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

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.
BARRY COMMONER

Agriculture Answers Energy
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Degradation Ecosystems Environmental
No action is without its side effects.
BARRY COMMONER

Action Effect Sides
When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Thinking Understanding
The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.
BARRY COMMONER

Crisis Environmental Signal
All of the clean technologies are known, it’s a question of simply applying them.
BARRY COMMONER

Clean Known Technology
Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.
BARRY COMMONER

Cooperatives Global Larger Planets
Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
BARRY COMMONER

Development Prevention Technology
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Doctors Teacher Views
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Inheritance Law Technology
I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It’s irrational.
BARRY COMMONER

Irrational Reason Shirts
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

Differences Feel Good People
Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.
BARRY COMMONER

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

Environment Lunch Nature
Technologists practice faith too; ‘Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.’
BARRY COMMONER

Practice Problem Solve
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Child Children Economic Labor

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

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

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