It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
BARRY COMMONERBy adopting the control strategy, the nation’s environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.
More Barry Commoner Quotes
-
-
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.
BARRY COMMONER -
The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
BARRY COMMONER -
Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.
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.
BARRY COMMONER -
When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
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.
BARRY COMMONER -
The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.
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.
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.
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.
BARRY COMMONER -
The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.
BARRY COMMONER -
Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.
BARRY COMMONER -
Everything is connected to everything else.
BARRY COMMONER -
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.
BARRY COMMONER -
Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.
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.
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.
BARRY COMMONER -
All of the clean technologies are known, it’s a question of simply applying them.
BARRY COMMONER -
The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.
BARRY COMMONER -
World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
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.
BARRY COMMONER -
In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.
BARRY COMMONER -
Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
BARRY COMMONER -
No action is without its side effects.
BARRY COMMONER -
In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
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.
BARRY COMMONER