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 COMMONERThe modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
More Barry Commoner Quotes
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The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.
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The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
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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.
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All of the clean technologies are known, it’s a question of simply applying them.
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Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
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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.
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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.
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Everything is connected to everything else.
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The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
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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.
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Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.
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The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.
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In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
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We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
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World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
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The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.
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I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It’s irrational.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
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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.
BARRY COMMONER