This is an excellent collection -- a festschrift at Barry Commoner's 80th birthday. It includes contributions from Italy on Commoner's important role there in "greening" the left, as well as an article on his early nuclear work in St. Louis. Environmentalists, labor, and academic points of view -- and points of appreciation -- are all evident. An important book about an important figure in science and social action.

Commoner's "peace" for the planet is a resolution of the conflict he describes as a "war between the ecosphere and the technosphere." He describes his objective quite well himself (pg 148 of the hard-cover edition): "The issue we face... is not how to facilitate environmental quality by limiting economic development..., but how to create a system of production that can grow and develop in harmony with the environment." And Commoner goes on to give specific examples of this harmonious system of production, well researched and documented. MAKING PEACE WITH THE PLANET is at its most inspiring when it offers practical ways to adapt (NOT downscale) our current lifestyle to move to more environmentally benign methods of sustaining ourselves. It is an essential addition to the library of anyone looking for practical solutions to today's environmental concerns. - Richard Warren Field, author of THE ELECTION, also available at amazon.com

This book was a non-fiction book that was written in 1967 and was mostly based on the United States. However, Commoner did talk about worldwide effects too.
The characters or people he dealt with in his book were government officials and scientists who kept information secret, other privately funded scientists who found serious mistakes in government testing, and everyone else in society.
Science is advancing before consequences of nuclear tests and other tests are known. Commoner urges citizens for reform in government policies to protect us from the evils of nuclear fallout. The story is quite interesting, because he describes a valid point even with the limited knowledge he had over thirty years ago. He warns of the danger of fallout in this quote: "To understand the biological effects of fallout we must know what happens at each step of this complicated chain of events. There is now a fairly complete published record of this knowledge. This record reveals a number of important errors in our understanding of the problem, which remained uncorrected until the testing of nuclear weapons in the atmosphere was in full swing and fallout had been massively disseminated into the environment."
This book was left open-ended. He called everyone to make changes in the system. This story still continues. As we continue to pollute our earth, the earth will eventually not be safe from mankind. Only scientists and society will decide how this drama will unfold.
The theme is that political power and moral judgment should be used to keep mankind and science from inevitably destroying our race. He says that society should protest against the evils of government testing.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in science or interested in the survival of the human race on this planet. I definitely discourage anyone with a short attention span or anyone with limited knowledge in science from reading this book. It gets very scientific and somewhat boring in some parts, but for the most part puts forth a good message.