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The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production – in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation – essential as they are, make people sick and die.

Barry Commoner

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

Environment Fads Lasts
The AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.
BARRY COMMONER

Army Command Scientist
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.
BARRY COMMONER

Animal Law Nature
We are in an environmental crisis which threatens the survival of this nation, and of the world as a suitable place of human habitation.
BARRY COMMONER

Earth Day Environmental Survival
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Meaningful Powerful Quality
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.
BARRY COMMONER

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

Practice Problem Solve
When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Thinking Understanding
In certain ways, I’m not very different than I was when I was a teenager.
BARRY COMMONER

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

Environmental War Years
Nothing can survive on the planet unless it is a cooperative part of larger global life.
BARRY COMMONER

Cooperatives Global Larger Planets
World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
BARRY COMMONER

Impact Technology War
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
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Doctors Teacher Views

The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production – in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation – essential as they are, make people sick and die.

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The environmental crisis arises from a fundamental fault: our systems of production – in industry, agriculture, energy and transportation – essential as they are, make people sick and die.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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