Barry Commoner Quotes
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.
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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.
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It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
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The major source of photochemical smog - petroleum-fueled vehicles - can be replaced by emission-free electric vehicles.
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In certain ways, I'm not very different than I was when I was a teenager.
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Nothing ever goes away.
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When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
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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.
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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.
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There is no such thing as a free lunch.
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The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.
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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.
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The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
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The real abhorrent consequence of the invention of atomic bombs is the fact that we still have them and they're spreading.
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Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.
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The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.
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Nature knows best.
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The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
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The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.
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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.
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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.