The methods that EPA introduced after 1970 to reduce air-pollutant emissions worked for a while, but over time have become progressively less effective.
BARRY COMMONEREnvironmental quality was drastically improved while economic activity grew by the simple expedient of removing lead from gasoline – which prevented it from entering the environment.
More Barry Commoner Quotes
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Earth Day 1970 was irrefutable evidence that the American people understood the environmental threat and wanted action to resolve 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 AEC had at its command an army of highly skilled scientists.
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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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By adopting the control strategy, the nation’s environmental program has created a built-in antagonism between environmental quality and economic growth.
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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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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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The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.
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The age of innocent faith in science and technology may be over.
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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 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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Seen that way, the wholesale transformation of production technologies that is mandated by pollution prevention creates a new surge of economic development.
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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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The proper use of science is not to conquer nature but to live in it.
BARRY COMMONER