By Jim Heffernan
I’ve been thinking a lot about Barry Commoner these days. Not really his fault, but it brews up in my mind an unsavory stew of wasted votes, unheeded advice, and pervasive negativity in the news media.
Barry Commoner was born in 1917 and died at age 95. He wrote a string of best-selling books in the 1970’s and is considered to be one of the founders of modern environmental science. He’s the one who came up with the “Five Laws of Ecology”.
He ran for president in 1980, and I foolishly wasted my vote on him. My choices were, Barry, Ronald Regan, and Jimmy Carter. I knew the “neo-liberalism” of Ronald Regan would prove to be detrimental. I was fooled into thinking that Jimmy Carter was ineffective. I was pure and simply manipulated by the negativity of pundits into wasting my vote on a candidate that had no chance.
I see the same thing happening today with Joe Biden. He’s really done his job pretty well, but our ignorance of civics and our fondness for negativity fools many of us into thinking he’s failing.
In many quarters, Biden is blamed for inflation as if there were a lever attached to his desk that he could pull back to bring inflation down. I firmly believe that prices are up because corporations, even when they’re making record profits, can raise prices at will. If Biden gets the blame, perhaps a new government will gift them with a new round of tax cuts.
We’re always hearing about an economy is shambles, but the American economy has recovered from Covid better than any other economy. Just today, the Dow-Jones reached an all-time high. Negativity sells advertising better than truth,
Congress is supposed to be enacting legislation to foster the common good, but Congress seems to be broken by partisanship and a “confederacy of dunces” who would prefer to quibble about an overblown border “crisis” while they blithely ignore promises we made in 1994 to protect Ukraine. Climate change, inequality, and homelessness are not problems they wish to consider.
If Barry were alive, he would not be pleased.
As a perfect example of unheeded advice, here are his 5 Laws of Ecology formulated in his 1971 book:
Five Laws of Ecology
Law 1-Everything is Connected to Everything Else
The basic message behind this law is that all things are connected to each other, sometimes in very obvious ways, and sometimes in very complex, indirect ways.
Law 2-Everything has to Go Somewhere of There is No Such Place as Away.
This is one law that has become increasingly clear as we attempt to find ways to deal with the waste we produce each day. The garbage truck takes our trash “away”, but where is that?
Law 3-Nature knows best.
Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is likely to be detrimental to that system.
Law 4-There is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch.
“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.”—Aldo Leopold
Law 5-Everything has limits
For many years, it was believed that there was no end to what we could take from the Earth. There were always more fish in the sea, more trees to be cut, more ore to be mined, more earth to be tilled and more places to dump our trash. We now realize that this is not true.
As always, discussion welcome at codger817@gmail.com