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.
BARRY COMMONERThe proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.
More Barry Commoner Quotes
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The gap between brute power and human need continues to grow, as the power fattens on the same faulty technology that intensifies the need.
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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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In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
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When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
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The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.
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Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
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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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Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.
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The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.
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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.
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Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.
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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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The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
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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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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