War & Peace Quote by Barry Commoner

“Modern assault” is a deliberately prosecutorial phrase, and Commoner wields it like an indictment: not a vague lament about “humanity,” but a timed charge sheet with a start date, a culprit, and a chain of command. By pegging environmental crisis to “about 50 years ago,” he rejects the comforting story that ecological damage is simply the price of civilization. His subtext is sharper: the turning point wasn’t people in general; it was a specific political economy that emerged from wartime mobilization and hardened into peacetime normalcy.

The contextual bullseye is World War II’s industrial acceleration and the postwar boom that treated nature as a logistical problem to be solved with chemistry, extraction, and scale. The war normalized centralized production, secrecy, and technical fixes; afterward those habits flowed into pesticides, petrochemicals, plastics, high-yield agriculture, highways, and suburban sprawl. “During and immediately after” is doing heavy lifting here: it implies continuity, suggesting that the mindset of emergency never really ended, it just found new markets.

Commoner, as a scientist with a public voice, is also making a rhetorical move: he’s pulling environmentalism away from sentimental wilderness talk and toward systems analysis. Naming a recent origin point makes the crisis feel political and therefore reversible. If the assault was initiated by decisions - industrial design, military funding, corporate adoption, regulatory permissiveness - then different decisions can stop it. The line quietly reframes environmental degradation as history, not destiny.