Barry Commoner (1917-2012), founded the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems at Washington University in 1966 as the first Federally-funded environmental health sciences center in the nation. Barry was an exceptional scientist, teacher, writer and citizen. Barry was rightly called the "father of the environmental movement," because his brilliant speeches, books, and writings beginning in the 1950's and 1960's influenced a generation and helped people understand the causes of and solutions to environmental problems. He took on a succession of seminal issues – radioactivity releases in the 1960’s, energy in the 1970's, solid waste and recycling in the 1980's, global dispersion of pollutants in the 1990's, and the use of genetic knowledge in the 2000's – harnessing whatever knowledge and creativity was needed to identify the core elements of the problem and the keys to its resolution. Barry had enormous confidence in democracy, i.e., citizen participation, and spent much of his career empowering the public to have influence in social decision-making that affected their lives. Barry's approach to identifying, connecting and addressing inter-related issues and subsequently locating the need to act on the root causes of the environmental crisis remains as true today as when he first began his work over 60 years ago.