Brand explained why he traveled to Stockholm with his “people” to organize a “parallel” conference called the “life forum.” “We’re going to be there,” he summarized, “mainly to be sure that some of the things that can’t or don’t want to talk about get brought up.” Viewing himself as a defender of individual freedom against state tyranny, Brand asserted governments “are usually not too interested in the effects of industrialization on their people.” Article in the Rockford, Illinois, Morning Star Newspaper, Tuesday, May 23rd, 1972, SBP, box 7, folder 1.

97 sully oneself to such a degree that whatever came out wasn’t worth the trouble put in.”81

The countercultural rejection of politics reflected a libertarian view of the problems with state power. The wide acceptance of this view across oppositional political groups offers an important explanation for the enduring legacy of the counterculture’s vision of apolitical environmental solutions.

Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture diagnosed the failure of America’s political and economic system. He believed that society was dominated and organized by a repressive “”—defined as a “regime of experts—or of those who can employ the experts.” The evil of this system of “social engineering” was that “politics, education, leisure, entertainment, culture as a whole, the unconscious drives, and even… against the technocracy itself…become the subjects of purely technical scrutiny and of purely technical manipulation.”So effective was this form of social control that it was “ideologically invisible” and its values became “as unobtrusively pervasive as the air we breathe.”Economically, this system was far more than “that old devil capitalism;” it was the “product of a mature and accelerating industrialism.”

Political organization and dissent within the system of the technocracy were useless, he believed, because they could not overthrow this entrenched system of “mature industrialism” built on scientific rationality.82

Roszak furthermore dismissed the elder generation’s political radicalism. He warned that the Old Left (communists, socialists, and trade unionists) offered no solution to overturning the technocracy: “This brand of politics finishes with merely redesigning

81 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 183. 82 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 7, 6, 8, 19.

98 the turrets and towers of the technocratic citadel.” The Old Left failed because it did not challenge industrialism, militarism, or consumerism. The working class and the Old Left were unable and unwilling to challenge industrial society. Politics offered no solution because, “Parties and governments may come and go, but the experts stay on forever.”

More than ineffective and illusory, though, Roszak believed the dominance of politics was inherently totalitarian; politics pervaded and corrupted all aspects of life.

While Roszak was influenced by the philosophical views of Frankfurt School intellectual

Herbert Marcuse, he rejected Marcuse’s call for political activism. While Marcuse’s

“commitment [to politics] is honorable…its politicization of the human experience may be the herald of a totalitarianization far subtler than Marcuse has so far discovered.”83

The only solution, Roszak concluded, remained a complete rejection of politics.

Yale Law Professor Charles Reich agreed with Roszak in his 1970 bestseller The

Greening of America. Reich witnessed firsthand state coercion and was particularly concerned about the detrimental influence of state power on civil liberties. In the 1950s, he observed two fellow Yale law students disciplined for refusing to testify before the

House Un-American Activities Committee. He saw the court’s acquiescence to government power at the expense of individual rights.84 Reich expressed his fears over government power in a 1964 Yale Law Review article, “The New Property”—to this day the most cited article ever published for the Yale Law Review.85Reich’s concern for the invasive state—and his rejection of state power and political solutions—united many

83 Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture, 31, 21, 119. 84 Rodger D. Citron, “Charles Reich’s Journey from Yale Law Journal to the New York Times Best-Seller List: The Personal History of The Greening of America.”New York Law School Law Review 52, no. 3 (2007/2008): 392, 397. 85 Ibid, 400.

99 countercultural environmentalists. Reich argued, “The revolution must be cultural. For culture controls the economic and political machine, not vice versa. The machinery turns out what it pleases and forces people to buy. But if the culture changes, the machine has no choice but to comply.”86 Brand, Roszak, and Reich embraced cultural rebellion as the best for social change.

The counterculture’s rejection of politics in favor of individualism and decentralized communities received support from across the political spectrum. The counterculture’s anti-political nature aligned with individualistic, anti-war, anti-state, pro- drugs views to imbue the with a distinctly libertarian ideology. According to philosophers Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, “by the end of the 1960s, libertarianism as a political philosophy sat at the intersection of the emerging , the New Left, and the counterculture.” The counterculture’s ecological sensibilities and disdain of the technocratic state attracted both libertarians and New Left political activists. As Heath and Potter note, “as the war dragged on, the anti-war movement grew, and a form of radical libertarianism emerged that saw the state…as the main enemy of freedom.”87

Libertarians, according to sociologist Rebecca Klatch, embraced the counterculture “both ideologically and in their own lifestyle.”88

86 Charles Reich, The Greening of America (New York: Bantam Books, 1971), 60. 87 Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Become Consumer Culture (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 153. 88 Rebecca Klatch, A Generation Divided: The New Left, the New Right, and the 1960s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 212.

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Social Revolution of Consciousness

Concurrent with their rejection of politics, Roszak, Reich, and Brand invested great faith in the importance of personal consciousness. Each expressed the countercultural idea that the creation of a just society was predicated upon the individual’s psychological disposition. As historian Fred Turner concludes, “For the new communalists, the key to social change was not politics, but mind.”89 Individual freedom and consciousness were directly tied to cultural rebellion and revolutionary social change.

Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture was particularly influential in advancing individual consciousness. He rejected experts and “objective consciousness,” as well as Western scientific rationality. In order for humanity to reclaim its dignity in the face of this new pernicious industrialism, Roszak called for the “psychic liberation” of individuals. He believed that change originated from individuals and their :

“change the prevailing mode of consciousness and you change the world.” Through this argument he rejected the Marxist conception that society determines individual consciousness. Roszak praised the “discerning few” of the counterculture who embraced the “building [of] the good society” not only as “primarily a social, but a psychic task.”90

Central to Roszak’s promotion of individual consciousness was his rejection of the Enlightenment’s “objective consciousness.” The Western scientific rationality of the

Enlightenment argued that there was an objective truth that could be verified by evidence and proved by experiment. This scientific rationality underpinned the Industrial

Revolution and the technological progress of modernity. Yet, Roszak rejected this

89 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 36. 90 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 168, 97, 49.

101 philosophy because although it provided a “proficiency of technical means,” it advanced the “production of frivolous abundance and the production of genocidal munitions.” Most importantly, Roszak drew a connection between the Enlightenment’s rationalism and the destruction of nature: “the scientific consciousness depreciates our capacity for wonder by progressively estranging us from the magic of the environment.” Roszak and many of his countercultural environmentalist peers rejected Western scientific rationalism and advanced the importance of personal consciousness, the “transcendent ends of life,” and the project of building a better society.91

Following Roszak’s The Making of a Counter Culture and Brand’s Catalog in

1968, Reich published The Greening of America in 1970. Reich embraced the dominant intellectual currents of the counterculture and consumed its main literary influences. His sources of intellectual inspiration were the young humanistic —popular in the

1960s due to historian —Herbert Marcuse and his The One Dimensional

Man, John Kenneth Galbraith’s The New Industrial State, and even the libertarian economist —whose 1944 The Road the Serfdom warned of the dire consequences of state power. Like Brand, Reich lauded Kesey’s work, noting Sometimes a Great Nation “probably comes closest to being in the fullest sense a work” of the new countercultural consciousness.92 Reich believed two consciousnesses pervaded American history and a third lay pending. “Consciousness I” emphasized self-reliance and the protestant work ethic of early America. “Consciousness II”—which currently gripped the nation—emphasized the importance of the public self and was defined by a strong federal

91 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counter Culture: Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its Youthful Opposition. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 13, 252, 13. 92 Charles Reich, The Greening of America, 431-432.

102 government and corporate power. He warned of “Consciousness II” as a “mindless juggernaut destroying the environment, obliterating human values, and assuming domination over the lives and minds of its subjects.”93

In response to the dehumanizing “Consciousness II,” Reich believed the youth generation would start a nonviolent social revolution. He wrote that college students of the 1960s were adopting “Consciousness III”—where a person’s “choice of a lifestyle is not peripheral, [but] is the heart of the new awakening.” On the cover of The Greening of

America Reich stated his argument concerning the importance of the individual in the coming psychological revolution: “It will originate with the individual and with culture, and it will change the political structure only as its final act.” Reich rejected “mere political change,” because lasting “social change cannot be accomplished without the support of an appropriate consciousness in the people.” The new consciousness would transform society by “changing culture and the quality of individual lives, which in turn change politics and, ultimately, structure.”94

Tens of millions of people read The Greening of America, and Reich’s synthesis of ideas became widespread during the 1970s. When the main thesis of the book was published as a 75-page New Yorker article in September 1970, the magazine received more response letters than any other publication in its history. The public was hungry for

Reich’s ideas, and The Greening of America offered them an entire book devoted to the subject; it was sold out within minutes at many campus bookstores. Within six months, it

93 Charles Reich, The Greening of America, 5, 18. 94 Ibid, 380, 59, 2.

103 had gone through twelve print runs.95The Greening of America became such an influential book that Reich’s term “green” pervades modern environmentalism. With the rise in environmental concerns during the 1970s, political activists turned to Reich’s book for their party name. By the 1980s, the showcased the intellectual importance of Reich’s book through their name.96 Today, the term “green” is synonymous with mainstream society’s ecological consciousness.

The Whole Earth Catalog echoed the counterculture’s emphasis on the importance of personal consciousness. In an interview, Brand argued that fighting environmental devastation must involve a shift in personal consciousness. He referenced his own experience where he “stop[ped] reading newspapers and watching .”

He contended such activities were “robbing my consciousness and my effectiveness because I was carrying around this big load of…guilt and someone else’s ideas of what ought to happen.” Brand argued that focusing on individual decisions and lifestyle choices allowed people to “start seeing like environmental problems for themselves,” without interference from the media or politics. Addressing environmental problems, he opined, “seems to start from that…capacity of what you can do with your personal mind and personal body to accomplish something.”97

95 Rodger D. Citron, “Charles Reich’s Journey from Yale Law Journal to the New York Times Best-Seller List: The Personal History of The Greening of America,”New York Law School Law Review 52, no. 3 (2007/2008): 406. 96 Erik v. Kuehnelt-Leddihn, “The Greening of Germany,” National Review 34, no. 25(December 1982): 1616. 97 Interview with Brand, Focus: Introductory Frame, SBP, box 7, folder 1.

104

The Centrality of Lifestyle

Brand’s Whole Earth Catalog emerged as the pragmatic manifestation of a countercultural milieu that applauded personal consciousness and derided organized political activism. Like Roszak, Brand viewed environmental stewardship as an inherently individualistic project. The Whole Earth Catalog was perhaps the first publication that advanced what sociologist Mike Featherstone coined the “heroic” consumer lifestyle— individuals could protect the environment through everyday consumer decisions. As the fate of the Earth rested with individuals, their decisions were either heroic or villainous.98 As Brand declared in 1971, “Individual buyers have far more control over economic behavior than voters.”99 He believed an individual’s lifestyle mattered more than collective political action.

When The Last Whole Earth Catalog won the prestigious 1972 National Book

Award, the citation highlighted the Catalog’s defense of individualism. It stated, “This

Space Age WALDEN affirms the ability of man, the individual, to survive in a world of increasingly dangerous technology.”100 As Rolling Stone summarized, “the Catalog celebrates an old-fashioned, fundamentalist individualism, the mystique of the self- taught, self-reliant do-it-yourselfer living in an organic relationship with his environment…”101

98 Sam Binkley, “The Seers of Menlo Park: The Discourse on the heroic consumption in ‘The Whole Earth Catalog’” Journal of Consumer Culture 3, no. 2 (November 2003): 292. 99 Kirk lauds Brand’s philosophy as “enlightened pragmatic individualism.” Andrew Kirk, Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism, (Lawrence KS: University Press of Kansas, 2007), xi. 100Whole Earth Catalog, 23rd Citation, May 6th, 1972, SBP, box 7, folder 1. 101 Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1.

105

In his “purpose statement” of the 1972 The Last Whole Earth Catalog, Brand declared: “So far remotely done power and glory—as via government, big business, formal education, church—has succeeded to the point where gross defects obscure actual gains.” His solution was “intimate, personal power” that would allow the “individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”102Brand argued against the “mistaken perception” that environmental issues were “vast…and unapproachable by an individual.”103 Rather, he promoted the Whole Earth Catalog as “a book of tools for saving the world at the only scale it could be done, one hand at a time.”104

Congruent with his libertarian politics of informed consumerism, Brand believed all individual actions had profound cultural implications—a kind of social politics.

“Individual lifestyle choices became political acts,” Turner writes of Brand’s thinking, as

“both consumption and lifestyle technologies” took on “a new political valence.”105

Brand presented the Catalog as defending populist democratic principles, asserting, “All power to the persons.”106 Individualism and , Brand argued, constituted a new populist democratic impulse that could revolutionize American society.

Beyond consumer politics, Brand also emphasized personal conservation decisions and ascetic lifestyles. Brand lauded other countercultural thinkers who emphasized the importance of lifestyle. In a letter to a friend in 1972, he applauded

Ernest Callenbach’s Living Poor With Style as an essential guide for “independent

102 Binkley, “The Seers of Menlo Park,” 307-8. 103 Interview with Brand, Focus: Introductory Frame, SBP, box 7, folder 1. 104 Ted Steinberg, “Can Capitalism Save the Planet?,” 9. 105 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 36. 106 Interview with Brand, Focus: Introductory Frame, SBP, box 7, folder 1.

106 living.”107 Callenbach later expanded his defense of and libertarian conception of individual liberty in his utopian science fiction novel Ecotopia.108 The

Catalog’s contents were more than tools or ideas to Brand and Callenbach. As Turner argues, they were “mechanisms that transformed their users into actors in the dramatic myths of American individualism.”109

Brand’s conception of social change and the back-to-the-land ethos of the Whole

Earth Catalog can only be understood in the context of the 1960s commune movement.

In the two centuries before 1965, between 500 and 700 communes existed in America.

Yet in the short seven year span of 1965 to 1972, as many as tens of thousands of communes—with hundreds of thousands of members—sprang up throughout the United

States. Literary critic and fellow communalist Judson Jerome estimates that in the early

1970s, some 750,000 lived in more than 10,000 communes nationwide.110 Brand told

Rolling Stone that the Catalog was “strictly an outgrowth of the commune movement.”111

He explained the Fullerian appeal of communes: “You don’t change a game by winning it or losing it or refereeing it or observing it. You change it by leaving it and going somewhere else and starting a new game from scratch.”112

107 Letter from Brand to Les Scher, 27th Dec, 1972, SBP, box 7, folder 1. 108 Yet unlike Brand, Callenbach’s futurist was forged from citizens usurping political power and precipitating a radical overhaul of the capitalist economy. , Ecotopia. Indeed, when Brand invited Callenbach in November of 1972 to one of the Point Foundation’s board meetings, Callenbach laid out his vision for a decentralized economy by focusing on social politics. Kirk, Counterculture Green, 136. 109 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 93. 110 Ibid, 32. 111 Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1. 112 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 109.

107

The Catalog’s emphasis on personal lifestyles and consumer decisions reflected

Brand’s views on “Whole Systems” and cybernetics. According to Fuller and Brand, both cybernetics and holistic thinking connected an individual’s daily life to larger environmental problems. In the first Catalog, Brand explained, “Society, from organism to civilization to universe, is the domain of cybernetics.”113 Paul Ehrlich first introduced

Brand to systems theory and holistic ways of thinking in a Stanford biology course. Here,

Ehrlich presented a view of life and natural systems—in the words of a text he authored—“as a complex energy-matter nexus.”114 “Understanding Whole Systems means looking both larger and smaller than where our daily habits live and seeing clear through our cycles,” Brand explained. He designed the text and format of the Catalog according to systems theory.115On the back of the first-edition of the Catalog, Brand’s holistic message resonated, “We can’t put it together. It is together.”116

In contrast to the New Left’s politics, “cybernetics and systems theory offered an ideological alternative.” These ideas “presented the possibility of a stable social order based…on the ebb and flow of .”117 Brand asserted, “Information wants to be free.” Implicit between the Catalog’s pages was an argument that and freedom of information could transform society. For appropriate technologists and libertarian survivalists, unplugging oneself from the grid constituted a radical political act—or a rejection of politics altogether. Thus, the Catalog aimed to forge “an information system that could connect…dispersed like-minded folks.” According to Kirk,

113 Ibid, 63. 114 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 43. 115 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 56. 116 Brand, Whole Earth Catalog (Menlo Park CA, Portola Institute, 1968). 117 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 39.

108 the Catalog advanced the “compelling notion that, by staying home from the protest demonstration and modifying your or building a geodesic dome or a solar collector, you could make a more immediate and significant contribution to the effort to create an alternative future than through more conventional expressive politics.”118

Reluctant Green Capitalism

Kirk posits that Brand demonstrated a “casual acceptance of capitalism.”119

Brand’s comments, actions, and journals throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s confirm this analysis. In time though, Brand emerged as a staunch defender of business and capitalism to advance ecological sustainability. Contemporary green consumerism owes a large part of its inception to the ideas and circumstances of the counterculture, but

Brand did not set out to defend capitalism or earn riches. As a pragmatist, he aimed to provide useful and transformative technologies to those who sought to forge a more ecological society. In striving for this laudable end, he embraced the means of business culture and casually accepted capitalism.

From the very inception of the Whole Earth Catalog, Brand aimed to empower individuals, not large corporations. “Our interest is giving information to the reader,” he explained, “and the supplier can go fuck himself.” To further the back-to-the-land movement and human-scale appropriate technology, Brand even claimed, if someone else does “what we’re doing even better…we’ll include them in the Catalog.” His philosophy epitomized demand-side (consumers) rather than supply-side (producers)

118 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 3, 1, 52. 119 Ibid, 20.

109 environmentalism. He explained that the Catalog emerged partly in response to those in the counterculture who “dropped out of the economic system in despair that there’s nothing worth buying.” Rejecting such anti-consumer positions, Brand applauded many technologies and affirmed, “There are a lot of tools that are worth sustaining.”120

Throughout his involvement with the Catalog Brand emphasized its mission—not its bottom line. He embraced Kesey’s philosophy—in Brand’s words—“you just take care of business and money takes care of itself.”121 When struggling with his personal wealth, Brand often returned to this philosophy. During a particularly depressing stint in the spring of 1970, he wrote, “I have all this money and shill. I gotta do something with it.” But he concluded this imperative was “backwards” and “leads nowhere.” Rather, he asserted, “Start with what’s gotta be done, then invest what’s available.”122

To this end, while the catalog was still several months away from being profitable, Brand disseminated free catalogs to his friends and in touch communes. In a letter to Baba (Richard Alpert), he offered, “I’m looking for perspective [sic] outlets for free CATALOGs…if you’re interested.”123 Years later, when Brand tired of editing the catalog, he donated the copyrights to his newly formed nonprofit, the Point

Foundation. Money was a means to an end for Brand, not an end in itself.124

Despite his generosity and passion for his product—or perhaps to further these ends—Brand embraced capitalism. Contrary to the professed beliefs of many in the

120 Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1. 121 Interview with Brand, Focus: Introductory Frame, SBP, box 7, folder 1. 122 Brand Journal Entry, 14th March, 1970, SBP, box 18, folder 1. 123 Letter from Brand to Baba Ram Dass, Franklin NH, 27th July 1969, SBP, box 6, folder 7. 124 Sam Brinkley, “The Seers of Menlo Park,” 301.

110 counterculture, Brand lauded business culture. “The school and drug culture are both naïve in their attitude toward business,” he explained. Repeating his common trope,

Brand affirmed, “Of all the big nasties—the church, education, business, the least nasty is big business.” He contended business culture was actually “more in tune with the individual Americans than politicians are.” Furthermore, Brand believed big business better reflected individual rights and desires since, “You have a stronger vote as a buyer than a voter; you can put them out of business.”125

While he seemed to waiver about embracing “capitalism”—no doubt in part because of the anti-business views of many communalists—Brand eventually accepted it as a pragmatic model. In a draft letter he wrote in 1968, he even joked that his IBM

Selectric Composer allowed, “Whole Earth Truck Store and Catalog to put their sordid commercial thoughts down pretty on paper” (emphasis mine).126 Yet when criticized,

Brand responded, “I’ve yet to figure out what capitalism is, but if it is what we’re doing, I dig it.”127 In the Last Whole Earth Catalog, he stated, “You may not think capitalism is nice, and I don’t know if it’s nice. But we should both know that the Whole Earth

Catalog is made of it.” Brand came to embrace the “uses of money, of ego, of structure

(read uptightness), of , of business as usual” to further ecological ends.

Dismissing those “elective applauders” of the Catalog who denied the Catalog’s capitalistic foundation, Brand refused to be a liar by omission.128 In line with his libertarian politics, Brand upheld the virtues of business culture and forged a new

125 Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1. 126 Draft Letter from Brand to Bevirts, Villa Ridge, Missouri, 20th Nov 68, SBP, box 6, folder 7. 127 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 99. 128 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 117.

111 countercultural business philosophy. A “capitalist at heart” in a countercultural milieu that shunned wealth, Brand reluctantly emerged as the progenitor of green capitalism.129

Despite initially being a half-hearted capitalist, as a responsible businessman,

Brand excelled. From the printing of the very first Catalog, he understood it “ought to make money” and kept the Catalog’s finances safely in the black. He explained the catalog “had to make money in order to be real, survive and not be some kind of a dependent.” Due to his savvy business model and hip product, Brand and his business associates found themselves, “unwitting millionaires.”130 As an entrepreneur, he also thrived at exploiting a promising opportunity. As he admitted to Rolling Stone, “only half jokingly” according to the author, “If [the counterculture is] a gold mine then we’re the shyster lawyers who are making a mint out of it.” Although he also confessed, “When you get to be around 30, you become interested in making a little money,” in his personal journals, Brand expressed extraordinary guilt for his wealth.131

Like other environmentalists, Brand felt ostracized for his personal wealth. In

1971, he journaled, “I felt indignant today when [my friend] Bern chided me for doing the money number—took it hard.” Brand felt increasingly guilty for his material success, and noted it affected his countercultural identity and led to his “increasing disaffection with long hairs.”132 “What should I do with my life?” he asked in the early 1970s: “We are blessed/ cursed with the leisure, money, and access to try damn near anything we can

129 Kirk, “The New Alchemists”, 350. 130 Interview with Brand, Focus: Introductory Frame, SBP, box 7, folder 1. 131 Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1. 132 Brand Journal Entry, July 11th 1971, SBP, box 18, folder 1.

112 conceive. Naturally this brings down enormous guilt.”133 Brand understood, “It only takes so much money to buy all the pleasure, excitement…you can use.” He questioned, “If you have more money than that, what’s worth doing with it?”134

In time, Brand fully embraced green capitalism and the social power of money and markets. In time, he overcame the counterculture’s aversion to money for a specific end. “I wanted to say among my friends,” he confessed, “money, not to swear but to honor its function.”135 “There’s a real secret of money,” he confessed in his journal, “in the private business meetings, money makes you be a little bit honest.”136Attempting to reconcile America’s dominant economy system with ecological imperatives, Brand charted a conciliatory middle road. As Kirk concludes, “Brand was completely consistent in his enthusiasm for business and unfettered capitalism as the best means for those like himself to make a meaningful contribution to American culture.”137

From Fuller to Bateson

Brand’s time studying under Ehrlich at Stanford added an important evolutionary view to his defense of individualism. In 1958, Brand journaled, “The responsibility of evolution is on each individual man, as for no other species.” Individual freedom became far more than a reason to fight against Communism, liberal government, or conformist

1950s culture; it became an evolutionary imperative. Only free individuals, unconstrained by social restraints, could experiment, and like mutating DNA, evolve to a higher

133 Kirk, CountercultureGreen, 126. 134 Brand Journal Entry, Nov. 1st, 1969, SBP, box 18, folder 1. 135 Kirk, CountercultureGreen, 207. 136Draft letter from Stewart to unknown, “Stewart on Money,” typed, 1973, SBP, box 7, folder 3. 137 Kirk, CountercultureGreen, 187.

113 biological niche. Brand believed that the individual’s ego fueled evolution. Quite simply, he recorded in his journal, “the matter [of] freedom—social, psychological, and potential—is of the highest importance.138

For Brand, “The Big Game—Evolution” and “survival,” as he wrote in his journal in 1968, necessitated a “self-selecting system of value and advance.”139As a self- professed “empiricist,” he admitted “the key ingredient in my thinking is survival; that’s what drives evolution.” In the “age of the dinosaurs,” Brand aimed to be a “mammal” who could “diversify and adopt” to new surroundings. Brand praised those holistic thinkers and generalists who could adapt and evolve, since “People who are dropping out are dropping out of specialization” Brand explained that the Catalog was a handbook for

“people who want to get away from specialization for a more comprehensive, whole system thing.”140 By returning to the land, he believed individuals could experiment, innovate, and ultimately evolve.

In an undated journal entry sometime in 1969 entitled “Perfectionism and Group

Process,” Brand elaborated on his individualistic evolution thesis. He wrote that individuals who were perfectionists drove evolution. Therefore, “Perfectionism and group processes are mutually exclusive.” “I think that most intellectual and emotional advances in human culture”—even those “quantum jumps”—“are made by perfectionists in the grip of their muse-demon.”As a self-professed “practicing perfectionist,” Brand

138 Turner concludes, “The liberation of the individual was simultaneously an American ideal, an evolutionary imperative, and, for Brand and millions of other adolescents, a pressing personal goal.” Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 45. 139 Brand Journal Entry, 26th Oct. 1969, SBP, box 18, folder 1. 140 Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1.

114 admitted, “My feelings about perfectionism are tightly braided with my feelings about freedom: they are to be defended against any annihilating .”141

With time, Brand began to doubt this individualistic and rebellious view of evolution. Beginning in 1969, Brand shifted the Catalog to a sounder ecological foundation.142 As the Catalog evolved, it shed its Fullerian-inspired radical individualism and the communal movement. As early as 1965, years after he graduated from Stanford,

Ehrlich’s research on the co-evolution of species intrigued Brand. In a study titled, “Co-

evolution and the Biology of Communities,” Ehrlich examined the evolutionary

relationship between Caterpillars and the plants they consumed. His conclusions proved

revolutionary for Brand’s thinking: species did not evolve through the freedom of

individuals, but rather via communal interactions.143

Brand’s transformative intellectual evolution is witnessed by his shift of mentors.

“Where the insights of Buckminster Fuller initiated the Whole Earth Catalog,” Brand wrote, “’s insights lurk behind most of what’s going on in [the 1974]

Epilog.” Of all the biologists Brand read—“Ed Ricketts, Aldous Huxley, Paul

Ehrlich,”—he explained that Gregory Bateson had the “deepest” influence on his thinking.144 Bateson was a member of the first generation of Whole Systems thinkers, along with Norbert Weiner—the originator of “cybernetics.” Through a cybernetic view of the world, Bateson argued humanity could recognize that the individual was no more than a “servosystem coupled with its environment.”

141 Brand Journal Entry: “Perfectionism and Group Process,” undated, box 18, folder 1. 142 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 87. 143 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 121. 144 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 164, 35, 164.

115

Brand embraced this thesis, because not unlike Fuller, Bateson argued that with a holistic view of the world, small communities could make a difference. Yet, unlike

Fuller’s individualism, Bateson stressed that individuals must work together in their local communities to produce change. Bateson’s influence, through Brand and others, helped to convince countercultural environmentalists that “dropping out” and living in communes could not reform mainstream society. As Brand understood, since all of evolution and life was a matter of “co-evolution,” individuals should rejoin society in an attempt at internal reform.145

Conclusion: The Illusion of Self-Sufficiency

As the countercultural dream of transforming society through cultural rebellion faded—communes succumbed en masse to infighting and lack of structure—many counterculturalists reflected upon their social movement. As a leading figure and pragmatic philosopher of the counterculture, Brand conceded in the mid-1970s, “Most of my contemporaries were either burned out or settling down to long-term work. We no longer had any remnant of a Generational Story to sustain us.”146 He recognized that the apocalyptic views of the counterculture were unstable and counterproductive. “People who organize their behavior around the apocalypse,” Brand later conceded, “are going to have a tough time knowing who they are when the apocalypse fails to show.”147 As a pragmatist, Brand recognized the radical individualism and apocalyptic philosophy infusing his Catalog were counterproductive.

145 Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 123-124. 146 Ibid, 120. 147 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 167.

116

As Brand’s thinking on ecology and cybernetic systems evolved, he came to reject his view of evolution as driven by liberated and rebellious individuals. In time, he even dismissed the entire philosophy of the back-to-the-land movement and communes.

In a 1975 article, he admonished, “‘Self-sufficiency’ is an idea which has done more harm than good. On close conceptual examination it is flawed at the root. More importantly, it works badly in practice.”148 In a remarkable concession, Brand admitted the limits of individual action to accomplish social change. He concluded:

…self-sufficiency is not to be had on any terms, ever. It is a charming woodsy extension of the fatal American mania for …It is a damned life. There is no dissectible [sic] self. Ever since there were two organisms life has been a matter of co-evolution, life growing ever more richly on life…We can ask what kinds of dependency we prefer, but that’s our only choice.149

As the 1970s progressed, Brand tempered his philosophies, specifically concerning humanity’s ability to dominate the natural world. While Catalog began “We are as Gods and we might as well get good at it,” Brand soon questioned the hubris of such words. In his acceptance speech at the National Book Awards in 1972, Brand clarified his evolving position, “We are not gods, of course,” he admonished, “and whatever we are, we’re still a long way from being good at it. We have a lot of listening to do.”150 Brand had long dwelled on the question of humanity’s responsibility and limits.

A year earlier, he wrote in his journal, “Part of becoming good at [becoming Gods] looks to involve learning…responsibility.” As an icon often in the public light, Brand gradually

148 He continued, “Anyone who has actually tried to live in total self-sufficiency—there must be now thousands in the recent wave that we (culpa!) helped inspire—knows the mind numbing labor and loneliness and frustration and real marginless hazard that goes with the attempt. It is a kind of hysteria…”Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture, 121. 149 Ibid, 121. 150 Brand’s Acceptance Speech at National Book Awards, April 13th, 72, SBP, box 7, folder 1.

117 learned how to embrace his position and shed his rebellious individualism.151 In reviewing Bateson’s work, Brand even quoted cellular biologist Ray Rappaport’s aphorism, “Knowledge will never be able to replace respect in man’s dealings with ecological systems.”152 While Brand rejected Rachel Carson’s liberal environmentalism, he slowly accepted her thesis concerning the need for greater responsibility.

Brand’s sentiments furthermore evolved in respect to the importance of institutions and statesmen. As a rebellious countercultural actor—like Roszak—Brand dismissed the elder generation’s institutions, organizations, and failed systems. He admitted in a 1968 letter, “Institutions, as they are, are wasteful of creativity, to put it kindly.”153 When he envisioned his “Mountain Fantasy,” Brand struggled with how to encourage innovation and institutionalize entrepreneurship. He questioned, “Can you follow anybody to freedom?”154 Congruent with his early beliefs on evolution being driven by radical individualism, for years Brand answered no. Ironically, at the same time, Brand lamented being a leader for others. In 1971 he privately wrote, “As usual I am awed and frightened by the prospect of taking that much in my hands. I don’t want to.

I don’t want to. I don’t want to be a MAN. I want to be a fox.”155 Yet in time, Brand looked for a personal role-model and sought to be a model for others to follow.

As he moved out of his countercultural adolescence and drug induced haze, Brand began to mature and see the world differently. First, Brand cut his drug use. “Dope ain’t

151 Brand sought to balance assuming “responsibility assume responsibility without forever wallowing in guilt.” Brand Journal Entry. 1st Jan.1971, SBP, box 18, folder 1. 152 SBP, box 10: “Both Sides of the Necessary Paradox.” 153 Brand to Steve Baer, multiple Letters, dated 4th Dec, 1968, SBP, box 30, folder 3. 154Brand Journal Entry, 2nd April, 1970, SBP, box 18, folder 1. 155 Brand Journal Entry, 2nd Oct. 1970, SBP, box 18, folder 1.

118 enough,” he admitted, “It raises hopes and dashes them.”156 This helped Brand to mature, as he had even admitted psychedelics like LSD were “pedomorphic”—“an extension of the juvenile.”157 In rejecting individualism, Brand also began to look for like-minded elders to learn from. “I surely feel I could use a master, an intellectual superior,” he admitted.158“I am short of respected elders,” he journaled, “and I’m starting to miss them, and I can see that this going to be an enormous generational problem.”159

In an ironic twist of attitudes, Brand also looked to be a leader and to institutionalize his knowledge. “There are coming to be Private Statesmen—,

David Brower, Buckminster Fuller. I seem to want to be one,” he wrote.“My task would be…institutionalize what I’ve been doing anyway.”160 To this end, Brand donated all the profits of the Last Whole Earth Catalog to the newly formed POINT foundation and focused on and an “activist model” for furthering environmental causes.

Ever concerned with the “doing-in” of the planet, Brand’s foundation focused on solutions in “education, society, technology.”161

As Brand came to accept capitalism and his function as a businessman purveying important green products, the Catalog reflected this shift. With the back-to-the-land movement fading into historical memory, the Catalog began selling recreational consumer goods for suburbanites and urbanites. Green consumerism fit perfectly with the individualistic and consumeristic ethos of the 1970s. The era’s introspective attitude was

156 Brand Journal Entry, 16th, July, 1971, SBP, box 18, folder 1. 157 Albright, “The Environmentalists,” Rolling Stone no. 48 (December 13th, 1969), found in SBP, box 30, folder 1. 158 Brand Journal Entry, 11thJuly 1971, SBP, box 18, folder 1. 159 Brand Journal Entry, 16th July, 1971, SBP, box 18, folder 1. 160 Brand Journal Entry, 20th Aug, 1971, SBP, box 18, folder 1. 161 Kirk, Counterculture Green, 120.

119 aptly summarized by Jerry Rubin. In a letter to Brand in 1973 seeking money for an event called “Body Day,” Rubin explained, “A quiet change in body consciousness has been taking place among the American people in the early 1970s.” While the 1960s were years of political protest and social turmoil, Rubin believed the 1970s were “years of individual self-growth.” Rubin pointed to “the growing number of joggers, mediators, yoga classes, dancers, massage groups, gestalt and encounter groups, men’s and women’s consciousness-raising groups, [and] natural food eaters” to prove his point.162 Rubin’s analysis proved correct, and Americans rejected politics in droves for the lifestyle products popularized by the Catalog. As Langdon Winner quipped, “If the 1960s proclaimed, ‘Let's see if we can change this society,’ the 1970s answered, ‘Let's get out of this skyscraper and go jogging!’163

162 Letter from Jerry Rubin to Brand, Monday July 30th 73 with enclosed “Body Day: A Preliminary Sketch”, Box 18, Folder 1. 163 Langdon Winner, “Building the Better Mousetrap,” 76.

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CHAPTER THREE: “ECOLOGY AS POLITICS”: THE ORIGINS OF ECO-

SOCIALISM1

On February 2nd, 1970, Time hit the newsstands across the United States.

Adorning its cover was an unlikely figure hailed as the “Paul Revere of Ecology”—Dr.

Barry Commoner. Months before the first “Earth Day” on April 22nd, 1970—in an atmosphere of increasing environmental concerns—Time lauded the microbiologist as a

“professor with a class of millions” who “has become the uncommon spokesman for the common man.” Commoner rose to prominence not only for his tireless work (in the year before the article’s publication, he gave thirty-two major speeches and published fourteen articles), but also because as “a voice of reason in a lunatic world,” he connected science to urgent social problems. His role as a politically-inclined scientist also led him to a radical critique of American society. More than any other thinker, Commoner’s insights proved foundational in forging the incipient philosophy of American eco-socialism.2

While Commoner began to articulate increasingly radical positions based on ecology in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the nation’s most famous economist—John

Kenneth Galbraith—used the insights of his discipline to reach similar conclusions about the limits of capitalism. Galbraith rose to prominence as a heterodox Harvard professor who authored the phenomenally-popular The Affluent Society (1958). As a speechwriter for Adlai Stevenson and John F. Kennedy, and then U.S. Ambassador to ,

1Ecology as Politics is the title of Andre Gorz’s influential 1980 eco-socialist manifesto. As a thinker who advocated for eco-socialism, this title certainly befits the work of Commoner, and to a lesser degree, Galbraith—especially as both are cited by Gorz. See Andre Gorz, Ecology as Politics (Boston: South End Press, 1980). 2 “Fight to Save the Earth From Man,” Time Magazine, Feb 2nd, 1970.

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Galbraith’s public image steadily rose.3 His The New Industrial State (1967) became the go-to source on radical economics for both the counterculture and the New Left.4 These two volumes only constituted the beginning of his “informal trilogy” of —his most radical work was yet to come.5

While Commoner and Galbraith each authored dozens of articles and books before 1973, their work reached a crescendo between 1973 and 1976, as they offered a spirited defense of an ecologically-oriented socialized political economy. In 1973,

Galbraith published his most radical volume to date, Economics and the Public Purpose.

Time called it “one of the most important books of the year” and said Galbraith was “that rarest of social critics—a reformer whose new ideas are cheerfully anticipated even by people whose worldly holdings may be swept away if his programs are put into practice.”6 Three years later—after reading Galbraith’s works and clarifying his earlier, reticent pleas for socialism in The Closing Circle (1971)—Commoner published a full- blown defense of socialism with The Poverty of Power (1976).

Commoner and Galbraith used similar arguments to ridicule the logos of capitalism and advocate for a more socialized political economy, but they arrived at this conclusion from divergent directions. An examination of Galbraith’s ideas next to

Commoners’ no doubt upsets both Galbraith’s defenders—radical and progressive liberals—and his leftist critics—Marxists and many contemporary eco-socialists. Yet, as this essay aims to show, Galbraith and Commoner shared similar conceptions of

3 Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 3-6. 4 See acknowledgements in Reich, The Greening of America. 5 Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 478. 6 Ibid, 512.

122 capitalism’s pitfalls and the possibilities for non-Marxist socialism. The confluence of their ideas moreover reflects their shared bonds with the tradition of radical liberalism.7

The fact that both arrived at broadly similar conclusions—despite approaching ecological problems from divergent disciplines—exemplifies the veracity of their insights.

Both Commoner and Galbraith rejected the orthodoxies of their disciplines and embraced their role as public intellectuals committed to social change. Each was at least a heterodox thinker, more interested in provocative insight than what Galbraith called

“conventional wisdom.” Both offered social critiques that cut to the heart of humanity’s relationship with the environment and the capitalist economic system. Commoner and

Galbraith embraced their gadfly status because they saw social needs—like efficient transportation and a clean environment—as superior to what they viewed as mainstream society’s obsession with private property and disposable consumer products.

As the term implies, eco-socialism entails the merger of socialist thought with the science of ecology. Galbraith used the tools of economics to lambaste the

“conventional wisdom” of the free-enterprise system; Commoner used the insights of ecology to highlight the dangerous environmental and social of capitalism.

While each approached the subject from his respective discipline, neither claimed to be the ultimate arbiter of truth. Rather, as Commoner clarified, each tried to approach the

7 Radical liberals addressed core economic issues and the relationship of politics to culture without falling victim to Marxist reductionism. Most argued that a democratic education, a belief in participatory democracy, pragmatism and rationality, direct engagement in politics and social activism would lead to substantive social change. See page 107.

123 complicated issue from his side of the “knot.” The economy’s destructive environmental influence would require redress from both economists and ecologists.8

The philosophy of eco-socialism, as supported through Commoner and

Galbraith’s arguments, contended that environmental ills stemmed from the very nature of the economic system. Environmental and social problems, in Karl Marx’s terminology, rested with the economic “mode of production.” Commoner explained that while

America’s “burgeoning industry and agriculture has produced lots of food, many , huge amounts of power, and fancy new chemical substitutes,” the nation had been

“paying a hidden price.” This untold price included streams devoid of life, smog-stricken cities, refuse-ridden landscapes, higher levels of disease, and . In short,

America’s affluence hid a dangerous “false prosperity.” “What this tells us,” Commoner explained in 1970, “is that our system of is at the heart of the environmental problem.”9 Commoner and Galbraith both articulated the need for a “more serious and

radical response” to the environmental crisis that dealt with its “cause” rather than merely

“symptoms.”10 Rejecting the view of environmental services as commodities, each argued a healthy environment constituted a “social necessity.”11

This essay makes no pretense to delineate the roots of socialism in the United

States. Rather, it seeks to illuminate the mid-20th century roots of a peculiar kind of socialist thought based on the insights of ecology. Far more than merely the marriage of ecology and Marxism, American eco-socialism derived from a distinctly New World

8 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 237. 9 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 141. 10 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 249. 11 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 3.

124 vision that utilized many of the insights of , liberal environmentalism and radical liberalism. Indeed, as conservatives have long argued, liberalism availed itself to “creeping socialism.” As historian Gary Gerstle argues, the “protean character of

American liberalism” is partially due to “its role as a surrogate socialism.”12 American eco-socialist thought is usually attributed to ecologically-conscious strains of anarchism and Marxism, with little attention given to radical liberalism’s contributions.13 This essay aims to redress that intellectual gap.

Radical liberalism never encompassed a single platform of ideals or policies, but ranged from a defense of democratic socialism to “ Socialism,” and decentralized communitarianism.14 Radical liberals were united around a defense of individual freedoms, the necessity to combat the excessive power of both corporations and the state, and as historian Kevin Mattson argues, the “goal to strike the right balance between participatory democracy and .” Before World War II, prominent radical liberals included Randolph Bourne, —with his belief in “Jeffersonian socialism”—Rexford Tugwell, and . In the postwar era, intellectuals like

Dwight MacDonald, Arnold Kaufman, , , Martin Luther King,

Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, and Barry Commoner carried on this tradition. Radical liberals addressed core economic issues and the relationship of politics to culture without falling victim to Marxist reductionism. Most argued that a democratic education, a belief

12Gerstle, “The Protean Character of American Liberalism,” 1045. 13 David Pepper, Eco-Socialism: From to Social Justice (New York: Routledge, 1993). 14 Gerstle argues in the 20th century, many liberals were attracted to “…which held the promise of group empowerment while keeping the state small.” Others, like Paul Goodman, strived for liberalism’s focus on emancipation and pragmatism through anarchism and communitarianism, while still recognizing the necessity of the state to achieve social justice. Gerstle, “The Protean Nature of American Liberalism,” 1046.

125 in participatory democracy, pragmatism and rationality, direct engagement in politics—as

Dwight McDonald argued—and social activism would lead to substantive social change.

As Mattson argues, “Radical liberals needed to eliminate poverty and racism, guarantee full employment, provide decent housing and medical care, preserve the environment, and grant equal access to higher education.”15

Galbraith identified as a liberal throughout his entire life, while Commoner always associated with liberal causes and identified with “democratic socialism.” The son of Jewish-Russian immigrant parents, Commoner supported prominent liberal social causes like defending the Scottsboro boys and supporting the Spanish Loyalists.16

Likewise, Galbraith came from an immigrant Scottish family and championed civil rights and public services. At the heart of their critiques of capitalism rested a defense of radical liberalism, with its belief that collective political action through was needed to ensure individual liberty and communal prosperity. As pragmatists, both rejected revolutionary movements and placed their faith in education, participatory democracy, and “voluntary associations.”

Galbraith and Commoner developed a kind of proto-eco-socialism and their arguments proved foundational for later developments. Neither used the term “eco- socialism” to describe their political philosophies. Galbraith favored a planned market economy—a mixed economic model—while Commoner favored an indigenous, non-

Marxist socialism informed by the laws of ecology. Galbraith identified as a reform- minded liberal, or as Marxists derided him, a “capitalist.” Ironically, however, his

15 Mattson, Intellectuals in Action, 213. 16 Commoner Speech, Barry Commoner Papers (BCP), Library of Congress, Washington D.C., box 52, folder: Feb 19th, 1976- Groton MA, Groton School.

126 reform-minded arguments laid the foundation for a far more radical critique of capitalism. Like Rachel Carson before him, Galbraith’s moderate arguments evolved to militate against their founder’s intentions. Ultimately, both Commoner and Galbraith embraced non-ideological variants of socialism (with a small “s”) and warned against the kind of Marxist bureaucratic dominating the and .

While both the economist and alike focused on environmental concerns, neither would identify primarily as an environmentalist. Rather, each understood environmental problems as the product of deeper social and economic ills, therefore remedying pollution must also tackle issues of economic, gender, and racial inequality—as well as the specters of war and hunger. In this regard, Commoner and

Galbraith were in-line with other radicals—literally those who looked to the “root”—of the time who saw social problems as inherent in the economic and political system.17

Commoner and Galbraith also shared their conception of social change with other radical liberals. Politics and an educated citizenry, not ethical consumerism or the market, offered the road to redemption for eco-socialists. The eco-socialist theory of historical change contrasted with the counterculture’s embrace of consumer activism and personal lifestyles. Radical liberals emphasized the limits of countercultural rebellion and argued it offered no substitute for collective political action. While Stewart Brand opined “the consumer has more power for good or ill than the voter,” Commoner and Galbraith

17Frankfurt School thinker Herbert Marcuse and anarchist Murray Bookchin offered similar arguments in the 1960s and 1970s. See Murray Bookchin, Our Synthetic Environment. New York: Knopf, 1962, and Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of the Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press, 1964.

127 rejected consumer activism.18 Commoner argued, “The hard political path is the only workable route to the soft environmental path.”19 Likewise, Galbraith rebuked conventional economic wisdom and asserted consumers had minimal influence in the corporately planned economy.

Against the Orthodoxies of Science and Economics

Born in 1917 in Brooklyn, New York, Commoner rose to prominence for his intellectual prowess. He graduated Phi Beta Kappa with a degree in zoology from

Columbia University and then matriculated at Harvard as a University Fellow.

Commoner graduated Harvard with a Ph.D. in cellular physiology in 1941. After serving in the United States Naval Reserve and attaining the rank of Lieutenant during World

War II, Commoner joined the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis in 1947. He soon earned a reputation as “A brilliant researcher in plant physiology and virology” and a “witty and articulate lecturer.” For these reasons, Time could confidently claim

Commoner was “endowed with a rare combination of political savvy, scientific soundness and the ability to excite people with his ideas.”20

After his debut on the cover of Time, Commoner’s stature as a public intellectual and outspoken critic of U.S. policies grew. Supporters and critics alike recognized his insight and skills as an ecological thinker. The Chicago Tribune reported that Commoner was “widely regarded as the strongest and most outspoken scientific voice in the ecology

18 Stewart Brand, The Last Whole Earth Catalog (New York: Random House,1972),40. 19 Mark Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1996), 251. 20 Profile “Current Biography” Magazine, BCP, box 52: folder: Feb 19th, 1976- Groton MA, Groton School.

128 movement,” and Emmy Award-winning Washington D.C. news anchor Jim Clarke hailed him as the “nation’s foremost ecologist.”21 Despite impugning Commoner’s “radical political ideas,” even conservative critic William F. Buckley lauded him as “the father of ecology.”22 Commoner gained this reputation because he brought the insights of his

scientific research to the lay public.

In fighting on behalf of the American public for , both

Commoner and Galbraith rejected the narrow, doctrinal ends of their disciplines. Both believed they could not divorce themselves from the broader social issues of their research. Each argued that essential public decisions could not be left to high-level scientists and public officials; each realized his work involved ethical issues and thus advanced a kind of public moralism.

Commoner argued for a strong reciprocal relationship between science and society. In a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, he explained, “Science, the way it works, what it is, is not independent of social forces.” The discipline of science was “a creature of social forces,” and therefore both the scientist and scientific institutions were bound to society.23In a provocative essay years before his Berkeley speech— “The Scholar’s Obligation to Dissent” (1967)—Commoner contended, “A scholar’s duty is…not to truth for its own sake, but to truth for society’s sake.”24

Elsewhere he explained, “I believe that the scholar’s work must be devoted not only to

21 Commoner interview with Jim Clarke, BCP, box 46, folder: WMAL TV Mr. Jim Clarke, May 2nd, 1972 22 Presumably Rachel Carson was the “mother of ecology.” Commoner on “Firing Line,” box 46, folder: May 1st, 73, Channel 9 KETC, “Firing Line” with William Buckley. 23 Commoner speech: “The of the Scientist,” Berkeley, California, BCP, box 33, folder: The Social Responsibility of the Scientist. 24 Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 6-7.

129 the truth, but to human needs, and that the scholar’s duty becomes, thereby, inevitably coupled to social issues.”25 His overriding professional concern throughout his long

career remained “properly integrat[ing] science into public life.”26 Yet Commoner did not believe this meant blindly following the accepted dictates of the scientific establishment.

Commoner perceived a tragic paradox in the ends of postwar science, which he described as “the contrast between our technological competence and our ethical ineptitude.” The consequences of this great disparity haunted Commoner: “We can nourish a man in the supreme isolation of —but we cannot adequately feed the children of Calcutta or of Harlem...We are attempting to live on the moon—but cannot yet live peacefully on the earth.”27 As such, Commoner argued scientists must question the use of technology for destructive purposes. “We cannot ask a mathematician, a biochemist, or a historian to dedicate his inquiring mind to society’s needs,” Commoner told the graduating class of Grinnell College in 1968, “without at the same time expecting him to be equally inquisitive about what those needs are, and what he thinks they ought to be.”28 He maintained that scientists must guard against “false pretensions, and avoid claiming for science that which belongs to the conscience.”29

Scientists had a profound duty, Commoner believed, to society and democratic values. As professionals with exclusive access to essential knowledge, scientists had an

25 Commoner speech: “Science and Survival,” 17, National Conference on Higher Education, March 3rd, 1968 BCP, box 24, folder: National Conference on Higher Education. 26 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 46. 27 Commoner speech: “Science, Technology, and Human Values,” 7th Feb. 1968, BCP, box 24, FOLDER: Science, Technology, and Human Values 2/7/68. 28 Commoner elaborated that the academic “will be motivated in his work not only by a concern for the truth about nature and man, but by an equally strong sense of engagement in the problems of society.” Commoner speech, “From Affluence to Survival,” Grinnell Commencement, 24th May, 1968, BCP, box 25, folder: From Affluence to Survival. 29 Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 46, 86, 57.

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“obligation to bring …information before their fellow citizens in understandable terms” and cultivate an “informed citizenry.”30 The “Paul Revere of Ecology” would often cite

Thomas Jefferson’s defense of ordinary citizens as the bulwark against tyranny.31 “If the scientist fails in his duty to inform citizens,” Commoner warned, “they are precluded from the gravest acts of citizenship and lose their right of conscience.”32 Indeed, a failure to inform their fellow citizens meant scientists “will have deprived humanity of the right to sit in judgment on its own fate.”33 Science at its best, Commoner argued, should research the problems that plagued society and “present these for consideration in the open community of scholars and the domain of public information for scientific and public scrutiny.”34 Although they understood complex scientific issues more comprehensively than the general public, Commoner rejected the prerogative of experts to decide pressing issues that he believed were inherently social and political.35

Likewise, Galbraith offered a scathing critique of his discipline and lambasted orthodox economics for enriching the elite. A Fortune magazine book review of his The

30 Commoner speech: “Science and Survival,” 17, National Conference on Higher Education, March 3rd, 1968 BCP, box 24, folder: National Conference on Higher Education. 31 Jefferson argued, “If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.” Thus, an “informed citizenry” was of paramount importance. 32 Commoner speech: “The Crisis in the Environment,” 8th March, 1968, BCP, box 24, folder: National Parks Association 3/8/68: The Crisis in the Environment—need to place a period at the end of each citation. 33 Commoner Speech: “Science, Technology, and Human Values,” 7th Feb. 1968, BCP, box 24, folder: Science, Technology, and Human Values 2/7/68. 34 Barry Commoner, Prologue for Magazine, Jan 1969, BCP, box 31, folder: Prologue for Natural History Magazine. 35 Commoner, like his intellectual forbearer Rachel Carson, argued that scientists and technical experts were not prophets. Both rejected the Progressive-Era view that citizens should leave technical issues to the experts, and asserted that scientists had a responsibility to humility. When asked to prescribe solutions for the ecological crisis, Commoner conceded, “I am the last person in the world to say who should do what…I’m not preaching.” He believed the moral and ethical dimensions of science must ultimately be decided democratically by the larger community. Commoner Speech, New York Academy of Sciences Meeting, Jan. 14th, 1973 BCP, box 48, folder: NY Academy of Sciences Meeting.

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New Industrial State championed his synthesis “of moral-social criticism with a professional and plausible economic analysis.”The reviewer argued that Galbraith went,

“beyond liberal , beyond Marxism or even neo-Marxism socialism, and—in the boldest leap of all—beyond economics itself.” He questioned “whether the American people actually want the particular kind of material progress their system delivers.” In rejecting America’s mass consumerism as a guiding social ideal, Galbraith refuted the very premise that orthodox economics relied upon.36

At the outset of Economics and the Public Purpose, Galbraith stated his position on behalf of the public interest eloquently. The problem with conventional economics rested with its bias towards economic and political elites. “Economics is not primarily an expository science,” he revealed, “it also serves the controlling economic interest.”

Economics had become “convenient for the great corporation but painful for the society.”

The maladies of orthodox economics, Galbraith contended, became especially

problematic when enshrined by the defenders of the public good. He argued government

helped to create “a democracy of the contended and the comfortable” while “the

uncomfortable and the distressed do not have candidates who represent their needs and

do not vote.”37 To remedy this reality—which was more often than not obscured by

economic jargon and esoteric formulas—America’s most popular economist offered a radical and prescriptive set of conclusions. Despite the complexities of his prescriptions,

36 Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 450. 37 Ibid, 304.

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Galbraith’s overarching conclusion could not be misconstrued: “Left to themselves, economic forces do not work out for the best except perhaps for the powerful.”38

The Ecological Threat

Galbraith and Commoner diagnosed a frightening list of problems confronting

American society. These economic and ecological issues, Commoner argued, dealt “with the fundamentals of life in this country.”39 In identifying and sounding the alarm concerning the grave ecological threat to the nation, Commoner emerged as a modern

Jeremiah—a prophet of doom. In explaining the ecological crisis, he offered both prescient warnings and exaggerated ultimatums.

America and other industrialized nations faced polluted waterways, smog-stricken cities, and skyrocketing rates of cancer. The shortsighted nature of postwar technologies,

Commoner posited, threatened the very foundation of life itself—, water, and air. He explained that inorganic fertilizers—while beneficial for increasing crop yields—eroded the of the soil and forced farmers to continue using non-renewable compounds in the future. While synthetic detergents—another booming postwar product—were extremely profitable and effective at cleaning clothing, they could not be broken down naturally in the environment and fouled the nation’s waterways.

Furthermore, Commoner noted the nation’s pervasive smog problems originated not only

38 As such, Galbraith believed conservatives touted the free-market and rejected government out of their own shrewd self-interest. “The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1973), xii-xiii, 515. 39 Commoner speech, Denver CO, Rocky Mountain Center on Environment, March 20th, 1975, BCP, box 49, folder: Mountain Center on Env.

133 from the profusion of automobiles—the very symbol of 1950s suburban America—but from their high-compression, high-horsepower engines. Commoner warned these new technologies threatened the “biological capital” foundational to the economy.

He explained that the “true meaning of the environmental crisis” rested with the inescapable conclusion that “our present system of technology is not merely consuming this capital, but threatening…to destroy it irreparably.” If this system endured,

Commoner warned, “our most advanced technology will come to naught.”40 He believed humanity’s destructive technology polluted man’s physiology and the biosphere. In a

Senate hearing, Commoner told Maine Senator that “new technological man...carries strontium 90 in his bones, iodine 131 in his thyroid, DDT in his fat, and asbestos in his lungs.” New postwar technologies negatively impacted “our most important biological capital, ourselves.”41Commoner argued that a “reductionist” and myopic scientific establishment, operating to meet the profit-driven demands of postwar capitalism, fueled the ecological crisis.

Commoner asserted that a profit-driven science had failed modern man. The environmental crisis loomed because “Western science” evolved in an “atomistic” fashion that failed to account for the “holistic” realities of the natural world.42 The problem, he explicated, lay in the fact that “new technologies are designed not to fit into

40 Commoner testimony, U.S. House of Representatives, Washington, D.C., April 24th, 1969, BCP, box 30, Folder: Testimony before the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations. 41 Ibid. 42“Western Science, since the , has been dominated by the assumption that a complex system can be understood only by determining the of its separate parts.” Commoner speech:“Lesson Not Yet Learned,” Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, BCP, box 24, folder: Lesson Not Yet Learned, Commoner speech: “The Cybernetic Organization of Biological Systems,” Burg Wartenstein, , BCP, box 26, folder: The Cybernetic Organization of Biological Systems.”

134 the environment as a whole, but only to enhance a singular desired effect.”43 Therefore, new chemicals, fertilizers, and synthetics were manufactured for a myopic purpose without due consideration for broader environmental impacts. Thus, Commoner argued the dangerous “technological failures” that caused pollution—an inherently unintended consequence of technology—“can be traced to the prevailing reductionist approach to the natural world.” The conclusion, he believed, remained inescapable: “Modern science provides a dangerously faulty foundation for technological interventions into nature.”44

Commoner’s conclusion also applied to attempts to alleviate pollution.

Because ecosystems were “bewilderingly complex,” Commoner argued, and

“very rarely [exhibited] a singular cause and effect relationship,” attempts to solve pollution without understanding ecology were counter-productive.45 “Without an understanding of the intrinsic complexity of the environment and of the cybernetic processes which govern it,” he admonished, “efforts to solve the initial failures are often self-defeating.” Only when scientists overcame their “reductionism” and acknowledged the “reality that holistic, cybernetic, processes govern the fundamental properties of living things,” could the ecological crisis be overcome.46 As such, Commoner advocated a “holistic” view that advanced an “appreciation for the fact that in a complex system

43 Commoner speech:“Lesson Not Yet Learned,” Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, BCP, box 24, folder: Lesson Not Yet Learned. 44Commoner speech: “The Cybernetic Organization of Biological Systems,” Burg Wartenstein, Austria, BCP, box 26, folder: The Cybernetic Organization of Biological Systems.” 45Box 33: FOLDER: Colloquium-- Goddard Space Flight Center-- 10/17/69--Pollution of the Environment 46Commoner speech: “The Cybernetic Organization of Biological Systems,” Burg Wartenstein, Austria, BCP, box 26, folder: The Cybernetic Organization of Biological Systems.”

135 interactions between parts are more important than the nature of the parts themselves.”47

Such an impoverished science furthermore precipitated problematic social views.

Like his friend Udall, Commoner argued that humanity’s intellectual relationship with the natural world needed urgent reformation. Following Carson, Commoner flatly rejected Brand’s idea that humanity was a “God” who could “conquer” nature and

“escape” from the environment through technology. “Trying to conquer nature,” he scoffed, was “obviously…ridiculous. How can a part of nature—us—conquer nature? We have to recognize our place in nature.”48 For Commoner, humanity’s belief that “we have at last escaped from the dependence of man on the balance of nature” constituted a

“nearly fatal illusion.” “The truth is tragically different,” he explained. “We have become, not less dependent on the balance of nature, but more dependent on it.”49

Because modern technology, “powerfully amplifies the effect of human beings on the biosphere, there is little leeway left in the system”50 Quite simply, “we need to reassess our attitudes toward the natural world on which our technology intrudes.”51

Humanity’s hubris in believing it had overcome the limits of nature, Commoner observed, derived partly from a utopian view of science. He considered titling his 1969

47 Commoner explained the way to “save science from itself” was by “dealing with things holistically, and therefore humanely.” Commoner speech:“Lesson Not Yet Learned” Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara, BCP, box 24, folder: Lesson Not Yet Learned. 48Ibid. 49 He concluded, “I would contend therefore that despite our vaunted mastery of nature, we in the ‘advanced’ countries are far less competent inhabitants of our environment than the Bushmen are of theirs.” Commoner speech: “Science and Survival,” 17, National Conference on Higher Education, March 3rd, 1968 BCP, box 24, folder: National Conference on Higher Education. 50 Barry Commoner, “The Politics of Pollution,” Resurgence: Journal of the Fourth World, Vol. 2 Number 10 Nov. -Dec 1969, BCP, box 29, folder: Sabotaging Nature. Elsewhere he argued, “The feedback characteristics of ecosystems result in amplification and intensification processes of considerable magnitude.” Commoner speech, “The Ecological Facts of Life,” UNSCO Conference, Nov 24th, 69, BCP, box 29, folder: UNSCO Conference. 51 Commoner speech: “Science, Technology, and Human Values,” 7th Feb. 1968, BCP, box 24, FOLDER: Science, Technology, and Human Values 2/7/68.

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Senate testimony paper, “The Failure of Modern Science and Technology?”52 Three years later, Commoner argued, “the most serious issue we face in the U.S” remained the widespread belief that “technology can always work: that it can always correct its mistakes and therefore it’s the perfect human activity.”53 He adamantly rejected any such notions, and admitted, “It is not true that science and technology are inherently competent.” On a day-to-day basis, “science as we know it and technology as we practice it…is a system of human endeavor which is in many ways unsound and unfit as a guide to our living in the world.”54 Thinking about the all-too-real terror and destruction wrought from nuclear weapons, Commoner observed,

Only recently have we begun to sense the enormous gulf between what we know and the good that comes of it…the progress of technology has also poisoned our bodies with radioactivity; it has fouled the waters of the countryside and the air of the cities; it has given us the power to destroy whole forests in Vietnam and great flocks of sheep in Utah; it has taught us how to make fire cling fatally to human flesh.55

Yet immature views of science only accounted for the immediate cause of pollution.

Ultimately the ecological crisis owed its inception to the imperatives of capitalism.

The Culprit of Capitalism

In defense of the public interest, Commoner and Galbraith found fatal problems with America’s professed system of free-market capitalism. Both reveled in perturbing

52 Commoner testimony before the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations, April 24th, 1969, BCP, box 30, folder: Testimony before the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations. 53 Commoner cited in “Must the World Take a Power Cut?” Gerald Leach, The Observer, Jan 14th, 1972, BCP, box 45: folder: Debate: Weinberg NYC Statler-Hilton. 54 Commoner speech: “The Social Responsibility of the Scientist,” Berkeley CA, BCP, box 33, folder: The Social Responsibility of the Scientist to be published in the Free Press. 55 Commoner speech, “From Affluence to Survival,” Grinnell Commencement, 24th May, 1968, BCP, box 25, folder: From Affluence to Survival.

137 their conservative critics with arguments that capitalism never functioned as advertised.

Galbraith and Commoner attacked the logos of capitalism with different, but mutually reinforcing arguments on three fronts. They showed that consumers were not the “boss” of the economy, as industry controlled which products were sold. Furthermore, both showed how the market system failed on account of the social costs and consequences of pollution and unwanted . Finally, each explained how private enterprise’s narrow concern for profit could not provide for the nation’s social needs. These three arguments constituted the essential logic for the future development of eco-socialism.

One of the most important arguments Galbraith and Commoner furthered was the myth of consumer agency. Advocates of free-market capitalism argued that consumers dictated what goods were purchased, and therefore which goods were offered. Under this logic, producers were powerless at the hands of the all-mighty consumer, who “voted” with their pocketbook each time he or she purchased a product. Galbraith explained that

“orthodox economics” lauded consumers as “the ultimate and sovereign source of wants.”56 Cultural historian Thomas Frank coined this logos “Market Populism,” where consumerism is understood as a vanguard of a democracy.57

Since consumers’ wants were created for the needs of corporations, Galbraith explained beginning with The Affluent Society, then producers—not consumers—

56 John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs (Boston MA: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1981), 338. 57 Frank explains, “That in addition to being mediums of exchange, markets were mediums of . Markets expressed the popular will more articulately and more meaningfully than did mere elections. Markets conferred democratic legitimacy; markets were a friend of the little guy; markets brought down the pompous and the snooty; markets gave us what we wanted; markets looked out for our interests.” Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York, Anchor Books: 2001), xiv. For many environmentalists this became enshrined in the green consumerism of Brand’s Catalog.

138 determined the nature of production. Instead of being “rational maximizers,” as the economist Alfred Marshall argued, Galbraith believed that consumers were manipulated by advertising and therefore inherently irrational. Galbraith argued this “dependence effect” meant, in the words of his biographer, “consumers were being, perversely, transformed into the ultimate end goods of the corporation itself.” By rejecting what he described as an “untenable theory of consumer demand,” Galbraith struck at the heart of capitalism’s logic.58 “Galbraith took unconcealed delight in exposing,” Curtis White explains, that corporations’ “had already left the market” and “were themselves the greatest threat to what remained of the neoclassical free market.”59

Commoner concurred and offered his own examples. In the realm of America’s heavy, high-horsepower, smog-producing automobiles, Commoner cited II’s famous remark that, “mini cars produce mini profits.” Quite simply, big automobiles with large high-compression engines were more profitable. Consumers had little option but to purchase the narrow range of products that manufactures offered. Commoner concluded that while some consumer activism efforts were “important,” he “simply refuse[d] to blame consumers” for the ecological crisis. “I don’t think that you and I are to blame for the fact that if you want to buy a car, the chances are you have to buy one that pollutes the environment.”Quite simply, Commoner believed, “that fault is not [with] the consumer. The fault lies with the producer.”60

58 John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 144. 59 Curtis White, The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature (Sausalito CA: PoliPointPress, 2009), 135. 60Commoner Interview with WBBM , Chicago, Jan 25th, 1974, BCP, box 48, folder WBBM Radio, Chicago, Interview.

139

Galbraith and Commoner highlighted the inability of the market system to account for the costs of pollution. These economic externalities (which Galbraith termed

“external diseconomies”) were particularly disastrous for the environment. Commoner defined an as “a cost of a productive enterprise which is borne by society because it is not taken into account by the conventional mechanism of marketplace exchange.”61As a biologist, Commoner understood that unregulated industry runoff into

waterways, , and environmental toxins constituted, “a crucial, potentially fatal, hidden factor in the operation of the economic system.” These environmental externalities, he wrote, were especially problematic because they were “borne not by the producer, but by society as a whole.” Thus, the market system ignored these unwanted pollutants, and the costs and consequences were “subsidized by society.” In this regard, while businesses were “free,” they were “not wholly private.” The environmental crisis was therefore a social crisis of private enterprise, he wrote in Environment magazine in

1970, which was “shared by the entire population.”62

The external costs of capitalism, Commoner argued, masked the actual social value of postwar production technologies. “We tolerate the operation failure of...technological hazards to the environment,” he said in 1969, because the high economic and social costs “are not charged to any given enterprise, but are widely distributed by society.”63 Indeed, the very “social value of new technologies,” Commoner

61 Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 255. 62 Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 144, 145, 147. 63Commoner Speech: “Some Data for a Theory of Action,” Burg Warwtenstein Symposium: The Moral and Esthetic Structure of Human Adaptation,” July 19th-28th, 1969, BCP, box 32, folder: Burg Warwtenstein Symposium, 1969. BOX 32: Folder: Some Data for a Theory of Action, Burg Warwtenstein symposium, July 19th-28th, 1969

140 argued before an audience of professionals, “depends on the avoidance of a reckoning with the important social costs represented by the health hazards which they cause.”64 Since “unmet environmental costs benefit the producer,” Commoner concluded that many industries would go bankrupt if forced to pay the full bill of environmental costs.65 Thus, vast sums of private profits were only possible because the environmental

costs were socialized. Because these “hidden and unidentifiable” externalities were so

costly, Commoner concluded postwar “technology is by no means as successful.”66

The devastating environmental cost of capitalism was by no means a new argument. In 1950, Columbia University professor and German-American economist K.

William Kapp published The Social Costs of Private Enterprise and argued the capitalist system had a fundamental flaw: it made society pay for its costs, while it privatized the profits. Preceding The Affluent Society by eight years, he cited environmental concerns as a chief problem. Kapp concluded that “capitalism must be regarded as an economy of unpaid costs, ‘unpaid’ in so far as a substantial portion of the actual costs of production remain unaccounted for in entrepreneurial outlays; instead, they are shifted to, and ultimately borne by, third persons or by the community as a whole.” As one of the founders of , Kapp argued that environmental pollution was a

64Commoner speech: “Man’s Environment: How it Affects His Health Behavior,” American Public Health Assoc. Philadelphia, 10th Nov. 1969, BCP, box 31, folder:Man’s Environment: How it Affects His Health Behavior. 65 Such extra costs would “constitute a serious threat to the industry’s viability.” Box 33: FOLDER: Evaluation of the Biosphere. Science Journal. Special Issue, October 1969 and Box 44: FOLDER: Nov 28th, 1972, SF “Jobs and the Environment” Conference sponsored by UC Berkeley. 66 Commoner Speech: “Some Data for a Theory of Action,” Burg Warwtenstein Symposium: The Moral and Esthetic Structure of Human Adaptation,” July 19th-28th, 1969, BCP, box 32, folder: Burg Warwtenstein Symposium, 1969.

141 salient characteristic of a capitalist economic system.67 Commoner read Kapp’s provocative book, and when Kapp died in 1976, Commoner contributed a chapter entitled

“The Environmental Impact of the Petrochemical Industry” to a volume subtitled, Essays in memorial of K William Kapp (1977).68

Beyond pollution, Commoner believed the private enterprise system became so transfixed by the profit motive as to reject most social needs as externalities. “In the context of the private-enterprise system,” he wrote in The Poverty of Power, “socially desirable ends” like fresh water, clean air, and even jobs, became “externalities and suffer the neglect that is their common fate” under capitalism.69 The plight of millions of workers who suffered from the depressed economy of the 1970s represented a particular concern for the liberal Commoner.

Commoner argued that in addition to environmental costs, unemployment should be considered an externality of capitalism. At a 1972 conference in Berkeley on “Jobs and the Environment,” he contended, “the jobs which are lost when a plant is closed down on environmental ground is also a cost borne by society.”70 Contrary to other environmental thinkers of his era, Commoner agreed with those who argued that environmental regulations would result in unemployment. Yet, he contended this dichotomy was merely the product of capitalism, and could be avoided. In a 1976 speech in Boston, Commoner explained that in America’s free-enterprise system, there existed

67 Kapp, The Social Costs of Private Enterprise, 231, found in Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside, 256. Also see Economics in Institutional Perspective: Essays in Memorial of K. William Kapp (Lexington: D.C. Heath and Co., 1977). 68BOX 146: Folder: Chapter for Kapp Book. 69 Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 256-7. 70Box 44: FOLDER: Nov 28th, 1972, SF “Jobs and the Environment” Conference sponsored by UC Berkeley.

142 an irreconcilable conflict between capital and labor. “I’ve described exactly what Marx talked about,” he admitted, which was “the displacement of labor by capital…so that people are now forced to lose jobs in order to avoid polluting the environment.”71 This conflict between labor and environmental standards remained most acute for workers.

Current workplace standards, Commoner emphasized, “require that the worker accept an environmental insult which is not tolerated outside the work place.”72

Like Commoner, Galbraith recognized the dire environmental problem of externalities. But Galbraith also extended his cultural and aesthetic critique to the issue of externalities. After explaining capitalism’s failure to account for pollution, Galbraith argued it would be insufficient to merely “internaliz[e] such economic diseconomies.” He rejected the notion that the market could affix a commodity price to an essential social value. He questioned how the market could value a “virgin countryside?” As commodifying such immaterial goods relied on the “piety” of the free-market faithful, who “find universal virtue in the market,” Galbraith advised that society must move beyond market-based values.73 After all, “...did nothing to prepare people for the explosion of concern over the environment.”74 Rather, society must move beyond orthodox and neoclassical economics to find the appropriate solution.

71Commoner speech, “Science and Political Power,” Graham Chapel Student Assembly Series, Jan 28th 1976, BCP, box 52, folder: FOLDER: Jan 28th 76, Graham Chapel Student Assembly Series Address 72Box 44, FOLDER: Nov 28th, 1972, SF “Jobs and the Environment” Conference sponsored by UC Berkeley. 73 This has been the conservative approach taken: As professor Sharon Beder writes in the academic journal Environmental Politics, the general public “accepted the conservative definition of the problem: that environmental degradation results from a failure of the market to attach a price to environmental goods and services.” 74 John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose, 288.

143

Commoner likewise dismissed the conservative argument that if only costs were included in the market system, environmental ills could be cured. In a 1973 exchange with William F. Buckley, Commoner explained his dissention. When Buckley argued in favor of minor price reforms to account for environmental externalities, he retorted, “I don’t feel that that’s where the problem lies.” Commoner argued that even if costs were included in the market, ecological issues would persist because wealthy people could continue buying wasteful and polluting goods. Buckley defended this as a prerogative of wealth, but Commoner argued it was inherently undemocratic, and contrary to the social nature of the ecological crisis.75

In the third of their arguments against capitalism, Commoner and Galbraith contended that a free-market could not meet the social needs of a community. More specifically, they affirmed that meeting social needs through the market system was exceedingly costly for society, although quite profitable for industry. Therefore, socialism was needed because the corporate and public purposes diverged so widely, with the public bearing the burdens and industry reaping the rewards.76

Commoner argued that profitability “seems to contradict” the social needs of a community. “The free enterprise marketplace,” he explained, “appears to be singularly incapable of responding, by its own internal mechanisms, to social needs such as a livable environment.” Commoner believed the problem rested not with “malice, or even...personal greed,” but rather with “the logical embodiment of the accepted principle which in a capitalist economy governs what is produced—the maximization of profit.”

75Box 47, FOLDER: May 1st, 73, Channel 9 KETC, “Firing Line” with William Buckley. 76 Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 301.

144

As Marx contended, capitalism championed the exchange value of goods while neglecting their . Commoner noted this problematic duality, and argued the end result of capitalism were “the wrong kinds of automobiles and freight carriers, the wrong kinds of power plants, [and] the wrong kinds of fuels.”77

The argument that capitalism failed to secure essential social needs, specifically a clean environment, did not originate with Commoner or Galbraith.78 In the 20th century,

Hungarian economist—and Columbia University professor and colleague of K. William

Kapp—Karl Polanyi best articulated this line of thought in his 1944 book, The Great

Transformation. “To allow the market mechanism to be sole director of the fate of human beings and their natural environment,” Polanyi warned, “would result in the demolition of society…Nature would be reduced to its elements, neighborhoods and landscapes defiled, rivers polluted...the power to produce food and raw materials destroyed.”79 Polanyi’s non-Marxist communitarianism found a receptive audience among proto-eco-socialists like Commoner and Galbraith.

While many of Commoner and Galbraith’s arguments contained deep intellectual antecedents, Commoner offered novel arguments based on the insights of ecology. After years of studying biochemical and physical interactions in nature, Commoner concluded,

“Everything is connected to everything else.” Similar to his belief that postwar science failed to be effective because it was reductionist and “atomistic,” he contended that

77 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 256-7. 78Indeed, the shadow of Marx looms over any discussion of the social costs of capitalism. See the scholarship of John Bellamy Foster and Paul Burkett. 79 Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 2001), found in James Gustave Speth, “America the Possible: A Manifesto, Part I,” Orion Magazine. March/ April 2012 Issue. http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6681/

145 humanity’s relationship with the environment failed when it became individualistic.

Because “There’s no way of distributing the air parcels so that it can be subject to a commodity exchange between individuals,” Commoner told Buckley, “The environment doesn’t belong to anyone.”80 Not unlike Bernard DeVoto before him, Commoner concluded that since “the environment cannot logically be regarded as private property” it was inherently “social property.”81 To those who believed the environmental crisis represented a grave threat to private property, Commoner offered a contrarian perspective. He contended that pollution actually represented an “assault on social property.” Commoner believed people were “concerned about is what kind of environment will be left for their children. Now that’s not private.” With this perspective, the politically-oriented scientist could confidently explain, “The entire production system is social property and should be treated as such.”82

From Critiquing Capitalism to Soliciting Socialism

For both Commoner and Galbraith, critiquing capitalism and the ends of the free- market system came naturally. Yet, such criticisms did not immediately lead to a defense of socialism. Revealing the environmental destruction wrought from capitalism

80FOLDER: May 1st, 73, Channel 9 KETC, “Firing Line” with William Buckley. 81 BOX 52: FOLDER: April 30th, 1976- New York Conference on the Bicentennial of Law, NYU“Law in the Perspective of Ecology” and Box 44: FOLDER: Nov 28th, 1972, SF “Jobs and the Environment” Conference sponsored by UC Berkeley. 82BOX 148, FOLDER: Unmarked, Interview with Commoner, by John J Zakarian, St.-Louis Post Dispatch, May29th, 1976, interview sent to Newsweek.

146 precipitated reformist attitudes, but only in the 1970s did each offer an explicit defense of socialism as the favored alternative.83

In 1968, Commoner asserted, “technological affronts to the environment were made, not out of greed, but ignorance.”84 This was the same “ignorance” of a myopic and

“reductionist” scientific system. Yet, as he probed deeper into the causes of the ecological crisis, Commoner’s conclusions evolved. By 1971, he asserted that the root of this scientific ignorance could be found in the economic system: “The only explanation which can be offered for the irrational, counter-ecological” direction in the postwar U.S. economy was “the drive—natural in our economic system—to increase the rate of economic return.”85 The same year he affirmed in a speech entitled, “Pollution and the

Profit Motive,” that environmental pollution was the result of “the very structure of our modern productive system.” Therefore, environmental ills could only be redressed by

“reorganizing our economy.”86

In Commoner’s best-selling The Closing Circle (1971) he uttered one of the most politically volatile words in Cold War America: “socialism.” He suggested, “The socialist system may have an advantage over the private enterprise system with respect to the

83 Ironically, after the publication of The Affluent Society, Irving Kristol noted that while some might think Galbraith was interested in socialism, “he clearly hasn’t the faintest interest in that doctrine.” Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 295. 84 Box 27: Article: “Frail Reeds in a Harsh World” (p44-45) Natural History, special supplement. Based on Conference: “On the meaning of ecological failures in International development” Warrenton Va, Dec 9- 11th, 1968. 85Box 38? FOLDER: Nov 21st, 1971, Museum of Science, Boston Mass, “Quality of Life” Seminar 86Box 39: FOLDER: Talk Log 1971. Paper: “Pollution and the Profit Motive.” The first time Commoner openly asserted the need for the social control of production was in a 1969 Senate subcommittee hearing with Senator Edmund Muskie (D-ME). Commoner argued that since the environmental crisis was “an issue which is too profound to be resolved by specific legislation alone,” the government must reassess the very structure of the economy. He concluded the crisis is “likely to require instead consideration of fundamental changes in the social control of environmental resources and their allocation to productive enterprises.” Box 30: Folder: Testimony before the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Relations.”

147 basic relationship between economic processes and ecological imperatives.”87 By 1976, after years of stagflation and oil shortages blamed on environmentalists, Commoner abandoned his reticence. As a book review noted after the publication of The Poverty of

Power— “sooner or later Commoner was going to have to come right out with it…Society would never be saved with the capitalist system.”88 That same year, he offered a straightforward explanation that environmental crisis was merely “a symptom of a much deeper problem: the viability of the U.S. capitalist economic system.”89

Commoner turned his analysis in The Poverty of Power to a radical critique of the economy in the final chapter. Because energy was a social need, Commoner asserted,

It is hopeless to expect to build it on the basis of production decisions that yield commodities rather than the solutions to essential tasks; that produce goods which are maximally profitable rather than maximally useful; that accept as their final test private profit rather than social value.

Despite a “long standing political taboo” against socialism, he admonished Americans to have “the wisdom to evaluate” old ideas—like capitalism—that fueled the environmental and economic crises. “At least in principle,” he asserted, “such a system is socialism.”90

In 1976, he admitted, “I would favor a form of democratic socialism.”91

Although Commoner invoked Marx and Fredrich Engels in concluding The

Poverty of Power, he rejected dogmatic Marxist-Leninist and Maoist Socialism. The

87 Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 164. 88 Ibid, 165. 89Commoner speech, Southern Governor’s Energy Committee, St. Louis MI, June 15th, 1976, BCP, box 52, folder: Southern Governor’s Energy Committee. 90 Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 258, 264. In a speech in Boston before the publication of The Poverty of Power, he similarly asserted: “We’re using the profit motive to make elaborate decisions about thermodynamics, about chemicals, about natural materials, when clearly we ought to be asking what’s good for people.” Commoner speech “Science and Political Power,” Boston Community Church of Boston,Feb 21st 1976, BCP, box 52, folder: Science and Political Power. 91 Interview with Commoner, John J. Zakarian, St.-Louis Post Dispatch, May 29th, 1976, interview sent to Newsweek, BCP, box 148, folder: unmarked, Interview with Barry Commoner.

148 radical biologist understood that individual freedoms, so central to American thought and identity were subverted by the highly centralized socialist bureaucracies of the Soviet

Union, Cuba, and China. “However,” Commoner noted in defense of the principle of socialism, “there appears to be nothing in basic socialist theory that requires of a totally centralized economy, or political repression to enforce it.”92“We would need to invent new political forms,” he suggested, “that combine the economic democracy of socialism with the that is such an important part of the American heritage.”93 Like other radical liberals, Commoner argued that uniquely American political and social traditions must be used to advance reform.

While Commoner invoked the political philosophy of socialism, he remained a committed pragmatist. He believed socialism—with a small “s”—could in principle better provide for human needs than capitalism, but Commoner held that the mere concept of the social control of production “is not good enough.” As witnessed by China or the Soviet Union, he understood, “you can have a socialist system which is stupid.”

Socialist “governance is a necessary but not sufficient condition.”94 Commoner accepted the merits of the profit motive, so long as it did not become the governing principle of

92 Ibid, 261. Commoner understood, “No existing example of a socialist society...is consistent with both economic democracy and socialism and the political democracy inherent in U.S. tradition.” Commoner did offer an interesting aside though. Since the American government in the late 1960s and early 1970s had been systematically violating its citizens rights and repressing dissent, this problem was not wholly unique to socialist systems. Since America already faced such problems, Commoner hinted, perhaps this argument against socialism carried less force. 93Commoner speech, Onway, Michigan SIPI- UAW Sponsored National Action Conference, May 3rd, 1976, BCP,box 52, folder: Onway, Michigan SIPI- UAW Sponsored National Action Conference. 94 Commoner speech: “Energy, The Human Dimension,” Scottsdale AZ, Sept 18th, 1976,BCP, box 52, folder: Sept 18th, 1976, Scottsdale.

149 society.95 He explained there was no single model of socialism to emulate: “We have to

invent our own way of doing it” through “radical political innovations.”96

To uphold the principles of socialism, Commoner turned to the deep-rooted

American tradition of radicalism and reform. Since “wholly new political forms would need to be created” to forge a socialistic political economy, Commoner reminded his readers—in the Declaration of Independence’s bicentennial year—that “such radical political innovation is a 200-year old, if long-neglected, tradition in the United States.”97

It was “Absolutely” true, he argued, that the “ [is] unfinished.”

Indeed, he believed the 1970s held such a promise. Commoner argued that more people were willing to consider a socialist alternative than any other time in his lifetime, including “during the Depression.”98 For Commoner and Galbraith, the 1970s were zero- hour for the advancement of democratic socialism. In advocating for an indigenous

American socialism, Commoner contended that prominent scholars had offered similar arguments for years. In the final pages of The Poverty of Power, Commoner cited

Galbraith’s 1975 assertion that “The word socialism is one we no longer can suppress.”99

While Galbraith had long championed certain prescriptions congruent with a socialized economy, in the 1950s and 1960s he expressed little interest in socialism.

95 Commoner speech, United Nations, March 4th, 1976, BCP, box 52, folder: March 4th, 1976, United Nations. 96Commoner speech, “Science and Political Power,” Graham Chapel Student Assembly Series, Jan 28th 1976, BCP, box 52, folder: FOLDER: Jan 28th 76, Graham Chapel Student Assembly Series Address 97 Ibid, 262. Commoner supported his defense of a distinctly American kind of socialism by turning to contemporary scholars like Gar Alperovitz, Jeff Faux, and Galbraith, who were contemplating the and public ownership of energy, transportation and defense industries. 98He also pointed to the advance of the left in Western Europe and its cultivation of a “democratic, politically-pluralistic socialism.” Interview with Commoner, John J Zakarian, St.-Louis Post Dispatch, May 29th, 1976, interview sent to Newsweek, BCP, box 148, folder: unmarked, Interview with Barry Commoner. 99 Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 263.

150

Indeed, in The Affluent Society, he argued that industry should not be hampered by antitrust litigation and expressed few doubts about corporatist management of the economy.100 Yet fifteen years later, the nation’s challenges evolved dramatically, and

Galbraith felt the urgencies of the era demanded bold prescriptions. Galbraith, however, knew his embrace of socialism would be provocative, as America was on the conservative spectrum of .101

In Economics and the Public Purpose—Galbraith’s most prescriptive work to date—he advocated for five explicit . Like Commoner, who noted that

Europe preceded America in advancing non-Marxist socialism, Galbraith looked at existing democratic socialist systems in Germany, the , and Scandinavia.

He called for “Public Service Socialism” to administer health care, public transportation, and housing.102 On environmentalism and the “energy crisis,” he advocated for greater social control of private-planning systems, as they were failing to produce efficient automobiles and other forms of transportation. Galbraith’s defense of socialism derived from another unlikely source—its similarities with capitalism.

“Modern capitalist organization and advanced socialist organization,” Galbraith wrote, “are not in diametrical opposition.” Rather, they shared the “common requirements of technology and large-scale production, the associated organization, the common need for planning and the similar motivational forces”103 Galbraith did not see a need to limit the corporatist management of the capitalist economy and found efficiency

100 Kevin Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique” in American Capitalism, 98. 101 Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 513. 102 Ibid, 513. 103 Ibid, 519.

151 in many of the corporations’ functions. As historian Kevin Mattson contends, “Galbraith hoped to move the American economy toward corporatist management.”104 While corporatist management would suffice, Galbraith argued the ends of the corporate enterprise must change. Galbraith believed the means of corporate management could achieve the ends of a more socialized society committed to essential social needs like a clean environment. Galbraith aimed to overthrow the outmoded ends of capitalism.105

Galbraith and Commoner argued the “corrective” power of the state constituted the necessary response to corporations’ planning of the market. To achieve a more socialized society, Galbraith and Commoner advocated for increased public planning and spending. Both articulated that social controls on production remained imperative because, as Galbraith argued, “The public and corporate purposes diverge.”106 Therefore, throughout his trilogy, Galbraith affirmed that the “Principle problem of public policy

104 Kevin Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique” in American Capitalism, 98. In this regard, Galbraith’s embrace of a large-scale, centralized economy contrasted with other eco-socialist thinkers. Murray Bookchin and E.F. Schumacher argued that decentralization and full worker control of the means of production were essential for any ecologically-oriented society. Bookchin’s “” emphasized a rejection of hierarchical control, not unlike John Dewey’s ideal of “Jeffersonian socialism.” See E.F. Schumacher, : Economics as if People Mattered (London: Blong and Briggs, 1973) and Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action, 16. Yet French eco-socialist and New Left thinker Andre Gorz shared Galbraith’s critique that modern society demanded the centralized organization of production. This is not surprising, as Gorz cited Galbraith’s work extensively in his seminal Ecology as Politics (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1980). 105 He recalled, “Irving Kristol in Fortune warned that I was undermining the whole existing rationale of capitalism. Since this was my intention, I did not reply.” John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs, 521.While he rejected the ends of capitalism, Galbraith never embraced the kind of state socialism advocated by Marxists. Yet, the Harvard economist nevertheless endured derision as a socialist by conservative critics like . To this, Galbraith offered the pithy retort that Friedman also considered the nation’s Social Security program “socialist.” Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 483. 106 Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 301. Yet Galbraith did want checks and balances on corporate decision-making, with a “public tribunal on which labor, management, and the public are represented.” See Kevin Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique” in American Capitalism, 98.

152 was that of bringing the corporate purpose into accord with the public purpose.” The arbiter of the public’s interest, the state, was therefore required to take action.107

Galbraith had long argued for the “corrective” of greater public spending to remedy the ills of the market.108 In Economics and the Public Purpose, Galbraith continued his plea for greater public funding, especially for environmental concerns. “A substantial part of the remedy for environmental damage consists,” he wrote, “simply, in willingness to spend public money to clean up.”109 Yet in his 1981 memoirs, Galbraith reflected that the imperatives of public health and a clean environment proved far more costly than he first envisioned. A proper social balance, “require[d] public outlays far beyond any imagined at that time.”110

In defense of the public interest, Galbraith and Commoner argued for public spending, but also asserted that this was insufficient. Both contended that the state would have to physically check the production of certain goods and limit the breadth of the market to secure the good society. Galbraith disliked the waste of affluence and suggested that limits be placed on consumption in order to protect the environment.111

Commoner’s concern derived not simply from the ugliness and inefficiencies of industry, but from its pernicious byproducts. Industry expressed little concern for the health effects of its externalities, specifically the noxious and cancerous chemicals inherent in their products. Commoner understood that removing these substances from the environment

107 John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs, 528. 108 “Presumably a community can be as well rewarded by buying better schools or better parks as by buying more expensive automobiles.” John Kenneth Galbraith, The Affluent Society, 193. 109 John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose, 287. 110 John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs, 336-7. 111 Kevin Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique” in American Capitalism, 100.

153 after they were produced was both costly and ineffective. “The lesson is plain,” he concluded, “ works; pollution control does not.”112 This insight led to his “,” where industry carried the onus to prove their products were safe, rather than individuals or the government.

The Problem of the Historical Agency of Change

In advancing eco-socialism as a political philosophy, Commoner and Galbraith articulated a coherent vision for humanity’s agency of social change. As New Left sociologist C. Wright Mills posited, “the problem of the historical agency of change,” constituted, “the most important issue of political reflection.”113 Both advocated for a collective political response to the environmental crisis. Commoner embraced a firm commitment to politics, direct democracy, freedom of information, and nonviolent . Galbraith placed his faith in the further education of America’s citizens and their ability to think independently of the “technostructure.” Like other New Left thinkers, both were more interested in radical liberalism and democratic socialism than Marxism.

Rejecting countercultural environmentalists’ embrace of apolitical and consumeristic individual action, Galbraith and Commoner both argued collective action through politics offered the best venue for social change. Commoner explained, “The hard political path is the only workable route to the soft environmental path.”114 The

“Paul Revere of Ecology” furthermore held that politics represented a concrete, firm position of power. “I’m involved in politics,” Commoner asserted, “because it’s become

112 Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 186. 113 Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action, 87. 114 Mark Dowie, Losing Ground, 251.

154 crystal clear that the issues I’ve been concerned with—nuclear issues, environmental issues, energy issues—are not going to be solved simply by protest.”115 Like many other radical liberals and New Left intellectuals, Commoner believed that cultural rebellion and

“lifestyle choices” offered no substitute for collective political action.116

As eco-socialist thinkers, Galbraith and Commoner asserted that individuals, operating on their own, could not overcome that daunting systemic environmental problems. In The Closing Circle, Commoner wrote, “the debt to nature which is the measure of the environmental crisis cannot be paid, person by person, in recycled bottles or ecologically sound habits.” Beyond rejecting the power of the consumer, Commoner dismissed the idea that individuals were directly responsible for the ecological crisis. The most popular representation of this idea was cartoonist Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” (Figure 1) cartoon that depicted a boy confronting a dump of refuse and disposable consumer goods.

Kelly’s main character, remarks: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.” The comic was reprinted as a poster during the 1971 Earth Day celebrations.

115 Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 168. 116 As historian Kevin Mattson argues, “New Left intellectuals were…deeply critical of the limits of cultural rebellion and self-expression as an ethic. After all, cultural rebellion could easily be taken over by a industry and turned into an empty commodity of stylized anger or hip withdrawal that failed to challenge the status quo.” Mattson, Intellectuals in Action, 12.

155

Figure 1: Walt Kelly’s “Pogo” Cartoon. Found in Commoner speech, International Youth Conference on the Human Environment, Toronto CA, Aug. 24th, 1971, BCP,box 41, folder: August 24th, 1971, International Youth Conference on the Human Environment, Toronto CA.

Commoner offered a direct rebuke of this argument. At the 1971 International

Youth Conference on the Human Environment in Toronto, Commoner addressed the

“Pogo” cartoon:

Take your choice. If you believe Pogo who said, “we have seen the enemy and he is us,” then you will take on yourself the burden of imposing conditions in the United States by not having so many children...On the other hand if you believe that there’s something wrong with the economic, social, and political system which extracts its wealth out of the eco-sphere and out of the bodies of people who live in it, then you will say let’s change those social relationships.

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When Commoner enjoined his audience to confront the “economic, social, and political system”—rather than facing the pollution as a personal problem—the youth at Toronto erupted into applause. “The problem is fundamentally economic,” Commoner continued,

“and it’s not going to get cured simply by calling for recycling and cleaning up.”117

Even before the “Pogo” cartoon gained currency among members of the environmental movement, Commoner rejected personal solutions as insufficient. In

November 1969, he addressed the American Public Health Association in Philadelphia and gave a speech entitled, “Man’s Environment: How it Affects His Health Behavior.”

In the address, Commoner argued, “The solution to problems is no longer a matter of personal hygiene, but an element in economic, social, and political policy.”118Elsewhere, Commoner offered an in-depth defense of what he dismissed as

“this kind of .”119 “The late Walt Kelly, I think, misled a lot of people with his famous slogan.”120 In an interview on a local television station in 1973, Commoner again offered his views on the “Pogo” argument. “Well, like most slogans, it’s half wrong and half right. Maybe more than half wrong,” he opined. In evaluating the merits of the argument that “if we all did our part it would be solved,” Commoner argued, “I don’t

117 Commoner speech, International Youth Conference on the Human Environment, Toronto CA, Aug. 24th, 1971, BCP, box 41, folder: August 24th, 1971, International Youth Conference on the Human Environment, Toronto CA. 118Commoner speech: “Man’s Environment: How it Affects His Health Behavior,” American Public Health Assoc. Philadelphia, 10th Nov. 1969, BCP, box 31, folder: Man’s Environment: How it Affects His Health Behavior. 119 Commoner Interview with KETC-TV, Forest Park, Illinois, BCP, box 47, folder: May 16th, 1973 KETC-TV. 120Commoner Interview with WBBM Radio, Chicago, Jan 25th, 1974, BCP, box 48, folder WBBM Radio, Chicago, Interview.

157 think the facts support this kind of conclusion.”121 In addition to the private nature of the production process, Commoner questioned, “Which people?” He contended, “Some people cause more pollution than others; some people are responsible for the decisions that cause pollution.” Because the nation did not address systemic issues of poverty and the maldistribution of wealth, Commoner retorted, “We have people who are poor, and people who are rich, with the rich polluting the environment in which the poor live.” In sum, the source of pollution was political and economic, not personal.122

An interviewer asked Commoner: “What’s the best thing for the individual to do?”Since the locus of pollution originated with the nation’s production system, he argued that individuals should act as political agents to reform the economy through government; that the social control of production must be accomplished through collective political action. On at least one occasion, though, Commoner referenced green consumerism, where people could “vote with their pocketbook, and not buy things like detergent.” Yet Commoner, always concerned with social justice, dismissed consumer decisions as inherently undemocratic because the rich could always outvote the poor. He summarized, “the best way to reduce pollution; it’s a political choice.”123

In this essential debate concerning individual versus collective action, Galbraith also affirmed that pinning the burdens of environmental devastation on individual consumers was a dead-end. In Economics and the Public Purpose, Galbraith explained

121 Commoner connected this line of reasoning with those who argued overpopulation was the source of the environmental crisis. He summarized that argument as, “if we all did our part it would be solved, and the more of us there are, the more pollution there is.” Commoner Interview with KETC-TV, Forest Park, Illinois, BCP, box 47, folder: May 16th, 73 KETC-TV. 122 Commoner Interview with KETC-TV, Forest Park, Illinois, BCP, box 47, folder: May 16th, 73 KETC- TV. 123 Ibid.

158 the difference between a single and a hundred drivers “is of considerable practical importance.” Whereas the “paper mill cannot deny its responsibility,” Galbraith argued,

“the automobile owner...[will] have no individual sense of responsibility, for what he adds to the total damage is immaterial.”124 Producers, not consumers, Galbraith contended, held ultimate responsibility for pollution.

While Galbraith and Commoner rejected the argument that individuals operating as consumers could solve the environmental crisis, both placed their faith in individuals as political actors. Commoner especially affirmed that democratizing control of the means of production—through state action—offered the best strategy to combat environmental ills. Responding to ecological problems in their social context, Commoner elaborated on his “Nature Knows Best” rule of ecology and prescribed, “Nature knows best what to do; and people ought to decide how best to do it.”125 Scientific and industry decisions, in Commoner’s eyes, were not merely the domain of the scientist and the

“technologist,” but ultimately should fall under the “governance of the public will.” If major scientific decisions were not held accountable to the public will, Commoner argued this represented a dire “crisis of democracy.”126

More than a belief in socialism, Commoner avowed that education and direct democracy—a firm commitment to politics—were the solutions to the ecological crisis.

He told a United Nations Conference in 1969, “Public judgment is essential for the action needed to restore the ecological balance of the earth; but such action can succeed only if

124 John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose, 286. 125 Chris Williams, “The Citizen Scientist,” Climate and Capitalism, Oct. 9th, 2012. http://climateandcapitalism.com/2012/10/09/the-citizen-scientist/ 126 Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 47-48.

159 it is guided by judgment which is informed by the facts.”127 From his experience with the contentious issue of the atmospheric testing of nuclear weapons, Commoner argued that scientific information—or the lack thereof—was politically decisive. The dissenting scientists who revealed the pernicious health effects of atmospheric radiation “were also destroying the source of power that the [Atomic Energy Commission] and the government had.”128 Quite simply, “Information has become the most politically explosive weapon in the hands of the people.”129

Commoner rejected that such knowledge should be kept from the people, and took an intransigent stand in defense of democracy. Scientists and experts were incapable of making such decisions, he felt, because,

The decision which balances benefits against hazards is a moral, social, political judgment. It belongs in the hands of the people who hope to gain the benefits and who would suffer the hazards. We are, all of us,—scientists and citizens alike— those people.130

Commoner argued many of his fellow scientists failed to understand that “the resolution of every social issue imposed on us by modern scientific progress can be shown to require a decision based on value judgments rather than on objective scientific laws.”131

Such value judgments abound with the enormous benefits but pernicious pitfalls of

127Commoner speech, “The Ecological Facts of Life,” UNSCO Conference, Nov 24th, 1969, BCP, box 29, folder: UNSCO Conference. 128 Commoner speech, SIPI Annual Meeting, New York City, March 30th, 1974, BCP, box 48, folder: SIPI Annual Meeting. 129 Commoner believed, “The truth has a way of getting out, but the thing is you have to read the footnotes.” Commoner speech: “The Scientist’s Responsibility Toward a Society in Crisis,” 7th March 1974, BCP, box 48, folder: DC Smithsonian Institute Seminar: “The Scientist’s Responsibility Toward a Society In Crisis.” 130Commoner Speech: “The Scientist and the Citizen,” and the Environment: An Inquiry, Stratton Mountain, Vermont, 11th September, 1968, BCP, box 27, folder: The Scientist and the Citizen 131 Commoner speech: “Science and Survival,” 17, National Conference on Higher Education, March 3rd, 1968 BCP, box 24, folder: National Conference on Higher Education.

160 postwar technology. Public value judgments were inherent in “every pollution problem.”

Commoner asked, “Who is to decide the relative value of paying more taxes [for public transportation], or paying more doctor bills, which happens when you get smog. That is not a scientific question, it is a social political judgment.”132 Elsewhere he asked, “Who will weigh in the balance the value of a wooded hill, a clear stream—or the life of a child not yet born?”133 For Commoner, a democratic political system also served as the vanguard against a biased economic system.134

Commoner warned the abrogation of citizens’ rights to information—and failure to act politically on that knowledge—constituted a grave threat to society. In a speech to the American Physics Society in 1969, he even argued the “two serious threats” facing the nation were nuclear war and “the danger that in the effort to cope with modern technology, the fundamental democratic base of our society will be destroyed.”135 It would be “disastrous” to leave such decisions to the “experts,” he argued, and would result in “the end of democracy.”136 Commoner warned that if scientists made moral

132 Commoner interview with Marcia Henning (of the Associated Press), Filmstrip: “Man and His Deteriorating Environment,” June 1969, BCP, box 32, folder: Filmstrip: Man and His Deteriorating Environment. 133Commoner Speech: “The Scientist and the Citizen,” Nuclear Power and the Environment: An Inquiry, Stratton Mountain, Vermont, 11th September, 1968, BCP, box 27, folder: The Scientist and the Citizen 134 “Whose job is it to decide whether it is right for rich people to heat up the environment for poor people, whether it is right for us to suffer from phosphate pollution because it’s more profitable for a certain industry? Who’s to make these decisions? Scientists? Doctors? No. These are straightforward, ethical, religious, political, social decisions. In a democracy they belong in everyone’s hands.” Commoner speech: “The Ecological Consequences of Social and Economic Inequalities,” The American Academy of Allergy, 7th Feb. 1972, BCP, box 45:folder: The American Academy of Allergy “The Ecological Consequences of Social and Economic Inequalities” Feb 7th, 1972. 135Commoner speech: “The Scientists Responsibilities to Society, American Physics Society, 3rd Feb, 1969, BCP, box 3, folder: The Scientists Responsibilities to Society. 136 Commoner speech: “The Social Responsibility of the Scientist.” Berkeley, CA, BCP, box 33, folder: The Social Responsibility of the Scientist.

161 judgments for the nation, “it would lead to .”137 As a radical liberal, he avowed,

“The new social issues generated by modern science and technology” must be resolved through the “direct democratic control of public policy.”138

Galbraith conveyed far less hope in America’s democratic system. He believed the legislature needed to take action on behalf of public interests, but he also recognized the complicity of government in the problem. While he affirmed, “it is on the state that the public must rely for the assertion of the public interest,” Galbraith warned, the state

“is extensively under the control of corporate power.”139 In overcoming corporate power in both politics and culture, Galbraith placed his faith in education.

From Radical Liberalism to Eco-Socialism

In advocating for various kinds of eco-socialism, Galbraith and Commoner drew from the robust political philosophy of postwar liberalism. Although liberalism in the postwar era reflected its polyglot roots and divergent coalition interests, as a philosophy it nevertheless offered a wellspring for environmental activists. As evinced by postwar liberal environmentalists, liberalism and environmentalism represented a natural alliance; each relied on the other to realize political objectives. Galbraith and Commoner, as well as others partial to eco-socialism, relied on liberal ideas and arguments. Liberal political philosophy emphasized reform, the importance of government in mediating the excesses

137 Commoner speech: “The Ecological Consequences of Social and Economic Inequalities,” The American Academy of Allergy, 7th Feb. 1972, BCP, box 45, folder: The American Academy of Allergy “The Ecological Consequences of Social and Economic Inequalities” Feb 7th, 1972. 138 Commoner speech: “Towards a Humane Science,” Portland OR, April 13th, 1969, BCP, box 30, folder: Towards a Humane Science. 139 John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose, 528.

162 of the market, a belief in the limits of humanity’s perfectibility, and a theory of social change that emphasized collective political action and participatory democracy.

Regardless of how radical their prescriptions may have seemed to orthodox economists and biologists, neither Galbraith nor Commoner were political . Both expressed an abiding faith in the ability of the American people and political institutions to resolve the ecological crisis through rational debate and reform.

“For better or for worse,” Galbraith explained in his introduction to Economics and the

Public Purpose, “I am a reformer and not a revolutionist.”140 As such, Galbraith favored a mixed economic model that balanced private consumption with the public good.

Modern liberals still sought to preserve private ownership and the private means of production, unlike Marxists. Radical liberals blurred this absolute distinction, favoring some public ownership of major industries, but never challenging the basic ideals of .141 Neither Galbraith nor Commoner intended to nationalize all industry. Galbraith advocated for corporatist control, mediated by labor and experts, and held accountable to public needs.142 Before a group of environmentalists and organized labor, Commoner argued that since “production has become a social problem …we need to deal with it socially.”143 Commoner believed in the direct democratic control of the

140 John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose, xiii. 141 Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 237. 142 Historian Kevin Mattson contends Galbraith’s belief in mixed economics resembled that of several other radical liberals, especially Paul Goodman. Mattson summarizes Goodman and Galbraith’s thoughts: “Local initiative—indeed, competition—needed to run alongside a state that was capable of looking after the public interest.” Kevin Mattson, Intellectuals in Action, 134. 143 He continued, “We have to decide that some public control over who gets paid what is necessary.” Commoner speech, Onway, Michigan SIPI- UAW Sponsored National Action Conference, May 3rd, 1976, BCP,box 52, folder: Onway, Michigan SIPI- UAW Sponsored National Action Conference.

163 major means of production and argued for the nationalization of major industries like the railroads and energy production.

As liberals, Galbraith and Commoner expressed concerns over humanity’s limits on controlling nature and perfecting society. Galbraith especially looked to his colleague and close friend Schlesinger. The Harvard historian’s instrumental work concerning postwar liberalism, The Vital Center (1959), criticized fellow liberals for the idea of the perfectibility of mankind and advocated instead for a “militant opposition to visionary ideals, a chastened liberalism of restraint and limits.” For Schlesinger and Galbraith,

World War II—with the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler—showed the danger of ideological mass movements and terrible atrocities inflicted in pursuit of perfection. Liberals need to break with “the sentimentalists, the utopians, the wailers,” Schlesinger argued, and instead identify with “the politicians, the administrators, the doers.”144

Like Schlesinger, pragmatism—not ideology—drove radical liberals like

Galbraith and Commoner. Galbraith argued that due to changing contexts, the line between public and private realms could shift; therefore, “the test of public action is a practical one.” While private industry offered competent corporate managers and of scale, “if needful good can be achieved only by government, or if it can be better achieved by government, the responsibility should be theirs.”145 Likewise,

144 Maurice Isserman and Michael Kazin, American Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 49. Liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr perhaps most popularly advanced this idea in the early postwar years. Niebuhr warned of society’s immoral nature, but understood, “we must defend a civilization which has been digging its grave for decades and has the right to live only because the alternative is so horrible.” 145 Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose, 303. Other radical liberals with a greater emphasis on decentralization reversed this equation, although similarly championed pragmatism and often advocated similar prescriptions. Paul Goodman asserted, “We ought to adopt a political maxim: to decentralize where,

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Commoner argued, “This is not a question of let’s choose sides and see who is for the private enterprise system and who is for socialism.” As a pragmatist, he concluded, “I don’t believe in drawing political blueprints.” Rather, he focused on answering the question: “What is the capability of our economic system to meet human needs?”146

With liberalism’s recognition of man’s inherent imperfectability, liberal environmentalists stressed the limits of humanity’s ability to control the natural world.

Like Carson, Leopold, and Udall, Commoner realized that science offered incredible possibilities, but also a long, dark shadow. Enthusiasm for technology, Commoner argued, “too often has led us to exaggerate our power to control the potent agents which we have let loose in the environment.” Commoner, far more than Galbraith, offered an ecological defense for the limits of man. Because of humanity’s hubris and delusions of dominating nature, he warned humanity was “likely to put massive technological processes into operation before we understand their eventual biological consequences.”147

If Commoner understood the limits of humanity to control the natural world,

Galbraith best articulated the limits of the state. This “dual role” of government in reform, he explained, offered a paradox, as it “is a major part of the problem; it is also central to the remedy.”148 As eco-socialists, Commoner, and especially Galbraith, understood that the federal government was, to use Murray Bookchin’s evocative phrase,

“the poison [and]…the antidote.”149 While eco-socialism derived many of its arguments

how and how much is expedient. But where, how, and how much are empirical questions; they require research and experiment.” Mattson, Intellectuals In Action, 126. 146Commoner speech: “Energy, The Human Dimension,” Scottsdale AZ, Sept 18th, 1976,BCP, box 52, folder: Sept 18th, 1976, Scottsdale. 147 Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 192, 49. 148 Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 303. 149 Murray Bookchin, Post-Scarcity Anarchism (Oakland CA: AK Press, 2004), 11-12.

165 from liberal environmental thought, the majority of mainstream liberals and environmentalists rejected socialism.150

If both thinkers advanced eco-socialist arguments from a foundation of liberalism, they each rejected mainstream liberalism’s complicity in America’s increasingly heated

Cold War. Commoner and Galbraith both emerged as critics of the and argued—much like Martin Luther King in his famous anti-war speech at New York’s

Riverside Baptist Church in 1967—that massive expenditure for warfare in Southeast

Asia would threaten social and environmental programs in America.

In the postwar years, conservatives and liberals coordinated the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. This massive expenditure of government funds also fueled the economy. As environmental historian Ted Steinberg contends, “the federal government, by arming itself to the teeth, produced the golden age of capitalism.”151 Of course, revealing the fundamental disconnect between capitalism and the environment—as Commoner and Galbraith contended—was the fact that militarism boosted the economy while destroying the natural environment.

Galbraith explicitly rejected the state’s embrace of militarism, especially at the

expense of social welfare and environmental protection. This dangerous dichotomy

materialized in state-directed military and strategic goals while the domestic economy

was left to advertisers and private interests, in a “celebration of private consumption.” He

150 When Commoner advocated for a socialized economy, his long-time rival (and mainstream liberal environmentalist) Paul Ehrlich used the opportunity to his advantage. After publishing The Closing Circle, which only hinted at socialism in principle, Ehrlich argued such talk would destroy the mainstream environmental movement: “There is no point in waving a red flag in front of the bulls” he said in 1971. Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 165. 151 Ted Steinberg, “Can Capitalism Save the Planet?” 12.

166 warned that state power, much like industry, could serve non-productive social ends. “We are living under a curious kind of military Keynesianism,” Galbraith observed in 1958,

“in which Mars has rushed in to fill the gap left by the market economy.”152 In rejecting this militarism, and the resulting Vietnam War, Galbraith split with President Lyndon

Johnson, even though his Great Society mirrored many of Galbraith’s ideas.153 The

Harvard economist even argued on behalf of the anti-war critic and whistleblower Daniel

Ellsberg at his trial over leaking Papers.154

Both the economist and ecologist alike argued that militarism caused environmental degradation. In Economics and the Public Purpose, Galbraith explicitly connected the “ability to survive…arms competition” and the ability to “breathe…air.”155

Despite the rising standard of living—as conventionally measured by GDP, productivity,

and material affluence—he warned the “commitment to the technology of war” would

undo this progress, either over time, or with the judgment of a mushroom cloud.156 In his memoirs, Galbraith concluded that if the nation failed to check militarism and the production of nuclear weapons, everything else “will be without meaning.”157

Commoner likewise advanced the argument that the nation’s massive commitment to militarism was non-productive. He pointed to the great and social systems of Germany and , whose marginal military expenditures allowed for far greater capital investment in social needs. In contrast, Commoner noted, the United

152 Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 302. 153 Kevin Mattson, “John Kenneth Galbraith: Liberalism and the Politics of Cultural Critique” in American Capitalism, 90. 154 Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 502. 155 John Kenneth Galbraith, Economics and the Public Purpose, 9. 156 Richard Parker, John Kenneth Galbraith, 449. 157 John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs, 537.

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States devoted ten percent of its national output towards the military, to the detriment of the nation’s people and its environment.158 He contended that militarism threatened the welfare of the American people, by defunding their schools, roads, and healthcare to pay for fighter jets, aircraft carriers, and nuclear missiles.159 For both Commoner and

Galbraith, mainstream liberalism proved a necessary foundation to advance arguments foundational to eco-socialism, but it remained insufficient.

Conclusion: The Social Nature of Ecology

For all of their insights and arguments, perhaps the most enduring legacy of

Galbraith and Commoner’s defense of eco-socialism remains their holistic understanding of . Like other holists of the postwar era, namely Rachel Carson,

Buckminster Fuller, and Martin Luther King Jr., Galbraith and Commoner argued that social issues were inextricably linked to ecological concerns.160 In this context, it is little surprise that neither preferred to be called an environmentalist; a polluted environment evinced deeper social issues.

Of the two thinkers, Commoner best advanced this holistic understanding.

Refuting the prescriptions of many mainstream environmentalists, he explained, “Energy problems will not be solved by technological sleight-of-land, clever tax schemes, or patchwork legislation.”161 In the truest sense of the term, Commoner was a radical because his solution cut to the very root of society. “To resolve the environmental crisis,”

158 Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 243. 159 Ibid, 251. 160 See Linda Sargent Wood, A More Perfect Union: Holistic Worldview and the Transformation of American Culture after World War II (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010). 161 Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power, 4.

168 he wrote in The Closing Circle, “we shall need to forego, at last, the luxury of tolerating poverty, racial discrimination, and war.”162 While giving a lecture at Berkeley,

Commoner explained, “When any environmental issue is pursued to its origins, it reveals an inescapable truth—that the root cause of the crisis is not to be found in how men interact with nature, but in how they interact with each other—that, to solve the environmental crisis we must solve the problems of poverty, racial injustice and war.”163

Despite the ecological wisdom of their claims, Commoner and Galbraith’s socialistic prescriptions fell on deaf ears by the end of the 1970s. As Commoner’s biographer concludes, “Commoner's message was relegated to a marginal place in the environmental discourse just at the moment that its prescience seemed almost incontrovertible.” Because of the myopic view espoused by environmentalists and conservative critics, many Americans blamed strict environmental regulations for the weak economy of the 1970s.164 In the 1980s, Commoner and Galbraith’s criticisms almost fell silent as the political left fractured or, in the case of New Left intellectuals, sought refuge in the ivory towers of academia. Yet Galbraith remained committed to his analysis and quipped, “A commitment to losing causes is still a constant in my life.”165

The failure of eco-socialism since the 1970s offers perhaps another important lesson. As environmental historian Michael Egan argues, in American history, the nation has mostly embraced an individualistic—not communalistic—relationship with the

162 Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 176. 163 Commoner speech: “Ecology and Social Action,” Horace Marden Albright Lecturer in Conservation, Berkeley, CA, March 15th, 1973, BCP, box 47, FOLDER: March 15th, 73, Berkeley CA, UC, “Ecology and Social Action.” 164 In in steel-producing communities during the 1973-75 the slogan “No work, no food—Eat an Environmentalist” became popular. Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 139, 146. 165 John Kenneth Galbraith, A Life in Our Times: Memoirs, 537.

169 natural world.166 Commoner and Galbraith questioned this individualized relationship with nature. Indeed, the current crisis of climate change—long predicted by

Commoner—offers irrefutable evidence for humanity’s fundamentally social relationship with the natural world. Since the costs of pollution are inevitably socialized—should not the nation’s citizens have direct control over the economic processes that create this pollution? In short, they argued, since pollution socializes itself, so too should politics.167

Perhaps Galbraith’s “commitment to losing causes” may be relegated to a failure of his era, not the present. Commoner never stopped championing this hope. Until his final days, passing away in September 2012 at the age of ninety-five, Commoner upheld his liberal commitment to environmental justice. “The collective power of people working together,” he reminded an increasingly-individualistic nation, “this is what will bring about what the world ought to have, which is….” Commoner affirmed at the age of ninety, “I’m an eternal optimist, and I think eventually people will come around.”168

166 Michael Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 82. 167Commoner understood that while pollution was socialized, it was propagated downwards on the socio- economic ladder. Thus, pollution was worse for the poor and marginal for the wealthy. 168 Daniel Lewis, “Scientist, Candidate, and Earth’s Lifeguard,” The New York Times, October 1st, 2012.

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AFTERWARD

As the 1970s progressed, the intellectual contributions of countercultural environmentalists dominated America’s ecological consciousness. Despite millions of

Americans approving of government-led —probably the widest public support for such a measure in American history—the counterculture’s anti- political ideals gained prominence.1 The fallout from the Vietnam War, Watergate, and budget constraints precipitated a rejection of social democratic solutions in the 1970s.

Like the Great Depression that created the New Deal regulatory state that thrived throughout the middle of the century, the growth of green consumerism owed its inception to larger systemic forces. With a decline in the faith of government, the energy crisis, and President Carter’s embrace of personal sacrifice, countercultural ecological ideas became central to American environmentalism.2 Furthermore, the Vietnam War, rising unemployment and inflation, and government expenditures contributed to economic stagnation and the collapse of the postwar economic boom. Economist Robert

Pollin argues, “These were the conditions that by the end of the 1970s led to the decline of social democratic approaches to policymaking.”3

As environmental historian Robert Gottlieb argues, the “abandonment of [the

New Left’s] political and organizational possibilities…not only served to disperse this

1 As Political Scientist Walter Rosenbaum argues, “In the early 1970s, environmentalists mobilized for political action in a uniquely congenial climate of opinion; perhaps at no time in this century was the American public more receptive to the environmental gospel.” Egan, Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, 112. This led to the passage of twenty-three environmental legislative acts in the short span of a decade. Dowie, Losing Ground, 33. 2 In his 1979 “Crisis of Confidence speech,” Carter said, “Every act of …is more than just common sense- I tell you it’s an act of patriotism.” See Kevin Mattson, What the Heck Are You Up To Mr. President? 3 Ted Steinberg, “Can Capitalism Save the Planet?” 12.

171 once promising movement but significantly altered the development of the environmental movement itself.” In its wake, the already commercialized ethos of the counterculture offered accessible products, individualistic consciousness, and a plethora of New Age remedies. The counterculture’s “diffuse environmental sentiment” endured as “part cultural expression, part social dissatisfaction, part search for new environmental values.”

While the communes of the counterculture collapsed during the 1970s, the legacy of the counterculture remained stronger than ever.4 The counterculture’s emphasis on social dissent, personal lifestyle, and a rejection of organized politics supplanted political socialism with green consumerism and personal responsibility as the dominant tactics of modern environmentalism.

By the end of the 1970s and early 1980s, according to philosophers Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, “Americans were far more likely to treat the countercultural idea as a self-standing political paradigm.” As evinced by Brand’s Catalog, “hippie counterculture shared many of the individualistic and libertarian ideas that have always made neo- liberalism and free-market ideology such a powerful force on the right wing of the

American political spectrum.”5 The progression from countercultural to free-market environmentalism was natural and logical.

Concurrent with the rise of libertarian environmentalism, the 1970s witnessed a profound shift in the interpretation of ecology. As environmental historian Donald

4 “Ultimately,” Gottlieb argues, “the post-scarcity-oriented New Left of the 1960s, with its vision of alternative communities, its critique of daily life, and its focus on industrial related pollution and the problems of consumption, represented a direction for environmentalism never fully explored.” Gottlieb, 140, 148. 5 Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture (New York: Harper Collins, 2004), 68.

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Worster argues, “Every generation…writes its own description of the natural order, which generally reveals as much about human society and its changing concerns as it does about nature.”6 Rejecting Carson and Commoner’s analysis of the interconnected nature of humanity and nature, and human communities across the world, the ecological views of 1970s environmentalism became increasingly individualistic. As the “Me

Decade” progressed, “Holists scaled back and retreated to more personal expressions,” explains historian Linda Sergent Wood. The holism of the 1960s shed “much of its communitarian drive, optimist impulse, and utopian thrust” and lost ground to an ecological view that emphasized individualism, disorder, and competition.7 This profound shift in holistic and ecological ideas owed much of its inception to countercultural interpretations and Brand’s individualistic ecology and emerged in full force during the 1970s.

In perhaps the most famous public service campaign of all time, the 1971 “Keep

America Beautiful” campaign exemplified the counterculture’s libertarian environmentalism, individual responsibility, and corporate consumerism. It featured actor

Iron Eyes Cody in Native American garb. He is confronted with the vast waste of industrial America and sheds a tear at the pillaged Earth. Then a voice admonishes,

“People start pollution, people can stop it.” Mirroring the individualized solutions of modern green consumerism, major corporations opposed to regulation funded and produced the commercial. The “Keep America Beautiful” campaign was formed and funded by the American Can Company and Owens-Illinois Glass Company to oppose

6 Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 292. 7 Wood, A More Perfect Union, 205-207.

173 national bottle laws and any form of environmental regulations.8 Following the lead of

Walt Kelley’s famous “Pogo” cartoon, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, the U.S. Brewers

Association and other corporations succeeded in depicting littering not as a systemic problem of a disposable society, but instead as a personal responsibility.9

As the 1970s drew to a close, the popularity of countercultural lifestyles, appropriate technologies, and anti-political tactics drew the attention of social critics.

Witnessing the culmination of the counterculture as a student at Berkeley from 1962 to

1973, Political scientist Langdon Winner published a scathing critique of the counterculture’s green consumerism and appropriate technology entitled, “Building the

Better Mousetrap” (1980).10 Opening with a description of $16,000 “His and Her Urban

Windmills” in the 1977 Neiman-Marcus catalog, Winner concluded, “movements for social change have often ended up a fashion trends.” He dismissed the countercultural notion of social change where individuals would “vote on the shape of the future through their consumer/builder choices” and argued counterculturalists “were unwilling to face squarely the facts of organized social and political power.” Because Brand and his ilk focused too much on the trees, they missed the forest—“the institutions that control the

8 Ted Steinberg, “Can Capitalism Save the Planet?” 13. 9 These very same industries phased out re-usable bottles to increase profitability. “It was an elegantly closed circle,” essayist Ginger Strand argues. “The titans of packaging pushed throwaways into production. The Ad Council preached the creed of consumption, assuring Americans that the road to prosperity was paved with trash. The people bought; the people threw away. Then, the same industries and advertisers turned around and called them pigs. The people shamefacedly cleaned up the trash. And the packagers, pointing to the cleaned-up landscape, just went on making more of it.” Ginger Strand, “The Crying Indian,” Orion Magazine, November/ December 2008. 10 Quoting Emerson’s theory of social change, Winner showcases his choice of title: “If a man can write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he builds his house in the woods the world will make a path to his door.” 78-79.

174 direction of technological and economic development.”11 Winner invoked Marx and

Engels’ conclusions about the 19th century utopians to describe counterculturalists: “they were lovely visionaries, naive about the forces that confronted them.” Instead of

“appropriate technologies,” he questioned, “Why not ‘appropriate economics?’”12

Despite the complaints of critics, American society showed few signs of reevaluating their consumeristic environmental consciousness. The 1980s and solidified green consumerism and individual action as America’s favored tactics for social and environmental change. The transformation of America’s “environmental imagination” in the late 1960s and early 1970s constitutes a crucial turning point for the environmental movement. Once citizens committed to collective political action,

Americans now act as individualistic green consumers committed to personal salvation.

11 As Isserman and Kazin noted, “LSD made it possible to have a decent conversation with a tree.” Rome, “Give Earth a Chance,” 543. 12 Winner, “Building the Better Mousetrap,” 61, 80.

175

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