The closing circle: nature, man, & technology

This book, along with such things as "Silent Spring", is one of the primary texts marking and shaping the American (and world) awareness of the dangers posed to nature and the worldwide natural environment by home sapiens and our species increasingly multitudinous and potent activities. Back in the day, there was a tendency in the American popular media to define this threat in terms of increasingly powerful and inscrutable technology or increasing human population. Fools and polemicists tended to see this "either ... or", and Commoner was usually pointed out as holding that technology was the principal threat; indeed, he did in fact downplay increasing population as an independent factor in environmental degradation, holding that unsustainable population increase was largely a result of poverty, and by extension inappropriate or inequitably distributed technological access. Paul Ehrlich was usually the symbol of the population side. But this kind of artificial opposition wasn't inherent in what anyone who really thought was really thinking, however easy it was for genuine thinkers such as Commoner to get drawn into media-driven polemic.