Barry Commoner famous quotes

Everything is connected to everything else,
-- Barry Commoner

#Connected

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

#Nature #Law #Firsts

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

#Earth Day #Use #Conquer

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

#Environmental #Disease #Pollution

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

#Art #Law #Medicine

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

#Tunnels #Light #Way

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

#Thinking #Environment #Situation

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

#War #Years #Environmental

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

#Pay #Environment #Natural

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#War #Technology #Profound

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

#Environmental #Action #Problem

No action is without its side effects.
-- Barry Commoner

#Sides #Action #Side Effects

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

#Army #Scientist #Command

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#War #Vision #United States

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

#Technology #Development #Prevention

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

#Air #Epa #Method

Nothing ever goes away.
-- Barry Commoner

#Advice #Information

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

#Technology

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

#Teenager #Different #Way

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

#Fads #Lasts #Environmentalism

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

#Technology #Needs #Gaps

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Simple #Triumph #Growing

What the new fertilizer technology has accomplished for the farmer is clear: more crop can be produced on less acreage than before. Since the cost of fertilizer, relative to the resultant gain in crop sales, is lower than that of any other economic input, and since the Land Bank pays the farmer for acreage not in crops, the new technology pays him well. The cost-in environmental degradation-is borne by his neighbors in town who find their water polluted. The new technology is an economic success-but only because it is an ecological failure.
-- Barry Commoner

#Technology #Land #Water

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Technology #Environmental #May

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

#Technology #Age #May

The environmental crisis is a sign that the ecosphere is now so heavily strained that its continued stability is threatened. It is a warning that we must discover the source of this suicidal drive and master it before it destroys the environment-and ourselves.
-- Barry Commoner

#Suicidal #Environmental #Warning

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?
-- Barry Commoner

#Powerful #Technology #Men

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Meaningful #Powerful #Effort

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

#Degradation #Substance #Recycling

Recycling is a good thing to do. It makes people feel good to do it. The thing I want to emphasize is the vast difference between recycling for the purpose of feeling good and recycling for the purpose of solving the trash problem.
-- Barry Commoner

#Differences #People #Feel Good

Despite the dazzling successes of modern technology and the unprecedented power of modern military systems, they suffer from a common and catastrophic fault. While providing us with a bountiful supply of food, with great industrial plants, with high-speed transportation, and with military weapons of unprecedented power, they threaten our very survival.
-- Barry Commoner

#Military #Technology #Survival

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Agriculture #People #Sick

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

#Zero #Impossible #Approach

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

#War #Technology #Impact

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

#People #Firefighter #Earth Day

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Teacher #Doctors #Views

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Technology #Law #Inheritance

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Powerful #Needs #Environment

Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch. If you don't put something in the ecology, it's not there.
-- Barry Commoner

#Lunch #Environment #Ecology

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.---->I dont 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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Believe #Law #Together

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Issues #Environmental #Nuclear

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Simple #Environmental #Quality

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Children #Economic #Child Labor

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

#Growth #Environmental #Quality

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Agriculture #Energy #Answers

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.
-- Barry Commoner

#Independent #Environmental #Hazards

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

#Earth Day #Survival #Environmental

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

#Reason #Shirts #Irrational