The gap between brute power and human need continues to grow, as the power fattens on the same faulty technology that intensifies the need.
BARRY COMMONERIf you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.
More Barry Commoner Quotes
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The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
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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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In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.
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In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
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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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The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.
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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.
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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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No action is without its side effects.
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The environmental crisis is a sign that the ecosphere is now so heavily strained that its continued stability is threatened. It is a warning that we must discover the source of this suicidal drive and master it before it destroys the environment-and ourselves.
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The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
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All of the clean technologies are known, it’s a question of simply applying them.
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.
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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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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 had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.
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Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
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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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World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
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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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In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.
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Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.
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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.
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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.
BARRY COMMONER -
I see no reason to have my shirts ironed. It’s irrational.
BARRY COMMONER