Chronicles the activist career of Barry Commoner, one of the most influential American environmental thinkers, and his role in recasting the environmental movement after World War II. For over half a century, the biologist Barry Commoner has been one of the most prominent and charismatic defenders of the American environment, appearing on the cover of Time magazine in 1970 as the standard-bearer of "the emerging science of survival." In Barry Commoner and the Science of Survival, Michael Egan examines Commoner's social and scientific activism and charts an important shift in American environmental values since World War II.Throughout his career, Commoner believed that scientists had a social responsibility, and that one of their most important obligations was to provide citizens with accessible scientific information so they could be included in public debates that concerned them. Egan shows how Commoner moved naturally from calling attention to the hazards of nuclear fallout to raising public awareness of the environmental dangers posed by the petrochemical industry. He argues that Commoner's belief in the importance of dissent, the dissemination of scientific information, and the need for citizen empowerment were critical planks in the remaking of American environmentalism. Commoner's activist career can be defined as an attempt to weave together a larger vision of social justice. Since the 1960s, he has called attention to parallels between the environmental, civil rights, labor, and peace movements, and connected environmental decline with poverty, injustice, exploitation, and war, arguing that the root cause of environmental problems was the American economic system and its manifestations. He was instrumental in pointing out that there was a direct association between socioeconomic standing and exposure to environmental pollutants and that economics, not social responsibility, was guiding technological decision making. Egan argues that careful study of Commoner's career could help reinvigorate the contemporary environmental movement at a point when the environmental stakes have never been so high.

Discusses the public and private sector's attempts to address environmental problems and explains why they have not worked.

"I regard him as right and compassionate on nearly every major issue." — Stephen Jay Gould. Radical 1971 argument about the root causes of climate change remains a must-read for environmentalists.

From Jamestown to 9/11, concerns about the landscape, husbanding of natural resources, and the health of our environment have been important to the American way of life. Natural Protest is the first collection of original essays to offer a cohesive social and political examination of environmental awareness, activism, and justice throughout American history. Editors Michael Egan and Jeff Crane have selected the finest new scholarship in the field, establishing this complex and fascinating subject firmly at the forefront of American historical study. Focused and thought-provoking, Natural Protest presents a cutting-edge perspective on American environmentalism and environmental history, providing an invaluable resource for anyone concerned about the ecological fate of the world around us.

"In the last ten years, the United States—the most powerful and technically advanced society in human history—has been confronted by a series of ominous, seemingly intractable crises. First there was the threat to the environmental survival; then there was the apparent shortage of energy: and now there is the unexpected decline of the economy. These are usually regarded as separate afflictions, each to be solved in its own terms: environmental degradation by pollution controls; the energy crisis by finding new sources of energy and new ways of conserving it; the economic crisis by manipulating prices, taxes, and interest rates. But each effort to solve one crisis seems to clash with the solution of the others—pollution control reduces energy supplies; energy conservation jobs. Inevitably, proponents of one solution become opponents of the others. Policy stagnates and remedial action is paralyzed, adding to the confusion and gloom that beset the country." So opens Barry Commoner's The Poverty of Power, the book in which America's great biologist and environmentalist addresses himself to the central question of our day. He concludes that "what confronts us is not a series of separate crises, but a single basic deficit—a fault that lies deep in the design of modern society. This book is an effort to unearth that fault, to trace its relation to the separate crises, and to consider what can be done to correct it at its root."