Barry Commoner Quotes
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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.
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The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.
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World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
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If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.
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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.
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No action is without its side effects.
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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.
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Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
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All of the clean technologies are known, it's a question of simply applying them.
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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.
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Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.
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Clearly, we have compiled a record of serious failures in recent technological encounters with the environment. In each case, the new technology was brought into use before the ultimate hazards were known. We have been quick to reap the benefits and slow to comprehend the costs.
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By adopting the control strategy, the nation's environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.