Best 54 quotes of Barry Commoner on MyQuotes

Barry Commoner

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    Finally, since human beings are uniquely capable of producing materials not found in nature, environmental degradation may be due to the resultant intrusion into an ecosystem of a substance wholly foreign to it.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    For that reason the simple test of the slogan 'Consume Less' as a basis for social action on the environment would be to tell it to the blacks in the ghetto. The message will not be very well received for there are many people in this country who consume less than is needed to sustain a decent life.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    No action is without its side effects.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.

  • By Anonym
    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?

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    Perhaps one of the most meaningful ways to sense the impact of the environmental crisis is to confront the question which is always asked about Lake Erie: how can we restore it? I believe the only valid answer is that no one knows. For it should be clear that even if overnight all of the pollutants now pouring into Lake Erie were stopped, there would still remain the problem of the accumulated mass of pollutants in the lake bottom.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    Technologists practice faith too; 'Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.'

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

    The modern technologist is less 'sorcerer' and more 'sorcerer's apprentice'.

  • By Anonym
    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.

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    Barry Commoner

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

  • By Anonym
    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.