Barry Commoner Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More Barry Commoner quote about:
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“Everything is connected to everything else,”
-- Barry Commoner -
“The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“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 -
“The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“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 -
“Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“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 -
“All of the clean technologies are known, it's a question of simply applying them.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“In certain ways, I'm not very different than I was when I was a teenager.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“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 -
“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 -
“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 -
“In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.”
-- Barry Commoner -
“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