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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.

Barry Commoner

No action is without its side effects.
BARRY COMMONER

Action Effect Sides
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
If you can see the light at the end of the tunnel, you are looking the wrong way.
BARRY COMMONER

Light Tunnels Way
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
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

Agriculture People Sick
When you fully understand the situation, it is worse than you think.
BARRY COMMONER

Environmental Thinking Understanding
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
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
In general, any productive activity which introduces substances foreign to the natural environment runs a considerable risk of polluting it.
BARRY COMMONER

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

Environment Fads Lasts
The modern technologist is less ‘sorcerer’ and more ‘sorcerer’s apprentice’.
BARRY COMMONER

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

Degradation Recycling Substance
The first law of ecology is that everything is related to everything else.—->I dont believe in environmentalism as the solution to anything. What I believe is that environmentalism illuminates the things that need to be done to solve all of the problems together.
BARRY COMMONER

Believe Environmentalism Law Together
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
What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology.
BARRY COMMONER

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

Practice Problem Solve

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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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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