Making Peace With The Planet

In Barry Commoner's Making Peace With The Planet, we find the finger-of-blame of environmental destruction pointed at corporate America. While Commoner does not undermine the importance of personal efforts to reduce, reuse, and recycle, he does take corporate leaders to task as the chief culprits behind the destruction of the environment. Commoner argues against our current system of economics and production. He argues that a handful of wealthy corporate leaders dictate decisions to the rest of us that obligates us to participate in environmental destruction. We often have no recourse over these decisions that are made to profit in the short-run but which destroy the environment in the long-run. For example, we had no say when ketchup bottles and milk bottles were changed to non-returnable plastic containers. Not only do we have no say in these decisions that bring more harm to the environment, but we receive no economic benefit from the profits that drive such decisions originally. According to Commoner (229), these corporate generals "have usually responded by bitterly resisting almost every effort to even acknowledge, let alone reduce, the environmental impact of those decisions."

Commoner does not save all the blame for environmental destruction for corporate America. He allots plenty of blame to political policies, especially those enacted by Reagan and Bush, which somehow seem to determine that certain levels o

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Category: Literature - M