“By adopting the control strategy, the nation’s environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.”

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.

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.

The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.

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.

I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It’s irrational.

When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.

Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.

Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.

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.

The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.

Everything is connected to everything else.

In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.

World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.

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

In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.

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.