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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

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

Degradation Recycling Substance
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
It is simply economically impossible to require controls that even approach zero emissions.
BARRY COMMONER

Approach Impossible Zero
The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
BARRY COMMONER

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

Environment Fads Lasts
Environmental pollution is an incurable disease. It can only be prevented.
BARRY COMMONER

Disease Environmental Pollution
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
If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.
BARRY COMMONER

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

Art Law Medicine
The environmental crisis is a global problem, and only global action will resolve it.
BARRY COMMONER

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

Impact Technology War
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
Everything is connected to everything else.
BARRY COMMONER

Connected Else Everything
Nothing ever dies, nothing ever goes away.
BARRY COMMONER

Advice Die Information
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
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
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.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Suicidal Warning
The environmental crisis is a signal of this approaching catastrophe.
BARRY COMMONER

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

Practice Problem Solve
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 COMMONER

Air Epa Method Progress
The modern assault on the environment began about 50 years ago, during and immediately after World War II.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental War Years
Everything is connected to everything else. Everything must go somewhere. Nature knows best. There is no such thing as a free lunch.
BARRY COMMONER

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

Army Command Scientist
When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Thinking Understanding
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 COMMONER

Gaps Needs Technology

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.

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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.

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