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The Closing Circle: a Review of Barry Commoner's Book

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The Closing Circle: a Review of Barry Commoner's Book IUSTITIA Volume 1 Number 1 Article 6 4-15-1973 The Closing Circle: A Review of Barry Commoner's Book Robert L. Scott Follow this and additional works at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/iustitia Part of the Environmental Law Commons, Environmental Policy Commons, Environmental Studies Commons, and the Other Life Sciences Commons Recommended Citation Scott, Robert L. (1973) "The Closing Circle: A Review of Barry Commoner's Book," IUSTITIA: Vol. 1 : No. 1 , Article 6. Available at: https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/iustitia/vol1/iss1/6 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. It has been accepted for inclusion in IUSTITIA by an authorized editor of Digital Repository @ Maurer Law. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The Closing Circle: A review of Barry Commoner's book by Robert L. Scott "The need for institutional progress is always the same: injustice or deprivation of one sort or another ....The conservation of the biosphere, elimination of poverty, racism, and war .... The intelligent participation of all men as citizens of a world republic. In all the class-divided societies of the past, and in the still imperfect approximations to the ideal of the classless society that are to be found in the best of existing socialist, democratic republics, revolution is always brewing, and there is room for progress to be made." 2 "We are suffering from a disordered and lawless form of humanism... I refer to the conviction,. ., that man, lord and master of nature, exists on one side, and, on the other side there is nature, entirely exterior to him. That makes nature no more than a thing, an object, an instrument.... In order to make their world intelligible, the so-called primitives construct myths. They try to arrange the various elements offered by the world of sense experience into a story. they try to fit these elements together in a relationship that makes a meaningful whole ....Perhaps it has never been more necessary than now, to say what the myths say: that a well- ordered humanism does not begin with itself, but puts things back in their place. It puts the world before life, life before man, and the respect of others before love of self.' 2 Commoner's book provides an opportunity to review the problems of pollution and their causes in the social, political, and economic fabric of our society. This review also provides an opportunity to compare and contrast natural and social laws. From this examination of the problem of pollution and the interface between natural and social law emerge certain ideological concerns confronting Americans as a people. 81 During the summer, this reviewer had occasion to read complaints prepared by the lawyers in the Environmental Division of the Ohio Attorney General's Office and to read actual judgments which came down pursuant to those complaints. Gradually a reality took shape-a reality which is only partly reflected in the court cases, the statutes, and the ecological text such as the one to be reviewed here. The problem of pollution involves real people and their conflicting value demands. The value de- mands of conservationists compete with corporate demands. The former demands an end of harm to human, plant, and animal life. The latter agrees in principle with this demand but seeks to protect profits, jobs, and the availability of products for public consumption. Whether one chooses to align with the conservationists or capitalists, in one way or another natural resources are involved, either as sources for production or as objects for consumption upon which man depends for life and sustenance. This is nothing new; the immediate consequence of living is the consumption of resources. What is new is the recognition that the current level of consumption may now have irrevocable effect upon the environment. These consequences derive from the particular manner in which resources are used: people lay claim to certain resources and then trade them off for money or other resources; the object is at the very least sustenance and at the most the accumulation of wealth in order to gain greater affluence or influence in the affairs of men. The consequence of this pattern of consumption is the focal point of Commoner's book. Commoner's book reveals a basic conflict in the operations between natural and human processes. On the one hand, nature consists of a system of interconnected life forms, each depending on and in turn being controlled by, another form. Human civilization, on the other hand, involves a sequence of cyclically interdependent processes that feed upon nature and that have a built-in tendency to grow without check. The latter tendency lacks nature's internal control. This uncontrolled growth is evident in the capitalist production system and is upsetting the balance of nature. (By nature is meant the elements of air, water, and soil which support human and plant life.) How Nature's Balance is Upset: Breaking Out of the Circle Commoner tells us that the actual chemical composition of living things is an enormously narrow selection from the range of possibilities. Organic compounds were derived from the simple ingredients of the earth's early atmosphere by non-living, linear chemical processes and later gave rise to life in the presence of the sun. Living things first survived by deriving their energy from organic food via the process of fermentation. Then, when the first green plant used sunlight to combine carbon dioxide and inorganic materials into fresh organic matter, the circle of life was closed. This crucial event reconverted the first life forms' waste, carbon dioxide, into its food organic compounds. Thus, this life became a system of interconnections called an eco- sphere, in which each affect is also a cause: an animal's waste became food for soil bacteria; what the bacteria excrete nourishes plants; and animals eat the plant. Man has broken out of this circle of life. The problem is how to close it, which is the source for the title of Commoner's book. In it, he describes the breakout and its causes and offers some suggestions for a solution. Soil, water, and air are the bases for sustaining natural life. An understanding of the environmental cycles that govern the behavior of these three great global systems is deemed by Commoner a prerequisite for understanding how the cycles are broken. 82 The water cycle is explained by showing the relationship between the movement of nitrogen within the system. This movement is cyclical through a sequence of steps: fish produce organic waste; micro-organisms working upon the waste release nitrogen from organic forms and combine it with oxygen to form nitrate, which is reconverted to organic forms by algae; the algae's organic matter nourishes small aquatic animals, and these, in turn, are eaten by the fish. The balance between the rate of decay of organic materials and the rate of algae growth determines the concentration of nitrogen in the water. Since little nitrate reaches the water from the soil because of its thrifty use in the soil cycle, the nitrate content of natural surface water is very low (on the order of one part per million), and the algae population is correspondingly low. There is a natural balance. The air cycle is explained by describing the effect of weather. The weather keeps the air clean. Anything that becomes airborn is caught by the weather and eventually brought to earth, where it enters the environmental cycles that operate in the water and the soil. If there is little air movement, whatever is introduced to the air by local activities, such as smog, tends to accumulate in the air. The soil cycle is, like the water cycle, explained by tracing the movement of nitrogen. Nitrogen can enter the soil through nitrogen fixation, a process carried out by various bacteria and algae, some of them living free in the soil and others associated with the roots of legume plants. Nitrogen also enters the soil from the decay of plant matter and animal wastes. Soil micro-organisms convert nitrogen into nitrate, which is taken up by the roots of the plants. Interruptions to these various cycles are caused by man. Pollutants in the water cycle come from sources such as contaminated water used in industrial processes, nitrogen (used in fertilizer) run-off from farms, and normal sanitation refuse from towns and cities. Pollution in the air is usually thrown off by car exhaust and smoke stacks from the varieties of industries. Soil pollution may occur from the intrusion of foreign chemical substances, such as pesticides or mercury. The effect of these pollutants is the gradual breakdown of the balance which normally exists among these three environmental cycles. Social and Economic Causes The break in the life-sustaining cycles is caused by certain social processes that, un- like nature, have a built-in tendency to grow. These processes are science, technology, and economics. The growth in scientific knowledge, the knowledge of how nature operates, is applied by technologists to achieve economic ends. Therefore, science and technology guide the economic system and are, in turn, guided by it. There is, then, a self-accelerating interaction between increased wealth and increased technology which has had the effect of increasing existing pollution levels and causing unprecedented threats to the balance of nature. In Commoner's view, most postwar technological developments and the population explosion have contributed substantially to this imbalance. In brief, man has been re- placing goods which are largely degradable with those which do not deteriorate and, therefore, accumulate as waste; he has also tended to create more goods that are dif- ficult or impossible to recycle.
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