Barry Commoner
Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Environmental
Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.Collection: Environmental
World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.Collection: Technology
The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.Collection: Environmental
The most meaningful engine of change, powerful enough to confront corporate power, may be not so much environmental quality, as the economic development and growth associated with the effort to improve it.Collection: Environmental
By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.Collection: Environmental
The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.Collection: Technology
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.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Environmental
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.Collection: Environmental
Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.Collection: Environmental
If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.
Nature knows best.
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.
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
There is no such thing as a free lunch.
I don't believe in environmentalism as the solution to anything. What I believe is that environmentalism illuminates the things that need to be done to solve all of the problems together.
It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
The major source of photochemical smog - petroleum-fueled vehicles - can be replaced by emission-free electric vehicles.
The weapons were conceived and created by a small band of physicists and chemists; they remain a cataclysmic threat to the whole of human society and the natural environment.
The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.
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 modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.
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.
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.
Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
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.
As the earth spins through space, a view from above the North Pole would encompass most of the wealth of the world - most of its food, productive machines, doctors, engineers and teachers. A view from the opposite pole would encompass most of the world's poor.
Nothing ever goes away.
No action is without its side effects.
When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
If you ask what you are going to do about global warming, the only rational answer is to change the way in which we do transportation, energy production, agriculture and a good deal of manufacturing. The problem originates in human activity in the form of the production of goods.
I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It's irrational.
In certain ways, I'm not very different than I was when I was a teenager.
The real abhorrent consequence of the invention of atomic bombs is the fact that we still have them and they're spreading.
The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.Collection: Earth Day
Everything is connected to everything else.Collection: Connected
Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements-the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself-are, in the environment, failures.Collection: Air
Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.Collection: Nature
The environmental crisis is somber evidence of an insidious fraud hidden in the vaunted productivity and wealth of modern, technology-based society. This wealth has been gained by rapid short-term exploitation of the environmental system, but it has blindly accumulated a debt to nature-a debt so large and so pervasive that in the next generation it may, if unpaid, wipe out most of the wealth it has gained us.Collection: Technology
Our assaults on the ecosystem are so powerful, so numerous, so finely interconnected, that although the damage they do is clear, it is very difficult to discover how it was done. By which weapon? In whose hand? Are we driving the ecosphere to destruction simply by our growing numbers? By our greedy accumulation of wealth? Or are the machines which we have built to gain this wealth-the magnificent technology that now feeds us out of neat packages, that clothes us in man-made fibers, that surrounds us with new chemical creations-at fault?Collection: Powerful
The favorite statistic is that the U.S. contains 6 to 7% of the world population but consumes more than half the world's resources and is responsible for that fraction of the total environmental pollution. But this statistic hides another vital fact: that not everyone in the U.S. is so affluent.Collection: Environmental
If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.Collection: Fads
Because the global ecosystem is a connected whole, in which nothing can be gained or lost and which is not subject to over-all improvement, anything extracted from it by human effort must be replaced. Payment of this price cannot be avoided; it can only be delayed. The present environmental crisis is a warning that we have delayed nearly too long.Collection: Ecosystems