Barry Commoner Quotes

Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.

Everything is connected to everything else.

Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.

Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.

Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.

The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production - in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation - essential as they are, make people sick and die.

After all, despite the economic advantage to firms that employed child labor, it was in the social interest, as a national policy, to abolish it - removing that advantage for all firms.

All of the clean technologies are known, it's a question of simply applying them.

If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.

Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.

In every case, the environmental hazards were made known only by independent scientists, who were often bitterly opposed by the corporations responsible for the hazards.

Environmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline - which prevented it from entering the environment.

It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.

The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.

We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.

The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.

Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.

By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.

My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically - and destructively - demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.

It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.

The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.

What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology.

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

What is new is that environmentalism intensely illuminates the need to confront the corporate domain at its most powerful and guarded point - the exclusive right to govern the systems of production.

In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.

The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.

Technologists practice faith too; 'Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.'

World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.

The AEC scientists were so narrowly focused on arming the United States for nuclear war that they failed to perceive facts - even widely known ones - that were outside their limited field of vision.

The gap between brute power and human need continues to grow, as the power fattens on the same faulty technology that intensifies the need.

I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It's irrational.

The modern technologist is less 'sorcerer' and more 'sorcerer's apprentice'.

In certain ways, I'm not very different than I was when I was a teenager.

In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.

No action is without its side effects.

Science is triumphant with far-ranging success, but its triumph is somehow clouded by growing difficulties in providing for the simple necessities of human life on earth.

What I have experienced over time is that environmental problems are easier to deal with in ways that don't go into their interconnections to the rest of what we are.

The wave of new productive enterprises would provide opportunities to remedy the unjust distribution of environmental hazards among economic classes and racial and ethnic communities.