“The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.”

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.

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

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.

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.

Environmental concern is now firmly embedded in public life: in education, medicine and law; in journalism, literature and art.

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.

Technologists practice faith too; ‘Faith that problems have solutions before having the knowledge to solve them.’

The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.

The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.

The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.

Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.

It is the artist who realizes that there is a supreme force above him and works gladly away as a small apprentice under God’s heaven.

I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?

We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.