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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.

Barry Commoner

If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.
BARRY COMMONER

Environment Fads Lasts
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
In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
BARRY COMMONER

Degradation Recycling Substance
Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.
BARRY COMMONER

Environment Natural Pay
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

Difficult Growing Simple Triumph
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
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

Environmental Hazards Independent
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 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

Entering Environmental Quality Simple
The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
BARRY COMMONER

Apprentice Modern Technology
The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.
BARRY COMMONER

Action Environmental Problem
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

Environmental Need Powerful
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
When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Thinking Understanding
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
BARRY COMMONER

Animal Law Nature
Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve it.
BARRY COMMONER

Day Earth Firefighter People

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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