black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.

Barry Commoner

Air pollution is not merely a nuisance and a threat to health. It is a reminder that our most celebrated technological achievements-the automobile, the jet plane, the power plant, industry in general, and indeed the modern city itself-are, in the environment, failures.
BARRY COMMONER

Achievement Air Cities
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
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
The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.
BARRY COMMONER

Crisis Environmental Signal
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

Degradation Ecosystems Environmental
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
The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.
BARRY COMMONER

Day Earth Environmental Use
World War II had a very important impact on the development of technology, as a whole.
BARRY COMMONER

Impact Technology War
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
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Issues Links
Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.
BARRY COMMONER

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

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

Environmental Quality Growth Strategy
In nature, no organic substance is synthesized unless there is provision for its degradation; recycling is enforced.
BARRY COMMONER

Degradation Recycling Substance
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

Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Sooner or later, wittingly or unwittingly, we must pay for every intrusion on the natural environment.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Barry Commoner Quotes