Environment: Paul Revere of Ecology

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Unless he is off making another speech, Commoner leaves the office by 6 p.m. and walks a mile and a half to his Mediterranean-style house, where he has a vodka on the rocks with his wife Gloria, a pretty New Yorker who majored in psychology at Oberlin. Gloria once gave him a bicycle to get home faster, but he prefers to walk because "it's a great time to use your head." It also keeps his 5-ft. 11-in. frame trim. Now that his two grown children have left home, he and his wife actually go to movies and the theater. But not much. Commoner dislikes schedules; his workdays seem like a chaos of unorganized activity—at least to outsiders. His view is different: "I've sort of created my own life-style and the main thing is that everything is interrelated. It's like nature and ecosystems —intrinsic complexity."