Barry Commoner

Commoner first came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s by opposing nuclear weapons tests, a campaign that soon branched out into other environmental concerns and issues of peace and social justice. Over 20 years he helped to lay the foundation stones for the “green” movement in a series of books which linked ecological concerns with a radical social agenda, appealing to traditional nature conservationists, the anti-nuclear movement and civil rights activists. The son of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Barry Commoner was born in Brooklyn on May 28 1917 and educated at James Madison High School, Columbia University and at Harvard, where he took a PhD in Cellular Biology. After two years teaching at Queens College, Brooklyn, and wartime service in the US Naval Air Corps, in 1947 he joined the faculty of Washington University in St Louis, where he became founding director of the Centre for the Biology of Natural Systems, an environmental think tank. In 1981 he moved the centre from St Louis to Queens College. In 1979 Commoner helped form the Citizens Party, hoping it would gain influence similar to that of the Green Party in Europe. The next year Commoner ran as the party’s presidential candidate. He got on the ballot in twenty-nine states but received less than one-third of 1 percent of the national vote. Like most third parties in the American system, the Citizens Party wound up being a minor fringe force. Commoner did not run again for office, but he advised Jesse Jackson’s Democratic Party presidential campaigns in the 1980s.