Connections

It is not often I'm ever aware that my thinking lines up to someone as esteemed as Barry Commoner, a biologist, academic environmentalist, and founder of modern ecology, who just passed away at 95.

Dr. Commoner was considered and known as the first person to sound the alarms about what toxic substances were doing to the earth, and therefore us.

In two separate obituaries the writers list Dr. Commoner's four informal rules of ecology. Each writer quotes the rules the same way, so I'm guessing even if they were informal rules, they were written in stone. No interpretations. No variance.

Everything is connected to everything else.
Everything must go somewhere.
Nature knows best.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.

I therefore find myself in great company when I match the ethos of this blog against his four pillars.

Everything gets connected somehow.
We live on a Mobius strip.

At 95 and born in 1917, Dr. Commoner was only two years younger than my father, who in no way lived as long. Born in New York City's borough of Brooklyn, Barry heard the same repeated and word-of-mouth generational laments that I became familiar with while growing up.

There were several old-timers who hung out at the family flower shop in the 1960s who I heard wistfully lament the passing of the good old days, when you could go into a saloon and pay a nickel for the beer and help yourself to the free stack of sandwiches on plates on the bar. You paid for the beer, but the lunch was free.

When things change, they never go back to what they were.

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