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 COMMONEREverything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
More Barry Commoner Quotes
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The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
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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.
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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.
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I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It’s irrational.
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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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It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
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Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.
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The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.
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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.
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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.
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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 first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.—->I dont believe in environmentalism as the solution to anything. What I believe is that environmentalism illuminates the things that need to be done to solve all of the problems together.
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In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.
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No action is without its side effects.
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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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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.
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Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.
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The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
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If environmentalism is a fad, it will be the last one.
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All of the clean technologies are known, it’s a question of simply applying them.
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The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.
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Technologists practice faith too; ‘Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.’
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When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
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We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
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My entry into the environmental arena was through the issue that so dramatically – and destructively – demonstrates the link between science and social action: nuclear weapons.
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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.
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