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.

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.

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

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

Perhaps the simplest example is a synthetic plastic, which unlike natural materials, is not degraded by biological decay. It therefore persists as rubbish or is burned-in both cases causing pollution. In the same way, a substance such as DDT or lead, which plays no role in the chemistry of life and interferes with the actions of substances that do, is bound to cause ecological damage if sufficiently concentrated.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

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

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

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.'

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.

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

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.

No action is without its side effects.

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.

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.

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