“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.”

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

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.

The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.

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

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.

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

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.

No action is without its side effects.

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.

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

Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.

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.

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

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.

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

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.